 This essay may prove controversial. Some
people may even consider these ideas to be of the devil,
but that will not bother me. My views have become what
they are only because I have never been afraid to change
them. I regard all opinion as written on sand. My faith
is centered in God only, not in anyone's interpretations
of the experience of God, even my own interpretations. Jesus was not born into a cultural vacuum. Not
only has his life had its impact on history, the world
has had its impact on the version of Jesus' life and
teachings which history has known. This is bitterly
fought territory with well-hidden secrets. But the
difficulty Christians have had interpreting their
scriptures bears this out. Christianity has long since
divided into those who believe that the Bible needs only
a literal reading, those who believe the Bible must needs
be interpreted somehow, and those who believe that the
Spirit alone should prevail -- Truth being alive and
wherever you find it.
The Bruderhof is the only group I have
encountered, except maybe the Quakers, which, at one time
or another, has fallen into all three divisions. But each
of these approaches to Christianity and the Bible has its
limitations.
All over the world little Christian children
are taught how their parents view the relation between
the Old and New Testaments. But the little Christian
children are not taught that Judaism was only one of the
religions ancestral to their parents' faith. Christian
children are always told that the chief exponent of first
century Chris-tianity was a Jew named Saul of Tarsus who
later became known as Paul the Apostle, but it is not
brought to the children's attention that the chief
religion in the city of Tarsus when Saul was a boy was
called Mithraism.
From an encyclopaedia of comparative
religion:
"Originally an Aryan
god, Mithras was worshipped in Iran as the god of
contracts (mithra actually means contract). He
preserves truth and order, destroying the disruptive
forces of evil, anger, greed, pride and
procrastination, all evil gods and men... As guardian
of truth he is the judge of the soul at death, and as
a preserver of contracts determines when the period
of the devil's rule is at an end. His coming
"amid the homage of the meek and lowly" in
the days of victory is awaited...
"The later
"Oracle of Hystapes" mentioned by Christian
writers has been identified as a Mithraic oracle
foretelling the god's coming at the end of the world
to destroy the wicked with fire and to save the
righteous. A number of Roman monuments depict his
birth and some fifth-century Christian texts imply
that there was a Mithraic myth foretelling the
ap-pearance of a star which would lead magi [in most
sources, shepherds instead of kings - C.L.] to the
birthplace of the saviour.
"Mithraism first
entered Rome in 60 BC, and in the second century AD
it spread through the empire as far as Britain.
Carried mainly by sol-diers, it was an exclusively
male cult. At baptism, when the initiate had to
submit to both physical and spiritual tests, he
renounced all crowns but Mithras, [during initiation,
under apparent threat of death. - C.L.] and was
expected to adhere to a strict moral code. In return
he was promised a share in the resurrection.
"The central belief
of the cult was the sacrifice of a bull by Mithras.
The act was both creative and redemptive. The
worshipper looked back to a sacrifice at the
beginning, when life had come out of death, and
foreward to the final sacrifice by Mithras when the
last animal to die would give men the elixir of
immortality. A foretaste of this divine gift would be
shared in the regular communion meal of bread and
wine in which the priest represented Mithras." 1
The sites of many of the early Christian
churches were formerly the sites of Mithraic temples.
Mithras' birthday was celebrated on December 25th.
To Christian ears all this may sound like
blasphemous parody, because, along with the Mithraic
contaminants, centuries of genuine spiritual experience
have be-come associated in Christianity with real
spiritual truth. But whether intentionally or
unintentionally, new revelations inevitably are placed in
old cultural forms. While the ritual or ceremonial
borrowings from older religions may or may not be
signi-fi-cant, borrowings of concept always pollute a new
revelation. Since the four Gospels were not written until
well after Paul's ideas had become known and accepted,
the mistaken idea that Jesus was the final, Mithraic
blood- sacrifice blighted the New Tes-tament, God
concept, right from the start.
Catholic or Protestant, the Bible teaches
Christians to believe that the Father Himself could not
save mankind until a price had been paid off in blood by
a subordi-nate Son who, by his own sacrificial
crucifixion, made it possible for the Father to save
those whom He otherwise could not. Isaiah knew better:
"The arm of the Lord is not shortened that it cannot
save." (Is 59:1)
Esme Wynn-Tyson writes regarding the
atonement doctrine of the Apostle Paul:
"...In place of the truly
Christian doctrine of at-one-ment through the
regenerate life, he substituted the pagan concept of
atonement through death.
"In
Romans iii, 23-25, (Paul) writes:
"
'For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of
God; being justified freely through his grace through
the redemption that is in Christ Jesus: whom God hath
set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his
blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission
of sins that are past, through the forbearance of
God.'
"And in Romans v, 8,
9:" 'But God commendeth his love
towards us, in that, while we were yet sinners,
Christ died for us. Much more then, being now
justified by his blood, we shall be saved from wrath
through him.'
"What
has this dark and primitive doctrine to do with the
simple teaching of Jesus who was never guilty of
evolving the doctrine of vicar-i-ous atonement that
so shocked the honest, modern Gandhi that he re-fused
to call himself a Christian, for all his Christ-
likeness, saying that he wished to be saved not from
the consequences of his sins but from sin itself.[?]
In this he was at one with Jesus but not with Paul,
for the master taught, as all the major world
teachers have done, that sin is forgiven only when it
is forsaken. Each man must, therefor 'forgive'
himself; no one can do this for him. Nor did Jesus
ever present a picture of a wrathful God from whom
man must be saved but always of an eternally loving,
wholly benef-icent Father who desired only good for
His children.
