Prologue
Several
years ago one of my daughters sent me a book by Marcus J. Borg entitled,
Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time.
It was being used on a chapter by chapter basis as a Lenten study guide
by her church. Since they had just begun
to discuss the book, she thought I might like to offer my thoughts on each
chapter of it also in order to help her assimilate the material. [1] It turned out to be an eye-opener for me as
well. So I then resolved, in a more
leisurely fashion, to put some of my own thoughts on paper about this
extraordinary man, Jesus of Nazareth. As
is my wont before starting to write about any subject, I began to do background reading on what others had to say
about Jesus in order to put Dr. Borg's rather unconventional views into
perspective
The first book I turned to was from my own library, one
that I had also received several years earlier from one of my children, who I
suspect was trying to steer my penchant for including Eastern religious beliefs
in my previous essays back into the Christian mainstream. This one, which I had never read, was
entitled, The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey. Although similar to the title of Dr. Borg's
book, he comes at the subject from an entirely different viewpoint. Unlike Dr. Borg, a Jesus scholar who has his doctorate degree in New Testament
from Oxford in England and who has
taught religion at the university level for a number of years, Philip Yancey is
a Christian journalist, formerly editor of Campus Life magazine, an official
publication of Youth for Christ. He also
attended a Bible college and has taught Christian classes at LaSalle Street
Church in Chicago. However, he has an
engaging writing style and articulates the traditional Christian message with
considerable skill and knowledge. One of
the reviewers of the book states on the back cover: "In a day when novel
ideas about Jesus are all the rage, Yancey's pages offer major help for seeing
the Savior as he really was."
Similarly, Billy Graham weighs in by saying: "There is no writer in
the evangelical world that I admire and appreciate more."
Next I checked out a book from our local library that was
co-authored by Marcus Borg and N. Thomas Wright, Dean of Litchfield Cathedral
in England, entitled: The Meaning of Jesus - Two Visions. This book, on a chapter by chapter basis,
contrasts the very different views of "modern scholarship" and
traditional ecclesiastical exegesis about
both the pre-Easter Jesus (the man) and the post-Easter Jesus (the
Christ). Interestingly, both Borg and
Wright obtained their doctorates in New Testament at Oxford University in
England at the same time. To round out
my background reading I chose another unread book from my library by Donald Spoto
(a Roman Catholic, who was once a monk).
This book, The Hidden Jesus: A New Life, was also an eye-opener.
Although known primarily for his fifteen biographies and a dynamic history of
the Royal Family in England, he completed The Hidden Jesus after being a book
in progress for almost twenty years Dr.
Spoto received both his masters and doctors degrees in New Testament theology
from Fordham University and taught theology, Christian mysticism and biblical
literature at the university level before
turning to full-time writing of his well-known biographies in 1976.
His thesis, in a nutshell, is that it matters little
about who the historical Jesus was (who, he believes, was probably born in
Nazareth and not in Bethlehem), his alleged miracles, etc. What really matters is who He (the hidden
Jesus) is right now and forever as He lives in the lives of those who seek
Him. "Every moment of every day in
what we call the passing of time is embraced by the eternal present of the
Resurrection of Jesus."[2]
Still,
I was curious to know more about the historical Jesus and what we could learn
about him from those who had studied in-depth what it was like to be a Jew in
Palestine 2,000 years ago. So I
purchased three VCR tapes comprising a series of programs hosted by
"Frontline" on PBS entitled, The Lives of Jesus (Episode 1 - Jesus the Jew; Episode 2 -
Jesus the Rebel; and Episode 3 - the Hidden Jesus). One of the people featured
in that series was the historian, Paula Fredriksen, who not only had an
in-depth knowledge of the history of the area where Jesus was born, raised,
taught and died 2,000 years ago but had also written a recent book about him,
which I then purchased to supplement the material included in the TV series.[4]
An excerpt from the introduction to her second
edition will give you a flavor of her approach to what the preoccupations of
Jews were in Palestine during the time period when Jesus lived and the culture
that surrounded the early Christian community following his death and
resurrection.
"Ancient people in general, ancient Jews in
particular, lived in a world radically different from our own, a world where
leprosy and death defiled, where ashes and water made clean, and where one drew
near the altar of God with purifications, blood offerings and awe. . . . . I
incline now to see the message of biblical redemption as the fundamental factor
shaping Jesus' mission and his supporters' response to him. Both he and they
exist as points along an arc that stretches roughly from the Maccabees [168-37
bc] to the Mishna [circa 200 ad], from the prophesies of Daniel through the
letters of Paul, from the later books of the classical prophets in the Jewish
cannon (Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel) to the Book of Revelation, which concludes
the New Testament. It is the arc of a
biblical perspective on God and history that scholars have labeled apocalyptic
eschatology; the belief that God is good, that he will not countenance evil
indefinitely, that in the End he will act to restore and redeem. This is what binds Jesus to his predecessors
(like the Baptizer), his supporters, and his later apostles (like Paul). No sketch of the economic conditions of
Galilee can have a sufficient or convincing explanatory effect on all the data
. . . . in the way these biblical apocalyptic commitments do."[5]
This perspective from a well-known
historian that what matters most in writing about Jesus is what people before
and after him believed about God and redemption expanded my thinking about the
scope of this essay. I then decided I
should include beliefs about God, the controversy over whether Jesus was God
incarnate or only an exceptional man, and the parousia (i.e., Christ's second
coming) in addition to the circumstances surrounding his birth, early life,
ministry, crucifixion and resurrection.
But viewing these tapes about Jesus and reading more about what modern
scholars have learned about him from a critical analysis of the Gospel accounts
and recently discovered other documents required another reassessment of the
scope of this essay. There were two
major finds of old documents beginning around the middle of the twentieth
century that set biblical scholars and academicians back on their heels
regarding their previous assumptions and conjectures about the history of the
pre-Christian era and the written material that was circulated among Christian
groups in the years following Jesus' death and resurrection.
The first major discovery of old documents was found in
1945 by an Arab peasant and his brother in Upper Egypt near the village of Nag
Hammadi. Digging around the base of a
large boulder they discovered an earthenware jar about a meter in height that
contained thirteen papyrus books bound in leather and a number of loose papyrus
leaves. Not realizing their worth, most of the loose leaves were used along
with straw as kindling to start a fire for the oven in their home . The first Western scholar to examine one of
the bound manuscripts was astonished when he translated the first line of the
document written in the Coptic language: "These are the secret words which
the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down."[6] This document, entitled the Gospel According
to Thomas, contained many sayings known from the New Testament gospel accounts
but contained other passages that "differed entirely from any know
Christian tradition."[7] Yet, even though a number of the loose
papyrus leaves had been inadvertently burned, this manuscript was only one of
fifty-two texts discovered at Nag
Hammadi.
"Why were these texts buried and why have they
remained virtually unknown for nearly 2,000 years? Their suppression as banned documents, and
their burial on the cliff at Nag Hammadi, it turns out, were both part of a
struggle critical for the formation of early Christianity."[8] It also turns out that many of these early
documents were written or transcribed by early (mostly Jewish) Christians known
as Gnostics. What they revealed was an
interpretation of the teachings of Jesus that were often at variance with those
documents being circulated by the followers of Peter, Paul and others that came
to be part of the canon adopted by members of the "Orthodox" branch
of the Christian church. All writings
circulated by the Gnostic groups in Egypt were branded heresies by early
Christian writers such as Ireneaus. By
200 AD "Christianity had become an institution headed by a three-rank
hierarchy of bishops, priests and deacons, who understood themselves to be the
guardians of the only 'true faith'. The
majority of churches, among which the church of Rome took a leading role,
rejected all other [than Orthodox] viewpoints as heresy."[9]
The
second major discovery of old documents was made in 1947 by a young Bedouin
shepherd in a limestone cave carved out of a cliff along the wadis that descend
through the Judean wilderness near the Northwest bank of the Dead Sea. Between 1951 and 1956 ten more such caves
containing documents were discovered, all of which came to be known as the Dead
Sea Scrolls. The struggle to let
scholars and other interested parties obtain photocopies of the many Hebrew and
a few Aramaic documents and shreds of documents was a protracted one. Many of the documents were incomplete and
thousands of fragments were found along with those that were found intact. In addition a number of documents were
deliberately shredded by their Arab discoverers and sold piecemeal to the
highest bidders. All told it is
estimated that the number of fragments from the eleven caves totaled more than
100,000.
It
took a number of years even after photocopies were made available to establish
which fragments went with which manuscripts and then to sort them in the proper
sequence in order to recover the original text. The problem of publication was
further impeded by a change in legal control when "all the scroll
fragments housed in the Palestine Archaeological Museum came under the control
of the Israel Department of Antiquities"[10] following
the occupation of East Jerusalem by the Israelis after the Six Day War in
1967. Finally, and certainly not least,
the publication of the scrolls was impeded by what one scholar called "the
academic scandal par excellence of the twentieth century"[11] ":Lack of organization and [an]
unfortunate choice of collaborators . . ,[the secrecy rule that restricted
access to unpublished texts and many other academic shortcomings, finally led
to the termination by the Israelis in 1990 of] the thirty-seven-year-old and
ultimately disastrous reign of the international team."[12]
However,
it didn't take long after the original discovery of the first scrolls to
determine that the religious community involved in secreting the documents was
the ascetic Jewish sect of the Essenes.[13] "The
first Qumran scrolls to reach the public [1951], and the archaeological setting
in which they were discovered, echoed three striking Essene characteristics.
[1] The Community Rule [manuscript], a basic code of sectarian existence,
reflects Essene common ownership and celibate life, while [2] the geographical
location of Qumran tallies with Pliny's Essene settlement on the northwestern
shore of the Dead Sea, south of Jericho. [3] The principal novelty provided by
the manuscripts consists of cryptic allusions to the historical origins of the
Community, launched by a priest called the Teacher of Righteousness, who was
persecuted by a Jewish ruler, designated as the Wicked Priest. The Teacher and his followers were compelled
to withdraw into the desert, where they awaited the impending manifestation of
God's triumph over evil and darkness in the end of days, which had already
begun."[14] These manuscripts helped pinpoint the
timeline to which they refer as occurring between the dates of the Maccabean
revolt in 167 BC and the independent rule by the Jewish Asmonean priests and
princes until the arrival of Pompey in Jerusalem in 63 BC. Then the last vestige of Jewish semi-autonomy
was crushed when the Roman army led by Titus utterly destroyed the second
temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD and slaughtered or dispersed not only most of the
Jews living in Jerusalem but throughout the whole of Palestine. Before that awful destruction, however, the
Essenes "climbed the nearby cliffs in order to hide away in eleven caves
their precious scrolls. No one came back
to retrieve them, and there they remained undisturbed for almost 2,000 years."
