I väntan på Jesus

Let us briefly consider here what the concept of "divine mystery' can mean. No one should deny that the human reason is limited, that thus truths must be given, which it is only vaguely able to perceive. But one thing is to vaguely perceive a truth; another thing is to discover in a sentence the most palpable contradictions. We ask the advocates of the dogma of Trinity to commit this distinction to memory. Human reason itself knows and recognizes that only God's infinite reason perceives everything with supreme clarity. When preachers from their pulpits claim that human reason does not want to know and admit this, and when they therefore accuse this same reason of arrogance and abuse, then this speech is ill-founded. What, on the other hand, the same preachers for good reason (more precisely from his standpoint) can reproach human reason, is something quite different: that the same namely from the beginning and forever is so established that it considers and must consider the self-contradiction as a characteristic of the delusion. It is a basic condition for thinking, it is a law of thought, that the contradiction counts as the mark of the impossible, as the signature of error, of conceptual confusion, of lie. Reason is not arrogant, it does not commit abuse, but is only itself and active according to its eternal nature, when it denies to accept as truth what it must reject as nonsense. For reason, every sentence that implies an irresolvable contradiction, must be false, even if she for millennia has been believed to be divine truth. A real and not just a pretended divine mystery thus cannot imply a contradiction. A divine mystery is an obscurely but without contradictions perceived truth about the highest things. (Truths, which are perceived unclearly but without contradictions, exist in all areas: such is every derived mathematical theorem, of whose truth one is convinced, before one can strictly prove her.) Thus human reason is forced to judge; to escape its judgments one has no other means but to kill it. And it is really possible to kill reason: history bears many testimonies of that. But spiritual suicide of this kind has its dubious consequences: its victims are significant testimonials thereof. It is not enough that they have surrendered unconditionally to their own delusions; they also stand unarmed against those of others. If in the bosom of their church a sect arises, which issues the most insane doctrines as divine mysteries, what shall they then do? Convince the sectarians of the contradiction and nonsense of their teachings? What is the use of that? They themselves claim, indeed, that divine mysteries can clothe themselves in the form of insoluble contradictions! Or shall they convince them of the unbiblicality of their doctrines? But then the question will become about the right biblical exposition, and it certainly does not allow itself to be gained, but with using the much decried laws of thought. Both sides complain, that "the natural mind perceives nothing of what belongs to the spirit of God" (whereby one party always assumes that it itself has the "spirit" and its opponent the "natural mind") — but this objection can be dealt with with equally big (i.e. with no) authority by all opinion parties.