Stichwort: Erlösung

Autor, Quelle: Lonergan, Bernard J.F., Topics in Education

Titel: Erlösung - drei Weisen

Index: Erlösung 1: Neuanfang, neue Erde (Toynbee), Christus (keine eschatologische Transformation der Welt); Sinngebung des Leidens

Kurzinhalt: The redemption in Christ Jesus does not change the fundamental fact that sin continues to head for suffering and death. However, the suffering and death that follow from sin attain a new significance in Christ Jesus.

Text: 1.3 Redemption

33/3 The third differential, redemption, can be conceived in various ways.

It is a break with the past, the dead hand of the past, its institutions, the mentalities it produced, the resentments and hatreds it accounted for. Mircea Eliade, in The Myth of the Eternal Return,1 sees in the rites of the vegetation cults, the Dionysian cults, the Roman Saturnalia, a symbolic wiping out of the past. The orgies connected with these rites were given the significance of wiping out the enmities, the resentments, the debts, the obligations to which the past had given rise, and making possible a new start. That idea of a new start is an element in confession, in the sacrament of penance. It involves the emergence of new men in a new situation.2 Eliade criticizes these rites as a flight from history, but one can also think of them as a primitive means on the symbolic level to deal with and dominate history. It is true that man is historical, but he is historical in the sense that his apprehensions and choices form a cumulative process; and there is no contradiction between the historical and the use of apprehension and choice to dominate and control that process in some manner. In that sense the myth of the eternal return, the return to the new situation, to starting afresh, can be thought of as a symbolic technique on a rather primitive level for dealing with the fundamental problem of history. History dominates man enough without his attempting to free himself from it. (65f; Fs)

34/3 Another type of redemption is what Toynbee calls 'New Soil'.'3 A corrupt civilization disintegrates. New people take over the achievements of the past without the memories and hatreds, the false ideas and degrading myths. Or again, there can be new soil in the more literal sense of immigration to new lands. When such an immigration occurs the society begins afresh. The cumulative problems created by sin as a component in social process and as aberration are undercut. There is a new start. (66; Fs)
35/3 There is a redemptive aspect in revolution, the violent destruction of existing institutions, existing habits, existing material equipment, and the persons that are the carriers of the institutions and the habits of a culture. Thucydides provides a terrifying description of the revolution at Corcyra,4 where the people were divided into the rich and the poor, and the rich were simply wiped out, mercilessly and completely. The French and Russian revolutions were more or less complete liquidations of the past of a country. In Marxism there is a Jewish eschatological element combined with the idea of revolution, a sudden, quasi eschatological5 transformation of the situation, produced by the revolution. (66; Fs)
36/3 There is an element of the notion of redemption that is illusory, in archaism with its revival of ancient virtues, in futurism with its leap to utopia, in esotericism with its attitude of 'Let the world go by, at least we shall live our well-regulated and happy lives by ourselves,' and, of course, in the more recent illusion of automatic progress, which is simply a denial of the problems created by sin. (66; Fs) (notabene)

37/3 However, when I spoke of redemption, what you all first thought of was redemption in Christ Jesus. That redemption was not what was expected: an eschatological transformation of this world, a complete destruction of the unjust, and a millennium of peace and prosperity for the just. The redemption in Christ Jesus does not change the fundamental fact that sin continues to head for suffering and death. However, the suffering and death that follow from sin attain a new significance in Christ Jesus. They are no longer the sad, disastrous end to the differential of sin, but also the means towards transfiguration and resurrection. Beyond death on the cross, there is the risen Savior. The antithesis between death and resurrection runs through the writings of St Paul in a series of different forms. There is the symbolic death of baptism and the symbolic life of the Eucharist; there is the ascetic death of mortification, of dying to sin, and the ascetic resurrection of the exercise of virtue. They are all spoken of by St Paul with the compactness of the symbol. (66f; Fs) (notabene)

Stichwort: Erlösung

Autor, Quelle: Lonergan, Bernard J.F., Topics in Education

Titel: Erlösung - Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe

Index: Erlösung 2: Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe; G. (Beibehaltung der Wahrheit); H. (Kraft des Widerstehens); Sünde (zwei Wurzeln)

Kurzinhalt: ... faith reestablishes truth as a meaningful category ... there arises hope ... which enables us to resist the pressures and the determinisms ... Redemption in Christ Jesus is the answer to the problem created by sin as a component in social ...

