Facs
Transcript
the central kairos, the center of history, in the event on which Christianity is based. But then we said: there are kairos moments everywhere in history. They are not always there, but they are sometimes there. And it is the function of the prophetic spirit to discover them, to feel them, to feel their presence, their coming, as the Prophets always did. Such moments are moments in which a whole form of cultural existence has disintegrated in itself, and the new breaks in from above as judging the old, and as promising and demanding the new. Wherever these things happen, there kairos is present.
Now we said, over against both sides – Lutheran transcendentalism and Marxian utopianism – “there is a kairos,” and in this kairos a special demonic force might be overcome – we never know it in terms of certainty because it depends on the chances of history and not only on the trends in history – but it is here, it is “at hand,” as the New Testament term is; and it might come.
Now this eliminates transcendentalism because the eternal breaks into the temporal; and it eliminates utopianism because one knows that it is a here-and-now situation, but not a universal one.
The second concept connected with this was the concept of the demonic. This concept couldn’t be used even in the beginning of the twenties of this century, because it was too much connected with the superstitious use of special spirits which grasp us, which run from one place to the other, and have special paint-able characteristics – and painters always like them very much.