"I was admitted to the Academic Gymnasium still during the war. It was not easy to pass then, the exams took two or three days. A German inspector came and was to test primarily our physical fitness; the P.E. made nearly half of the whole examination. In the morning there was the German language, and the remaining quarter was left for all the other subjects. It was quite paradoxical that the inspector himself was in a wheelchair. They even measured our skulls to see if we were Aryan enough."
Interviewer: "Once, you quoted a definition by Karl Barth that his assistant published after his death: 'Resurrection or the eternal life is "what is not lost".'
Pokorny clarifies after a moment: "Literally, 'nothing will be lost'; and the assistant’s name was E. Busch (1965-1968)."
The interviewer: "Do you agree with this definition?" Pokorny: "Eternity does not mean lasting forever in time. That would make life relative. This is what makes Buddhism so deep - understanding that this is no hope really. The naiveté of the modern people is that they want to secure this cheap eternity, find a secret recipe, resort to transmigration, which is actually a punishment for both Buddha and Plato, before man finally dwells in nirvana or atones for his sins. On the contrary, it is this confrontation with the Ultimate Reality which brings people together, it is when personal histories become intertwined. This is where the simple image of common dining as a vision of eternity comes from: inscription in the Book of Life, a face-to-face meeting. These are the metaphors that directly affirm human identity: face to face, inscription in the Book of Life ... after all, that's what is written in our IDs."
"I see the principal benefit of the Christian-Marxist dialogue in that, first, the entire Ateist Committee of the Party's Central Committee sided with the Church in the civil dispute on the rights of the churches (for which they were all expelled from the Party in 1969), and, second, in that it contributed to triggering the Prague Spring."
Prof. Souček (Biblical and New Testament Studies) wrote a letter to the Secretary General of the World Council of Churches, Visser't Hooft, about the situation in Czechoslovakia and the alternatives for future development. His interpretation (as paraphrased by Pokorny) was that democracy had not been maintained by constitutional means and could have been maintained only by a military coup. That way, however, it would have discredited itself finally. It lost its credit for the first time during Munich, when many people ceased to trust in democracy and workers turned away from the West. For the second time, it lost credit during the expulsion of Sudeten Germans. That was a brave statement from him at the time (and a very rare one, others included P. Pitr; J. L. Hromadka only questioned whether the expulsion was done in a humane way). If the “Yugoslav model” had been used, the democratic tradition would not have survived the third blow. That, however, was not a realistic scenario (as Yugoslavia had been founded before the Soviets invented the A-bomb). Therefore, the Christians must take the burden - of which Hromadka talked after the February 1948 - upon themselves. As for the economy, it does not have to mean a total disruption, offers Souček; economy runs on inertia and the post-war results were good, with Czechoslovakia making it among the top 10 richest countries in the world at that time. Therefore, he concluded, we had to suffer through it all."
"We evangelicals were raised on the notion that the world is rotten and man is sinful (envious, aggressive etc. - see the doctrine of the original sin etc.), which, interestingly, affected the entire Catholic church as well. In reality, people actually long for something good. Nowadays, many people are ready to volunteer for a purpose if they know it has a meaning, but they do not have that substantial assurance covering their back. These people are like sheep without a shepherd. They need somebody to tell them that it is meaningful. When we say the prayer "Your kingdom come..." we mean "May your Kingdom come on this Earth" – this is the future that we live for.
The apocalyptic vision of the world is very topical these days. It has integrated the two dimensions of human hope: that man wants to live for something - something that has a meaning even without his contribution – because if it depended only on man, it would be very unstable. And he wants to know that he is not meant to become something new- that he is the ultimate aim of God’s intentions with mankind. And that's the beautiful thing about the apocalyptic notion - that the dead, for example those who were tortured to death, will rise again and see the victory of what they lived for. This should be translated into a common language, taken out from the apocalyptic context, or it should frame it somehow, knowing it is an objective expression, the “second naiveté”as Ricoeur puts it, which is indispensable. This has to be said these days."
Petr Pokorný was born in 1933 in Brno to a traditional evangelical family (he is a relative of Prof. J. B.Souček, a prominent theologist). After graduating from the Academic Gymnasium in Brno, he studied at the Comenius (Evangelical) Theological Faculty of Charles University in Prague (1951-1955). Influenced by Professor Souček, he focused on early Christian literature and later, with Prof. Karel Svoboda, on Greek literature (1957-1958). He served as an evangelical priest in Prague between 1957 and 1967. In 1964 he worked at the Haardt Institute for Classical Philology in Geneva, and took a post-graduate course on the New Testament with Prof. G. D. Kilpatrick in Oxford and with Prof. Jiří Černý (Coptic language). He submitted his thesis (SÓMA CHRISTOY in the Epistle to the Ephesians) in 1959, and his inaugural dissertation (Gnostic Mysteries) in 1962. His graduation was permitted in 1963, and once his inaugural dissertation was discussed (1967), he was invited as a guest professor to the University of Greifswald (1967-68). He became a New Testament tutor at the Comenius ETF in 1968; was appointed Professor in 1972; was appointed the Head of the Bible Institute in 1990; and has been the Dean since 1996. He obtained his CSc. degree in 1968 on the basis of his paper about early Gnosis, and his DrSc. degree in Greek Literature 1993 based on the sum of his work. He lectured at more than 30 universities in Europe and the US; spent prolonged periods in Pittsburgh and at Princeton (1986-87 and 1992, respectively) and at the University of Tübingen (1988-89, a research scholarship in 1995-96). In 1967 he was voted a member of the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas, and presided the society in 1995-96; he was a member of the translation committee of the United Bible Societies in 1975-96 (and the chairman in 1992-96); in 1986 he became an international member of the US Society of Biblical Literature; in 1995 he was voted an internationa member of the German Academy of Sciences in Göttingen; and in 1996 he was awarded the Humboldt Prize. Since 1995 he has been an advisor to the committee for the Russian literary translation of the Bible; he was a member of the Editorial Board of the New Testament Studies (Cambridge) twice (between 1992 and 1996 for the last time). A member of the Learned Society of the Czech Republic. Petr Pokorný passed away on 18 January 2020.
