Facs
Transcript
in the name of the ultimate, to fight against the concrete demonic powers. And we found two of them especially important, in the social realm, namely at that time nationalism and capitalism. In the name of the ultimate principle of love and justice, we demanded a fight against these demonic forces, their undercutting, their destruction. This was the meaning of the fight of religious socialism against the one side, the Lutherans.
We had the same critical atittude [sic.] toward utopian Marxism. We said that, in time and space, under the conditions of man’s estrangement – which by the way is a Marxian and Hegelian term – there is no possibility of actualizing the kingdom of God in time and space. Every attempt to do so is utopia, and utopia is a form of idolatry which, like all idolatry, after a certain time necessarily leads to what I like to call metaphysical disappointment – not a disappointment about a concrete expectation, but disappointment about an ultimate commitment, and therefore a tragic and destructive disappointment, the disappointment the consequences of which always are emptiness and the danger of falling into other demonic powers. This was our criticism of Marxism, of the utopian progressivistic belief in the coming of the kingdom of God in terms of justice on earth.
On this basis we used a term which in the meantime – several terms, but the first of them – which has in the meantime been accepted largely, namely the term kairos. This term was not simply taken from the New Testament language, where kairos means the time of fulfillment, the right time, the time in which the eternal breaks into the temporal and makes it infinitely meaningful. This concept was taken out of the New Testament and applied to an interpretation of history. We accepted