Strong faith and intense religiosity have been expressed in two ways in history: either in striving for perfection, for love, for the Kingdom of God, or in fanatical and cruel persecution of other believers. Two types of understanding of God correspond to these two types. Final victory over darkness and joy are possible only with apophatic thinking about the Divine. Ancient worldviews that infect theological teaching cause gloomy thoughts. Purgatory, paradise, hell – all this is still worldly. To test our concepts of God, imagine that an omnipotent God recognized the eternal suffering of creatures as the highest good. Would it be possible to put up with this? Only the terrible intimidation of man explains the fact that they reconciled themselves to Calvin's teaching about predestination. A higher and liberated consciousness must recognize the humanity of God. Otherwise, the one who is idolatrously called God is the devil, and not God. God, like man and the world, cannot be understood otherwise than through evaluation, while evaluation is creative activity.

Kierkegaard has a wonderful passage about the relationship to Jesus Christ. [11] The call to those who labour and are heavy laden came from Christ who was humbled, and not in glory. But the Christian Church does not want to recognize the kenotic Christ. Nor does he want to admit that Christ is a contemporary, which Kierkegaard especially values. Christ was in the world incognito, and this was His kenosis. Therefore, the perception of Him requires faith, i.e. freedom. Direct recognition of Him without the possibility of temptation would have made the God-man an idol. Christ speaks only in humiliation, not in exaltation. A person wants to start with exaltation, not humiliation. For Kierkegaard, the transformation of the church into a glorified church on earth was its undoing. Christ considered suffering to be a triumph. And He should be imitated, not admired or worshipped. I will say that not only Jesus Christ, but also God is incognito in the world, and the freedom of man is connected with this. This is the mystery of revelation. But they wanted to remove this mystery and make the revelation compulsory.

The reverse side of the denial of mystery and divine kenosis was atheism. Man is not able to deny the things that are visible, which compel him, he bows down before their reality, but he is able, or thinks he is able, to deny the reality of God. Man is given freedom in the experience of denying God, and this freedom is guaranteed by the kenosis and incognito of God. Atheism is only an experience in the life of man, a dialectical moment of the knowledge of God. Going through the experience of atheism can be a purification of the human idea of God, a liberation from bad sociomorphism. But there are two types of atheists – the suffering atheist and the evil atheist. I will not talk about a frivolous atheist. Dostoevsky depicts suffering atheists. Nietzsche was a suffering atheist. But there are malicious and self-righteous atheists who say: "Thank God that there is no God." Suffering atheism is a form of religious experience and even piety. Evil atheism usually means that man has not withstood the test of the exorbitant sufferings of the world and man, it is worse than the first type of atheism, but it also means, first of all, education against false, humiliating ideas about God. Therefore, believers should not look down on atheists, they should delve into other people's experience, into other people's trials. Moreover, believers sometimes got faith too easily for them. Feuerbach was a pious atheist, and through him the human concept of God was purified. A person, society, the world can go through abandonment by God, and in the limited consciousness of people this can be reflected as atheism. People can hardly endure the incognito of the Godhead, the kenosis of Christ. They would like the royal majesty of God and the God-man. They first rationalize, adapt God's Providence to their level. Then they rebel against their own false ideas, become atheists. In the first case, they were no closer to God than in the second.

With revelation, which is the basic phenomenon of religious life, the same thing happened as with all manifestations of the Spirit: it was objectified. [12] It must be admitted that Christian revelation could not play a social role, could not become a driving historical force, if it were not objectified, i.e., socialized, adapted to the level of the masses. This is a contradiction from which it is impossible to get out within the phenomenal world. Objectification is a distortion of spirituality, and at the same time objectification is necessary in realizing the fate of mankind and the world, in moving towards the kingdom of the Spirit. But on the way it is necessary to expose the illusions and distortions of objectification, there must be purification. And this is the mission of the prophetic side of religion and philosophy. Revelation cannot be understood in the spirit of naïve realism, as it is almost always understood in theological treatises. Revelation does not fall from the outside on the human head, it is not at all the revelation of some objective reality. The philosophical critique of revelation, which has not yet been created, must be above all a critique of this naïve realism, just as Kant's critique of reason was an exposure of the illusions of naïve realism. This, in fact, should be the final liberation from the illusions of religious and metaphysical naturalism. The criticism of revelation that has taken place in recent centuries has been in essence the ultimate triumph of naturalism and the rejection of God, the Spirit, and religion. I am talking about the criticism of revelation, which should lead to the triumph of spirituality, to the liberation of the spirit from naturalistic and materialistic distortions. God is not an object, is not an object. God is Spirit. The mystery of the Spirit cannot be partaken of in any objectification, it never manifests itself in the object, only the symbolism of the Spirit is possible in the object, but not reality.

