The Grand Inquisitor

[phkrause]

In the greatest chapter (“The Grand Inquisitor”) in the greatest novel (The Brothers Karamazov), by one of the West’s greatest novelists (Fyodor Dostoyevsky), Jesus Christ returns to earth, not in heavenly glory on bright clouds of angels, but “in that human shape in which He walked among men for three years fifteen centuries ago.” The time and place of this advent are awkward for the church: Seville, Spain, in the sixteenth century, where “the day before almost a hundred heretics had, ad majorem gloriam Dei, been burned by the cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, in a magnificent auto da fé, in the presence of the king, the court, the knights, the cardinals, the most charming ladies of the court, and the whole population of Seville.”

http://www.adventistreview.org/issue.php?issue=2012-1517&page=25