Several other documents
discovered previously to those at Qumran
are now also believed by many to be of
Essene origin. Two of these, The Book
of Jubilees, and The Book of Enoch have long been known and a third, The
Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was never lost. Since these documents are
all believed to have been written at least a hundred years prior to the
ministry of Jesus, it almost seems that he was following a script of the life
lived earlier by an Essene prophet.
"There
is evidence which indicates that, about 70 BC or soon thereafter, an Essene
prophet known as the Teacher of Righteousness had been put to death by the
Jewish authorities because of doctrinal, ritualistic and organizational
heterodoxy; that, in due course, his followers declared that he was God
himself, appearing as a man in Jerusalem, and that his death was an atoning
sacrifice for the elect; that he arose from the grave and returned to heaven;
and that he would send a representative in a few years who would be precisely
the kind of Messiah that Jesus at first proclaimed himself to be. It is [this author's] belief that Jesus had
for some years been a full-fledged member of the Order; and that, wholly
persuaded that he was himself the Messiah expected by the Community, he left it
and preached the Gospel to the public; and that finally, in a revised concept
of his own mission, he declared himself to be the atoning Christ, re-enacted
the role and the passion of the slain Teacher, and proclaimed that in his
eschatological role he would reappear as the last judge and the all-powerful
Son of Man."[15]
Even a
better case can be made that Jesus' cousin, John the Baptist, was an
Essene. "Many thoughtful students
have in the past been convinced that both John and Jesus had been Essenes; and
many more think so now. In fact, the
evidence concerning the former seems in some respects even more
conclusive. He proclaimed the imminent
apocalyptic kingdom; he inducted his converts by baptismal ritual for the remission of sins; and he denounced
his generation as one of vipers upon whom the vials of heavenly wrath would
shortly be poured forth. He declared
that the wicked would soon be consigned to the unquenchable flames; [and like
the Essene Community] that every one should share his food and clothing with
those less well supplied; and that equality, justice and pacifism must
prevail."[16]
There
are also a number of similarities between some of the early Jewish-Christian
believers and the Essenes. After the
destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 AD "the Scribes and Pharisees
continued as the rabbis of the Diaspora; and we may consider the Sadducees the
forerunners of the Jewish merchants, traders, bankers, and money-lenders of the
subsequent centuries. What then happened
to the Men of the [Essene] Community? . . . . The only reasonable hypothesis
seems to be that they came over to Christianity, either as individuals or in
groups, some of them before, and many more soon after, the destruction of
Jerusalem. . . . many of the early Christians were merely Essenes with a new
name."[17] Because many of these early Christians were
originally Jews there was a considerable controversy, particularly concerning
non-Jew Christians (i.e., Gentiles), as to whether they should continue Jewish
dietary proscriptions and rituals such as circumcision.[18] Not only did many Essenic Jews in and around
Palestine become members of the early Christian church but there are some who
believe that the Gnostics in Egypt were originally Jewish before they became
Christian and very likely members of the Essencic sect of Judaism as well.[19]
Toward
the close of the Asmonean Jonathan's reign (143 BC) the historian, Josephus,
wrote that "At this time there were three sects among the Jews, who had
different opinions concerning human actions; the one was called the sect of the
Pharisees, another the sect of the Sadducees, and the other the sect of the
Essens."[20] During the entire period of Hellenic [Greek]
domination of Egypt, the Middle and Near East, the Seleucids, with their
capital at Antioch in Syria, and the Ptolemys, with their capital at Alexandria
in Egypt, beginning with their young "world" conqueror, Alexander the
Great, actively sought to "Hellenize" all the areas under their
control. This involved not only their
language, arts and architecture but also their Greek philosophy and
culture.. Each of the three major sects
of Judaism absorbed some of these Greek beliefs and philosophy in addition to
their traditional Judaic heritage.
"The noble, wealthy, and successful Jews ...[the Sadducees] had gradually absorbed the Epicurean
philosophy and had continued to Hellenize throughout the Maccabean War.....The
Pharisees based themselves upon the Yahweh prophets; effected an intricate
elaboration of the Law; and drank of Zoroastrian metaphysics and Stoic
philosophy." [21] Very
different though "were the Essenes; for, while purporting to accept both
the Law and the prophets, they proceeded to create a revised law and other
prophets and revelations of their own.
They were neither rich nor powerful, like the Sadducees; nor were they
popular or influential among the masses, like the Pharisees. Instead, they were nicknamed the Holy Ones,
because, throughout all the phases of their evolution, they continued as the
repository of dedicated faith."[22] Their philosophy, like that of the Pharisees,
contained elements derived from Persian
Zoroastrianism but it also contained many elements similar to, if not
identical, to the Greek Pythagoreans.
"Pythagoras
was the first in the western world who devised a complete synthesis
incorporating the central religious elements of several dominant cultures.
Before 540 [BC], he had traveled over the then-known world in his quest for
esoteric knowledge: from Egypt, he derived the concept of the sacrificial
savior-god; from Persia, the Zoroastrian doctrines of dualism and eschatology;
from India, the tenets of incarnation, celibacy, communism, and holy poverty;
and from the Chaldeans his astronomical theories. He also absorbed other elements from the
various mystic-cults, particularly the Orphic.
He then reconstituted all this into a harmonious system, the like of
which had never before been seen."[23]
Perhaps
the greatest difference, therefore, between the "Pious" Pharisees and
the "Holy" Essenes in the years following their withdrawal to Qumran
was the adoption of the rules, similar to those prescribed by the Pythagoreans,
for becoming and being a member of the Community. Some of the similarities noted by Dr. Larson
are as follows:[24]
·
Both required long novitiates (from three to five
years) as prerequisites for full membership.
·
Both exacted the most tremendous oaths enjoining
irrevocable secrecy.
·
Both were esoteric orders.
·
Both had their own sacred and exclusive
revelations and their own supreme prophets.
·
Both established degrees or classes of membership.
·
Both practiced the strictest community of goods.
·
Both were self-supporting, independent communal
organizations.
·
Both require each candidate for membership to
sell all his possessions and place the proceeds in escrow with the curator of
the Order during his probationary period.
·
In both, memberships dined at communal tables,
where meals were eucharistic ceremonials.
·
Both required that all participants wear white,
linen robes at these rituals.
·
Both despised earthly riches and condemned all
personal ownership of property.
·
Both enjoined a total love for, and
interdependence upon, their brethren, but utter rejection of all others.
·
Both had affiliated orders of Hearers, or
secondary members, who accepted their beliefs as a theory, but did not live in
communes or practice their celibate-communal discipline.
·
Both condemned sex-desire and repudiated marriage.
·
Both taught dualism, predestination, and human
depravity.
·
Both repudiated every form of animal sacrifice.
·
Both practiced the most extreme personal
frugality.
·
Both were supreme pacifists, and died under
torture rather than offer resistance to
force or violence.
·
Both considered themselves the elect of the
Supreme God.
·
Both realized an intense belief and conviction in
a personal and happy immortality and looked forward to death with anticipation.
·
Both taught that man's soul, which is immortal,
is placed in this life in a corruptible body, as in a prison; a theory taught
also by the Platonists and in the Pauline literature.
·
Both worshipped a sacrificed god-man.
·
Both visited an unimaginably fierce condemnation
upon apostates.
·
Both disciplined members for minor violations of
cultic rules and excommunicated them for major offenses.
·
Both emphasized a dedication and separation which
rendered them, as it were, a nation apart.
All these similarities, and
the many more that were listed by Dr. Larson, "confirm the statement of
Josephus that the Essenes (in their maturity) lived a Pythagorean life."[25] It also explains why both Jesus and John the
Baptist (who, as young men at least, were probably Essenes) were at odds with
the teachings and practices of both the orthodox Pharisees and the Hellenizing Sadducees. It further explains why Jesus in the gospel
accounts would speak to the people (i.e.,the uninitiated) in parables but
explain their real meaning to his disciples in private. ("He who has ears to hear, let him
hear.") Likewise, Marcus Borg
titles one of the chapters in his book: "Jesus - Teacher of Alternative
Wisdom"[26]
In
addition to the differences in philosophy between the various Jewish sects
prior to and during the earthly life of Jesus there were major differences in philosophy in the
post-Easter period between Gnostic Christians and those Christian groups
established by Paul and many of the disciples that received the Holy Spirit on
the day of Pentecost. By the time of Emperor Constantine's conversion to
Christianity in the fourth century AD "possession of books denounced as
heretical was made a criminal offense. Copies of such books were burned and
destroyed. . . . But those who wrote and circulated these texts did not regard
themselves as heretics. Most of the
writings use Christian terminology, unmistakably related to a Jewish heritage. Many claim to offer traditions about Jesus
that are secret, hidden from 'the many' who constitute what, in the second
century, came to be called the 'catholic church.' These Christians are now called gnostics,
from the Greek word gnosis, usually translated as 'knowledge'. . . . . But
gnosis is not primarily rational knowledge.
. . As the gnostics use the term, we could translate it as 'insight',
for gnosis involves an intuitive process of knowing oneself. . . Yet to know
oneself, at the deepest level, is simultaneously to know God; this is the
secret of gnosis."[27] As a gnostic teacher named Monoimus puts it:
"Abandon the search for
God and the creation and other matters of a similar sort. Look for him by taking yourself as the
starting point. Learn who it is within
you who makes everything his own and says, 'My God, my mind, my thought, my
soul, my body.' Learn the sources of
sorrow, joy, love, hate . . . If you carefully investigate these matters you
will find him in yourself."[28]
Adherents
of Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism would have no difficulty in
accepting this gnostic teaching. Nor would nineteenth century
Transcendentalists like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson; nor would
twentieth century Christian existentialists like Paul Tillich and explorers of
the unconscious mind like Carl Gustav Jung; nor would practitioners of New Age
consciousness-raising programs such as "transcendental meditation"
and "A Course in Miracles"[29]
With
all these additional documents now available from the Dead Sea Scrolls and from
the fifty-two texts discovered at Nag Hammadi it became apparent that it would
not be possible to combine all these conflicting philosophies in an essay that
presented only a single point of view.
