THE REVELATION OF GOD

While acknowledging the sincere efforts of every church of his day, Jesus did not consider himself a member of any of them, as he did not join the official church and did not allow anyone to regard him as the founder of any church, theology, or ecclesial mandate. He did not keep reciting rosaries and did not even waste his time examining biblical texts, trying to explain or interpret their contents.

In fact, what happens is the secular error that all certainty comes from biblical texts, that God's revelation is limited to the was written in the Bible - or any other sacred book - and even worse, than by Bible, in this case, is the understanding of phrases, words, and letters in this book.

This unfortunate craze - or, as the illustrious North American pastor Harry Emerson Fosdick (1878–1979) put it, this horrible bibliolatry - of wanting to decide everything with individually analyzed and arbitrarily interpreted biblical texts, divided Protestantism into hundreds of sects, particularly in the USA. Well said Paul of Tarsus, that the letter kills, but the spirit gives life. The more one analyzes the letter of the Bible without reaching its spirit, the more and more the sects within Christianity multiply.

There is no report that Jesus, who possessed the spirit of the sacred books in his soul, had examined biblical texts to deepen his knowledge of God. When Francis of Assisi, this incomparable messenger of the Kingdom of God heard that some of his disciples founded in Bologna, a library to study theology and discussing biblical texts, he refused to lodge in this kind of theological seminary, seriously fearing that his disciples asphyxiate the divine spirit of the Gospel under the dead weight of human theologies. To those who possess the divine spirit of the Bible, the proper study of the letter can only increase and intensify that spirit, but anyone who thinks that by the simple analytical study of sacred texts it can become a genuine and integral Christian, or of any other creeds, lives in a dangerous error, confusing quality with quantity, identifying divine revelation with human erudition.

It is known that Jesus spent whole nights on the heights of the mountains or in the solitude of the wilderness, diving into the ocean of Divinity, in deep introspection and intense communion with the heavenly Father; above him, the vast silence of the starry sky; around him, the mysterious whisper of the night breezes, and within him the sea and the shores of the kingdom of God upon which he bathed his soul thirsty of the Infinite - but not in the pages of any book! And from those long nights illuminated by the light of God, Jesus leaves with a soul full of a firmness, tranquillity, peace and serenity that no explanation or interpretation of texts can give ...

This is the great evil of modern Christianity, especially of the so-called “evangelical” sector, because it replaced the living Gospel with debates and discussions in theology. Whoever once spent a single night, or even an hour, in this bath of divine light, which is the living Gospel, knows with unerring certainty that human redemption is not in this or that church, theology, explanation, or interpretation of texts, but in a personal encounter with Jesus in the depths of the lived Gospel. It can be said that Jesus is Christianity and who does not identify with him from personal experience does not live Christianity. It may even be said - as much as it scandalizes the inexperienced - that even the knowledge of the Gospel as a text does not guarantee the real possession of Christianity, although it is an excellent way to possess it. There are people who know perfectly the four Gospels, but they do not have Christianity, because they do not know experientially what Christ is, because they did not have their personal encounter with God.

Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), social reformer, educator, and pioneer in the emancipation of the Indian woman, says she lived ten years with Christians without meeting Jesus. The personal encounter with him is the great Pentecost of the spiritual man's life; it is the decisive step, the death of the Adamic man and the birth of the Christlike man; it is the redemptive crisis, the transition from darkness to light, from death to life. Before this encounter, there is no real solution to any problem in human life - after this encounter there is no problem that is not solved or in the process of a definitive solution. The redemptive crisis is exclusively in this personal encounter with God, in this joyful “I am no longer the one who lives - the Christ lives in me!” It suffices that, in a certain place or in some community, there lives a single man who really knows God by personal experience, who possesses the mystics of faith embodied in the ethics of life; it is enough that there is a single explorer of the spirit of this nature, not a superman, but an integral man, and he will see that from the intense focus of his faith hundreds of faiths will leap, that when they find enough fuel they will become new centres of faith, true chain reaction, and over time will be heaven and earth illuminated by the flashes of a vast fire of universal faith. And all who risk this leap to the encounter with God will know from personal experience that it was not a leap into the sad emptiness of darkness and death, but the exultant plenitude of light and life. Any “spiritual revivals” worthy of the name invariably begin, with the profound experience of those who seek in their intimacy, the encounter with God, and not with any ecclesiastical organization, however powerful it may seem.

The followers of Jesus from the time of the catacombs knew no other kind of Christianity than this one, of the real Christ Jesus lived in the pages of the Gospel, and that is why with the smile on the lips, the glow of joy in the eyes and the peace of Christ in the heart, they gave themselves to martyrdom ... For they had crossed the last frontiers of sin and death and lived immortal life here on Earth.

Where is this radiant and irresistible Christianity? It may revive as long as instead of dragging this sick pseudo-life under the shadow of the “dead letter” it rises to the plenitude and exuberant health given by the “life-giving spirit” of divinely-inspired books.

To want anyone to prove, with texts taken from the dead letter, that Jesus saw God, man, and the world in a grand panoramic view, in an Organic Whole, in a stupendous Cosmic Harmony - is to confess illiterate to the Gospel’s Spirit and to ignore what the greatest human spiritual geniuses of all times and countries have experienced as they come into intimate and vital contact with the life-giving spirit of the Gospel.