Without Cologne Cathedral

The next, last and only “project” I really need to get done in this
life is “Second
Acts
“, which deals with finding God at work in this world today, as
a confirmation for my faith in God and Christ. For the project, cf.
also my mindmap-style project plan in article “My
vision for my life, as a mindmap
“. Currently I can do just some
thinking, planning and preparations. Here’s one thought:

One of the crucial issues of this project is how to determine the
truth content of religions, religious experienced and claimed or
supposed-to-be experiences with God. Sunday 2007-12-09 I was in Colone
with some friends, and we also did a short visit to Colone Cathedral.
The best result of which is an inspiration I got there and typed into
my handheld computer. It is a candidate for a criterion to determine
the truth content of claims about God:

Remove all outer forms from a religion or style of
devotion, and what
remains is authentically the work of God.

That’s because all outer form is authentically the work of humans,
and it tends to obscure the work of God. Cathedrals, music, solemn speech
and so on is human work. This criterion does not require to abandon all
form in order to be the faith “where God is authentically at work”. We
may have forms, as forms can be nice, like worship music. But forms
must never ever be our reason for believing some claims about God to be
true. Therefore, experimenting with abandoning forms temporarily will
make it apparent on what basis our beliefs rest: hopefully on something
that God does, and that becomes visible as the content of the forms.

I’ll give one example how to apply this criterion. It’s an extreme
one: what remains as the authentic work of God if you substract all
outer forms from a  Sunday service in Colone Cathedral? Watch the
little video clip I made in 2007-06 in the Freiburger Münster … I
wanted to show you one from an evening mass in Colone Cathedral from
2007-12-09, but that material is not adequate here ;-). So, look at
this illustration and imagine that every impressive outer form, even
every intentional, human created audible or visible or touchable form,
is removed. What remains? I’m not sure if anything would remain in this
concrete case. What do you think?


Start date: 2007-12-09
Post date: 2007-12-12
Version date: 2007-12-12 (for last meaningful change)


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