"But
the pagans had always believed in redemption through
sacri-fice and vicarious atonement. As Weigall points
out:
"
'Adonis, Attis, Dionysos, Herakles, Mithra, Osiris,
and other deities were all saviour-gods whose deaths
were re-garded as sacrifices made on behalf of
mankind; and it is to be noticed that in almost every
case there is clear evidence that the god sacrificed
himself to himself.' 2
"Therefore when a
Mithraist was confronted with the story of a great
prophet who called himself a son of God, and who had
been crucified and had risen again, he would at once
have seen the hero of the story as 'the bull of
Mithra killed by the God who was himself.' (Ibid.pg
169) And it is not difficult to understand how the
zealous Judaic-Christian mission-aries would have
seized upon this mystical explanation of what had
once seemed to them to have been the shameful death
of their master on a cross like a common criminal.
"From the time of
Abraham their race had known of the belief in the
efficacy of human and animal sacrifice as a means of
propitiating the deity. Searching the scriptures in
the light of this popular belief, they may well have
imagined that they had found the correct explanation
of their master's tragic experience, an explanation
that would conclusively prove his Messiahship since,
if it were true, he had indeed saved mankind from the
burden of sin.
"It will be seen from
a close scrutiny of Paul's Epistles that he accept-ed
this point of view with caution and reservations but
he undoubtedly supplied the authority for the
hardening into dogma of the doctrine of vi-carious
atonement which has always been so prominent a
feature of the Christian church. The writer of the
Epistle to the Hebrews on the other hand shows full
acceptance of the pagan theory, saying forthrightly
(He-brews ix, 12): that Christ by his own blood
"entered into the holy place having obtained
eternal redemption for us. For if the blood of
bulls... sprinkling the unclean, sanctifieth to the
purifying of the flesh; how much more shall the blood
of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered
himself without spot to God, purge your conscience
from dead works to serve the living God."
"All this is
recognizably pure Mithraism, no hint of which can be
found in the teachings of Jesus Christ as recorded in
the gospels.
"But the idea
evidently spread during the first century like a
forest fire, not only among the pagans but the
Christians. In the First Epistle of Peter i, 18, 19,
we find:
" 'Forasmuch as ye
know that ye were not redeemed with corrup-t-ible
things ...but with the precious blood of Christ, as
of a lamb without blemish and without spot...'
"And in the First
Epistle of John i, 7.
"
'...the blood of Jesus Christ his son cleanseth us
from sin.'
"In fact it is
impossible to avoid the conclusion that at the time
when the Epistles were written, the Christian Church
had accepted the pa-gan 'rationalization' of the
crucified and risen saviour, the God, or Son of God,
who had not merely been crucified like a criminal at
the instiga-tion of Orthodoxy and the occupying Power
but had himself elected to die as a living sacrifice
for the transgressions of mankind. As Weigall writes,
in the light of this theory:
" 'Jesus not only
fulfilled the Judaic scriptures, but he also
fulfilled those of the pagan world; and therein lay
the great ap- peal of early Christianity. In him a
dozen shadowy gods were condensed into a proximate
reality; and in His crucifixion the old stories of
their ghastly sufferings and sacrificial deaths were
made actual, and were given a direct meaning.' (Ibid
pg 169.)
"There can be no
doubt that this familiar idea had much to do with
popularizing the new faith. But it is bitterly
ironical that in order to popu-larize the creed of
Christ it had to be perverted; for not only did this
primi-tive belief entirely reverse Jesus's vision of
a perfect all- loving Father, who asked for nothing
more and nothing less than the love of His chil-dren
and their obedience to the beneficent laws made for
their protection, presenting instead the picture of
an inhuman monster who could only be appeased by the
shedding of innocent blood, but it was in direct
conflict with the main theme of Jesus's gospel...
"Jesus's immense
contribution to the universal evolutionary pro-cess
was his example; he was the transitional man, showing
not only that the transition could be made, but how
it could be made. Without such proof humanity would
have no sense of direction, would not know in what
its salvation consisted and could have no assurance
that the thing could be done.
"Therefore the debt
we have been supposed to owe the Founder of our Faith
for his vicarious atonement, still remains in its
immensity; for what he did was to establish the
all-essential precedent, the living proof, that
at-one-ment with God could be obtained in the present
life, and in this sense he became forever the hope of
the world.
"But when this
doctrine is perverted to imply that man is freed from
the consequences of his own behaviour by the
sacrifice of another, the spiritual law contained in
the words: "Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall
he reap," known in the East as the law of Karma,
is violated and the law of Justice is annulled.
"It is true that by
at-one-ment with the Perfect Man we may put off our
sins and, with them, their effects, and so find
ourselves freed from "the law of sin and
death;" but that cannot be achieved by the death
of any man but only by the living of a regenerate
life. And the biggest stumbling block to the living
of that life throughout the ages has been the
disastrous-ly misleading doctrine of vicarious
atonement." 3
Derived from ancient Judaic and Mithraic
sources, and injected into Christianity right after
Jesus' death, the Paulinian atonement doctrine implies
that the character of the Father is not dominated by
love, but by justice and contracts. It is implied that
man had lost access to God's affection; that criminal
responsibility transmits from creature to creature, and
that God would be satisfied by the punishment of an
innocent to re-deem the guilty. These implications amount
to a slur on the character of God. No one could square an
actual experience of God to these tenets logically, so
all down the cen-turies Christian believers have been
forced into a mystic, symbolic, or allegorical approach.
