Metz (A Passion for God, 49-53) suggests that the “sickness unto death of religion is not naivete, but banality.”
Banality arises from some of the deep seeds of modernity. Our “cult of possibility,” our confidence that “everything is possible” has an underside, resignation to the fact that everything will be superseded. Thus “the cult of managing our fate on the one hand and the cult of apathy on the other belong together like two sides of a single coin.”
On the other hand, there is an opposite terror in our conception of evolutionary time: “nothing comes to an end anymore . . . there is no end at all . . . everything is sucked into the swell of a faceless evolution that finally rolls over everything from behind” and “makes everything equi-valent.” Cynicism arises from “this secret fear of timeless time.”
The terror that nothing changes and terror that nothing stays the same conspire to produce an apathy and resignation in the face of history.
Metz thinks that the Christian antidote is to take account of the biblical category of apocalyptic. Apocalyptic resists the “Promethean-Faustian” image of human beings as superhuman managers of history; “apocalyptic . . . is directed against the image of the person devoid of mystery, incapable of mourning and incapable of allowing him- or herself to be consoled, whose living space certainly appears to have been successfully insulated from the storms of God but who drifts ever more helplessly into the twilight of banality and . . . boredom.”
Apocalyptic also challenges the timeless time of modernity. Metz doesn’t think that apocalyptic texts “contain idle speculations about the exact point in time of some catastrophe” (making allowances for the prejudicial language here, I think Metz is wrong – “apocalyptic” texts in Scripture abound in temporal references that must be taken seriously if history is to be taken seriously).
Yet Metz believes apocalypse is valuable because it is about “the catastrophic essence of time itself,” its chief insight being that “time itself is full of danger.” More importantly, it insists that “Time belongs not to Prometheus or to Faust, but to God.”
Thus, paradoxically, apocalyptic shocks moderns out of both their boredoms and their terrors.
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