Therefore, I decided instead to present the various topics about God,
the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter Jesus and the parousia (the second
coming) from several perspectives: (1) the familiar or "orthodox"
viewpoint based on a literal reading of scriptures; (2) the more recent view of
scholars who have taken into account both the Dead Sea scroll documents and
those found at Nag Hammadi; and (3) the
view obtained from material variously
styled as "wisdom", the
mysteries, and from those claiming to be able to read the so-called akashic records.
Anyone
who has read my previous essays will understand my predilection for looking at
things in groups of three.[30] While it is true there is only one ultimate
reality, it manifests itself in triads: Body-Mind-Spirit; World-Man-God;
subconsciousness-ego consciousness-superconsciousness; matter-light-energy; and
so on. An analogy of trinities connected
with the present essay can be seen in the three predominant Jewish sects at the
time of Jesus' birth: Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. As shown above, these groups respectively
adopted some of the Greek philosophies of the Epicurians, the Stoics and the
Pythagorians.[31]
The
founder of Epicurianism was Epicurus (341-270 bc) who "taught that there
were only natural causes. Any belief in
supernaturalism he regarded as a superstition which only a weak intellect could
possibly entertain. . . . . With
Epicurus man/s chief end is the attainment of
pleasure."[32] Similarly, the Sadducees were the noble,
wealthy, the merchants, and the worldly.
Good and evil were the results of man's own actions. Thus they didn't
believe in fate. Neither did they believe in an afterlife or in the
resurrection of the dead. The Stoics, on
the other hand, eschewed the sensual pleasures and emotional side of human
nature and "taught that one can achieve freedom and tranquillity only be
becoming insensitive to material comforts and external fortune and by
dedicating oneself to a life of reason and virtue."[33] Similarly, the Pharisees, unlike the Sadducees, viewed the material and sensual side of
life as something to be subjugated and brought under control by reason and a
virtuous life. Also, unlike the
Sadducees, the Pharisees were interested not only in the scriptures contained
in the first five books of the Old Testament (i.e.,the Torah) but also considered authoritative the writings of
the Prophets. "In addition, they
believed that Moses had not only promulgated the written Torah but also a body
of oral law that interpreted the meaning of what was written. This oral law, called, 'the tradition of the
elders' , were eventually codified in the Mishnah . . . and finally came out in
an expanded addition known as the Talmud."[34] It was also a group of learned Pharisees who
put their official stamp on the authorized canon of the Jewish scriptures at
the Council of Jamnia about 90 AD.[35] Closely
allied with them were the scribes who made copies of the scriptures approved by
the Pharisees. In the New Testament,
therefore, Jesus often condemned both the "Scribes and the Pharisees"
for their over-emphasis on outward behavior. We have already discussed above
the close relationship of the philosophy and practices of the Essenes to those
of the Greek Pythagorians. Thus, the
Essenes clearly represented the inner, secret and esoteric knowledge revealed
to only the relatively few men who after several years of probationary training
and study were shown to be worthy of being fully admitted to their membership.
Now it can be seen why I suggested there was
an analogy between the three sects of Judaism extant during the time of Jesus'
life on earth and the threefold division by which I plan to approach the
sections of the body of this essay. The
Sadducees, similar to the first proposed category, represent the Orthodox or conservative way of
looking at things. Since they only
accept as authentic the earliest scriptures as found in the Torah, they focused
their beliefs on the literal words contained in only those scriptures and
closed their minds to any other manuscripts or points of view (just as certain
Christian groups do today). Although they were certainly not atheists, their
perception of reality focused on this world and gave no credence to the
existence of angels, demons or a life hereafter. Although they had control of the temple in
Jerusalem and the selection of its priests and the high priest, they were also
in charge of the money changers in the outer section of the temple since only
Jewish money (the shekel) could be used to purchase birds and animals for the
daily sacrifices required under Jewish laws and customs.
The
scholars of Palestine 2000 years ago clearly were the Pharisees. They were able to think "outside the
box" of rigidly defined scriptural limits by including the oral tradition
and reinterpreting it as circumstances dictated. This "Pharisaic freedom of
interpretation, based on the oral law, meant that the principle of harmony with
the written Torah could be applied flexibly."[36] Thus, they favorably correspond with the scholarly pursuit of scriptures
contained in our second proposed category.
Although modern scholars, like the Pharisees of old, often include
writings not included in either the Old or the New Testament, they often have
differing opinions on who wrote these documents and their approximate
dates. Many documents, both in and
outside the established canons show signs of being modified by later writers to
support the then current beliefs and philosophies of their readers. Therefore, because of these many
uncertainties and varying opinions of biblical scholars, I felt it necessary to
add a third component representing the
mystic and esoteric viewpoint adopted more than
2000 years ago by the Essenes, viz,
the philosophy of the ancient
Pythagoreans. In previous essays I have
referred to this by the name given to it by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz in the
seventeenth century - philosophia perennis (the perennial
philosophy). It is defined by Aldous
Huxley in his anthology of this philosophy as:
"The metaphysic that recognizes a divine
Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology
that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with,
divine Reality; the ethic that places
man's final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all
being - the thing is immemorial and universal."[37]
We will discuss this philosophy more fully in
the section on the nature of God. For
the present, however, emphasis will be on the immanent nature and not on the
transcendent nature of the Ground of Being.
Earlier I alluded to the threefold nature of reality, and it is to the
inner or subjective side of this trinity that we now turn our attention. In one of my earlier essays[38] I noted
that when I first received my fifty-four volume set of the Great Books I was struck by the fact that the subject matter
covered in them, indexed in two volumes called the Syntopicon, comprised 102 topics beginning with "Angel"
and ending with "World".
Poised exactly midway between the first and the last category was the topic of "Man". Angel-Man-World thus formed a trinity of
topics whose middle term was "Man".
The more familiar trinity of Spirit-Mind-Body springs to mind as do
words from Pope's poem, Essay on Man, as
he reminds us that man is "placed on this isthmus of a middle state"
between the opposite poles of Spirit and Matter. In our proposed exposition the Sadducees
represent the worldly, objective and literal nature of reality, the Essenes
represent the spiritual, subjective and mystical side while the Pharisees
represent the balancing function of mind between these opposing ways of viewing
reality.
A
similar analogy of can be made by
considering the threefold structure of the temple in the center of Jerusalem
built by King Solomon in the tenth century BC.
According to Ezekiel's vision the outer wall was 500 cubits (or about
750 feet) on each side. All Jews, even women, were allowed in this outer
portion of the temple grounds. That was
the area where all of the sacrifices to be made inside the temple building
itself were bought and sold. It was here that Jesus upset the tables of the
money changers and told them "It is written, 'my house shall be called a
house of prayer'; but you make it a den of robbers."[39] The inner court building was divided into two
sections. All the priests making the
sacrifices to Yahweh were allowed in the first section, but in the inner
sanctuary, the sanctum sanctorum (the
holy of holies) that contained the ark of the covenant brought down from Mt.
Sinai by Moses, only the high priest was allowed to enter. Even he was allowed to enter this inner
sanctuary only on special occasions.
Since the ark containing the covenant represented the presence of the
Lord himself to Moses, "there is a legend to the effect that anyone who
chanced to enter the Holy of Holies unclean would be destroyed by a bolt of
Divine fire from the Mercy Seat. If the
High Priest [on entering] had but one selfish thought, he would be struck dead.
. . . Therefore, when their leader was
about to go in and receive the commands of the Lord, they tied a chain around
one of his feet so that if he were struck down while behind the veil, they
could drag the body out."[40] Note that not only does this analogy
represent a threefold division of reality from the outermost level (the
physical world) to the innermost level (the world of Spirit) but it also
represents an increasing progression of consciousness from spiritual blindness
to spiritual awareness. Likewise, it has
been said that the nature of the Torah
(the bible of the Sadducees) is the Law, while the nature of the Mishna (which includes commentaries on
the Torah and the oral tradition accepted by the Pharisees) is the soul of the
Law, and the Cabala (that mystic and
esoteric system following the tradition of the Essenses) is the Soul of the
Soul of the Law.
Finally,
a few remarks are needed to support the inclusion in our proposed third
category of writings by those who obtained their information from the so-called
akashic records. Admittedly, many will look ascant at their
very existence and the credibility of people who claim to have read them. However, since certain of these writings
reinforce a number of events included in the orthodox view that have been
called into question by modern scholarship, I have chosen to present this
material as at the least very interesting even though it is totally foreign to
the more traditional methods of interpretation and analysis.
"For ease of understanding, the Akashic Records
or "The Book of Life" can be equated to the universe's super computer
system. It is this system that acts as the central storehouse of all
information for every individual who has ever lived upon the earth. More than
just a reservoir of events, the Akashic Records contain every deed, word,
feeling, thought, and intent that has ever occurred at any time in the history
of the world. Much more than simply a memory storehouse, however, these Akashic
Records are interactive in that they have a tremendous influence upon our everyday
lives, our relationships, our feelings and belief systems, and the potential
realities we draw toward us."
It is claimed that "the Akashic Records contain
the entire history of every soul since the dawn of Creation. These records connect
each one of us to one another. They contain the stimulus for every archetypal
symbol or mythic story which has ever deeply touched patterns of human behavior
and experience. They have been the inspiration for dreams and invention. They
draw us toward or repel us from one another. They mold and shape levels of
human consciousness. They are a portion of Divine Mind. They are the unbiased
judge and jury that attempt to guide, educate, and transform every individual
to become the very best that she or he can be. They embody an ever-changing
fluid array of possible futures that are called into potential as we humans
interact and learn from the data that has already been accumulated. Information
about these Akashic Records – this Book of Life – can be found in folklore, in myth, and throughout the Old and New
Testaments. It is traceable at least as far back as the Semitic peoples and
includes the Arabs, the Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Babylonians, and the
Hebrews. Among each of these peoples was
the belief that there was in existence some kind of celestial tablets which
contained the history of humankind as well as all manner of spiritual
information."