Revelation is an event of the Spirit in me, in the subject, it is a spiritual experience, a spiritual life. The intellectualistic interpretation of revelation, which is expressed in dogmatics, is the objectification of revelation, an adaptation to the average normal consciousness. But the events of the Spirit described in the Holy Scriptures, the manifestations of the Spirit in the lives of the apostles and saints, were not of an intellectual nature, the integral spiritual nature of man was at work in them. Thus, the intellectualistic, rationalistic doctrine of God as a pure act, which played such a role in Catholic scholasticism, is taken not from the Bible, not from revelation, but from Aristotle. This teaching, which seems to satisfy an abstract mind, turns God into a stone, deprives him of all inner life, of all dynamics. [13] But God is life, life, and not being, if by being we understand the rational concept of being. Being is secondary, not primary, it is revealed only after the division into subject and object, it is already the product of thought, of rationalization. In this respect, Hindu religious philosophy is higher and deeper than Western ontological philosophy, which is too subordinate to the categories of Aristotle. [14]

The only true way is the path of intuitive description of spiritual experience. And it reveals that both God and man are active in revelation, that revelation has a divine-human character. The religious phenomenon is dual, it is the revelation of God in man and man in God, it reveals man's longing for God and God's longing for man. This longing of God for man is denied by traditional, rational theology, fearing to introduce into God an affective, passionate life, since the rational concept of perfection does not admit of longing and the need for fulfillment, and prefers stony perfection. At the same time, the relationship between God and man ceases to be a drama of the two, resolvable in the third. Revelation is a creative act of the spirit, it has a theogonic and anthropogonical character. Above the naïve realistic understanding of God rose only mysticism, which found another language, and Christian theosophy. And perhaps the most successful symbolic expression of the mysteries of the divine life is that of J. Böhme, the great mystic-theosophist. Spiritual experience can be expressed only in symbols, not in concepts. Philosophical criticism must understand this symbolic character of the language of religious metaphysics. But the most important question of the criticism of revelation is not a question of metaphysics, but of metahistory.

In the criticism of revelation, the problem of the relation of revelation to history is of great importance. Christianity is the revelation of God in history, and not in nature. The Bible tells of the revelation of God in history. The mystery of Christianity is connected with the Incarnation. It is usually said that Christian revelation is not the revelation of an abstract Spirit, but of a Spirit active in history. God enters history, metahistory enters history. The appearance of Jesus Christ is a historical phenomenon, it is a historical fact in time. But this creates the most complex problem, which is exacerbated by biblical criticism, the scientific and historical study of Christianity. Christianity was formed and crystallized when myths and legends were credulously accepted as realities, when historical criticism and historical science did not yet exist.

It is well known how history was falsified on this basis. But spiritual religion must recognize that there is no religion higher than truth, for God is truth and is known in spirit and truth.

This means that the concept of historical revelation is contradictory and is a product of religious materialism, corresponding to the stages of revelation that have already been passed. There is only spiritual revelation, revelation in the Spirit, and historical revelation is the symbolization in the phenomenal historical world of events taking place in the noumenal historical world. But the whole mystery is that noumenal events break through and enter the phenomenal world, the metahistorical breaks through and enters the historical world, there is no absolute gap between these two planes. But when metahistory enters history, it is not only revealed in history, but also adapts itself to the limitations of historical time and historical place. Light is emitted in a dark environment. The Infinite God speaks in a limited human language, in the limited conditions of a certain age and a certain people. Revelation is always concealment, in revelation there is the exoteric and the esoteric.

Scientific historical criticism must be completely free, and its work can have a purifying and liberating significance for the Christian consciousness. But historical criticism cannot solve any religious, spiritual question, it has fundamental limits. These limits can be seen in the so-called mythological theory, which denies the historical existence of Jesus. [15] Mythological theory, historically very dubious, has even been useful in discovering the limits of historical criticism.

