The closer you get to good and truth...

The closer you get to anything good, true, or beautiful in this world, the more counterfeits swarm around it in order instinctively to occlude it; & these counterfeits all pander to some yearning to commit evil or wallow in falsehood which is more attractive to enormous numbers. 

It is like that proto-scifi and cosmic horror novel The Night Land, where all of surviving humanity resides in two something like geothermally-powered pyramids; and monsters abound in dense profusion around them to destroy them, like the dragon waiting to devour the child in the book of Revelation.

The 2nd Coming inspired an explosion of counterfeits which in their variety pander to the various ways the masses of humanity do not want unadulterated good and truth.

Rather, they want mediated good and truth which leaves more of their sin and error alone.

This is for instance why Kardec's spiritualism has so many millions of followers, which contains a few correct teachings from the New Church about charity and the spiritual world; it is mediated so that these millions find it palatable.

And this is why Jung is so popular, whose system would not exist in its present and sophisticated form without the enormous influence of the Latin Word on the young Jung: it is mediation and adulteration that makes it palatable to the broad masses and intelligentsia. Time and again this happens. 

And as this happens, the same process that made the Bible central to the art and literature and thought of the West and the Koran central to those same areas of Islamic civilization is quietly happening with the Writings; the greatest, truly quality achievements are quietly beginning to rotate around a new nucleus, which is a long-term process and difficult to see; but very real.

Schopenhauer? Same deal. He was enormously effected by the Writing's teachings about will and understanding, to the point that he made everything rotate around these. There may not be a Gideon Writings on every hotel room table, but the intelligentsia has already begun to rotate around them without realizing what they are doing.

There is so much to be done to mediate the Writings for planetary civilization and world religions without adulterating the good and truth of New Jerusalem; and we can only approach that task with a great diversity of individuals and temperaments and approaches.

We will not coerce Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, and all. We will speak to them in their own tongues, a process portrayed in Acts as happening on a single day which yet represents a macrocosm of a more gradual and protracted process.

We will enrich them with some spiritual gift, to use Paul's language when expressing his desired outcome; we will not trash their religions and civilizations, but share the light of New Jerusalem with all the world; and demonstrate with magnanimous lucidity how freeing and non-coercive it is, this illuminated and protracted, hidden and intricate process of bringing the temperaments and religions and types and tongues of the world to sit at the feet of the Divine Human, Jesus Christ.

I call this 'positive evangelism' or 'mutually-enriching evangelism', and I believe it is just one part of a great movement of the Lord in our tumultuous, planetary civilization. We will make bread and wine and flesh and blood and Jesus Christ as relevant as the heart and the thoughts which proceed from it to everyone everywhere in the world, so help us God!

Never did the mainline Christians do this, it is not their role to do this, we will do this!

The New Church, the New Jerusalem, the new bottle for new wine, the many things that we can bear now, the all things made new will do this. God be with us.