theories

• dead; powerless to transform human character

34:6.6The dead the­ory of even the high­est re­li­gious doc­trines is pow­er­less to trans­form hu­man char­ac­ter or to con­trol mor­tal be­hav­ior. What the world of to­day needs is the truth which your teacher of old de­clared: “Not in word only but also in power and in the Holy Spirit.” The seed of the­o­ret­i­cal truth is dead, the high­est moral con­cepts with­out ef­fect, un­less and un­til the di­vine Spirit breathes upon the forms of truth and quick­ens the for­mu­las of righ­teous­ness.

• experience always has advantage over

102:6.7Be­lief may not be able to re­sist doubt and with­stand fear, but faith is al­ways tri­umphant over doubt­ing, for faith is both pos­i­tive and liv­ing. The pos­i­tive al­ways has the ad­van­tage over the neg­a­tive, truth over er­ror, ex­pe­ri­ence over the­ory, spir­i­tual re­al­i­ties over the iso­lated facts of time and space. The con­vinc­ing ev­i­dence of this spir­i­tual cer­tainty con­sists in the so­cial fruits of the spirit which such be­liev­ers, faithers, yield as a re­sult of this gen­uine spir­i­tual ex­pe­ri­ence. Said Je­sus: “If you love your fel­lows as I have loved you, then shall all men know that you are my dis­ci­ples.”

• one cannot confide in a postulate

102:7.3Those who would in­vent a re­li­gion with­out God are like those who would gather fruit with­out trees, have chil­dren with­out par­ents. You can­not have ef­fects with­out causes; only the I AM is cause­less. The fact of re­li­gious ex­pe­ri­ence im­plies God, and such a God of per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence must be a per­sonal De­ity. You can­not pray to a chem­i­cal for­mula, sup­pli­cate a math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tion, wor­ship a hy­poth­e­sis, con­fide in a pos­tu­late, com­mune with a pro­cess, serve an ab­strac­tion, or hold lov­ing fel­low­ship with a law.

• post-mortem salvage of imprisoned truth

180:5.2Di­vine truth is a spirit-dis­cerned and liv­ing re­al­ity. Truth ex­ists only on high spir­i­tual lev­els of the re­al­iza­tion of di­vin­ity and the con­scious­ness of com­mu­nion with God. You can know the truth, and you can live the truth; you can ex­pe­ri­ence the growth of truth in the soul and en­joy the lib­erty of its en­light­en­ment in the mind, but you can­not im­prison truth in for­mu­las, codes, creeds, or in­tel­lec­tual pat­terns of hu­man con­duct. When you un­der­take the hu­man for­mu­la­tion of di­vine truth, it speed­ily dies. The post-mortem sal­vage of im­pris­oned truth, even at best, can even­tu­ate only in the re­al­iza­tion of a pe­cu­liar form of in­tel­lec­tu­al­ized glo­ri­fied wis­dom. Static truth is dead truth, and only dead truth can be held as a the­ory. Liv­ing truth is dy­namic and can en­joy only an ex­pe­ri­en­tial ex­is­tence in the hu­man mind.

• may quarrel with faith; facts do not

195:7.1How fool­ish it is for ma­te­rial-minded man to al­low such vul­ner­a­ble the­o­ries as those of a mech­a­nis­tic uni­verse to de­prive him of the vast spir­i­tual re­sources of the per­sonal ex­pe­ri­ence of true re­li­gion. Facts never quar­rel with real spir­i­tual faith; the­o­ries may. Bet­ter that sci­ence should be de­voted to the de­struc­tion of su­per­sti­tion rather than at­tempt­ing the over­throw of re­li­gious faith—hu­man be­lief in spir­i­tual re­al­i­ties and di­vine val­ues.