The so-called "Jesus problem" is insoluble by historical research, it remains elusive. There is not enough historical evidence to write a biography of the man Jesus. And religiously it was supposed to be so. [16] This mystery, invisible from the outside in history, was revealed in the religious experience of the Christian community. The solution of the "problem of Jesus" lies in the area where the historical plane comes into contact with the metahistorical plane. But for historical science, the metahistorical exists not as a reality, but as the beliefs and ideas of church societies. The error of the epoch, which did not yet know historical science and historical criticism, was that the historical was considered metahistorical, i.e., sacred, and therefore human introductions and distortions were considered an integral part of divine revelation. This is especially clear in the Bible, in which there is religious light and phenomena of a religious nature, but ordinary historical events and distortions of the limited consciousness of the Jewish people were very much mixed with this. The ancient Hebrew understanding of God was a product of the still dark consciousness of the Jewish people, and only the prophets rose above this limited consciousness. In the same way, the Gospel, which tells about metahistorical events, bears the stamp of the limitations of the language and concepts of the Jewish people in a certain period of its existence, in which only the eternal divine light breaks through. The Bible and the Gospel were created historically, with all the limitations and intricacy of the historical, but they also radiate the super-historical.

There can be no historical authority. But thanks to the introduction of the metahistorical into history, the historical acquires meaning. Christian revelation has both been active in history and has been distorted in history. This is the complexity of the relationship between the divine and the human, the complexity of the interaction of God, human freedom and necessity. Infinite revelation manifests itself in the finite, but the finite can never contain the infinite, there always remains the perspective of the infinite, infinite creativity and infinite revelation. Man is not a static creature, once and for all given in a ready-made form. Man is a dynamic, creative and developing creature, infinity is hidden in him. The volume of human consciousness changes, consciousness can expand and contract, deepen and be thrown to the surface. This already determines the degree of revelation and its incompleteness. Infinity is possible in the revelation of the Spirit and the spiritual world. The crystallization of the finite distorts the perspective not only of the future, but also of the past. A limited consciousness, narrowed and superficial, the consciousness of the average man of the ordinary, and accepts revelation in accordance with its nature. It is possible to object to the possibility of a new revelation, a revelation that continues and completes, only with a static view of man, with the assumption of man's complete passivity in the perception of revelation. But revelation is divine-human.

Historicity has a positive and negative meaning. Everything that exists, everything that is alive is historical, has a history. Historicity indicates the possibility of novelty. At the same time, historicity indicates relativity and limitation. Historicity distorts. Christianity is historical, this is its strength, its dynamism. And Christianity is distorted by historicity, distorted by historical time, relativized. Historicism is a fundamentally false philosophy, the historian. Historicism, in fact, makes impossible a philosophy of history, which always rises above the relativism of historicism. Historicism knows no meaning. Only messianic consciousness has constructed the historical and makes it possible to reveal the meaning of history. The messianic consciousness awaits revelation in the coming phenomenon, which communicates the highest meaning of history, the appearance of the Messiah and the messianic kingdom. Greek thought did not know messianic expectation, history was a cycle for it, and the golden age was in the past, so it did not have a philosophy of history and did not know the meaning of history. Messianism had ancient Hebrew and partly Persian-Iranian sources. [17]

Christianity remains messianic, it awaits the second appearance of the Messiah and the messianic kingdom. But Catholic theology resists any introduction of the messianic idea into Christianity for fear of prophetism. [18] Early Christianity was undoubtedly eschatologically attuned. But the prospect of a long historical path between the two appearances of Christ the Messiah was revealed, when the Church was formed instead of the Kingdom of God; Christianity, which had become historical, began to adapt itself to this world, to the kingdom of Caesar. Only a few in "historical Christianity" awaited a new revelation of the Holy Spirit, and then often in a distorted form. The prophetic side of Christianity was weakened and disappeared almost completely. Historical Christianity took on an organized, dogmatic and authoritarian character. The historic church was recognized as the coming of the Kingdom of God. The idea of the Kingdom of God, which permeates the Gospel, is a prophetic idea. "Thy Kingdom come." The kingdom of God does not yet exist, our world is not like the kingdom of God. It can only be thought of eschatologically.