Eberhard Arnold, writing in Inner
Land:
"The human conscience
can be purified in no other way than through the
sacrificed lifeblood of Jesus Christ, who was and is
the only pure image of God. His sacrificed soul
brings God's life to us. To have faith in our own
blood --faith in the beauty of the soul or the purity
of the race-- is to confuse and per-vert facts as
they truly are. The blood of every one of us proves
to be burdened with an evil inheritance. It shows its
ut-ter impurity. 'The soul of any creature lies in
its blood.' (Leviticus 17:11, Moffatt) Therefore
throughout the ages, all the weaknesses and failures
of human life are revealed in the bloodline of the
individual, of the nation, and of mankind. Faith in
Jesus Christ holds firm to nobler blood. The soul of
His blood was ruled and filled by the pure Spirit of
God's love. No other human life can be compared with
it. Therefore He is more than a living human soul. He
is the quickening Spirit...
"From God He once
more sends this quickening Spirit down to us. Those
who receive this pure Spirit will have their souls
and consciences purified from all former guilt, and
their lives will be protected from new offences. This
is because the life of the Bearer of this Spirit,
which was sac-rificed for them, is purity itself --
the purity of a love that is perfect unto death. The
blood that was sacrificed for them in death is
mightier than death and more powerful than all its
deadly, poisonous, and divisive pow-ers. This is
because it bears a life within it that has remained
free from all the elements of death and
decomposition, which are hostile to life and to God.
Purification through the blood of Christ means that
in His Spirit His spotless, surrendered life unfolds
its powers here and now. Therefore it is able to set
our consciences free from all impurity." 4
Nowhere in Europe did the atonement doctrine
become more ingrained than in Germany. Look at the Mateus
Grunewald Crucifixion for example, perhaps one of the
most ghastly ever painted. Read the unbelievably morbid
words to some of the Bach chorales. Esme Wynn- Tyson
suggests the reason is that the Mithraic religion of the
Roman soldiers took a firmer hold in Germany than any
other part of the Empire. In any case, the atonement
doctrine took its toll in Germany, and the subsequent
failure of the resulting Mithraic-Christian God concept
was, I believe, the direct, albeit under-lying, cause of
Hitler's Third Reich.
Elie Wiesel, quoted in the Plough:
"The killers'
laughter and the hallucinatory silence of the con-
demned. The distant look of old men who knew.
"If we were to say it
all, nobody would believe us. The screams, the
moaning, the beatings. The thirst in sealed railroad
cattle cars. The terror inside the barracks during
the selections. The silent, almost solemn
pro-cessions marching toward the mass graves or the
ovens; the lucidity of some, the delirium of others.
"The shame of the
starving, who pray to God for a crust of bread, who
think of bread more than of God, more than of honor,
more than of life.
"How is one to speak
of such things and not lose one's mind? And not beat
one's fists against the wall?
"For the first time
in history, machinery was set up to exterminate a
whole people. Children not even born were sentenced
to die -- just be-cause they were Jews. It defies
analysis. Reason. Civilization.
"Time does not heal all
wounds.
"There are those that remain painfully open.
"It is impossible for
any but a survivor to know the nature of a world
where, as in Moses' time in the desert, the living
and the dead are no longer separate.
"The sincere
Christian knows that what died in Auschwitz was not
just the Jewish people but Christianity.
"Pope John XXIII was
one of the greatest men I have known. He did feel
guilty, that's what made him so great.
"He understood, also,
that Auschwitz represented a failure, a defeat for
2,000 years of Christian civilization. Because, just
think about it, the harsh truth is that in Auschwitz
all the Jews were victims, all the killers were
Christians.
"How is one to
explain that neither Hitler nor Himmler was ever
excommunicated by the Church? That Pius XII never
thought it necessary, not to say indispensable, to
condemn Auschwitz and Treblinka?
"That among the S.S.
a large proportion were believers who re- mained
faithful to their Christian ties to the end?
"That there were
killers who went to confession between massacres. And
that they all came from Christian families and had
received a Chris-tian education?
"How explain that the
Christian in them did not make their arms tremble as
they shot at children or their conscience bridle as
they shoved their naked, beaten victims into the
factories of death?" 5
When this passage appeared in the Plough, the
text read: "...what died in Auschwitz was not just
the Jewish people but [institutional -- Ed.]
Christianity." But Elie Wiesel was right. It was not
just institutional Christianity that died in Auschwitz;
it was Biblical Christianity itself.
Because of the Mithraic emphasis in their God
concept, the German people be-came particularly
vulnerable to a loss of faith. -- After all, who, except
perhaps a reli-gious genius, could love a God who would
have nothing to do with mankind until certain scales of
contractual justice had been balanced by the blood
sacrifice of His own Son? It is the repulsiveness of this
contaminated God concept that caused the under-ly-ing
spiritual weakness and uncertainty of faith which made it
possible for Hitler to subvert the German people
spiritually and turn them back to a natural, tribal,
pagan religion, a religion somewhat like the religions of
the Roman Empire before the times of Christ, a religion
that made it perfectly natural for a nominally Christian
people to do just what they did in the Nazi Third Reich.
Much has been said about the supposed economic,
nationalistic and psychologic causes of Naziism. But
these explanations merely shrivel and die in the face of
the ac-tual deeds of the German people. I am convinced
that had this people actually known God, they could not
have done these deeds. Modern historians don't seem to
grasp the fact or the significance of the fact that, for
a time, the German people actually con-ver-ted back to an
older type of religion, a religion involving the worship
of their tribe and tribal leader.
