Strange and true, they define themselves as “Christians”, but they don’t believe in the Resurrection! Even re-incarnation or a complete vanishing seems to them more plausible and desirable! According to Aeneas’ Quest, this is the situation among French Catholics, and we have no reason to infer that Catholics of other nationalities may differ substantially.<\/p>\n
A visitor of the Greek-speaking blog of Ellopos<\/a> asked what are the differences between Orthodox and Catholic Christians. I gave her a short answer, referring her to an online article where such differences are listed, warning her at the same time, that most of these differences need careful thinking if one is going to understand their deeper meaning, otherwise they look insignificant. Finally I told her that all of these differences come from and lead to a Catholic understanding of the Christian faith as a road that makes man a slave of God. For an Orthodox Christian a man should become not a slave but a friend of God and be united with Him.<\/p>\n I believe that this crucial difference explains also the Catholic denial of the resurrection, which seems absurd at first glance, since Resurrection is a fundamental Christian doctrine.\u00a0 Sometimes we say that Nietzsche accused Christians (having knowledge only of the Western Christians) for their lack of joy. Yet, this accusation is much older, made also by such devoted Catholics as Meister Eckhart. It is not a coincidence that Meister Eckhart, the greatest theologian in the West, was condemned by the pope for teaching among other, perfectly right, doctrines, that “if \u0399 were accepting anything from God, \u0399 should be subject to him or below him as a servant or slave, and he in giving would be as a master. We shall not be so in life everlasting” (see the ninth article of Eckhart’s condemnation<\/a>).<\/p>\n How can one have joy and believe in the Resurrection trully, if one’s personal, distinctive, and eternal life with God will be the life of a slave? Thus people seek ways to avoid themselves, either by completely vanishing or by being re-incarnated into other forms of life.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Strange and true, they define themselves as “Christians”, but they don’t believe in the Resurrection! Even re-incarnation or a complete vanishing seems to them more plausible and desirable! According to Aeneas’ Quest, this is the situation among French Catholics, and we have no reason to infer that Catholics of other nationalities may differ substantially. A […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[9,10],"tags":[2753,758,2756,2755,2754,375,208,665,2435,2752],"class_list":["post-874","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-orthodox-christianity","tag-catholic-christians","tag-catholics","tag-christian-doctrine","tag-eternal-life","tag-friend-of-god","tag-incarnation","tag-meister-eckhart","tag-nietzsche","tag-orthodox-christian","tag-western-christians"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=874"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/874\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=874"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=874"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=874"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}