"In terms of contemporary insights, perhaps the
most extensive source of information regarding the Akashic Records comes from
the clairvoyant work of Edgar Cayce (1877-1945), Christian mystic and founder
of A.R.E.[41]
For forty-three years of his adult life, Edgar Cayce possessed the uncanny
ability to lie down on a couch, close his eyes, fold his hands over his
stomach, and put himself into some kind of an altered state in which virtually
any type of information was available. The accuracy of Cayce's psychic work is
evidenced by approximately one dozen biographies and literally hundreds of
titles which explore various aspects of his information and the thousands of
topics he discussed. When asked about the source of his information, Cayce
replied that there were essentially two. The first was the subconscious mind of
the individual for whom he was giving the reading and the second was the
Akashic Records."[42]
The most controversial subject pouring out of
Cayce's subconscious mind was undoubtedly the disclosure that all of us have
lived a number of previous lives - i.e.,
the reality of reincarnation. It should
come as no surprise therefore that the man, Jesus, born in Palestine 2000 years
ago, also had a number of past lives - a total of thirty-two according to the
Cayce readings. No one was more
disturbed by the readings relating to reincarnation than was the conscious
Edgar Cayce. After all he was raised in
a very conventional Christian family, taught Sunday school classes, and since
his youth had made it a practice to read the entire Bible through every year. But, as the readings continued in this vein, it
became apparent that they didn't contradict what he had been taught about Jesus
but rather enlarged it and showed him to truly be an incarnation of God, the
Father. A number of people for whom he
gave readings had also incarnated in the same area and in the same period as
Jesus lived. Indeed, it was through
their lives that we gain an extraordinary insight into his life and times. References will be given from several books that
discuss the Cayce readings about this period in much more detail than can be
addressed in this essay. Their focus on
the Essene Community in Palestine at that time is all the more remarkable since
the Dead Sea Scrolls confirming its role and existence were not even discovered
until several years after Cayce's death in 1945.
Another source of information allegedly obtained
from the akashic records during the period when Jesus lived is taken from the
writings of Levi H. Dowling, who was born in
Having now summarized the genesis and the complex of
factors that were considered in the writing of this essay, let us (at long
last) begin by looking at a threefold approach to understanding the nature of
God.
The Nature of God
In an earlier essay[45]
I examined three basic approaches to the nature of reality: viz, the worldviews as seen through the
lenses of science, philosophy and religion with their respective emphasis on
the realms of matter, mind and spirit.
Although each of these approaches makes different assumptions about the
nature of reality, each endeavors to arrive at an understanding of the ultimate
foundation and the basic truths underlying these premises. It should come as no surprise, therefore,
that by whichever approach one begins with it leads to a common center To use a common analogy, regardless of the
far-flung Roman empire and its extensive network of roads, one eventually
discovered that "All roads lead to Rome". Perhaps the poets best express this truth
about the ultimate unity underlying all things when they tell us:
"Little flower in the
crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the
crannies.
If I could understand what you
are, all in all,
I would know what God and man
is." - Tennyson
"All
are parts of one stupendous whole,
Whose body Nature is and God
the soul." -Alexander Pope
"Earth's crammed with heav'n
and every common bush ablaze with God;
But only those who see take
off their shoes.
The rest sit round it and
pick blackberries." - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
"To see a World in a Grain of
Sand
And a Heaven
in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity
in the palm of your hand
And Eternity
in an hour." - William Blake
Similarly, man, who scriptures tell us
was created in the image of God, finds him (or her) self "placed on this
isthmus of a middle state" poised equally between the poles of God and
Nature. As St. Paul reminds us though,
his awareness of this duality didn't exist until the Law is given by Yaweh to
Moses. "If it had not been for the
law, I should not have known sin. . . .
. Apart from the law sin lies dead. I
was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin revived
and I died."[46] This is not to say, however, that mankind was
unaware of the reality of the spirit world prior to Moses receiving the commandments
on Mount Sinai (circa 1290 bc). On the contrary we find that "Primitive man feels himself to be dependent
upon the mysterious forces invisibly environing him; he feels himself to be in
social communion, not only with beings like himself, ... but with the whole of
Nature, animate and inanimate. ... Not only does he possess a consciousness of
the world, but he imagines that the world, like himself, possesses
consciousness also. Just as a child talks to his doll or his dog as if it
understood what he was saying, so the savage believes that his fetish hears him
when he speaks to it, and that the angry storm-cloud is aware of him and
deliberately pursues him. For the newly
born mind of the primitive natural man has not wholly severed itself from the cords
which still bind it to the womb of Nature; neither has it clearly marked out
the boundary that separates dreaming from waking, imagination from
reality."[47]
The world of the primitive, therefore, like that of the child, is one in which
self-consciousness is not yet fully developed.
So ill-defined is the concept of self in both early man and a young
child that there is no clear differentiation between their interior and
exterior worlds, their objective and subjective perceptions. This interior awareness of the
"numinosum", the feeling of divinity, is projected outward onto
objects, both animate and inanimate, creating a perception that nature itself
is alive and conscious, that everything possesses a "god" within it. As Mircea Eliade expresses it, "for those who have a religious
experience all nature is capable of revealing itself as cosmic sacrality."[48]
When we grow older, we tend to lose
much of our "participation mystique" with Nature. We also tend to lose the inner feeling of the
"numinosum". As Miguel de
Unamuno affirms: "The clearer our consciousness of the distinction between
the objective and the subjective [i.e. the greater our self-consciousness], the
more obscure is the feeling of divinity within us."[49] "Desacralization", Mircea Eliade concurs,
"pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern
societies and [consequently] he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover
the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies."[50]
It is only a step in the evolution of
consciousness from the primitive's notion that the world and everything in it
is sacred and alive to one that perceives a hierarchy of powers and spheres of
influence, that is to say, only a step from a belief in animism to one in
polytheism. A theogony, or family tree,
of the gods and goddesses varies with a particular mythology or culture, but
most of them contain a number of incestuous relationships and extra-marital
affairs. They even interbreed with mortals
creating demigods - half men and half gods.
The story of gods interbreeding with human beings is even recounted in
the Old Testament:
"And it came to pass, when men
began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them,
that the sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair; and they
took them wives of all which they chose. ... There were giants in the earth in
those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the
daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men
which were of old, men of renown."[51]
Even the word translated
"God" in the above passage, "Elohim" in the original
Hebrew, is the plural of the word "Elhoa", meaning a "god"
or "celestial being". "Elohim",
therefore, would better be translated as "gods" or "celestial
beings". It is understandable, of
course, that the English translators of the bible "from the original
tongues", who believed in only one God, would be reluctant to render the
creation story in Genesis by: "In the beginning celestial beings created
the heaven and the earth."
Still the story of
creation by celestial beings appears in many ancient civilizations. The Hindus refer to them as
"Prajapatis", the Zoroastrians as "Amesha Spentas", the
Egyptians as "mystery gods", while the Greeks, Romans and
Scandinavians named their creative celestial beings after the visible heavenly
bodies. We even continue to honor them
today by using their names for the days of the week - Sunday (Sun); Monday
(Moon); Tuesday (Tyre or Mars); Wednesday (Wodan or Mercury); Thursday (Thor or
Jupiter); Friday (Freya or Venus); and Saturday (Saturn). It well may be,
therefore, that the creation story whereby "what is seen was made out of
things which do not appear" [52]and the
ancient stories of gods descending from the celestial spheres to intermingle
with the daughters of men are more than mere mythology and allegory.
In previous essays I wrote
about a widely held belief (at least until the 20th century) called "the great chain of
being". In brief, it is the conception
of the universe as composed of an immense "number of links ranging in
hierarchical order from the meagerest kind of existents, which barely escape non-existence,
through evry possible grade up to the ens
perfectissimum"[53]
(the most perfect being, i.e.,
God). In other words, every particle of
matter, every molecule, everything, whether mineral, vegetable, animal, human
or divine, has a spiritual component.
Since we are told that "God is Spirit"[54],
He is, therefore indeed, immanent in all creation. Howver because He is also the Ultimate Being,
the ens perfectissimum, He is the
cause of everything that exists (from ex
histani, meaning to "stand out from"). As the "causeless cause", and the
ground of all being", His nature is therefore also transcendent and
ineffable (from in effari, meaning
"not speakable"). As the
mystic, St. John of the Cross, expresses it: "One of the greatest favors
bestowed on the soul transiently in this life is to enable it to see so
distinctly and to feel so profoundly that it cannot comprehend God at all. These souls are herein somewhat like the
saints in heaven where they who know Him most perfectly perceive most clearly
that He is infinitely incomprehensible; for those who have the less clear
vision do not perceive so clearly as do these others how greatly he exceeds
their vision."[55]
It is because of this immanence at the
heart of all creation that St. Luke is able to affirm that "He is not far
from any one of us, for in Him we live and move and have our being."[58]
Not only is He not far from any one of us, but according to Mohammed's
revelation from the archangel Gabriel (as recorded in the Koran): "We
[God] are nearer to him [man] than his jugular vein." Meister Eckhart, the Christian mystic,
likewise affirms that "God is nearer to me than I am to myself; He is just
as near to wood and stone, but they do not know it."[59] In another of my essays I explained this
ubiquity of Spirit throughout all creation in terms of an entity's
characteristic frequency.[60] Therein an analogy was also made of this
immanence in the hierarchy of nature to the manner in which frequencies of
sound and pictures are transmitted from television cameras to our receiving
sets by superimposing them on a much higher carrier frequency (viz, the television VHF channel). The
reason, as noted by Meister Eckhart above, wood and stone are not aware of this
immanence of God is the result of their lower frequencies in the hierarchy of
being.
The process of creation from the
invisible into the visible realms (now labeled by our scientists the "Big
Bang" hypothesis) begins with the most elementary subatomic particles
which then combine into atoms of hydrogen and helium that form the chemical
composition of all new born stars. It is
only later in their death throes (e.g., a
super nova explosion) that the other 90 or so elements are created that form
the building blocks of all subsequent life on planets such as our earth. However, as will be discussed more fully in
the next section, man is created in the spiritual worlds long before his
appearance here in a body of flesh. In
recent years one of the most respected quantum physicists, David Bohm, has even
hypothesized the existence of a deeper, hidden dimension of reality he calls
the "implicate" or folded order "that gives birth to all the
objects and appearances of our physical world . . .[which he refers to] as the
'explicate' or unfolded order."[61] He,
like the writer of the New Testament book of Hebrews, posits "what is seen
was made out of things which do not appear."[62]
Similarly, the ancient Chinese philosophy developed in their I Ching (the Book of Changes) begins the
process of creation by the invisible, active, male, spiritual forces
(called yang) pushing into the visible, passive, female forms (called yin).