Christianity failed in Germany.
From the Judeo-Christian tradition I personally
can validate this: God is my Father; He loves me and I
thereby am led to love all those He loves also, being the
kind of person I know Him to be. This is my faith; I can
verify it inside me. If this were not my experience I
would not believe it at all. Although I cannot
distinguish be-tween the Spirits of Deity, everything in
my experience supports the belief that Jesus is the
divine Son of local astronomic jurisdiction to whom I
look for passage from here to the Universal Father. But I
depart from the Bible in that I believe salvation depends
only on love. I take my salvation entirely for granted. I
know that God loves me and He knows I love Him.
I see in the story of all religions a history
of conflict between veracity and false-hood in the
portrait of God. Difficulties dissolve and humans make
progress when-ever people realize that God loves,
understands and helps his children. Difficulties multiply
and human beings suffer whenever people believe God
resembles anything like a barbaric, anthropomorphic,
Judeo- Mithraic "judge."
Christians who want to cast aspersions often
accuse each other of being "Old Testament." But
the Old Testament at its best is better than the New
Testament at its worst. Dispite notable barbarities, the
Books of the Old Testament generally present a
progression of growth in the Deity concept; from Samuel
to Isaiah, God is revealed with increasing truth and
clarity. In some respects, the New Testament represents
progress in concept over the Old, since the Father of the
"Lord Jesus Christ" at last becomes the Father
of every individual. But in some very important ways the
New Testament concept fell short.
In Isaiah, the loving, Old Testament Father
says:
"I have created you,
I have redeemed you, I have called you by your name;
you are mine." "Everyone who is called by
my name I have created for my glory and they shall
show forth my praise." "When you pass
through the waters, I will be with you since you are
precious in my sight." "Can a woman forget
her suckling child that she should not have
compas-sion on her son? Yes she may forget, yet I
will not forget my children, for behold I have graven
them upon the palms of my hands; I have covered them
with the shadow of my hands." "I, even I,
am he who blots out their transgressions for my own
sake, and I will not remember their sins."
"And the Lord's hand is not shortened that it
cannot save, neither is his ear heavy that it cannot
hear." "He shall feed his flock like a
shephard; he shall gather the lambs in his arms and
carry them in his bosom." "Come let us
reason together. Though your sins be as scarlet, they
shall be as white as snow... " "Let the
wicked forsake his ways and the unrighteous man his
thoughts, and let him return to the Lord, and to our
God for he will abundantly pardon." (Isaiah,
various verses and chapters.)
These lyrical passages, as opposed to many dark
and primitive ones also to be found in the Old Testament,
represent the truest portrayal of Deity I know.
The New Testament does not always keep pace.
New Testament literalists have had to struggle with
doubts about the basis of their personal salvation; with
doubts about the basis of their personal salvation in God
the Father's love.
On the one hand it says:
"For by grace you are saved
through faith; and not that of your- selves: it is
the gift of God: Not of works lest any man should
boast." (Ephe: II:8&9)
And on the other:
"And I saw the dead, small
and great, standing before God; and the books were
opened: and another book was opened, which is the
book of life: and the dead were judged out of those
things which were written in the books according to
their works." (Rev:XX:12)
So is it by works or by faith? Regardless of
whether salvation is by works or by faith, the New
Testament writers seem to have lost some of the bright
vision of Di-vine love, devotedly sponsoring human growth
and progress, that was so clear to Isa-iah. While they
exalted the merciful and sacrificing Christ, they made
the terrible mistake of debasing and distorting the
nature of the loving and saving Father.
The Protestant Martin Luther, who was nothing
if not logical and forthright in his approach to these
problems, writes:
"If it is difficult to
believe in God's mercy and goodness when he damns
those who do not deserve it, we must recall that if
God's justice could be recognized as just by human
comprehension, it would not be di-vine. Since God is
true and one, he is utterly incomprehensible and
inac-cessible to human reason. Therefore his justice
must also be incom-pre-hensible." 6
Again, speaking of this scriptural New
Testament God, Luther is also quoted in an article by
Eberhard Arnold that recently appeared in "The
Plough:"
"This distress of
conscience is the final, the decisive affliction. The
unutterable agony that Luther experienced in his
Black Tower could not be expressed in words. Those
who are not acquainted with Luther's suffer-ing,
forsakenness, and despair cannot grasp his faith.
Only this agony un-der God's wrath and his remoteness
makes it possible to understand the certainty and joy
of faith which was awakened in Luther as an entirely
new experience. About this agony Luther wrote:
" 'I too know a man
who declares he has often suffered this punishment.
True, it did not last long, but it was so severe and
so hellish that no tongue can tell of its severity,
no pen can describe it, nor can any man believe it
who has not experienced it. If it had reached its
peak or continued for half an hour long- er - yes for
only a tenth of an hour longer -- he would have been
utterly destroyed and all his bones burned to ashes.
Here God appears, mighty in his wrath, and all
creation too, so that a man does not know where to
turn. There is no comfort, either from within or
without; everything accuses him.' "
Eberhard Arnold then goes on in
commentary:
"To face this 'just'
God he saw before him full of wrath and punish-ment,
whose peace and fellowship he had striven for in
vain, filled Luther with passionate hatred. Today,
others whose experience appears similar to Luther's,
but whose consciousness of guilt is only shallow, see
divine judgment spread over all mankind as 'unjust.'
