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January 2010 VOICE OF SHALOM |
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LAST JUDGEMENT AND JUSTICE OF GOD A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power - whatever beguiling ideological mask it adopts - will cease to dominate the world. This is why the great thinker of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno, were equally critical of atheism and theism. Horkheimer radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-worldly substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the image of a good and just God. In an extreme radicalization of the Old Testament prohibition of images, he speaks of a "longing for the totally Other" that remains inaccessible - a cry of yearning directed at world history. Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejction of images,which naturally meant the exclusion of any "image" of a loving God. On the other hand, he also constantly emphasized this "negative" dialectic and asserted that justice - true justice - would require a world "where not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which is irrevocably past would be undone". This, would mean, however - to express it with positive and hence, for him, inadequate symbols - that there can be no justice without a resurrection of the dead. Yet this would have to involve "the resurrection of the flesh, something that is totally foreign to idealism and the realm of Absolute spirit." to be continued . . .
Pope Benedict XVI
Spe Salvi(#42) |
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