The very first verse of the book of Genesis concurs when it states:
"In the beginning God created the
heavens [the invisible worlds] and the earth [the visible universe]"[63]
Henri Bergson confirms this idea when
he tells us: "In the universe
itself two opposite movements are to be distinguished ... 'descent' and
'ascent'"[65]
Cardinal "Nicholas Cusa defined God Himself as a 'complexio oppositorum'[a
complexion of opposites]".[66]
. Similarly, a favorite theme in
medieval alchemy is the "circulatio" or circulating process. "By this is meant firstly, the
'ascensus' and 'descensus' ... and secondly the rotation of the universe as a
model for the work." [67] Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, taught
that over time all things tend to turn into their opposites. He called this phenomenon,
"enantiodromia", meaning a "running of opposites". As he explains the process:
"From the living comes death; and
from the old, youth; from waking, sleep; and from sleep, waking; the stream of
creation and decay never stands still." "Construction and
destruction, destruction and construction - this is the norm which rules in every
circle of natural life from the smallest to the greatest. Just as the cosmos
itself emerged from the primal fire, so must it return once more into the same
- a double process running its measured course through vast periods, a drama
eternally re-enacted." [68]
"Panentheism is very different
from pantheism, with which it is often confused. Pantheism
(without the en) identifies
the universe with God; God and the universe are coextensive (literally,
'everything is God'). Pantheism affirms
only God's immanence and essentially denies God's transcendence; though the sacred
is present in everything, it is not more
than everything. But panentheism affirms
both transcendence (God's otherness or moreness) and immanence (God's
presence). God is not to be identified
with the sum total of things. Rather,
God is more than everything, even as God is present everywhere. God is all around us and within us, and we
are within God."[69]
"The world hath many centers, one for each created being, and about each
one it lieth in its own circle. Thou
standest but half an ell [about 21 inches] from me. Yet about thee lieth a universe whose center
I am not but thou art."[70]
"Understand that thou art a second world in minature, and that the sun
and the moon are within thee, and also the stars."[71]
"taught that both man and the universe were made in the image of God;
that both being made in the same image, the understanding of one predicates the
knowledge of the other. He further
taught that there was a constant interplay between the Grand Man (the universe)
and man (the little universe)."[72]
Since, as Pascal stated, God is like a
circle whose circumference is nowhere (i.e.,
a Being infinitely great) and a universe that for all we know is likewise
infinite in its extent, we can envision man as being at the center of a
gigantic "X" whose spiritual (i.e.,
heavenly) nature goes upward without limit and whose material nature
similarly extends downward without any known limits or boundaries. Alternatively, we can express man's central
position between these opposite poles as a trinity of God-Man-Nature or as one
of spirit-mind-matter. His position can even be expressed as a trinity of
Father, Son and Holy Mother by recalling that the Latin word for matter is materia and for mother is mater - one being the neuter gender and
the other the feminine gender of the same root Latin word.
In another of my essays I developed
the trinitarian nature of all reality.[75]
For example, when the fertilized egg of a mammal (including the human mammal)
begins to subdivide and multiply, it first separates into two types of cells -
the ectodermal and the endodermal layers.
The middle layer, the mesodermal, then develops from and between the
other two. From the ectodermal cells
arise the outer layers of the animal, including the skin and the nervous
system From the endodermal cells evolve
the internal organs and the alimentary canal.
Lastly, from the mesodermal cells are developed the connective tissues,
the muscles and skeletal framework. Similarly, in each of the trillions of
cells making up our physical bodies there are three processes continuously at
work: anabolism, catabolism and metabolism (performing the three functions of
cell creation, destruction, and the preservation of a balance between
them). It is hardly a coincidence then
that in the Hindu trimurta of three persons that constitute Brahman (their God
above all gods) Siva is called the Destroyer, Brahma is called the Creator and
Vishnu is known as the Preserver, the balancing function between the opposite
forces of destruction and creation. In
an analogous manner Jesus distinguishes between his nature and that of the
Father by saying: "I am the true vine [the preserver of the vine] and my
Father is the vinedresser [the one who prunes the vines]."[76]
The meaning given to the name Yahweh gives us another insight into the
nature of God. Originally, Hebrew was a
consonantal language, which made it difficult for the scribes to translate the
written language into a spoken one. A
group of scholars called the Masora did this by inserting notes in the margins
or above or below the Hebrew text. It is
uncertain when this practice began.
However, "according to some Jewish writers the notes in some cases
are as old as the time of Moses."[79]
In any event "innumerable scholars contributed to this work, which ceased
circa 1425."[80]
The name of God in Hebrew consists of the four letters Yodh, He, Waw (or Vau), and He which are usually transliterated
into English letters by either YHWH or JHVH
(These four consonantal letters are called the
"tetragrammaton".) In the King
James version the name of God is usually translated simply as "the
Lord". It is also sometimes translated
by the insertion of vowels in the two versions of the tetragrammaton
above as either yahweh (YaHWeH) or Jehovah (JeHoVaH). The meaning of the Hebrew word for God or the
Lord was given to Moses at his first encounter with God at the "burning
bush" when he asked God:
"If I come to the people of Israel and say to them, 'the God of your fathers has sent me to you', and they
ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I say to them?" God said to Moses,
"I AM WHO I AM." And he said, "Say this to the people of Israel,
' I AM has sent me to you.' "[81]
"The
Tao is forever undefined. Small though
it is in the unformed state, it cannot be grasped. . . . . [Then] The Tao
begot one. One begot two. Two begot three. And three begot the ten thousand
things."[83]
We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the
only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from
Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the
Father, through him all things were made.[86]
The Heavenly Man
The question of whether Jesus the
man was the "only begotten Son of the Father" from the moment of his
birth and questions relating to "soteriology" (i.e., the saving work effected by the actions of the Christ manifested
through the man Jesus) will be discussed later in this essay. Therefore, the
present section will focus primarily on the nature of the Heavenly Son, the
Christ, who represents one of the three co-equal members of the Christian
Trinity.
The Trinitarian nature of the One
God was not explicitly taught in the New Testament, but in several places Jesus
is seen as having a unique relation to the Father. For example, when Jesus asks his disciples:
" 'Who do you say that I am?' Simon Peter replied, 'You are the Christ,
the Son of the living God.' And Jesus
answered him, 'Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jona!
For flesh and blood has not revealed this to you, but my Father who is in
heaven.' "[88] Similarly, the Spirit of God is manifested in
many places in the Bible - primarily through the prophets in the Old Testament
and as an ever present reality among the "born again" believers in
the communities formed after the death, resurrection and ascension of
Jesus. The indwelling of the Spirit was
foretold even prior to Jesus' death when he told his disciples: "the
Counselor, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name [after I am no
longer with you] will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all
that I have said to you."[89]
The Trinitarian nature of God is not
exclusively a Christian doctrine, however. The names and attributes of the
three coequal members of the Trinity differ from one culture or religion to
another, but some preceded Christianity by hundreds, and perhaps in some cases
by thousands of years.
Religion
or Culture 1st
Person 2nd Person 3rd Person
Egyptian
Osiris
Horus Isis
Hindu Shiva
Vishnu Brahma
Zoroastrian
Ahura-Mazda Mithra Ahriman
Scandinavian
Odin Thor Freya
Druidic
Taulec
Fan Mollec
Grecian
Ouranos Kronos Ea
Notice that the middle member in
each of these various trinities represents the reconciliation or balance
between the other two members who are opposite in nature. For example, in Hinduism, Siva is the
Destroyer and his opposite is Brahma the Creator while Vishnu performs the
balancing function of the Preserver.
Several of the middle members are also offspring of the other two
members of the trinity. Thus, in the
Grecian trinity, Kronos (whose nature is time or motion) is born from the union
of Ouranos (God of Heaven) and Ea (Goddess of Earth); and in the Egyptian
trinity Horus is the son born from the union of his father, Osiris and his
mother, Isis.
In two of the trinities shown above
the third member is neither a female entity nor an apparent agent of creation
but rather is a personification of evil - viz,
Ahriman and Mollec. Remember,
however, the reference made earlier about the similarity between the etymology
of the Latin words for "mother" (mater)
and for "matter" (materia) Likewise, earlier reference was made to
alternative names for the Trinity of beings - viz, Father-Son-Holy Mother, Spirit-Mind-Matter, or God-Man-Nature
(or Mother Nature). Recall also the
earlier discussion about the process of creation representing the involutionary
or downward half of the cosmogonic cycle whereby entities from the spirit realm
cascade down in successive stages until they reach the level of the material
world.
Recall too that Satan, once an
angel in the heavenly realms, was expelled from heaven and sent down to earth
where he still reigns today. He is also
known as Lucifer (meaning "the bearer of light") and was associated
with Venus, the morning star.[91]
Light is also associated with knowledge.
Remember it was Satan in the form of a serpent that gave Eve the apple
from the tree containing the knowledge of good and evil. Immediately after eating it Adam and Eve were
"sent forth from the Garden of Eden to till the ground from which they
were [originally] taken."[92] Since Satan was responsible for giving Adam
and Eve the fruit containing the
knowledge of good and evil, he too was sent to earth by God just as Prometheus
in Greek mythology (whose name means “forethought”) was sent to earth by Zeus
for giving men the “fire” (or knowledge) denied to them by Zeus. Along with
knowledge of good and evil Adam and Eve acquired knowledge of self – i.e.,
self-consciousness. Satan himself also
acquired this awareness of self which was the proximate cause of his being
expelled from Eden as well.[93]
Satan was not sent down to
earth by himself, however. In keeping
with his exalted status he took all of his angels in heaven down with him.[94]
“Light is life, and life is intelligence,
or Spirit. It is energy. It is motion and activity – and it is the
power of God. By it and OF it all things
were created – the universe – the stars – the worlds – and mankind.”[97]-
Similarly, John's gospel begins with
identifying this heavenly man with God, his Word and light:
In
the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He
was in the beginning with God. All
things came into being through him, and without him not anything came into
being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of
all people. The light shines in the
darkness and the darkness did not overcome it .[98]
Another attribute of the Divine
Logos, akin to, but not the same as, reason or intelligence is “Divine
Wisdom”. Several books in the Old
Testament are referred to as “wisdom writings”.
