Christ and Anti-Christ
(Autists only - deep stuff)
excerpts:
Corruptio optimi quae est pessima [The corruption of the best becomes the worst].
Through the attempt to insure, to guarantee, to regulate Revelation, the best has become the worst. There isn’t a religion called Christianity that was then later corrupted. Rather the corruption was in its institutionalization as a religion.
“Faith in the incarnate Logos sacrificed on the cross is not a religion and cannot be analyzed within the concepts of religious science.” The teachings of Jesus are full of anti-religious statements and satires on the scrupulous observances of his opponents as in his pregnant statement (Mark 2:27) that “the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.”
“What is impressive about the transition from the early Church to the established Western church is how thoroughly this mystery – [the mystery of evil] – disappeared from the Church’s teaching and the concern of most of its members.”
“The ways of history do not lead directly upwards to the Kingdom of God, they pass by way of the final unveiling of the anti-Christ who conceals himself under the last mask to be stripped away – the mask of what is good and what is Christian.”
“Man can do what God cannot, namely manipulate others for their own salvation.” This domestication of the Gospel is a historical process perceptible to all – Christianity changes the world – but, to quote Paul, it is also a “mystery of evil” - a mystery because its meaning, and perhaps its dynamism as well, depends on and derives from the Revelation which it corrupts and betrays. This mystery, is now more clearly present than ever before. In other words, the attempt to make institutions perform in place of persons is now reaching a kind of theoretical maximum.
http://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2015/10/22/christ-and-anti-christ-in-the-thought-of-ivan-illich