Title: Christ Consciousness and the Three Ages of the Church
Subject Classification:  Religion and Faith, Philosophy  
BIC Classification: HRC
BISAC Classification: REL067080, REL067050, PHI022000
Binding: Hardback, eBook
Planned publication date: Feb 2026
ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-83711-676-8
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-83711-677-5

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Description

'The three ages of the church' is an old idea going back before the Reformation to the prophetic monk Joachim of Fiore (c.1135-1202): the age of the father, the age of the son and the age of the holy spirit. St. Peter here is a cipher for the first age of the church, of which the Roman Catholic church in its heraldry holds the keys; the monarchical church of empire. The apostle Paul is a cipher of the second age of the church, the age of book-based theological belief, and colonisation (spreading the Gospel); the church of correct believers and believing.
The third age of the church according to Joachim would be an age of the holy spirit. This book takes “spirit” in both Christian (religious) and Hegelian (secular) senses as the force of freedom or liberty: a vision of peace and goodwill on earth, and human creativity.
The age of the spirit is associated symbolically, spiritually, and philosophically, with the apostle John, the friend of Jesus. John was commissioned by Jesus to take care of his mother Mary (symbol of the feminine carriage of religion) and at the Last Supper, he laid his head on Jesus’ breast, traditionally taken among the Church Fathers as the symbol of hearing the true heart and inward divine sense of the Lord. Peter, Paul, and John stand for three different paradigmatic ways that historic Christianity, working with the spirit, has comprehended itself and continues to comprehend itself and present itself to the world at large, and thereby, three kinds of “Christ consciousness.”
The age of the spirit was the age to come in Joachim’s day, but since the time of Rousseau, Goethe and Kant it has been our age. It is an age associated with freedom, striving, and destruction. The second part of the book takes Christ consciousness outside the idiom of theological Christology. The book draws on transcendental empirical ideas that have psychological traction. This includes ideas from Buddhist as well as modern philosophy.

Biography

Author(s):  Matthew Del Nevo is a professor of philosophy at the Australian University College of Divinity, Sydney.

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