Text: 38/3 Faith is the fundamental answer to the problem of sin not only in the next life but also in this life. Against sin as aberration, that is, the sin that verifies the old Greek proverb 'Whom the gods would destroy they first make blind,' faith reestablishes truth as a meaningful category. Pilate asked our Lord, 'What is truth?' The modern human scientist does not ask that question if he is preoccupied with imitating the techniques of the natural sciences. For then knowledge is science only in the measure that it can verify and enable one to predict. The reestablishment of truth as a meaningful category is also a liberation of intelligence and reason. (67; Fs)

39/3 Again, against sin as a component in the social process, sin as changing social process from a matter of freedom and creativity to routine and drudgery with all its determinisms and pressures and in the limit violence, there arises hope, which liberates the pilgrim in us,1 and which enables us to resist the pressures and the determinisms that are, as it were, the necessity of sinning further. Pius XII spoke of the fact that the modern world creates situations in which people have to be heroic to avoid mortal sin. To have that heroism there is needed the virtue of hope; and without that heroism there is no victory over the cumulative effects of sin as a component in social process. (67; Fs)

40/3 Finally, against sin as self-perpetuating, as a chain reaction, there is love of one's enemies and the acceptance of suffering. Sin as a chain reaction has two bases. It has a basis first in the hearts of men, where sin leads to ever further sin insofar as hatred arises. But Christ teaches us, 'Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you.' Secondly, there is a chain reaction of sin in the logic of the objective situation,2 and against that aspect Christianity teaches the acceptance of suffering. 'The servant is not better than his master.' 'Do not resist evil, but overcome evil with good.' The acceptance of suffering puts an end, at least at one point, to the chain reaction of sin that spreads throughout a society. When everyone is dodging suffering, when no one accepts it, the burden is passed ever further on. (67f; Fs)

41/3 Redemption in Christ Jesus is the answer to the problem created by sin as a component in social process and as fundamental aberration, but it has not merely a negative office. It comes through the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, through a personal communication of the life of the ever Blessed Trinity to mankind. 'In the fulness of time, God sent his Son, born of woman, made under the law, that those who were under the law might be redeemed and receive the adoption of sons. And now that you are sons, to show that you are sons, he sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, "Abba, Father!"' (Galatians 4: 4-6).3 The mission of the Son and the mission of the Holy Ghost is the basis of a new society in Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in which there is communicated to us personally, through the person of the Son and through the person of the Spirit, a participation of divine perfection, a participation of the order of truth and love that binds the three persons of the Blessed Trinity.4 Sin, suffering, and death remain, but in Christ they have become transition points to an ever fuller life on this earth with God the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, with whom we aspire to live in eternal life. The process of redemption, then, as conceived by the Catholic, is first of all the radical answer to sin - not the answer to sin that eliminates sin, but the answer to sin that endures its consequences and nullifies them and transforms man into a child of God, with a participation in the sonship that God the Father acknowledged when Jesus was baptized at the Jordan: 'This is my beloved Son. Hear ye him.'5 In baptism we become adopted sons as Christ was the natural Son of the Father.6 (68; Fs) (notabene)

42/3 So much for the three differentials of the human good. We set up an invariant structure, and then we noticed that the structure was realized differently at different times, and we distinguished three differentials: intellectual development on the two levels of civilization and culture; sin contradicting, deforming both those types of development; and finally, redemption. That analysis of the good, of course, makes it obvious why we want Catholic education. The fact of sin is not any private opinion of Catholics, but something to be noted by all. Our notion of the good cannot prescind from the tension between the good and evil. If we have an answer to the problem of evil, it will influence our education in all its aspects, because it influences our very notion of the good. (69; Fs)