"Even if we are still
far from Luther's personal torment, from the agony of
separation from God as our personal guilt, in
relation to the will to unity we are still in the
same sin of isolation as he was, the same de-s-pair.
We too can do nothing to overcome world need except
by getting to the bottom of the abysmal suffering and
our own guilt for the separation and isolation." 7
The God, which Eberhard Arnold and Martin
Luther describe, is not the God I know and love.
It should surprise no one that a nation whose
theologians, both medieval and modern, regarded God in
such a horrible light would eventually erupt in a
holocaust. The German people, fed on these pernicious
doctrines, struggled with resentment and self-loathing,
with a compensating sadistic sense of moralism and with
hate. Inevi-tably they found a scapegoat on whom to
project all this hatred.
Toward the end of his life, the father of the
Protestant Reformation, whose spiri-tual insight Eberhard
Arnold commended as noted above, wrote a treatise called
"On The Jews And Their Lies." Here are a few
excerpts:
"Therefor be on your guard
against the Jews, knowing that wher-ever they have
their synagogues, nothing is found but a den of
devils in which sheer self-glory, conceit, lies,
blasphemy, and defaming of God and men are practised
most maliciously and vehemently, just as the devils
themselves do. And where you see or hear a Jew
teaching, remember that you are hearing nothing but a
venomous basilisk who poisons and kills people merely
by fastening his eyes on them. God's wrath has
consigned them to the presumption that their
boasting, their conceit, their slander of God, their
cursing of all people are a true and great service
rendered to God -- all of which is very fitting and
becoming to such noble blood of the fathers and
circumcised saints. This they believe dispite the
fact that they know they are steeped in manifest
vices. And with all this they claim to be doing
right. Be on your guard against them...
"What shall we
Christians do with this rejected and condemned
people, the Jews? Since they live among us, we dare
not tolerate their conduct, now that we are aware of
their lying and reviling and blasphem-ing. If we do,
we become sharers in their lies, cursing and
blasphemy. Thus we cannot extinguish the unquenchable
fire of divine wrath, of which the prophets speak,
nor can we convert the Jews. With prayer and the fear
of God we must practice a sharp mercy to see whether
we might save at least a few of them from the glowing
flames. We dare not avenge ourselves. Vengeance a
thousand times worse than we could wish them already
has them by the throat. I shall give you my sincere
advice:
"First, set fire to
their synagogues or schools and to bury and cover
with dirt whatever will not burn, so that no man will
ever see a stone or cinder of them. This is to be
done in honor of our Lord and of Christen-dom, so
that God might see that we are Christians, and do not
condone or knowingly tolerate such public lying,
cursing, and blaspheming of his Son and of his
Christians...
"Second, I advise
that their houses also be razed and destroyed. For
they pursue in them the same aims as in their
Synagogues. Instead they might be lodged under a roof
or in a barn like the gypsies. This will bring home
to them the fact that they are not masters in our
country, as they boast, but that they are living in
exile and in captivity, as they incessantly wail and
lament about us before God.
"Third, I advise that
all their prayer books and Talmudic writings, in
which such idolatry, lies, cursing, and blasphemy are
taught, be taken away from them.
"Fourth, I advise
that their Rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth
upon pain of loss of life and limb...
"Fifth, I advise that
safe-conduct on the highways be abolished com-pletely
for the Jews. For they have no business in the
countryside, since they are not Lords, officials,
tradesmen, or the like. Let them stay at home.
"Sixth, I advise that
usury be prohibited to them, and that all cash and
treasure of silver and gold be taken from them and
put aside for safe-keeping. ...Whenever a Jew is
sincerely converted, he should be handed one hundred,
two hundred, or three hundred florins, as personal
circum-stances may suggest. With this he could set
himself up in some occupa-tion for the support of his
poor wife and children, and the maintainence of the
old or feeble. For such evil gains are cursed if they
are not put to use with God's blessing in a good and
worthy cause.
"Seventh, I recommend
putting a flail, an ax, a hoe, a spade, a dis-taff,
or a spindle into the hands of young, strong Jews and
Jewesses and let-ting them earn their bread in the
sweat of their brow, as was imposed on the children
of Adam (Gen. 3 [:19]). For it is not fitting that
they should let us accursed Goyim toil in the sweat
of our faces while they, the holy peo-ple, idle away
their time behind the stove, feasting and farting,
and on top of all, boasting blasphemously of their
lordship over the Christians by means of our sweat.
No, one should toss out these lazy rogues by the seat
of their pants.
"When you lay eyes on
or think of a Jew you must say to yourself: Alas,
that mouth which I there behold has cursed and
execrated and ma-ligned every Saturday my dear Lord
Jesus Christ, who has redeemed me with his precious
blood; in addition, it prayed and pleaded before God
that I, my wife and children, and all Christians
might be stabbed to death and perish miserably. And
he himself would gladly do this if he were able, in
order to appropriate our goods. Perhaps he has spat
on the ground many times this very day over the name
of Jesus, as is their custom, so that the spittle
still clings to his mouth and beard, if he had a
chance to spit. If I were to eat, drink, or talk with
such a devilish mouth, I would eat or drink myself
full of devils by the dish or cupful, just as I
surely make myself a cohort of all the devils that
dwell in the Jews and that deride the precious blood
of Christ. May God preserve me from this!
"I wish and I ask
that our rulers who have Jewish subjects exercise a
sharp mercy toward this wretched people, as suggested
above, to see whe-ther this might not help (though it
is doubtful). They must act like a good physician
who, when gangrene has set in, proceeds without mercy
to cut, saw, and burn flesh, veins, bone, and marrow.
