The Gospel is a book of faith, freedom, and conscience. It is not a book of rules and laws. One must read the Gospel and understand it with a living spirit, through the depth of your own faith, your own freedom and conscience, not formalist rationalism. The Gospel contains a certain grace-filled and free Spirit, and it must be accepted with one’s own spirit.
Not with the flat, sober, common-minded reasoning brain, but with one’s own free, conscientious, and spiritual vision, one’s own ability to contemplate with the heart and to believe through spiritual vision. Then it will become clear that the Gospel is not a book that ties a person down with rules, but a living source of love and vision that pours into the soul and awakens in it the most profound sources of personal spirituality. This source pours into us and frees us to a personal vision, decision-making process, and creativity. The Gospel (literally, the “good news”) was not written to turn a person into a frightened slave who constantly awaits punishments and who doesn’t dare to create independently. Such a slave is useless to God and man both – he is not the one to create Christian culture.
Instead, the Gospel exists to give man freedom in the Spirit, not a freedom without spirit – that would be a blind and passionate fatalism, nor a spirituality without freedom— that would be a formalistic righteousness of absence of personality. No, freedom in the Spirit is the gift of personally seeing the divine and simultaneously walking a divine path.
(Ivan Ilyin 1883-1958)
ps. I don’t actually need glasses, I just thought it looked cool! ABG