Internal Forms of Religion

John Gill's book 'Practical Divinity' is in its own way brilliant. The twenty-two chapter leading section on internal forms of religion as distinct from the following section on external forms such as occur at regular church services works to develop those important, vital characteristics of the thought of a Christian living in-the-world. I will write a little here of the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard was a poet initially rather than a philosopher. Though he was Christian and heavily drawn to the subject he was not an ordained priest or minister with a church or parish. For quite a time he was tempted to take such a position and even negotiated a little with church officials about it. In reading his works it is easy to see why some have regarded Kierkegaard as an early existentialist philosopher because of his attitude toward salvation and the Christian life of his day while in the world. He wrote with a poet's insight of how the Christian should stand in complete phenomenal relationship to God without concern for else. The detachment from temporality is worthy of Sartre's objective review of all experience as subjective.

Kierkegaard does write of Abraham's situation of being brought to sacrifice Isaac yet he is necessarily regarded as a Christian philosopher instead of as a Christian theologian. Theologians tend to be far more scripturally oriented directly writing of the meaning of particular scripture and considering it with modal hermeneutical methods. There were scholastic theologians such as Aquinas and Duns Scotus in the late Middle Ages and brilliant early theologians like St. Augustine so heavily influenced by neoPlatonism and exposure to other philosophical schools as to be able to write comparatively well-informed of subjective schools of thought and develop in response a concentration on scripture informed of empirical issues of space-time such as had been raised in his day in order to write well enough about it in reference to scripture.

Sometimes the internal forms of religion and worship and set aside in Christian ecclesiastics and the outward, ritual forms are structured even to disregard the inward forms. That may occur in Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant sects.

On the other hand, atheist and agnostic sects of government and media may work to annihilate Christian conscience and inward forms of thought altogether. Removing Christian conscience and internal forms of religion may occur concurrently with a rise of raving dissociationist psychology with associationist truth value theory philosophically. What better way to outrun the void of Christian conscience than with fractured thought and social ethics governing meta-sociological phenomenalism?

Internal forms of religious experience are the foundation for Christian experience under God with the Lord's saving grace for all of the elect. While it may be nice to utter some Latin phrases, here the rising beautiful songs and catch a whiff the the sweet smelling incense wafting around the altar the love of God is unbound to temples of any sort other than making itself one with the human heart and mind. It is in the internal forms of worship that one has a direct experience of God.