Such a procedure must also be followed in this
instance. Burn down their synagogues, forbid all that
I enumerated earlier, force them to work, and deal
harshly with them, as Moses did in the wilderness,
slaying three thousand lest the whole peo-ple perish.
They surely do not know what they are doing;
moreover, as people possessed, they do not wish to
know it, hear it, or learn it. Therefor it would be
wrong to be merciful and confirm them in their
conduct. If this does not help we must drive them out
like mad dogs, so that we do not become partakers of
their abominable blasphemy and all their other vices
and thus merit God's wrath and be damned with them. I
have done my duty. Now let everyone see to his. I am
exonerated.
"Finally I wish to
say this for myself: If God were to give me no other
Messiah than such as the Jews wish and hope for, I
would much rather be a sow than a human being... Even
if I could become the ruler of Turkey or the Messiah
for whom the Jews hope, I would still prefer being a
sow. For what would all of this benefit me if I could
not be secure in its possession for a single hour?
Death, that horrible burden and plague of all
mankind, would still threaten me. I would not be safe
from him; I would have to fear him every moment. I
would still have to tremble and quake before hell and
the wrath of God. And I would know no end of all
this, but would have to expect it forever. The tyrant
Dionysius illustrated this well when he placed a
person who praised his good fortune at the head of a
richly laden table. Over his head he suspended an
unsheathed sword attached to a silk thread, and below
him he put a red-hot fire, saying: Eat and be merry,
etc. That is the sort of joy such a Messi-ah would
dispense. And I know that anyone who has ever tasted
of death's terror or burden would rather be a sow
than bear this for ever and ever.
"For a sow lies down
on her featherbed, on the street, or on a dung-heap;
she rests securely, snores gently, sleeps sweetly,
fears neither king nor Lord, neither death nor hell,
neither the devil nor God's wrath, and lives entirely
without care so long as she has her bran... In brief,
no thought of death occurs to her, for her life is
secure and serene.
"And if the butcher
performs his job with her, she probably ima-gines
that a stone or piece of wood is pinching her. She
never thinks of death and in a moment she is dead.
Neither before, during, nor in death did she feel
death. She feels nothing but life, nothing but
everlasting life! She never ate of the apple which
taught us wretched men in paradise the difference
between good and evil.
"What good would the
Jews' Messiah do me if he were unable to help a poor
man like me in the face of this great and horrible
lack and grief and make my life one-tenth as pleasant
as that of a sow?...
"However, if I had a
Messiah who could remedy this grief, so that I would
no longer have to fear death but would be always and
eternally sure of life, and play a trick on the devil
and death and no longer have to trem-ble before the
wrath of god, then my heart would leap for joy and be
intox-icated with sheer delight; then would a fire of
love for God be enkindled, and my praise and thanks
would never cease.
"The Jews and the
Turks care nothing for such a Messiah. And why should
they? They must have a Messiah from the fools
paradise, who will satisfy their stinking belly, and
who will die together with them like a cow or dog.
"Nor do they need him
in the face of death, for they themselves are holy
enough with their penitence and piety to step before
God and attain this and everything. Only Christians
are such fools and timid cowards who stand in such
awe of God, who regard their sin and his wrath so
high-ly that they do not venture to appear before the
eyes of his divine majesty without a mediator or
Messiah to represent them and to sacrifice himself
for them." 8
Great religious pioneers may persevere - like
Job - through a forest of false the-ology and find the
Father in spite their entanglement in horrible
misconceptions. But when whole populations are long
subjected to such misrepresentations, eventually the lies
bear fruit. So, four hundred years after Martin Luther
wrote his horrible diatribe, all his recommendations and
more, regarding the Jews, were meticulously carried out
by his German posterity.
The Nazi Holocaust will always defy
civilization, but it must not be allowed to defy reason
or analysis any longer than we can help.
One of the differences between Judaism and
Christianity is that Judaism is the more sex-positive of
the two religions, again thanks largely to the Mithraic
prejudices of the Apostle Paul. In Mithraism, chastity
was supposed to strengthen soldiers for bat-tle. In
Christianity, the stigma of preemptive damnation by which
we all are cursed has been commonly interpreted as a
matter of human sexual imperfection. As the envy and
jealousy which fueled the contempt in Martin Luther's
theologic attitude toward the Jews (an attitude that did
not originate with him, by any means) gradually permeated
Christian social culture, it came to focus more on the
psychological effects than on theologic causes.
Christianity puts a premium on human sexual
abstinence, material poverty and psychologic misery. The
fact that Judaism is more positive toward human
prosperity and sexual well-being than is Christianity
gradually weighed in to foment increasing resentment,
jealousy and hatred of the Christians for the Jews.
The Arnoldian Hutterites and the older,
hereditary Hutterites both have deep roots in the same
soil which gave rise to the Nazis. Both represent the
results of sin-cere but inconclusive attempts to grapple
with the self contradictory Mithraic-Christian concept of
God. But until Christian believers are willing to face
down the Apostles of primitive Christianity and reject
the doctrinal contaminations of their scriptures, there
will be no answer for those who ask "Why?" and
no assurance for those who cry, "Never again!"
-- either to the problem of the Nazi Holocaust or the
question of why so much evil comes out of so many
Christian groups like the Bruderhof.
However, if Martin Luther, Eberhard Arnold and
others were not able to con-ceive of any approach to God
and Jesus except through his blood- sacrifice, I am.
