Souls of the Righteous
Mixed media assemblage on museum board, 2021
8 x 8 inches
Eschatological Experience of Historical Action
“Hitler did not have to invent anything. The ideology was waiting on the streets of Linz and Vienna, and he only had to absorb what was already there. The Vienna Hitler observed during his stay from 1907 to 1913 was a madhouse.”
Anton Pelinka, Austria: Out of the Shadow of the Past (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 177.
“The anti-Jewish statements of the New Testament can at any time reemerge from the Christian sub-conscious.”
Friedrich Heer, “The Catholic Church and the Jews Today,” Midstream 17 (May 1971): 25.
“Christianity cannot continue to exist unless Christians are constantly aware of their responsibility for the continued existence of the Jews on this, our common earth.”
Friedrich Heer, “The Catholic Church and the Jews Today,” Midstream 17 (May 1971): 27.
“The dignity of the Jewish No consists in bringing both, the Christian Yes and the non-Christian No, to their raison d’être in the reality of God by contesting both their final and ultimate validity in the name of the still living God. Let humankind honor this dignity! Let Christian theology subject itself to this No!”
Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, “‘Enemies for Our Sake’: The Jewish No and Christian Theology,” in Theological Audacities: Selected Essays, trans. Don McCord, H. Martin Rumscheidt, and Paul S. Chung (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010), 29–30.
“By renouncing every eschatological experience of its own historical action, the Church—at least on the level of praxis, because, as to doctrine, twentieth-century theology from Barth to Moltmann and von Balthasar has seen a renewal of eschatological themes—has itself created the specter of the mysterium iniquitatis. If it wants to free itself of this specter, it is necessary for it to find again the eschatological experience of its historical action—of all historical action—as a drama in which the decisive conflict is always underway.”
Giorgio Agamben, The Mystery of Evil: Benedict XVI and the End of Days, trans. Adam Kotsko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 37.