Life is a tight rope walk between the past and the future. It is not at all different in the Church. One is pulled between the instincts of life and death, repetition and innovation, continuity and rupture, community and destruction, eros and death. The history of time began with modernity. Modernity is the time period when time has a story.

Ghosts often appear in ‘the name of justice,’ says Derrida. While nostalgia is the longing for a lost home and another time, ghosts emerge from the past and interrupt the present. “There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim,” wrote Walter Benjamin. The retrospective gaze dominates encountering the past within the present, and the past is connected with how we imagine the future by caring for this world and for one another. This small non-time-space in the very heart of time, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born into, can discover and ploddingly pave it anew. Each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and infinite future, must discover a new present. Meaningless repetitions must give way to meaningful innovations.

The Marxian identification of action with violence implies another fundamental challenge to tradition. Marx’s glorification of violence therefore contains the more specific denial of logos, of speech, the diametrically opposite and traditionally most human form of intercourse. He had an anti-traditional hostility to speech and the concomitant glorification of violence.

Jesus’ view of coping with violence appears to imply a perspective diametrically opposed to Marx’s. It is a Manichean heresy. The Church is said to follow the way of Jesus, but its history shows it has practically resorted to violence to its own faithful as we see in the case of the so-called devil possessions, heretics and schismatics. Thousands were killed in the Manichean war against evil. Authority always uses different forms of violence to impose its dictum. The whole thing is founded on lies and blatant lies. There are acts of violence when words, texts or behaviour, whether obvious or subtle, are used intentionally against subjects to bring about negative repercussions of anxiety, loss of material and mental assets, trauma, psychological damage, developmental problems, psychic injuries, mental pressures. Authority does it with silence, which takes on the form of violence.

An attack is now happening on Christians who are members of a particular Church and a common culture with authentic existence before God. This is not a peripheral feature though; rather, is the critique of Christian communalism which lies implicit in the thought of certain authorities. Christian citizens of Christianised cultures today would do well to heed this warning: Every effort that tends toward the establishment of a Christian State church, a Christian people, is by itself un-Christian, anti-Christian and Manichean. If anything at all is to be done, it is to try to introduce Christianity into the Christendom they establish. Christendom is nothing but a lifeless outer shell of power-crazy mediocrity with Hegelian dialectics or a Marxian class war. Who will smoke out illusions and knavish tricks from the church?

There is a parable in the Scriptures that is seldom considered yet very instructive and inspiring: “There was a man who had two sons. The father went to the first one and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ And he answered, ‘I will not’; but afterward he changed his mind and went. And the father went to the second son and said the same and he answered, ‘I will go, sir,’ but did not go. Which of the two did the will of his father?” (Matt 21:28–31). The New Year awaits both a ‘no’ and a ‘yes.’ Beware! The “Yes” of promise keeping is sleep-inducing. An honest “No” possesses much more promise. It can stimulate; repentance may not be far away. He who says “No” becomes almost afraid of himself. But he who says “Yes, I will” is all too pleased with himself. The world is quite inclined – even eager – to make promises, for a promise appears very fine at the moment – it inspires! Yet for this very reason the eternal is suspicious of promises. Now suppose that neither of the brothers did his father’s will. Then the one who said “No” was surely closer to realizing that he did not do his father’s will. A “no” does not hide anything, but a “yes” can very easily become a deception, a self-deception; which of all difficulties is the most difficult to conquer.