Autor: Lonergan, Bernard J.F.

Buch: Topics in Education

Titel: Topics in Education

Stichwort: 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.

Textausschnitt: 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)