When I was about thirteen, I had little social
and no spiritual comfort at all. I disbelieved in God. I
was miserable and bitter. As I forecast my life I did not
like what I saw. With nowhere to turn, I made the
experimental offer: If there is a God, let him come in.
He did, and I experienced God. I knew about Nazi Germany
and the Jews, about the United States and the atom bomb.
I realized that any of these or many, many other horrible
things might just as well have happened to me. So the
first thing I wanted to find out was: Considering all
this horror and insanity, is it worth it? I found out
from God that it is.
I know nothing of God from any book, but only
from experience. Books are only good when they inspire or
clarify one's personal spiritual experience. They are no
substitute. I always thought it was stupid for the little
children to be made to sing, "Yes, Jesus loves me,
yes, Jesus loves me; the Bible tells me so." I never
believed, or would ever have believed in God's love at
all until, by personal experience, I knew it for a fact.
It was also apparent to me when I first knew God that,
unknown to me, my spiritual experience had been growing
all along. Even as an atheistic child I had loved
fairness, honesty, beauty, truth and goodness, and, to my
delight, when I found God, I found that He does also.
So thereafter, when I came to read the Bible, I
would compare the passages to what I knew from
experience, and I saw that one clause would contain
truth, but the next one horrible falsehood. I never
hesitated to disregard any clause that conflicted with my
own personal experience. But nevertheless, I have since
found that false religious teachings do hinder spiritual
progress, and I have very often been fooled in my search
for truth. One pitfall is the confusion of psychologic
with spiritual phe-nomena. But I am thankful to have been
liberated from arbitrary reliance upon any sacred book as
opposed to my own experience. And by personal experience
of God, I know that the whole idea of salvation by any
kind of blood sacrifice, literal or symbolic, is totally
absurd.
When I was a child at Woodcrest I overheard
conversations that led me to infer that some brothers and
sisters of good standing in the "life" did not,
at that time, be-lieve in the atonement doctrine. If my
inferences were correct, there must have then been some
brothers and sisters who did not regard the entire Bible
as the "Word of God." I don't think there are
any now, because the idea of an Intercessionary Church,
which I have heard reiterated more recently, is another
branch from the same ancient, trouble- making root. For
if it is necessary for Christ to make of himself a blood
sacri- fice in order to reconcile God and man, who will
intercede for those who are not rec-onciled to God by
this blood-sacrificing Christ? I believe this has been
the Arnoldleut brothers' and sisters' view of the role
they are called on to play in the spiritual econ-omy of
the planet, a role they believe so essential that any
human costs, to themselves or to their outcasts, are
simply irrelevant.
The trouble with the idea of an intercessionary
church is that, like the atone-ment doctrine, it implies
that people can't reach God and that God can't reach
people. Although I cannot agree with this supposition at
all, I can appreciate the intentions of those who do
believe it. I would not have written this except for what
I know of their dedication and faith. Nevertheless, the
whole proposition strikes me as enormously egotistical.
How ironic that a group who all try so hard to annihilate
their own egos should believe that the salvation of
others might actually depend upon them! But since the
generation of German seekers who founded the Bruderhof
were not spiritually liberated enough to challenge the
Bible, I can't blame them for accepting the challenge of
"witnessing to the Intercessionary Church." The
vision is breathtak-ing, albeit fatally flawed. But the
flaws are embedded in Christianity itself, that is in
Christianity as it has come down to us from the Apostles
-- not in the religion of Jesus that lives in the Spirit.
Nor can I blame the Bruderhof completely for
many of the cruel things they have done in witnessing to
this Intercessionary Church. For, since Eberhard Arnold
could not sift the wheat from the chaff in the Bible,
since he could not get past the Apostles who had poured
Jesus' new wine into Jewish and Mithraic wineskins right
after the crucifixion, the guiding star of the movement
he founded inevitably fell below the horizon, and with
little relevance to the future of religious evolution on
the planet, the Bruderhof has effectively lost touch with
transforming spiritual guidance, and so, hopelessly
entangled with vested human interests and with their own
pro-pa-ganda, the brothers and sisters now can only fight
battle after pointless, losing battle with such evils as
may beset a retrograde religious movement.
By recognizing and validating the inevitable
plurality of individual intellectual viewpoint in genuine
spiritual experience, the Bruderhof might have achieved
gen-uine spiritual unity, not mere intellectual
uniformity. The Brotherhoods could then perhaps have
taken up a useful position between Heaven and earth and
sustained a real spiritual intercourse with the
contemporary world. But in the struggle between the
Arnold brothers and others of the servants of the Word
that followed Eberhard Arnold's death, it was by a
charismatic and fundamentalist turn that Heini finally
won out and triumphed over other visions. At the heart of
this fundamentalism lay the doctrinal fetish of
blood-sacrifice atonement. The atonement doctrine was the
wine, union with the older Hutterites was merely the
wineskin.
In the posthumous letter to his son, Christoph,
which is to be found at the end of the second edition of
Torches Rekindled, Heini wrote:
..."Before 1961 the
"plain brother" considered himself so good
that I fear he no longer needed a crucified Christ.
Repentance was scorned and rejected as
"emotional." The "plain brothers and
sisters" did not need any of that.
"For all these
brothers and sisters I want to fight constantly and
pray to God. They have been blinded by a trick of the
devil. Most of them, when they came to the Bruderhof,
were quite simple people, plain in the true sense of
the word, who had brought sin with them and who, as I
believe, had been taken in to the brotherhood by your
Opa through the crucified Christ...
