In response to a post I made about Theosophy, a friend of mine posted a quiz called:

"What's your Theological Worldview?" (http://quizfarm.com/test.php?q_id=7095N) Take it yourself if you are interested. I took it and was not surprised to discover that my view was mostly "Post Modern and Classical Liberal". Here are the definitions of them:

Emergent Postmodern --Emergent postmodern theology is ecumenical, dynamic, communal and organic. It is ecumenical in that it struggles to fight against institutions and desires to bring all into the conversation; it is dynamic because it reads the Bible through the lens of a Story and attempts to bring about life-action and response from the text; it is communal because it seeks first the community (over against the individual) and arrives at such an interpretation through authentic relationships of people in dialogue; it is organic because it is fluid, ever-changing and has a good understanding of human limitations.

Classical Liberal --Liberal Christianity, sometimes called liberal theology, is an umbrella term covering diverse, philosophically informed religious movements and moods within late 18th, 19th and 20th century Christianity. The word "liberal" in liberal Christianity does not refer to a leftist (or rightist for that part) political agenda or set of beliefs, but rather to the freedom of thought and belief associated with the philosophical and religious paradigms developed during the Age of Enlightenment.

One of the questions posed was about the Theologian Karl Barth.

I will confess that I had to look him up. Having done so, I will further confess I still have no clue who he is. That is probably because our world views are... er... worlds apart.

I, as scary as this sounds, subscribe more to a Nietzsche type philosophy. Nietzsche's most profound insightⁱ was that he recognized that personal power (or empowerment) was a primal driving force, not exclusively the will to live or to reproduce (a "proof" of this is risk taking behavior).

Nietzsche's problem (other than going mad) was that he had a very hard time being authoritative. Given that he understood the nature of human reality, this is understandable. When you recognize that the truth of the human condition is actually often base and ugly, its hard not to go a bit mad.

I too want to try to bring to light the reality of who we are and what we need to become, but to do so, I have to battle the two strongest "schools" there are - Authoritarianism ("a thing is this way because we say it is" type mentality - which is the manner in which all religions operate) and Libertarian (the individual is the supreme entity - "I am my own God" - mentality).

Both are profoundly flawed concepts, and as always, the "truth" (if I may use Keats) lies somewhere in the middle, which is what Authoritativeness is - A thing is the way it is because we can observe, test and falsifyⁱⁱ it - a rational mentalityⁱⁱⁱ .

For me, the change in the character of man, if he wants to become closer to God, must be to embrace the concept of a Rational and Ethical "Platonic Form"^iv that stands as its own "self-evident truth", not a God given (imposed) one. Man, to be worthy of God, must become like God. This is the true nature of free will (and where I depart from Nietzsche in philosophical premise, and lean more toward Kant).

Or, maybe I am just nuts like Nietzsche.

Foot Notes:
(i) Though his most famous quote is "God is Dead", I feel people misinterpret what Nietzsche was trying to say. It is a reflection on the character of Religion, not God.

(ii) Falsifiability is one of the most difficult concepts for laymen to understand - put simply, for anything to be "true" (Law) it must have an alternative (competing) theory that can be demonstrated to be of near equal, but lesser, value.

(iii) There is a rational argument for the existence of God, which is found in science, and thus observable, testable and falsifiable, and that is Mathematical and Physical order (I will even go so far as to suggest that Chaos is not actually chaotic, but non-understood order).

(iv) A Platonic Form might be viewed as an "archetype" that contains within itself a "beingness" (if I may coin a word and borrow from Heidegger) that is, or has become, the template for all that comes from it.