These are the books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job. “In addition, there are a number of poems,
now included in the Psalter or the prophetic collections, which apparently came
from the circle of Israel’s sages.”[105]
Also included in these wisdom writings are several books written in the
inter-Testamental period between 180 and 30 bc entitled The Wisdom of Solomon and The
Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach.[106]
The roots of “wisdom writings date back to the Egyptian Pyramid Age (c.
2600-2175 B.C.) and to the Sumerian era in Mesopotamia.”[107] Although these writings reflect on the
problems and experiences of a particular society, they “were essentially
problems found in varying forms in all societies. Thus, the wisdom movement was in essence
international . . . not bounded by culture, nation or race. Wisdom is the concern of man as man: Greek or
Jew, Babylonian or Egyptian, male or female, king or slave. The quest for wisdom is the quest for the
meaning of life. And this quest is the
basic interest of every human being.”[108]
in the more than
1,200 years following the exodus of the Jews from their some 300 years of being
virtually slaves in Egypt. In contradiction to the outward behavior required to
be a “good” Jew, Jesus taught it was what was on the inside of a man that
really mattered. For example, he railed
against their strict dietary restrictions by saying to them it is “not what
goes into the mouth [that] defiles a man, but what comes out of [his] mouth.”[109] Likewise, when his disciples were seen
plucking heads of grain in the field on the Sabbath in contradiction to the
overly restrictive rules imposed on activity during that day of the week, he
reminded his Pharisee critics that “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for
the Sabbath.”[110] In a similar incident after asking his
critics “Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or do harm, to save life or to
kill?” he proceeded to restore the withered hand of a man.[111]
Not only, however, was Jesus a
teacher of alternative wisdom, but in many ways he was also the embodiment of
Divine Wisdom. Just as the gospel of
John identifies the man, Jesus, as the incarnation of the Divine Word (i.e.,the
Logos) or Reason of God, so do other
New Testament writers associate him with the Wisdom of God. For example, St. Paul reminds the church in
Corinth that “God is the source of your life in Christ Jesus who became for us
the power of God and the wisdom of God.”[112] In the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and
Luke) Professor Borg likewise confirms that they portray Jesus not only as a
teacher of wisdom but also as one intimately related to the personification of
Divine Wisdom.[113]
In Jewish wisdom literature, referenced earlier, wisdom is often personified as
“the Wisdom Woman”. In fact, the word wisdom
in Hebrew (hokmah), and also in Greek
(Sophia), is a feminine noun. Therefore, scholars
commonly refer to
this personification of wisdom by the name of Sophia since it
is commonly used as
a woman’s name in English. Just as a
member of some of the
Trinities listed above
who had feminine names were involved in the process of
creation, it should
come as no surprise that the Sophia (i.e.,
Wisdom) of Judaism plays a similar role.
For example, in the book of Proverbs, Chapter 8 she says:
Yahweh
created me at the beginning of God's work, the first of God's acts
of
long ago. Ages ago I was set up, at the
first,
before
the beginning of
the earth . . . . . When God established the heavens, I was there . . .
. . .
When God marked out the
foundations of the earth, I was beside God as
a
master worker.
In the intertestamental book of
Sirach (written circa 180 bc) Sophia
again speaks of her
origin:
From eternity, in the beginning,
God created me and for eternity I shall
not cease to be.
In another intertestamental book, The Wisdom of Solomon, written near the
time of Jesus, she even takes on some of the attributes usually associated with
God. Thus, she claims to be "the
fashioner of all things" and the "mother of all good
things." Then, in a remarkable
passage, she is spoken of as:
.
. . . a spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold, subtle, mobile,
clear, unpolluted, loving the good, keen, irresistible, beneficent,
humane, steadfast, sure, free from anxiety, all-powerful, overseeing
all, and penetrating through all spirits . . . .
Like God she is everywhere present
(i.e.omnipresent), all-powerful (i.e, ,omnipotent) and the sustaining
source of life. “She pervades and penetrates all things, is a breath of the
power of God and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty and a reflection
of eternal light.”[114] This characterization of God as a woman
reinforces an alternative formulation of the Holy Trinity, previously
suggested, of Father, Son, and Holy Mother.
Also, as pointed out in other Trinitarian depictions, the middle member
then becomes the reconciliation or synthesis or these two polar opposite
natures. “Thus, the language about Sophia
[the Wisdom Woman] is not simply a personification of the
Wisdom of God [but
also] a lens through which divine reality is imaged as a woman.”[115] She, therefore, can readily be thought of as
a co-equal member of the Holy Trinity. (In some early Christian circles the
Holy Spirit was also thought to be female.)
Dr. Borg reinforces the idea of the feminine nature of God when he
reminds us that when God is characterized in the Old Testament as having mercy that the Hebrew, as well as the
Aramaic, word can also be translated as
compassion (from two Latin words meaning to “feel with passion”).The feeling
or emotional component of our human nature is more often associated with a
woman rather than with a man. Even more
to the point, the Hebrew word is the plural of a noun that in its singular form
can mean womb, thus emphasizing the
feminine nature of being or feeling compassionate.[116]
Since the Heavenly Man is a
synthesis or composite of both the nature of the Father (i.e., the vinedresser) and the Holy Mother, it can readily be seen
why Jesus as the incarnation of Christ, the Heavenly Man, so often emphasized
God’s compassionate and loving nature (i.e.,
his feminine side) in his teachings and in his miracles of healing and even of
restoring to life those who had died.[117] Indeed, his emphasis on love was central to
his teaching and mission on earth. When,
for example, he was asked by one of the Pharisees what was the greatest
commandment in the Jewish law, he replied:
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all
your
soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first
commandment. And a second is like it. You shall love your neighbor
as Yourself. On these two
commandments depend all the law and the
prophets.[118]
Likewise, John in one of his
letters reminds us that the essence of God’s nature, and therefore of his “Only
Begotten Son, is LOVE:
Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is
born of God and knows God; He who does not love does not know God;
for God is love.[119]
Thus, not only does the Heavenly
Man embody the Wisdom of God but also his compassion and his Love. He also, like the Wisdom Woman, Sophia, is
involved in the creation of the world, its downward or involutionary half of
the cosmogonic cycle that culminates in the creation of Adam (from the Hebrew
word for mankind). He not only is involved in his creation but remains within
his soul as a seed that has the potential of leading him back again after his
descent into a mortal body to the Father.
The path from mortal man back to the immortal Heavenly Man is thus
placed within Adam (i.e., mankind)
from the very moment of his creation. Remember from our discussion of the
nature of God that he is immanent in creation as well as transcendent. As his
only begotten Son, the Christ Man is not only present at man’s beginning (i. e.,as Alpha) but he remains within
him as an inner guide throughout the evolutionary half of the
cosmogonic cycle as
well. He then becomes the “way-shower”
or the path by which
man, if he chooses,
can find his way back from the mortal to the immortal, Heavenly Man, who
therefore is both the Alpha and the Omega, man’s beginning as well as his
end. Jesus then, speaking as the Christ
within him, can rightly say:
“I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father
but by me.”[120]
The Father concurs in this exalted
position of his Son when we read
in the gospel of
John these well-known words:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever
believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life.”[121]
This verse, one of the most quoted
in the New Testament, implies, of course, that the Only Son of the Father was
the incarnation of the Christ in the man Jesus.
Yet the characterization of Jesus as the Christ, the “only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father” was not officially adopted in what became the
Nicene Creed until the Council of Nicea in 325
– nearly 300 years after his crucifixion, death, resurrection and
ascension. In the interim there were a number of beliefs about who Jesus really
was that challenged this eventual formulation. For example, there was a belief
in the first century ad called “Docetism” that believed that reality consisted
of either spirit or matter. God, therefore, as Spirit could not be associated
with matter. Thus, they could not accept a literal interpretation of John 1:14
that the “Word became flesh”. Some of these held that Jesus only had a
celestial body that was incapable of suffering the human pain of
crucifixion. Docetism, however, was not
officially condemned as a heresy until the Council of Chalcedon in 452. Similarly, some early Christians called
“Gnostics” (about whom more will discussed later in this essay) believed that
“Christ, the Divine Spirit, inhabited the body of the man Jesus and did not die
on the cross but ascended to the divine realm from which it had come.”[122] There were also those in the early days of
the Church who denied the full divinity of Christ and on his being placed on
the same level as the Father since, unlike the “Only Begotten Son, God is not
begotten and is without beginning. This
belief, known as “Arianism”. was named after a priest from Alexandria named
Arius, who was its most ardent advocate. Even though “this teaching was
condemned by the first Council of Nicea in 325 [and the] doctrine was
eventually outlawed throughout the Roman Empire, it survived for two centuries longer among the
barbarian tribes that had been converted to Christianity by Arian bishops.”[123]
An earlier well-known Christian writer, who
held views similar to those later
espoused by Arian, was Origen (circa 185-254).
“He may well have been the most accomplished biblical scholar of the early
church. His accomplishments as an
exegete and student of the text of the Old Testament were outstanding. He was a voluminous writer whose works
include letters, treatises in dogmatic and practical theology, apologetics,
exegesis, and textual criticism.[124] He wrote over 250 works. “He taught the
principle of the threefold sense, corresponding to the threefold division of
the person into body, spirit and soul, which was then a common concept. He was a Platonist and endeavored to combine
Greek philosophy and the Christian religion.
He developed the idea of Christ as the Logos, or Incarnate Word, who is
with the Father from eternity, but he taught also that the Son is subordinate
to the Father in power and dignity. This
latter doctrine and others, such as that of the preexistence of the soul, were
severely criticized by many of Origen’s contemporaries and by subsequent
writers.”[125] However, his belief in the preexistence of
the soul wasn’t formally declared a heresy by the Church until the second
Council of Constantinople in 553 ad.
