Jeg skal derfor ikke lave en ny religion eller religiøs trosretning med en ny hellig skrifts påståede generelt endelige definition på sandheden om alt. Hold op med det pjat igen.
Du kom for sent Gerth, det skete for 2000 år siden.
Åndens Apostel og Tænkningens Skytshelgen Paulus gør at kristendommen aldrig bliver en hellig bogreligion vi tilbeder som sandheden, der hvor Ånden er, er også Friheden.
Og kristendommen har alt i alt gjort det rigtig godt lige siden.
Her gives ordet til Nicolai Berdyaev og Albert Schweitzer og Paul Tillich der alle står i stor gæld til den Paulinske urkristendom. Først Berdyaev:
The coming Christ will never appear to him who by his own free effort has not revealed within himself the other, the creative image of man (Thus is revealed man's spontaneity and autonomy in creativeness, man's free activity on the way to the Coming Christ). Only the courage of free creativeness will bring man to the Coming Christ, prepare man for a vision of another image af the Absolut Man. And if great obedience is needed for redemption, for creativeness there is needed great courage. ..
The third creative revelation in the Spirit will have no holy scripture; it will be no voice from on high; it will be accomplished in man and in humanity - it is an anthropological revelation, an unveiling of the Christology of man . God awaits the anthropological revelation from man and man cannot expect to have it from God. And one cannot merely wait for the third revelation; man must accomplish it himself, living in the Spirit; accomplish it by a free, creative act. In this act everything transcendent will become immanent. The third anthropological revelation, in which the creative mystery of man will be revealed, is man's final freedom. Man is quite free in the revelation of his creativeness. In this fearful freedom lies all the god-like dignity of man, and his dread responsibility. The virtue of accepting a dangerous position, the virtue of daring to do, is the basic virtue of the creative epoch. MCA
Christianity makes God immanent in human nature and hence cannot admit a completely transcendent separation between this world and the next. MCA
Creativeness is neither permitted nor justified by religion - creativeness is itselv religion. Creative experience is a special kind of experience and a special kind of way:
the creative ecstasy shatters the whole of man's being - it is an out-breaking into another world. .. The creative experience is unique and self-sufficient - it is not something derivative; its roots go into the deepest depths. ..
Creativeness is the final revelation of the Holy Trinity
- its anthropological revelation. This is a consciousness which has never existed in the world - it is being born in our epoch. Berdyaev skriver det her for mere end 100 år siden og med New Age idag vi må sige at han fik ret. De fleste mente ellers at den religiøse spirituelle dagsorden var sluttet for altid, men nej sagde Berdyaev som en af de få store profetiske tænkere og han fik ret i en grad han måske ikke engang har kunnet forestille sig.
Demokrati, sikring af menneskerettigheder, ytringsfrihed, religionsfrihed og høj uddannelsesniveau får den religiøse spirituelle dagsorden til at blomstre uden lige. Et paradoks for mange ateister der tror den religiøse spirituelle dimension er en svækkelse af dømmekraften, intelligensen og i det hele taget er noget der snylter på vores energi, livskraft og livsglæde og gør os mindre engageret i vore omgivelser og mindre i stand til at forstå vores omgivelser uhildet, med friske klare øjne.
Den religiøse spirituelle dimension kan aldrig være i konflikt med viden, og eksakt videnskab, og en videnskabelig tilgang til os selv og vore omgivelser.
Uden den religiøse spirituelle dimension tømmes menneskets fornuft for meningsfylde og betydningsbærende indhold. Dette menneske visner eller bliver offer for et dæmonisk indhold, hvor endelige betingede anliggende gøres til et ubetinget anliggende af ultimativ betydning, som vi ser hos bibelfundamentalisme, og islamisk fundamentalisme og hos totalitære styreformer. Og vi ser det også i New Age. Det, disse kætterier, er netop noget der kommer til udtryk hvis menneskets religiøse spirituelle intelligens svækkes.
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The usual Christian answer, that man's chief end is life in God, cannot satisfy us - it is too general and too formal. Those who give this answer are too much engrossed in the way to the final goal. Rest in God is usually thought of as victory over the evil and sin in human nature, as the extinguishing of this nature, as the absorption of the human by the divine. Man merely makes free within himself a place for God and returns to God's bosom without any profit. There is a fateful tendency toward monophysitism in historic Christianity. It is as though the man who is redeemed from his sins desired that his human nature should cease to exist - that only the divine natur alone should exist. But Christ is God-Man. He redeems and restores human nature to its likeness unto God. Human nature which knows itself, knows its independent and free being, must exist eternally only as a creative and creating nature. Human nature finally justifies itself before the Creator not by extinguishing itself but by its own creative expression.
Man must absolutely be. Human nature, redeemed and saved from evil, has a positive human content and a positive human purpose. This content and purpose can be only creativeness. Man's creativeness is connected with the ecstatic element in him. MCA
Albert Schweitzer siger det samme:
Paul's mysticism was not like the mysticism elsewhere described as a soul being at one with God. In the mysticism he felt and encouraged, there is no loss of self but an enriching of it; no erase of time or place but a comprehension of how time and place fit within the eternal. A. Schweitzer.
Her lige et tydeligt eksempel på hvor nær Tillich og Berdyaev stod på hinanden,
hvor Tillich endda taler om Fornuft og Ekstatisk Fornuft i Troens Dynamik (verdens bedste bog om tro):
"Ecstasy" ("standing outside one's self)") points to a state of mind which is extraordinary in the sense that the mind transcendens its ordinary situation. Ecstacy is not a negation of reason; it is the state of mind in which reason is beyond itself, that is, beyond its subject-object structure. In being beyond itself reason does not deny itself. "Ecstatic reason" remains reason; it does not receive anything irrational or anti-rational -- which it could not do without self-destruction --- but it transcends the basic condition of finite rationality, the subject-object of structure. This is the state mystics try to reach by ascetic and meditative activities.
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Og jeg er enig med Arne Gerth, du skal formå at tale forstandigt til os moderne mennesker med et moderne verdensbillede. Så forklar dig og definer dine ord og begreber.
Vh HansKrist