DIVINE REVELATION

There is a secular error within the Christianity of the churches, or human theologies, that all certainty comes from sacred texts, that God's revelation is limited to the Bible, and, even worse, that by the Bible is the understanding of its phrases, words and letters contained in it.

In that sense, the American pastor, Harry Emerson Fosdick, who became a central figure in the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of American Protestantism in the 1920s and 1930s and was one of the most prominent liberalists ministers of the early 20th century, and highly revered for Martin Luther King Jr has claimed that this unfortunate mania, this horrible bibliolatry - of wanting to decide everything with biblical texts individually analyzed and arbitrarily interpreted, divided Protestantism into hundreds of officially registered sects, in addition to dozens of others, this only in The United States.

It was well said by Paul of Tarsus that: “not of the letter, but the spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The more one analyzes the pages of the Bible without reaching its spirit; the more and more the sects multiply within theological Christianity.

No one has news that Jesus, who intimately had the spirit of the sacred books, had analyzed biblical texts to deepen his knowledge of God. When Francis of Assisi, this incomparable Christian saint, heard that some of his disciples had founded a library in Bologna to study theology and discuss biblical texts, he refused to stay in this kind of theological seminary, fearing that his disciples were asphyxiating the divine spirit of the Gospel under the deadweight of human theologies.

In fact, for those who possess the divine spirit of the Bible, the correct study of its pages can only increase and intensify that spirit, but whoever thinks that by a simple analytical study of texts can become a genuine and integral Christian, live in a dangerous mistake, confusing quantity with quality, identifying divine revelation with human erudition.

Jesus often spent whole nights in the heights of the mountains in silent stillness, dwelling in the ocean of Divinity - but not in the pages of a book - in deep and constant introspection and intense communion with the Father. And in these long soliloquies, illuminated by the light of God, he bathed his soul filled with a firmness, tranquillity, peace and the serenity that no interpretation of texts can offer.

This is the greatest evil of modern Christianity, especially Christianity called “evangelical” because it has replaced the lived Gospel with the discussed theology.

Who once spent a single night or even an hour in this bath of divine light, which is the lived Gospel, knows with infallible certainty that the redemption of the human being is not in this or that church, theology or interpretation, but in a personal encounter with Jesus in the infinite depths of the lived Gospel. It can be said that Jesus is Christianity and that whoever did not identify with him through personal experience does not live Christianity. It can even be said - as much as it scandalizes the inexperienced - that even knowledge of the Gospel, as a text, does not guarantee the real possession of the teachings of Christianity. However, it is a good way to reach that goal.

Some people know all the pages of the Bible, the four gospels and do not live Christianity, for they do not know experientially what Christ is because they have not had their personal encounter with God. The personal encounter with Christ is the great descent of the Holy Spirit into man's life; it is the decisive step, the death of the Adamic man reemerging in the Christlike man, the transition from darkness to light, from death to life.

To want someone to prove, with texts extracted from some sacred book or with some religious organization and its sterile rituals, however powerful they may be that Jesus saw God, man and the world in a grand panoramic view, in a wonderful Cosmic Harmony, is to confess illiterate of the spirit of the Gospel and to ignore that the greatest spiritual geniuses of humanity experienced when coming into intimate contact with the life-giving spirit of the Gospel.