Since several references quoted in later sections of this essay require
an understanding of the nature of the soul, we now turn our attention to that
subject. Parenthetically, the reader should recall that it wasn’t until the
middle of the nineteenth century, 300 years after Nicolaus Copernicus published
his monumental work in 1543, that the Church recognized that the earth revolves
around the sun. Perhaps then, after
nearly 1,500 years, it is time to revisit the orthodox belief concerning the
preexistence of the soul.
The Soul – A Missing Link
Before addressing the life (and even
conceivably some prior lives) of Jesus, his birth, childhood, ministry, death,
resurrection and ascension let us address the nature of the soul as an entity,
not only within man but also the role played by it in the creation and
maintenance of both the visible and invisible realms of being. Let’s begin then our discussion with a couple
of dictionary definitions:
Soul: (1) The animating and vital principle in
man credited with the facilities of thought, action, and emotion and conceived
as forming an immaterial entity distinguished from but temporarily
coexistent with his body.
(2) Theology: The spiritual
nature of man considered in relation to God, regarded as immortal, separable from
the body at death, and
susceptible to happiness or misery in a future [disembodied]
state.
-
American Heritage Dictionary
Yet we are told in the Book of Acts
that “In him [God] we live and move and have our being”[126]
The soul then, as defined above, is an entity that exists between man and God.
Recall, as noted in the last section, that the Christian writer, Origen,
believed and taught the then common concept of man being composed of “spirit,
soul and body” with soul being the intermediate entity between spirit and
body. This Trinitarian view of man was
also taught by Plato and other Greek philosophers hundreds of years before the
birth of Jesus. A number of later
philosophers also believed in the reality of the soul. For example, Rene Descartes, the well known
French philosopher of the seventeenth century, who was the first to articulate
the separate nature of body and mind, maintained that “there are three grades
of being: Body, Soul, and Mind or Spirit”[127] He also comes down squarely on the side of
the reality of mind and soul and its superiority to the body and material
things. Following his famous
declaration, Cogito ergo sum (I
think, therefore I am) he declares that “the soul, by which I am what I am, is
entirely distinct from body . . . . and even if the body were not, the soul
would not cease to be that it is.”[128]
George Berkley, the Eighteenth century Irish philosopher, went even further by
denying the reality of matter and “would not speak of himself or other men as having souls, but rather [as their] being souls.”[129] Even today all of the major religions (except
for Buddhism) believe in the reality of the soul. An insight into the nature of
the soul was expressed by the Nineteenth century American philosopher, Ralph
Waldo Emerson, when he addressed the graduating class of the Harvard Divinity
School in 1838. Herein he emphasizes the
human nature of the historical Jesus while at the same time in no way denying
his (or, for that matter, our) divine nature:
"Jesus Christ belonged to the true race of prophets. He saw with open eye the mystery of the soul. Drawn by its severe harmony, ravished with its beauty, he lived in
it, and had his being there. Alone in all history, he estimated the greatness of man. One man was true to what is in you and me. He saw that God incarnates himself in man, and evermore goes forth anew to take possession of his world. He said, in this jubilee of sublime emotion, 'I am divine. Through me, God acts; through me, speaks. Would you see God, see me; or, see thee, when thou also thinkest as I now think'. .... He felt respect for Moses and the prophets; but no unfit tenderness at postponing their initial revelations, to the hour and the man that now is; to the eternal revelation in the heart. Thus was he a true man. Having seen that the law in us is commanding, he would not suffer it to be commanded. Boldly, with hand, and heart, and life, he declared it was God. Thus was he a true man. Thus is he, as I think, the only soul in history who has appreciated the worth of a man."[130]
In one of Emerson’s essays, The Oversoul, he tells us more about the nature of soul and its superior status to the ordinary man of everyday life:
"If we consider what happens
in conversation, in reveries, in remorse, in times of passion, in surprises, in
the instructions of dreams, wherein often we see ourselves in masquerade - the
droll disguises only magnifying and enhancing a real element and forcing it on
our distant notice- we shall catch many hints that will broaden and lighten
into knowledge of the secret of nature.
All goes to show that the soul in man is not an
organ,
but animates and exercises all the organs; is not a function, like the power of
memory, of calculation, of comparison, but uses these as hands and feet; is not
a
faculty,
but a light; is not the intellect or the will, but the master of the intellect
and the will; is the background of our being, in which they lie - an immensity
not possessed and that cannot be possessed.
From within or from behind, a light shines through us upon things and
makes us aware that we are nothing, but the light is all. A man is the facade
of a temple wherein all wisdom and all good abide. What we commonly call man, the eating,
drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself,
but misrepresents himself. Him we do not
respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his
action, would make our knees bend. When
it breathes through his intellect, it is genius; when it breathes through his
will, it is virtue; when it flows through his affection, it is love. And the blindness of the intellect begins
when it would be something of itself.
The weakness of the will begins when the individual would be something
of himself. All reform aims in some one
particular to let the soul have its way
through
us; in other words, to engage us to obey."[131]
But the concept of “soul” is not
to be confined just to mankind. Recall
that Pythagoras in the 6th century BC taught that both man and the
universe were made in the image of God.
Also recall that Origen believed that man was a microcosm of the
macrocosm “and that the sun and the moon are within thee, and also the stars.”[132] Similarly, in Alexander Pope’s poem, An Essay on Man, he tells us that:
All are parts of one stupendous whole, whose body Nature is and God the
soul.[133]
So, the universe and everything
within it, including man, have souls. As
discussed earlier in the section on The Nature of God, a spiritual center, the
monad, lies within the heart of all levels of creation from atoms, to molecules,
to all inorganic matter, plants, animals, men and even to angels and other
invisible entities in the heavenly realms.
God is therefore immanent in every aspect of His creation as well as
transcendent over it. Spiritual (i.e., the I AM) consciousness thus
pervades the universe both that which is perceptible to our senses and
scientific instruments and that which is not perceptible to them. The soul we are discussing in this section is
merely the vehicle by which these spiritual monads are made manifest. Naturally, since soul is of a spiritual
nature, it cannot be seen by our physical senses or measured by our
instruments. Since man is created in the image of God, his fundamental or
essential nature is also spiritual, not physical. Recall, for example, the belief expressed
earlier by the Irish philosopher, George Berkley, that men do not have souls but rather they are souls.[134] And the apostle Paul concurs: “The first man Adam was made a living soul;
the last Adam was made [by God] a
quickening spirit.”[135]That
which survives the death of the body is not a physical body but a spiritual
body. Although as Christians we know
that “at the last trump the trumpet shall
sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible. . . For this corruptible
must put on incorruption and this mortal must put on immortality.”[136], we do not have to wait
until “the last trump” is sounded to become aware of our immortal nature.
While it is true that in this
life we inhabit a physical body, it is also true that this outer sheath we don
does not represent our real self. To
paraphrase a popular expression: We are not a physical being having a spiritual
experience, but rather we are a spiritual being having a physical
experience. As St. Paul explains the
difference between our outer, material nature and our inner, spiritual nature:
Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being
renewed every day. For this slight
momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all
comparison, because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things
that are unseen; for the things that are seen are transient, but the things
that are unseen are eternal. For we know
that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God,
a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.[137]
As difficult as it may be for the
average westerner to conceive, we have been walking around with a nonphysical
body all of our life and with the higher triad which it contains much longer
than that. It is this spiritual triad, one
that is a reflection of the Trinitarian God in whose image we are created, that
this section has been trying to describe, viz.,
the human soul. So let’s examine some of the evidence that has been
accumulated, not by philosophers or theologians but by scientifically trained
professionals, on the existence of a nonphysical body and the evidence that we,
viz. our souls, have experienced a
number of incarnations before the life we are now living.
Eastern religions such as
Hinduism have long taught the existence of a sheath, called by them the linga sharira, that underlies and forms
the basis of the physical body. Not only does such a sheath pertain to the
human body but to all things that are manifested in our three dimensional
world. This next higher dimension is
called by them the “astral” plane which in turn forms only the lower reaches of
the unseen worlds (called by them the akasa) that contain a record of all the events that
have occurred since the beginning of time.
Twentieth century scientists, like particle physicist, David Bohm,
mentioned earlier[138], have come to the
conclusion that this physical world is like the projection of a picture taken
by split images of a laser of a three dimensional object on a two dimensional
photograph called a hologram. An amazing
feature of the hologram is the ability of any portion of the photograph when
viewed with a laser (or sometimes even with a bright light) to reproduce the
original object in three dimensions. Not surprisingly, the image so projected
from a hologram is a “virtual” image (viz.,
one that appears to be where it is not.
You can move your hand right through a holographic projection). This holographic model adds credence to the
Eastern religious belief that the nature of this world is nothing but maya (i.e. illusion). It forms the basis for Bohm’s hypothesis of what he
calls the implicate (or folded) order underlying and forming the basis of the
explicit (or unfolded) order for this three dimensional world.
The feature of any piece of a
hologram being able to produce the entire three dimensional object photographed
is called by scientists the principle of non-locality. This leads to Bohm’s hypothesis of the
indivisibility or wholeness underlying the entire manifested universe. Not only does this explain why sometimes an
electron can be explained as a particle and sometimes as an electromagnetic
wave, but also at some level why consciousness itself is also non-local. As touched on here earlier[139], and discussed at some
length in others of my essays, the concept of the great chain of being “was
long one of the most famous in the vocabulary of Occidental philosophy, science
and reflective poetry; and the conception which in modern times came to be
expressed by this or similar phrases has been one of the half-dozen most potent
and persistent presuppositions in Western thought.”[140] By now then phrases such as God as the ”Monad
of monads”, of man as the “microcosm of the Macrocosm, of both man and the
universe “being created in the image of God”, of the poets’ declarations that “Earth’s crammed with heav’n and every common
bush ablaze with God”, or “To see a
World in a Grain of Sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower” and “All
are parts of one stupendous whole, Whose body Nature is and God the soul” should be resonating in your ears. Similarly, you should see why previous
Trinitarian formulations such as body-mind-spirit and World-Man-God were joined
with hyphens and not commas.
