Friedrich W. Nietzsche considered one of the most important western philosophers of the nineteenth century wrote: "If Jesus returned to the world in our days, the first statement that he would pronounce to the Christian world would be this: Christian peoples, know that I am not Christian."
Mahatma Gandhi answered to all Christian missionaries who wanted to convert him: "I accept Christ and his Gospel, but I do not accept your Christianity."
Albert Schweitzer, son of an evangelical minister, polymath, Christian theologian, organist, writer, humanitarian, 1952 Nobel Peace Prize winner for his "Reverence for Life" philosophy, wrote: "We inject men with the serum of our theology, and whoever is vaccinated with our Christianity is immunized against the spirit of Christ".
Abraham Lincoln, a celebrated president of the United States never joined any of the many existing Christian churches in his country, because he was waiting for the church of Christ.
Why this discrepancy between Christ and Christianity that comes from famous, spiritual and sincere people?
Simply because it is impossible to identify Christ with any religious organization; any such attempt is necessarily a misrepresentation and a failure. Every organization is the product of the ego, and this ego is, by nature, ego-centred, and therefore anti-Christlike.
The only thing that might happen is an individual Christlike experience, but never a Christian social organization. Several people have had and have Christlike experience, and where there is great plenitude there is necessarily an overflow. If there were many individual men with that genuine experience, our society would be greatly benefited by this individual plenitude. The Christlike spirit of many may produce, by indirect means, a kind of social Christianity by induction.
But what it is impossible and counterproductive is that the spirit of Christ should be expressed by some organization, as the West has tried with no success.
Jesus himself knew that when he warned his countrymen, saying: -"The kingdom of heaven does not come with observances (compliance and obedience to rules or dogmas), nor can I say is here or there. The kingdom of heaven is within you."
There are various models of Christianity in the world, as well as various models in other religious creeds. Can these organizations - some quite sincere - be identified with the true message of Jesus? Had he established the great cosmic message of his Gospel in rules of confession, communion, and mass? Or the obligation to read and memorize the entire Bible and believe in his redeeming blood? Or practising charity and the belief in successive reincarnations to redeem oneself? If so, Jesus would be a skilled coder of precepts and prohibitions, but never this cosmic genius that he was! One of the wisest Christs in human history.
The same goes for other creeds, with their divisions, their labels, their precepts, observances, dogmas, etc.! Did these masters also establish rules of conduct to reach the kingdoms of their particular heavens? Obviously not! This whole protocol was introduced inside divine messages, by the contaminated hands of the founders of the different churches.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, former President of India, wrote: "The religion of future humanity will be mystical."
However, the mystique is also a strictly individual experience, which, when socially organized, ceases to exist. The intimate essence of the mystical experience is individual, which however, does not prevent this individual verticality from unfolding into social horizontality; but this unfolding or overflow only happens when the vertical experience reaches the zenith of its plenitude.
Our troubled world cannot be remedied by any new organization, religious or civil; only the mystical experience of many can benefit mankind.
All true mystique is irresistibly overflowing, radiating and dynamic; otherwise, it's just mysticism!
Jesus organized nothing in the religious context of the Israel Synagogue, nor in the civilian sector of the Roman Empire politics. His performance was exclusively indirect, by the spontaneous overflowing of his plenitude, by what Paul of Tarsus said, that the plenitude of the Divinity dwelt in him.
For nearly three centuries, from the year 33 to 313, Christianity of the catacombs lived this mystical Christianity, without any social organization. And this was the most glorious and fertile period of the Christian world, the period of mystical verticality of the catacombs, whose only way out, sadly, was to martyrdom in the Coliseum.
In the year 33 of our century, Jesus was betrayed and condemned to death by the kiss of one of his disciples - but many ignore that the same Jesus, in the year 313, was murdered by the kiss of another disciple, the first Christian emperor Constantine the Great. The kiss of Judas killed the body of Jesus - the kiss of Constantine killed the spirit of Christ.
Judas versus Jesus.
Constantine versus Christ.
The kiss with which Constantine betrayed the spirit of Christ was the Edict of Milan in the year 313, which recognized Christianity and ended three centuries of persecution - but with this benefit, he preluded centuries of traitor harms: he invited the disciples of Christ to integrate into the organization of the Roman Empire; made Christianity the official state religion and defended through weapons, politics and money - weapons to kill enemies, politics to deceive friends, money to buy and sell consciences.
This edict decreed the end of three centuries of true Christianity - and the beginning of many centuries of another kind of Christianity: social, political and military.
Constantine's Christianity continues to this day in the world, being part of the official ideology of the churches and some governments. But fortunately, in the shadow of the catacombs, in silence and solitude, the mystical Christianity continues to dwell in some souls, whose names do not appear and whose statues are not placed in squares and halls.
In some European countries, the traditional Christianity of the churches was almost abandoned. For this reason, theologians and missionaries turn their target to underdeveloped, poor and semi-illiterate countries, where it is still possible the acceptance of theological Christianity, like in the times of the Roman Empire, when Christianity arose. The countries of the East will never accept Christianity in its ecclesiastical form, because the ancient philosophical culture of the East is incompatible with theologies of the West, for until today, after centuries of missionary efforts, there are few Christian followers in Asian countries.
The message of Jesus is perfectly compatible with the highest cultural evolution of mankind - but not with the Christian theologies adopted by the churches.
The only chance to return humanity to a Christlike status is its return to the initial message of Jesus, which is not conditioned by time and space, because it is typically extra-temporal and extra-spatial, for, as Tertullian said, the human soul is Christlike by its very own nature.
However, ecclesiastical or religious organizations that claim to be Christian cannot be condemned, for a large group of people still need a standardized religion, which they can address as a moral norm. This standardized religion can be considered as a kind of body, but not as the soul of Christianity, which is the very Gospel of Jesus.
Most members of religious organizations are represented by people who are still in the primary school of their spiritual evolution and their followers must believe what they have the ability to believe, remaining handcuffed in these beliefs, without breaking free into a more evolved universe of religious knowledge, since the message of Jesus is something infinitely more sublime, for it represents the realization of the Kingdom of God in the life of the human being.
As long as beliefs and external practices do not prevent the realization of God's Kingdom, they can be tolerated, but if anyone identifies them with the soul of Jesus’ message, constitute an impediment to the realization of the kingdom of God on earth.
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