Faith and reason -- Christianity; Immortality -- Christianity; Tragic, The -- Religious aspects -- Christianity
In the middle of the eighteenth century, two pietists of Protestant
origin, Johann Jakob Moser and Friedrich Christoph Oetinger, gave a new
force and value to the Pauline anacefaleosis. Moser "declared that his
religion consisted not in holding certain doctrines to be true and in
living a virtuous life conformably therewith, but in being reunited to
God through Christ. But this demands the thorough knowledge--a knowledge
that goes on increasing until the end of life--of one's own sins and
also of the mercy and patience of God, the transformation of all natural
feelings, the appropriation of the atonement wrought by the death of
Christ, the enjoyment of peace with God in the permanent witness of the
Holy Spirit to the remission of sins, the ordering of life according to
the pattern of Christ, which is the fruit of faith alone, the drawing
near to God and the intercourse of the soul with Him, the disposition to
die in grace and the joyful expectation of the Judgement which will
bestow blessedness in the more intimate enjoyment of God and in the
_commerce with all the saints_" (Ritschl, _Geschichte des Pietismus_,
vol. iii., § 43). The commerce with all the saints--that is to say, the
eternal human society. And for his part, Oetinger considers eternal
happiness not as the contemplation of God in His infinitude, but, taking
the Epistle to the Ephesians as his authority, as the contemplation of
God in the harmony of the creature with Christ. The commerce with all
the saints was, according to him, essential to the content of eternal
happiness. It was the realization of the kingdom of God, which thus
comes to be the kingdom of Man. And in his exposition of these doctrines
of the two pietists, Ritschl confesses _(op. cit._, iii., § 46) that
both witnesses have with these doctrines contributed something to
Protestantism that is of like value with the theological method of
Spener, another pietist.
We see, therefore, that the Christian, mystical, inward longing ever
since St. Paul, has been to give human finality, or divine finality, to
the Universe, to save human consciousness, and to save it by converting
all humanity into a person. This longing is expressed in the
anacefaleosis, the gathering together of all things, all things in earth
and in heaven, the visible and the invisible, in Christ, and also in the
apocatastasis, the return of all things to God, to consciousness, in
order that God may be all in all. And does not God's being all in all
mean that all things shall acquire consciousness and that in this
consciousness everything that has happened will come to life again, and
that everything that has existed in time will be eternalized? And within
the all, all individual consciousnesses, those which have been, those
that are, and those that will be, and as they have been, as they are,
and as they will be, will exist in a condition of society and
solidarity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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