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There is a cross and a man put to death thereon. This man is God incarnate – Immanuel, or God with us – the Lord Jesus Christ, who afterwards rose from the dead, became transfigured and ascended into heaven. We are to understand that this is our atonement, the offering pleasing to God, whereby we are accepted among the redeemed. How very strange! What does this mean? In a nutshell it means that the sin of the world is vanquished – entirely, completely. This is the good news implicit in the term gospel, and it ought to be hailed a great thing. Yet even where this idea is accepted – among professed Christians – its profound meaning remains unrecognised. Most fail to understand that the vanquishing of sin is an accomplished fact and offered essentially without condition. It is a gift of God – an expression toward humanity of his love, mercy and grace. If a condition is involved, it is that intrinsic to the receiving of any gift – namely that the gift is accepted. Implicit in this is one further condition – one must believe that the giver is fair dinkum (as we say in I, as a private student of the scriptures to whom this revelation is imparted, assert that it is so. If we grant this proposition, we see at a glance what’s wrong with the body that, historically, has called itself church. While extensive lip service is rendered to the concept of grace, its magnitude, its deep essence, entirely eludes the common grasp. What is grasped instead is an ethical prescription – a code of conduct – surely the common conception of religion in general. Most people indeed are religious in this sense – and here we can include the religion (literally: a binding or covering) of ethical humanism. Most people, in short, possess an ethical creed in accord with which they propose to conduct their lives. They accept that they mostly fail to conform to their own standards, which perception is likely to engender a sense of unworthiness before a projected divinity. Nevertheless, because of the moral effort put forth, they regard themselves as decent, honest, ideal-aspiring human beings. Their creed and self-esteem actually demand that they maintain some such self-image. The suggestion that they are sinners would seem to them an affront, to which they are likely to respond with vehemence. Yet even the orthodox conception of sin and repentance tends to fall short in this regard. For the moral agonising, typical of this orthodoxy, concerns such relative trifles of which the creed permits acknowledgement. (The creed, in other words, is the symbolic covering of fig leaves (Genesis 3), wherewith we seek to cover our spiritual nakedness. Civilisation, for Sigmund Freud, was simply such a covering. This explains why the religious denominations surreptitiously replace the prophetic scriptures with a creed.) The implicit stance is one of self-justification, a context in which forgiveness – the radical grace of God – means very little. The error of this conception is that it equates sin with moral weakness and failing. The scriptural concept of sin, by contrast, is actually far more profound. It denotes separation from God, the loss of divine apprehension – integral and all-inclusive – through grasping at the tree of knowledge. As such it is intrinsic to a natural human birth (the legacy of so-called original sin), whereby we come to identify with a body that is subject to age and death – a body, moreover, that is the occasion of pain and fear and deep unrequited longings. I take it that my readers identify with such a body, and are therefore in need of forgiveness and the salvation that is implicit therein. What this religion – this salvation – promises is not a superior ethic, but a body as we would wish to possess – eternal and free from affliction. Such a body, however, may seem a remote conception, and indeed, insofar as redemption proceeds ‘from the inside out’, it is understood within the aegis of this revelation that the physical body (in actual effect) is not yet redeemed. We shall ask therefore what forgiveness means in the practical sense of our daily experience. Essentially it means we can look at ourselves honestly and accept ourselves as we are, without the pretensions demanded by our ethics. We are able to apprehend ourselves at psychedelic depths, to countenance our repressed shadow and to acknowledge our deeply buried fears and desires – that our fears may be allayed and our desires met – and this in itself, the conforming to our authentic nature, is the initiation, the induction into the sanctuary of God – the human soul. It means we can come – as we are – into the spiritual light that is brighter than mortal eyes can bear. We can walk in this light, without being blinded, and bring into the light the things that are hidden in darkness. We can reverse the human tendency, as described in Genesis, of hiding from the light with a covering of our own making. John, the beloved disciple, wrote, if