"Without the cross an
encounter with Jesus cannot be imagined. His person
emanates the way of suffering, and his great love for
all men floods our hearts and becomes an urge to go
out to men, to save those who are in the grip of
darkness. In the deep encounter with Jesus the wish
to suffer for him wells up quite naturally. I cannot
imagine a meeting with Jesus unless there is a deep
understanding of his way of suffering..." 9
By the force of personal charisma and leverage
of character, Heini led a group of intelligent, liberal,
American Christians from the twentieth century back to
the six-teenth. To follow him, they not only gave up
their personal property but their right to self
determination, their right to think and hold an
independent thought for them-selves. Why did they do
this? What did they gain?
There was undoubtedly genuine spiritual
experience in the equation. Heini in-troduced many of the
Bruderhofers to God and to their own inner life. But he
did not stop at that, for he too was trapped in the
all-or-nothing system of the Bruderhof. He too could be
excluded. The only way he could be sure of his own
personal and emo-tional safety was to make certain the
triumph of his own personal leadership. To this end, as
have many before him, he sought to determine the terms of
spiritual experi-ence for his whole congregation and, as
have many before him, for this he fell back on the
elements of primitive mythical belief in Biblical
Christianity. And Heini saw to it that, whatever they
once may have been, his followers became anti-
intellectual.
The notion that the central requirement of life
is to believe in Jesus' blood-sacri-fice is Christianity
at its worst. And in the Bruderhof as elsewhere, the
doctrine caused terrible harm. The integrity of men can
be no greater than the integrity of the God whom they
worship, and the atonement doctrine is an assault on the
integrity of God. Whether he swallows and assimilates
this pagan draught by means of allegorical men-tal
gymnastics or by the negation of his intellect, the
believer is left vulnerable to spiritual sabotage.
Sacrificial myths and sacrificial religious
systems always entail social coercion and intellectual
enslavement. Woodcrest soon went from being a place where
you could hold any religious opinion to where you could
be thrown out simply for ques-tioning Heini. But this is
nothing new. The paranoid and hateful reaction of
me-dieval Christians to the Jewish people among them and
the brutal purges and exclu-sions of the (pacifist)
Bruderhof result from the same idea, the idea that people
can and should be forced to believe and live a certain
way in order to be alright with God.
Nevertheless, I cannot blame Martin Luther,
Eberhard or Heini Arnold or oth-ers for failing to
penetrate all the way through Paul and disencumber the
gospel of Jesus. Neither can I blame the Apostle for the
fact that his personal opinions came to be re-garded as
canon. Nowhere does he say that he thought he was writing
the Bible. But there is an instructive parallel between
what happened in early Christianity with Paul, and what
has happened recently in the Bruderhof in the case of
their beloved Heini. I do not mean to suggest that anyone
thinks Heini was as great a religious leader as Paul. The
point in both cases is simply that human beings are so
love-starved they tend to canonize anyone who induces a
spiritual experience in them. That, both Paul and Heini
did, and their followers canonized both of them. Only in
Paul's case, they canonized his writings also.
Neither Christianity nor the Bruderhof has ever
been without the ideal of love, but love and tolerance
are completely inseparable. Love can only be expressed in
an atmosphere of social and intellectual tolerance, and
by means of spiritual forbearance and personal
generosity. There has always been a conflict between the
ideal of love and many, many forms of intolerance
throughout the entire history of Christianity. And the
Hutterites, both East and West, following carefully in
the footsteps of certain pioneers of the Protestant
Reformation, are some of the most intolerant groups ever
to talk about love. Socially, economically,
intellectually and spiritually, the Hutterites all
maintain the very highest barriers between themselves and
others.
But Jesus never meant death and damnation to be
presented as the calling cards of his Gospel. Neither did
he foster any sort of economic or cultural barriers
between his followers and other people. And there is no
reason to suppose that the Father and Son want to see
their children all huddled under the umbrella of some
particular religious leadership rather than each facing
the sun, the wind and the rain of personal spiritual
experience on their own. The gospel Jesus brought to the
planet is first a matter of the personal discovery of the
beneficent parental relationship that exists between the
Father, the Son and each individual faith-child, and
then, on that basis, going on to realize and demonstrate
the fraternity of all those whom God loves also.
And who is to judge between those who perhaps
hear the sound of his voice and those who happen to call
Jesus by name?
1 World Religions, From Ancient
History To The Present:
Edited by Geoffrey Parrinder, Facts on File
Publications, 1984, p182.
2 The Paganism in our Christianity, Arthur
Weigall, Hutchinson & Co., Ltd. p163.
3 Mithras, The Fellow in the Cap, Esme
Wynn-Tyson Centaur Press, Ltd., 1972, p 135 ff.
4 Inner Land, by Eberhard
Arnold, Woodcrest Service Committee, Rifton, NY 12471
5 "The Plough," Plough
Publishing (Late 1980's - early '90's, I don't
have the date.)
6 Here I Stand, A Life of Martin
Luther, by Roland H. Bainton,
Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, MCML, p 255
7 "The Plough" Number 28
February/March 1991 Plough Publishing
House, Farmington, PA 15437-9506
8 On The Jews And Their Lies, Luther's
Works Vol 47, "The Christian In Society,"
Helmut T. Lehmann, ed., Fortress Press,
Philadelphia, 1971, p 172 ff.
9 Torches Rekindled, The
Bruderhof's Struggle for Renewal told by Merrill Mow
Plough Publishing House, Rifton NY 12471, 1990
- Click
here to get back to The Peregrine Archives
Page.
|
