Dear Tom,
actually, though, you are definitely right that we are very close “brothers” in this regard, because the typical Catholics on most internet forums are utterly oblivious to the apoc. They are content to just wave their hands and explain it all away as nothing more than “coded-comfort” and “preterism”. Their argument is, “The Church has always had problems, always will, so what’s new. Just forget about it, because it’s basically irrelevant, except perhaps for the Early Church, and only in a very vague and fully allegorical sense for any other era of the Church.”
but as I have repeatedly pointed out, and which Vern ignores, we must distinguish the DEGREES and TYPES of ways in which there has been SPIRITUAL opposiition to the Church!!! When these people say “there have been many ‘apostasies’”, they are way oversimplifying the word “apostasy”. They say, “for there were the arians, and the Islamics, and the Orthodox, and the Protestants, and the deists…” “Yes, you liberal son of a gun, but just look CLOSER at the categories! Catholicism formally, through doctrine, distinguishes varying DEGREES and TYPES of spiritual categories. For what separates the Church from Orthodox is LESS than what separates from Protestants, which is less than from the Enlightenment children, which is less than from the atheistic or relativistic materialists”.
I cannot understand how people can be so blind to the fact the modern spiritual crisis in terms of the degree of spiritual depravity, is basically as bad as it can get, that is, with regards to atheism and relativistic, hedonistic materialism. Couple that with the unimaginable amplification of the consequences of sin through materialistic developments, they are going too far in just dismissing Fundamentalism as UTTERLY off base. Now, admittedly, Fundamentalists ask mostly wrong Q’s about the data, but their assertion of a great spiritual crisis is not too off base. My real objection is simply this: yes, it seems highly likely that we are on the brink of a cataclysm wrought on humanity simply as the consequences of its depravity. But must it be the end? Must this be it? Or is it possible that the crisis of suffering will reawaken the world’s awareness of its need for God and serve to bring about a great renewal. Therein is the mistake of the Fundamentalism. They are right in asserting that an apostate culture dominates significant portions of humanity. Where they go wrong is to assume, this is the apostasy of the end. They fail to recognize that the apostasy could be healed through the suffering that seems likely to occur any time now.
But anyway, Tom, I agree, we are rather similar in that we refuse to relegate the apoc to nothing more than a code book for the Early Church, and that we perceive deeper meanings and also meanings that can be relevant for our own age, and not just the beginnnig of Church history or the end of it. And the fact that we are regarded as freaks really po’s me, to be quite honest. Catholics do not have to be exclusively preterists. We are free to explore additional layers of meaning, and yet for some reason, we are all but ignored for it.
