The Invisible World – Christianity

In our time, a change occurs at the highest level of the Christian world. A document from the Vatican Secretariat for Non-Christians, issued after the Second Vatican Council, titled “Orientations for a Dialogue Between Christians and Muslims”, published in 1970, attests to the depth of this change in official attitudes. Calling for the removal of the “outdated image, inherited from the past, or distorted by prejudice and slander” – that Christians had created about Islam, the Vatican document undertakes the responsibility – “to recognize the past injustice towards the Muslims for which the West, with its Christian education, is to blame.” It emphasizes the unity of belief in God and reminds that in 1967 the Vatican Secretariat invited Christians to offer their best wishes to Muslims during Ramadan fasting – with “genuine religious worth”.

At the Second Vatican Council (1962 – 1965), after five revisions, a compromise text was agreed upon:

“In view of the human situation prevailing before Christ’s foundation of salvation, the Books of the Old Testament enable everybody to know who is God and who is man, and also the way in which God, in his justice and mercy, behaves towards men. These books, even though they contain material which is imperfect and obsolete, nevertheless bear witness to truly divine teachings.”

“The authors of the Bible carefully preserved the received treasure, modernized it and clothed it in formulations that suited them and met the demands of life, while inserting additions. The book emerged and grew along with life and time. Psychologically, it is possible for a contemporary reader to read the Bible through their own scientific lens instead of the biblical ones, which leads to fundamental misunderstanding. This insight into the true nature of the book is not only a help to the reader but also a fundamental norm for its scientific study. Its aim is: to provide a religious understanding of the world and the events in it. The garment, the notions about the world and nature, belongs to the time and environment in which it was created.“

Excerpt from the introduction to the Bible

“Consciousness beyond conscious understanding is a reality, an experiential fact, we just do not understand it.”[1]

C. G. Jung

“A confession professes a collective belief, but the word religion expresses a relationship with metaphysical, which means otherworldly, factors. I hold all confessionalism to be completely unchristian.”[2]

C. G. Jung

“If faith is genuine and alive, than it works. But if it is merely an effort of will, without understanding, then I place little value on its inner worth. Unfortunately, this inadequate state is widespread in our time. And since those who cannot believe but wish to understand are left only with doubt and scepticism, the entire Christian tradition is dismissed as mere fantasy. I see this as a tremendous loss for which we will have to pay a great price. The consequence is evident in the disintegration of ethical values and the total disorientation of our worldview. Scientific truth and existential philosophy are a weak substitute.”[3]

C. G. Jung

“I consider myself a Christian, but I am also convinced that today’s Christianity does not represent the ultimate truth. This is proven by the chaotic situation of our time. The current state seems unbearable to me, and therefore a profound further development of Christianity is absolutely necessary.”[4]

C. G. Jung

“An increasingly permissive culture, exploiting the principle of the separation of church and state, squeezes out the religious factor but without substituting for it any secular “categorical imperatives,” thereby transforming the inner moral code into a vacuum. That moral vacuum defines the essential meaning of the notion of spiritual emptiness – an emptiness which appears to be increasingly pervasive in much of what is called Western civilization. It is a striking paradox that the greatest victory for the proposition that “God is dead” has occurred not in the Marxist-dominated states, which politically propagated atheism, but in Western liberal democratic societies… The urgent surfacing of questions that are of ultimate importance: What is the human being? What is the irreducible and essential quality of human authenticity? These issues are likely to become dominant questions in the advanced countries within the next several decades… In the advanced world, the frontiers of science are likely to be pushed to the extreme, enhancing for some the external and internal dimensions of life to a degree that will amount almost to the transformation of the very character of human existence.

One must hope that in the more distant future, in reaction to the spiritual emptiness of modern cornucopia and the new challenges of science, modern society may begin to refocus on the significance of the philosophic and even spiritual facets of life.”[5]                              

Zbigniew Brzezinski

“Man’s attitude to the world must be radically changed. We have to abandon the arrogant belief that the world is merely a puzzle to be solved, a machine with instructions for use waiting to be discovered, a body of information to be fed into a computer in the hope that, sooner or later, it will spit out a universal solution.

It is my profound conviction that we have to release from the sphere of private whim such forces as a natural, unique and unrepeatable experience of the world, an elementary sense of justice, the ability to see things as others do, a sense of transcendental responsibility, archetypal wisdom, good taste, courage, compassion and faith in the importance of particular measures that do not aspire to be a universal key to salvation. Such forces must be rehabilitated.”[6]

Vaclav Havel

“The rethinking is beginning to be felt in philosophical and scientific discussions. Some academic thinkers are inclined to reject the emphasis placed in the modern age on the notions of scientific certainty and uniformity; they emphasize instead the reality of contingency and diversity… stressing the importance of the catastrophic and of the paradoxical in scientific inquiry, challenging the notion that knowledge points to certainty and uniformity.”[7]

Zbigniew Brzezinski

“Marxism always seemed to me to be a consequence of the profound erosion of man’s religious imagination on the European continent… The erosion of the religious imagination is, in my view, the core of twentieth-century thought; and it is what has lent our age its apocalyptic features. But the dissolution of totalitarian movements by no means suggests that a fundamental change has taken place in this regard. It is enough to look at the prosperous and well-fed sector of humanity in the countries of the West to become convinced that the concept of a religiously ordered cosmos is disintegrating also under the impact of science and technology, and that if people, especially among the younger generations, still have a strong need for faith, it is a homeless, groping faith that does not necessarily turn to Christianity.”[8]

Czeslav Milosz