Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 702
FUTURE OF REVELATION despotic rule of the Roman Empire. Two thousand years have passed since their rejection of Jesus as as Messiah, yet no Messiah of their expectation has come. History has changed the political geography of the world and the prophecy of the coming of the Christ has lost all relevance. . There is no Judea or Palestine under the yoke of a Roman. Empire from which the Jewish people are to be liberated. In fact, that Roman Empire which once ruled half of the world has completely disappeared from the map of the world. We still hear of deliverance, but it is a deliverance from the. Jews, not of the Jews. . Although there was nothing wrong in their belief that. Christ would be born like any other human child to a human mother, yet they attached some supernatural preconditions to his birth which could not have been realized. Their belief about the bodily descent of Elijahas before the advent of the Messiah, is just the case in point which effectively blocked the passage of the Messiah they awaited. So the Jewish position, vis-à-vis the advent of a. Messiah, in reality turns out to be a denial of his advent altogether. . TURNING OUR GAZE from the Jews to the Christians, we. I find a situation not too dissimilar to the one described above. Imagine a Christ paying a second visit to earth in the grand style envisaged by the Christians who still await his literal second coming. A son of God descending in glory from heaven in a human form is an idea fit only for fiction, yet it serves to keep hope, or shall we say blind faith, alive. Looking at it from the rational vantage point of the non-Christian, the absurdity becomes even more glaring. No non-Christian, be he religious or otherwise, can share this belief because it speaks of an outrageous wedlock between spirit and matter. Yet the Christians see no element of irrationality about it because dogma has blinded them. 660