we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. The path then is one of confession, albeit not after the perfunctory manner of the Roman confessional – bless me Father for I have sinned, nor after the emotional manner of the evangelicals – me poor sinner, weep, howl, screech, but by the recognition, in the aforesaid light, that our spiritual alienation goes to the root. From a temporal perspective this tends to be an ongoing process. Perceived spiritually, from an a-temporal perspective, the moment the soul has perceived the atonement – the message of grace – that soul is made perfect in the sight of God. This is what it means to be ‘born again’ or to ‘follow Jesus’ – not the religious motions we perform, but the cognitive event of the perception of grace. Yet even this is not all. For according to scriptural testimony we are not merely forgiven; we are justified in the sight of God. When a man is justified in a court of law, it is considered that he is not guilty as charged. This also is the status in Christ of a man or woman who has recognised the atonement. Sin is not imputed to such a person. In the eyes of God he or she never committed sin in the first place. When God (the I Am) looks at such a person through the atonement, he sees Christ – an eternal son or daughter who never for a moment departed the divine estate. For, although the said recognition is an event in time, identification is effected with the eternal aspect of the soul. The individual recognises his or her immortal nature, revealed in the garment of infinite grace. As St Paul put the matter, whom [God] did predestinate, them he also called, and whom he called, them he also justified, and whom he justified, them he also glorified. Do I at this point hear a chorus of buts, emanating from the ranks of the moralists? What of their alternative – the idea of salvation through personal merit? As stated above, this conception seems to be the universal religious keynote, and perhaps this goes far to explain the dubious status of institutional religion in the world. We are further aware that priestly classes – the biblical pharisees, the moral theologians of Rome – who made a science of this approach, becoming experts in the minute permutations and gradations of sin, became also a byword for pedantic hypocrisy. Enlightened consensus, if there is such a thing, is that these forms of legalism can only have a darkening effect on the human moral constitution. Indeed one need look no further than certain religious institutions to observed their effects. Whereas the above disclosed, admittedly, are rarefied conceptions, it should not be thought that they are merely symbolic in the sense of being without practical consequence. To illustrate we shall delve a little more deeply into the psychology of redemption as perceived from a temporal perspective. Let us first acknowledge that the saints of God, as here defined, will continue to sin in their own sight, and in the sight of others, as long as they possess a mortal body. But a transformative process is set in motion – subtle as it is profound. For the spiritual light of mercy and grace effects of itself an ongoing process of analysis, which penetrates the labyrinths of the psyche (the descent of Christ into hell), bringing light to the darkness and the dark things into the light. This light dissolves the underpinnings of negative cultural imprinting, such that psychological complexes are resolved into their original constituents, psychic elements purified, and the ‘standing wave’ of the perishable ego assimilated into the spiritual body of the theophany or pillar of fire. In the language of alchemy, the blood of Christ is both universal solvent and elixir. Divine grace and mercy, simply through contact or immersion, restore the creature to its primordial self. What the soul contemplates, that it becomes. I will offer no further apology for this doctrine, sensing that explanation, if not a profaning, nevertheless constitutes a trivialising of its grandeur. I will suggest rather that its sublimity commends itself to the spiritual intuition, and that what we behold is surely astounding. For we are contemplating the righteousness of God – and the imputation of this righteousness – without the works of the law. As Whereas legislators may feel uncomfortable with this doctrine, and whereas its apparent simplicity will cause it to be lightly esteemed – if perceived at all – it cannot be sufficiently emphasised that this is the salvation of God. This is the way of the sanctuary, which truth is echoed even in the Buddhist canon, wherein compassion is considered the basis of bodhichitta, of enlightened mind. In a non-arbitrary sense, this is the way. To neglect this is to wonder in outer darkness. To embrace this is to enter the path of divine revelation, the opening of the mysterious Seven Seals of the Apocalypse, in the searching of the soul as above described, to discover and assert its spiritual birthright – the abstract or title deed of Adamic godhead and eternal life. |