However, even in the world of
quantum physics this hypothesis of non-locality applies only to the implicate (i.e., the hidden or folded) order and
not to the explicit order of our everyday world of three dimensions. Similarly, in the realms of consciousness the
perception of the unity and harmony of all levels of creation only appears at a
level above that in which we spend most of our lives here on earth. However, the awareness that each of us has an
etheric body that on occasion is separable from our physical body has not only
been known to certain individuals but to entire cultures for many
centuries. This experience, in which an
individual’s conscious awareness appears to detach itself and travel to some
other location, is commonly called an “out-of-body experience” or an “OBE” for
short. Such notables as “Aldous Huxley,
Goethe, D. H. Lawrence, August Strindberg, and Jack London [have] all reported
having OBEs. They were known to the
Egyptians, the North American Indians, the Chinese, the Greek philosophers, the
medieval alchemists, the Oceanic peoples, the Hindus, the Hebrews and the
Moslems.”[141] A recent study of “488 world societies – or
roughly 57 percent of all known societies – found that 437 of them, or 89
percent, had at least some tradition regarding OBEs.”[142] It has been estimated that roughly one out of every five people now
living will have an OBE at some point in their lives.
A related phenomenon that has
received a considerable amount of attention and research in recent years is the
“near-death-experience”, or “NDE” for short.
Like the OBE, the NDE phenomenon has a long history to support it. NDEs “are described at length in both the
eighth-century Tibetan Book of the Dead and the 2,500-year-old Egyptian Book of
the Dead. . . The Venerable Bede gives a
similar account in his eighth-century work, A
History of the English Church and People, . . . [and] a lecturer on the
study of religion at Harvard points out [in a recent book] that medieval
literature is filled with accounts of NDE’s.”[143] Not only is this an ancient experience but
“as more and more [contemporary] researchers began to document the phenomenon
it became increasingly clear that NDEs were not only incredibly widespread – a
1981 Gallup poll found that eight million adult Americans had experienced an
NDE, or roughly one person in twenty – but provided the most compelling
evidence to date for survival after death.”[144]
In a typical example an
individual has a near fatal accident, heart attack or other life threatening
event that places him or her in an emergency room at the local hospital. While the doctors and emergency workers are
trying to re-establish a heartbeat to the dying person on the table, he
“suddenly finds himself floating above his body and watching what is going on. Within moments he travels at great speed
through a darkness or a tunnel. He
enters a realm of dazzling light and is warmly met by recently deceased friends
and relatives. Frequently he hears
indescribably beautiful music and sees sights – rolling meadows, flower-filled
valleys, and sparkling streams – more lovely than anything seen on earth. In this light-filled world he feels no pain
or fear and is pervaded with an overwhelming feeling of joy, love, and
peace. He meets with a ‘being (and/or
beings) of light’ who emanates a feeling of enormous compassion, and is
prompted by the being(s) to experience a ‘life review’, a panoramic replay of
his life. He becomes so enraptured by
his experience of this greater reality that he desires nothing more than to
stay. However, the being tells him that
it is not his time yet and persuades him to return to his earthly life and
reenter his physical body.”[145]
Current research by
scientifically trained professionals supports not only the continuation of life
beyond the death (or near death) of the physical body but also the belief in
the pre-existence of the soul before its entry into the present life of an
individual – in other words, it supports the widely held belief by Hinduism and
other eastern religions in the reality of reincarnation. Before presenting the findings of a few of
these recent studies let us examine the historical basis for the church’s
current position on the subject.
Innumerable authors, philosophers and poets
down through the ages, regardless of whether they were pagans, Hindus, Buddhists, Moslems, Jews, or Christians, whether
devout or
sceptic, have expressed an interest or a belief in the ideas of the
preexistence of the soul and its periodic return to a body of flesh. Early Christian divines such as as Justin
Martyr, St. Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St. Gregory, bishop of Nyssa, St
Jerome, and even
St. Augustine either openly taught or speculated about the preexistence of the
soul and the concept of reincarnation.
It was not until the year 553 A.D. that the Second Council of Constantinople
declared that the teaching or writing about the preexistence of the soul, and
by implication the idea of reincarnation, was a heresy. The reason for this official position was
obviously to keep their members in line by not holding out the possibility that
they might obtain salvation in a future life if they didn’t achieve it in this
one.
In later years many have expressed thoughts similar to
those early Christians just mentioned.
For example, there are the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge
in England and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Longfellow,
Walt Whitman, James Russell Lowell, Emily Dickinson and John Greenleaf Whittier
in America. Among authors and
philosophers who have written favorably about pre-existence and/or
reincarnation are Kant, Goethe, Carlyle, Louisa May Alcott, Emerson, Thoreau,
Edgar Allen Poe, Mark Twain, Jack London, William Faulkner and J. D.
Salinger. Similar beliefs have been
expressed by such notables as Napoleon Bonaparte, Alexander the Great, the
American general, George Patton, Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison and
William Randolph Hearst. The list could
be extended, but suffice it to say that reincarnation is not just simply an
idea that has been revived by New Agers and others who are attracted to Eastern
philosophies and religions.
Two relatively recent examples of
research being done by professionals in this growing field of parapsychology
are from the work of two professors of psychiatry: Dr. Joel Whitton with the
University of Toronto Medical School and Dr. Ian Stevenson with the University
of Virginia Medical School. Dr.
Whitton’s work has extended over several decades. “To conduct his research [he]
gathered together a core group of roughly thirty people. These included people from all walks of life,
from truck drivers to computer scientists, some of whom believed in
reincarnation and some of whom did not.”[146] His basic research approach was to hypnotize
his subjects and then use age regression techniques to elicit memories from
their unconscious minds about recollections they had, if any, prior to their
birth in this life. As a trained
clinical hypnotist he was careful not to ask questions of his subjects that in
any way would lead them to fantasize or make up responses just to please the
hypnotist or be influenced by any questions that might reveal his belief about
the reality of the soul’s pre-existence. In spite of these precautions each of
his subjects, whether they initially believed in reincarnation or not, recalled
a number of past existences, some as many as twenty or twenty-five in
number. Other studies by similarly
trained professional hypnotists “have shown that over 90 percent of all
hypnotizable individuals are able to recall these apparent memories. . . .
[Many of Professor Whitten’s] subjects also experienced profound psychological
and physical healings as a result of the traumatic past-life memories they
unearthed and gave uncannily accurate historical details about the times in
which they had lived. Some even spoke
languages unknown to them.”[147]
Like Professor Whitten Dr. Ian
Stevenson has spent more than thirty years researching the subjects of
reincarnation and pre-existence. He has
collected and analyzed thousands of cases from all over the world “and to date
has published six volumes on his findings. . .. Instead of using hypnosis
[however] Stevenson interviews young children who have spontaneously remembered
apparent previous existences. . . . Generally, children are between the ages of
two and four when they start talking about their ‘other life’, and frequently
they remember dozens of particulars, including their name, the names of family
members and friends, where they lived, what their houses looked like, what they
did for a living, how they died, and even obscure information such as where
they hid money before they died and, in cases involving murder, sometimes even
who killed them. Indeed, frequently
their memories are so detailed Stevenson is able to track down the identity of
the previous personality and verify virtually everything they have said.”[148]
At the risk of beating a dead horse
to death, let us examine once more the
relation between the human soul and the soul of God. Earlier we quoted Pascal’s apt simile that
“God is like a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is
nowhere.”[149] We then introduced Leibnitz’ concept of a
spiritual “monad” at the center of all created things, invisible as well as
visible, and the Italian philosopher, Giordano Bruno’s description of God as
the monadum monas (the Monad of
monads). Lastly, we introduced the concept of “panentheism” that posits God’s
otherness as well as his universal immanence.
Since the Heavenly Man represents God’s “only begotten Son”, who sits at
the right-hand of the Father and is a co-equal member of the Trinity composed
of Father-Son-Holy Spirit and since all of us were originally created in God’s
image as spiritual beings, we too as souls have this same divine heritage. As the German mystic, Meister Eckhart, wrote
in the fourteenth century: “God is forever begetting the only begotten.” However, in most of us this divine heritage
has been overlain by so many incarnations in which we allowed our God given
free will to be used for selfish purposes that we have forgotten our true
nature. Therefore because it is God’s
will that not a single soul should perish[150]
it was necessary for the Heavenly Man (the Christ) to be born as a man to show
us the path of return to the Father’s house. (“I am the way, the truth and the
life, no one comes to the Father but by me.”[151]).In
the beginning all men were conscious of being sons of God and full participants
with Him in the creation of the world. For example, when the Lord answers Job
out of the whirlwind He says:
“Where
were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. . .[about
the time] when the morning stars sang
together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy. . . You know, for you were
born then, and the number of your days is great.”[152]
Even though the Sadducees didn’t believe
in the resurrection of the body or in anything supernatural, the Pharisees
believed not only in an eventual bodily resurrection but according to Edgar
Cayce (in one of his trances) they also believed in souls being reincarnated. A
number of passages in the Old Testament can also be interpreted as supporting
the periodic return of a soul into a new body.
For example, one of the psalms tells us that “The
Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time
forth and for evermore.”[153];
and in the book of Revelations the risen Christ tells John: Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in
the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out.”(emphasis added)[154]
At the close of the book of Malachi
he prophesizes that God will send “the
prophet Elijah again into the world before the great and terrible day of the
Lord comes.”[155] In the New Testament Jesus goes even
further than Malachi by announcing that Elijah had already returned as John the
Baptist:
“Truly,
I say to you, among those born of women there has risen no one greater than
John the Baptist; . . . and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who
is to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”[156](emphasis
added)
That the idea of reincarnation was
not unknown in biblical times even to the disciples of Jesus can be deduced
from their asking him about the reason why a certain man had been born blind: “Which did sin, this man or his parents?”[157]
Obviously, the only way the man could have sinned was to have done so in a
previous existence.
Finally, let us use an analogy using
the “Great Chain of Being” referenced earlier.
It is now widely accepted that the physical body of man has a long
evolutionary past. It is composed of a hierarchy of lesser entities, viz., atoms, inorganic and organic
chemical molecules, amino acids, proteins, cells, and organs. The human body is at the top of an
evolutionary chain beginning with the lowly cell and progressing through the
various stages of animal life until finally reaching perhaps some 500,000 years
ago the species called homo sapiens, or
thinking man. Each level in the hierarchy is built upon the foundation of
earlier and more primitive levels.
Similarly, that entity called the soul contains a number of lesser lives
that appear from time to time in a body of flesh. As Shakespeare tells us “All
the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and
one man in his time plays many parts.”[158]
.