Schelling and the Johannine Age

Harold Stahmer traces Rosenstock-Huessy’s notion of a “Johannine” age to Schelling: “In Schelling’s Philosophy of Revelation . . . the millennarian idea of the successive ‘ages’ of the world – the Petrine, the Pauline, and finally the Johannine – is developed at length. These ages were linked by schelling to three historic forms of Christianity: the Petrine age to Roman Catholicism, the Pauline to Protestantism, and the Johannine age, i.e. th Age of the Spirit, to a new era marked by an absence of doctrinal and dogmatic concerns.”

For Rosenstock-Huessy, “the Johannine age would be an age ruled by the Word, and traditional barriers between the sacred and the profane would be eliminated,” as Christians “immigrate into our workaday world, there to incarnate the spirit in unpredictable forms.” (A prophecy of Surnaturel , or Bonhoeffer?) They believed that in the new age “the New Jerusalem” would bring “healing of the nations without any visible Church at its center.” Yet, where Schelling saw the Johannine age as an age of Spirit, Rosenstock-Huessy characterized it as an age of the word.