From Death to Life: The Christian Journey by Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn

Author:Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn [Schoenborn, Christoph Cardinal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9781681497181
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2016-07-23T05:00:00+00:00

3. The Kingdom of God, Society, and the Problem of Evil

What we have said up to this point can give the impression that the conflict criticized by Rousseau, which de facto appears again and again, between the heavenly citizenship and the earthly is caused by the clash of two unreconciled and irreconcilable worlds here. Are “Church” and “world”, civitas Dei and civitas terrena, antagonistic entities, essentially hostile to one another? This tendency has existed again and again in the long history of the doctrine of the two kingdoms.27 Its newest variant, which is still potently effective at the present day, is the view held by the so-called political theology that the Church is something like the “institutionalized critique of society”.28 We hear also of the “critically liberating function of the Church” in relation to society, giving the impression that a society that is permanently criticized in this way is ultimately a negative entity that must be fundamentally called into question. Indeed, the hallmark of this criticism is that society in all its spheres (economics, culture, defense) is continually told it must have a “bad conscience”: not because of particular abuses and wrong attitudes but fundamentally and universally. It is not the abusive practices of banks that are criticized but their very existence; not this or that measure taken in the defense of a country but the very existence of this defense. Behind this criticism, which likes to call itself “prophetic”, there lies in reality a kind of “political millenarianism”29 that, in the name of a future “paradisal” society, rejects and “demonizes” the existing society en bloc, demanding that it be overthrown by revolution.

We have presented the relationship between Church and society, between civitas Dei and civitas terrena, up to now as full of tensions. This picture would be onesided if we failed now to add precision by means of a new element: the problem of evil.

Two basic temptations run through the history of the relationship between Church and society, between religion and politics in the West: we can call these, somewhat summarily, the naturalistic and the Manichaean temptations. The latter sees the two entities as mutually hostile by their very nature: the “world” is evil, only the “kingdom of light” is good, and an implacable conflict exists between these two. Evil is located on one side exclusively: the world, society, politics, etc.; the good lies only on the spiritual, heavenly, or future side. The “naturalistic” temptation consists in denying the problem of evil, declaring it to be the “so-called evil” (Konrad Lorenz), which in reality is nothing other than the play of forces according to the blind necessities of nature, in which there are conquerors and conquered but not good and evil. This is the world-view in which the highest laws are the “struggle for life” and the “survival of the fittest”. It is the world-view of Darwin and all his disciples, while the “Manichaean” temptation is that of the Marxist world-view. Jacques Maritain has characterized these two tendencies as typically “right” and “left”.

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