It’s more than a crisis. These are events of apocalyptic proportions. The waves of the corona pandemic have been circling our world for more than two years. It has claimed more than six million lives so far. The adaptability of the virus requires mankind to adapt to a life with a constant risk of infection. The economic and social consequences of global crisis management can scarcely be estimated, while the war in Ukraine is intensifying them in an unexpected way. The West is upgrading militarily with budgets that will increase the debt pressure on public budgets for years. Set off against the necessary counter-financing of the pandemic lockdowns, the future of the next generations will be massively burdened.
Today, this future is being questioned with a degree of radicalism that seemed almost unimaginable after the end of the Cold War. Russian President Vladimir Putin is blatantly threatening the use of nuclear weapons from which there would be no turning back: the chain reactions after a first strike promise the end of humanity, at least as we know it. With the climate catastrophe that is taking place, it has long been at stake. Record temperatures were measured at the North Pole in March 2022: little more than another piece of news to add to the ensemble of devastating consequences of global warming.
one life in of the catastrophe cannot be stemmed politically. What is in store for every human being; what is oppressed as a personal fate becomes acute with images of the end of the world. Because not only do individual people die here, but the cosmic structure dissolves, in which every life project pays into its meaningful accounts. The real apocalypses of the present reveal what life means under the sign of death: the superiority of death cashes in everything. If this becomes a realistic option with the end of humanity as an evolutionary attempt, all promises of meaning lose their cling point. And the transmission of life turns into its opposite.
The supremacy of death collects everything
The reversal of that creative power which religious traditions assert as the beginning of everything is demonstrated in the potency of negative creativity: in man’s ability to annihilate himself and his entire world. Humanity has known about this since the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It takes place in the extinction of species, in the consumption of resources, in an ecological debt that can no longer be stopped. Mankind must not with, but in the catastropheliterally: the reversal of the conditions of creation from life to death Life.
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Bild: ©Harald Oppitz / KNA
Gregor Maria Hoff is Professor of Fundamental Theology and Ecumenical Theology at the Paris Lodron University in Salzburg.
This experience is firmly anchored in the cultural memory of mankind with images of fear. The narratives of creation, which in the canonical structure of the Bible form the starting point for speaking of both God and man, are combined with experiences of the annihilation of life. The paradisiacal situation at the beginning serves as a mirror of a reality of life in which death is part of everyday life: with fratricide as a beacon, with the management of a world in which it is a question of ensuring survival; with the consequences of the agrarian revolution and urbanization that can be understood in the biblical texts; with conflicts and wars. The apocalyptic script of the book of Genesis is heading towards total annihilation, against the background of which one has to ask how the authors could have imagined that the creation described scenario of a beginning of everything as gut to qualify.
But that is not just what the creation story Gen 1:1-2:3 claims; she carries out this thought. By making a beginning, she draws attention to the possibility and also the necessity for people to live in a world in which they can meaningfully perceive the difference between being and non-being, between life and death – and got to. In the light of the first distinction, which man does not have, which is rather associated with that creative life force which im and created as a beginning, man is confronted with a reality that is still proving to be the beginning of processes of annihilation of life and possibly also of this world. The experience of this creativity is extensive. When it comes to that gut be what is created, that’s what it’s all about: the possibility of meaningful perception of this world. Experiences with a successful life are questioned by death. But he doesn’t take her back. Death is therefore understood by the religious origin stories of the Book of Genesis as an aspect of a creative dynamic. Everything is related to God and interpreted in the sign of his unlimited creative life power.
meaningful perception of the world
The philosopher Thomas Nagel, in his discussion of a naturalism shaped by a world view, pointed out that every attempt to interpret the world and, last but not least, to pursue science claims an inner connection between “mind and cosmos”. Michel Serres spelled this out along the lines of the miracle of a mathematical description of the world. Voices that are not suspicious because they are not religious. They point to the experience of a meaningful world, a world with patterns of order even at the moment of entropic dissolution. This does not represent mere theory, but rather an experience that asserts itself even with someone like Friedrich Nietzsche: He still wants the truth of a radical nihilism as truth said, addressed, asserted and argued. The fact that we don’t escape meaning by communicating says nothing about whether there is a “sense of meaning” (Volker Gerhardt) that beyond of all calculable destruction of this world. However, the insight that there are comprehensible patterns of meaning-related order sticks to it in there is in a world, even if it seems geared towards annihilation.
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Bild: ©User:AngMoKio/Creative Commons
Saint Paul was among the first missionaries of Christianity.
This experience is also brought into play by the author from whom the first note is available, in which an autobiographical note speaks of a resurrection from the dead. In a world ruled by the imperial power of Rome, which had Jesus of Nazareth executed, represented by the Jerusalem governor Pontius Pilate, Paul of Tarsus claims that the crucified raised on the third day had been (1 Cor 15:4). Even more: that he appeared not only to his circle of followers, but also to himself (v. 8). Paul knows that such a claim causes more than irritation. It is nothing less than “folly” (1 Cor 1:18, 23) for someone who – like the Greeks – is looking for philosophically valid knowledge (“wisdom”: v. 22). At the call of the first witnesses alone, Paul is unlikely to have found a conviction that turned a persecutor of the “Church of God” into an ardent follower (vv. 8-11). The theologian Paul was determined by two fundamental insights: belief in God’s creative life power (Rom 1:20) and in the Torah, in the law that brings order and the good meaning of God’s creation to bear. But doesn’t it have to fail when death has the last word and man, in his attempt to do good, is repeatedly led into the self-contradiction of his existence? “Because I don’t do the good that I want, but the bad that I don’t want. But if I do what I don’t want to do, then it’s no longer me doing it, but the sin that dwells in me. So I encounter the law that evil is present in me, although I want to do good.” (Rom 7:21) Paul’s crucial question is how this contradiction can be resolved. “Who will take me out of this? deliver a body that has fallen to death?” (v. 24)
A stunning realization
How Paul comes to understand that God raised the crucified Nazarene from the dead can only be summed up in his own words as a confrontation. It appears in him as a conviction that has the character of an overturning cognition. Paul relates the problem he is struggling with to his belief in the creative life power of God. She is the beginning of everything. Nothing is prior to her. But it only proves to be unlimited when death, that is, the power to destroy all life and everything, is only assigned to it. This insight allows Paul to speak of life on the cross. For the people who have lived with Jesus, the life of Jesus and the message of the kingdom of God are the place where the creative life power of God finds itself in human turns out to be unlimited. In concrete terms, this means: the inclusion of people in this kingdom who are excluded from life, who are threatened by social death, who suffer.
In the face of the real apocalypses of history, such an experience relies on a meaning that cannot be eradicated because a creative reality manifests itself in it: interpreting the world, experiencing meaning, living love and affirming life even in the face of death be able. As with Paul, this is always said with reference to hope. But isn’t man’s possibility of hope in a world surrounded by death itself already an aspect of resurrection? Beyond the oppressive Apocalypse in our time such a hope is of course unattainable. Man’s ability to do more than to survive, decides on this question. Paul gives the most radical answer imaginable – especially today.shh
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By Gregor Maria Hoff
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