Sorry for butting in, I hope you don't mind, but I have been thinking about this:
but his act of mercy is not to give humanity eternal life, as in the Gospels, but to give mortality back to them
I'd say that the point of the Gospels isn't eternal life (especially not in the sense of manufactured immortality that the Miracle brought about), but salvation. So there isn't a difference, Jack's blood brings salvation - the freeing breath that goes around the world - just as much as Christ's blood does, through death. Christ's death, but also the transformation of death in itself is a big point in Christianity, and necessary for the real life.
(Thinking about it, if you see the whole thing from a Christian perspective, Jack brings the real eternal life back, because people can only reach that if they die. It's not like immortality in religious terms means in any way what we have seen in MD.)
And just as MD criticizes the wrong use of Jack's blood, the church has been criticized throughout history again and again for using the blood of Christ for the wrong purpose (= its own power), be it during the Protestant Reformation or in the recent Liberation Theology.
RTD keeps the metaphysics and just changes the ultimate reference points: from "God" to "mystery of life and death", represented by the Blessing, and from "eternal life" to "next generation".
no subject
but his act of mercy is not to give humanity eternal life, as in the Gospels, but to give mortality back to them
I'd say that the point of the Gospels isn't eternal life (especially not in the sense of manufactured immortality that the Miracle brought about), but salvation. So there isn't a difference, Jack's blood brings salvation - the freeing breath that goes around the world - just as much as Christ's blood does, through death. Christ's death, but also the transformation of death in itself is a big point in Christianity, and necessary for the real life.
(Thinking about it, if you see the whole thing from a Christian perspective, Jack brings the real eternal life back, because people can only reach that if they die. It's not like immortality in religious terms means in any way what we have seen in MD.)
And just as MD criticizes the wrong use of Jack's blood, the church has been criticized throughout history again and again for using the blood of Christ for the wrong purpose (= its own power), be it during the Protestant Reformation or in the recent Liberation Theology.
RTD keeps the metaphysics and just changes the ultimate reference points: from "God" to "mystery of life and death", represented by the Blessing, and from "eternal life" to "next generation".