Just focus on learning as much about God as you can and if God wants you to quit any bad habits at the appropriate time He will give you the will and the power to do so. In modern times, people can no longer think in the mythological terms employed in the New Testament presentation of the Gospel. Many people are thinking about God today. It’s through Jesus and His death and resurrection that you are seen as cleansed, pure, and holy. Doherty claimed that Paul and other early Christian writers did not believe in Jesus as an earthly figure, but instead as a celestial being crucified by demons in the lower realms of heaven and then resurrected by God. Also, he claimed that it is not possible to dispense with the symbolic, which is essential to the task of speaking about ultimate reality, but the myths are to be “broken”-that is, they are to be seen as not being literally true. The central experience Otto refers to is the numinous (Latin numen, “spirit”) in which the Other (i.e., the transcendent) appears as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans-that is, a mystery before which humanity both trembles and is fascinated, is both repelled and attracted.

Apparently it is not necessary, however, to hold this doctrine, since one could as well classify types of religious change (i.e., temporal sequences), as indeed Max Weber attempted to do. He was concerned not only with descriptive phenomenology, in which context his analysis of the religious functions of time and space is most illuminating, but also with a kind of metaphysical speculation (as exemplified in his idea of the Fall). Christian theology since the 19th century has largely been more concerned with intellectual and social challenges, however, than with the analysis of religion, which has been secondary to that concern. The same, in principle, is true for the comparative study of religion, though this sometimes is thought to cover the theology of other religions, such as the Christian appraisal of Hindu history. Since World War II, Western Christianity has found it difficult, from a cultural point of view, to ignore the challenge of other religions, and the mood has changed somewhat from the more rigorous climate in which the theology of the Word (i.e., Barth’s position) was dominant. Thus, faith in Christianity involves a kind of fall from archaic timelessness, and secularization-in which the overt symbolism of religion is driven underground into the unconscious-is a second fall.

Thus, God can appear both as wrathful or awe-inspiring, on the one hand, and as gracious and lovable, on the other. If there is such a thing called God, can you come to it face-to-face so you may realize what is truth? In 2003, Korean Unification Church members started a political party named “The Party for God, Peace, Unification, and Home”. Wach was concerned with emphasizing three aspects of religion-the theoretical (or mental; i.e., religious ideas and images), the practical (or behavioral), and the institutional (or social)-and, because of his concern for the study of religious experience, he interested himself in the sociology of religion, attempting to indicate how religious values tended to shape the institutions that expressed them. Heiler, however, went beyond the scientific study of religion in attempting to promote interreligious fellowship, partly through the Religiöser Menschheitsbund (Union of Religious Persons), which he helped to found. Wach, however, was not committed to a religious neutralism in his use of the idea of a “science of religion.” For him, Religionswissenschaft deepens the sense of the numinous and strengthens, rather than paralyzes, religious impulses.

The phenomenological method was brought to the United States primarily by the German American historian of religions Joachim Wach (1898-1955), who established Religionswissenschaft (“science of religion”) in Chicago and was thus the founder of the modern “Chicago school” (though his successor, Mircea Eliade, had a rather different slant). The first congress of Religionswissenschaft (“science of religion”) took place in Stockholm in 1897, and a similar one in the history of religions took place at Paris in 1900. Later, the International Association for the History of Religions, dedicated to a mainly nonnormative and nontheological approach, was formed. The history of religions on a cross-cultural basis, though it has quite an ancient pedigree, came into its own in a modern sense from about the time of Max Müller. The “theology of religions” (analogous to the “history of religions”) has moved in the direction of dialogue, which sometimes simply refers to mutual acquaintance in charity so that people of differing faiths can come to understand more deeply the meaning of each other’s religions. The inner meaning of the myths, he claimed, must be explicated in existential terms and purged of the objectifications that they contain.