Bruce Charlton's Notions

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First Letter of John: 

2: My little children, these things write I unto you, that ye sin not. And if any man sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous: ² and he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world...

4: ⁷ Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. ⁸ He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. ⁹ In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. ¹⁰ Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.

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There is an apparent incompatibility between the Gospel message that God is love - especially prominent in John's Gospel and the first Epistle; and the idea that God is the kind of deity who requires propitiatory sacrifice.  

A propitiation is an act done to appease or win favour from a god - and therefore to regard the death of Jesus as a propitiation seemingly flies in the face of the understanding of the true nature of God as revealed by the teaching and life of Jesus. 

The Christian response to this surface paradox has been various - but one response has been to make the propitiatory sacrifice of Christ into something resembling the focal point of the whole religion - so that the most-emphasized teaching becomes the assertion that God needed propitiation by an ultimate sacrifice of His own perfect Son - and that after that had been done, the decks were cleared for Him to be a God of Love. 

The key question about Christ as propitiation was whether propitiation was something demanded by God, or something demanded by Men. 

Is the need for propitiation a divine characteristic, or a sub-divine (human) characteristic? 

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The answer comes from contrasting the core of Christianity being love, with the (occasional) use of a language of sacrifice and propitiation as an explanation. 

It seems clear to me that the concept of a necessity for propitiation is a pre-Christian (anti-Christian) one - the use of propitiation to (try to) manipulate divinity is apparently something natural and spontaneous in Men, but it is multiply-contradicted and explicitly-superseded by the teachings and revelations of Christ. 

My understanding is that the language of sacrifice and propitiation was being used about Jesus (and quantitatively, it was not used this way very much in the New Testament, and even less in the Gospels) purely as a concession to the imperfect state of Men's understanding and motivation. 

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In effect, the intended message was along the lines of:

If you insist upon regarding me as the kind of God who demands propitiation by sacrifices; then please assume that the death of Jesus was sufficient sacrifice and that I have now been propitiated once-for-all. 

So, please forget about that stuff, if you can; and please stop organizing your religion around the need for propitiation!

The things I want you to focus-upon is that I am your perfectly-loving Father. To understand what I want from you, and how I want you to behave; all you need to do is imagine yourself a perfectly loving parent, and consider what you most hope for from your children in terms of attitudes, motivations, behaviours... 

Then you may gradually come to realize the absurdity, the gross misunderstanding, of supposing that I would ever want to be, or allow myself to be, mollified and manipulated by sacrifices; whether personal, animal, human or divine. 

Of course I understand and forgive that you may fall-into such behaviours, even from the best of intentions; but please, please, please do not suppose that I demand or respond-to a religion based-upon propitiation, or that propitiation is what I most want from you. 

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I have often written of the un-Christian, indeed anti-Christian, idea that God want, needs and demands propitiation. 

I have also often written about my conviction that the spontaneous and natural "spiritual knowledge" of young children was built-into us by God, for our guidance, and as the basis of that adult knowledge we develop from properly-interpreted experiences and (usually) increasing capacity. 

I was considering my own childhood compulsion to pray (I was aged about 5-6 years), and how such prayers were almost entirely propitiatory in nature: I would beg my god (who was, I think, conceptualized as Thor) for the safety and survival of those I loved; and these prayers "needed" to be specific for each person, were desperate, and were repeated over and over again to the limit of my endurance.

These prayers were a ritual (before sleep) needed to avoid the punishment of harm being visited on those I loved. 

And, although the ritual was done to avert harm, I was very unsure of its effectiveness. Partly this was because of a sense that if I said or did anything wrong, then this would at least negate the prayer; and it might even evoke a punishment for my mistake - such that just what I prayed against, would be inflicted as the punishment.

(This seems to have been a common view of religious ritual through much of history, e.g. in the European Middle Ages - i.e. that it must be done exactly correctly or else it would do more harm than good.)

My first thought was to wonder whether this childhood experience of spontaneous propitiatory prayer was a guide to the real nature of God. I wondered if the fact I prayed in this style and spirit without being told, might be evidence that this was the real nature of God and his relationship with us. 

But then it suddenly struck me that I never felt the same way about my own mother or father. 

I never felt that my parents wanted, needed or demanded "propitiation". Indeed, the idea never even crossed my mind. 

The reason was obvious: I knew that my parents loved me. 

And I knew this - it was my solid faith. 

Therefore, because my parents really loved me and I knew it; propitiation was utterly alien and inappropriate - and indeed would be hurtful to loving parents. 

The God of whom Jesus speaks is spoken of as his Father and our Father, as the ideal and perfect loving Father.

Of Course a loving Father does not want propitiation - certainly He does not demand propitiation, nor does God our loving Father punish his children for failing to perform sufficient or correct propitiations...  

Jesus is saying pretty plainly that the real God, the Creator, is our loving Father*; and asking us to have the same "faith" in God's love that a child may have in the love of good parents - as I had in the love of my parents. 

By talking of and to his loving Father; Jesus is saying that a God who is regarded as wanting, needing, demanding propitiation is a false God; because the real God (the "Christian" God, the true creator) is of an absolutely different kind - God is Jesus's actual loving-Father, and our actual loving-Father; and we should have absolute confidence that He loves us as the ideal and perfect Father. 

Many, most - perhaps all? - other religions conceptualize their God or gods in ways that make propitiation of such God/s natural and needful...

And there are plenty of Beings - including human-beings, as well as various spirit-beings, including demonic - that do demand propitiation...

But these are not who Jesus meant by God.

(It very often seems to me that many self-identified Christians {and especially those who profess ultra-orthodox or traditionalist convictions} are actually - albeit implicitly - worshipping the God of Judaism, and/ or of Islam, rather than the Father of Jesus Christ.)  

What this means is that self-identified Christians who believe that their God requires propitiation are making a very serious error. 

(There are many, many, such Christians - often among the most "devout" - and always have been.) 

And if they persist in this error of worshipping a propitiation-demanding God; and if they (for instance) build their core theology, their articles of faith, around the necessity for propitiation; then the God that such people are advocating is Not the same God whom Jesus was addressing. 

In a nutshell: The Christian God is a loving Father, and Jesus asks us to have the same kind of faith in God's love that a good child has in the love of his parents. 

Genuine parental love - by Man of Men, or God of His children - has nothing to do with propitiation. 

   

*Note: I should clarify that ultimately I personally regard God as a dyad of Heavenly Father and Mother for metaphysical (and intuitive) reasons explained elsewhere; but my argument applies the same both to God understood as Father only, and to God as Heavenly Parents. So, I have presented the above argument in traditional language.   

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I feel in myself a deep, existential worry which is superstitious, and relates to the idea of propitiating - ultimately by sacrifice.

So, I resist expressing happiness, confidence, hope, optimism - I resist allowing myself to feel confidence in the future - I am to some extent constrained in being honestly positive about such matters, for fear that it will trigger resentment, revenge, reaction from others.

It feels like there is something which regards my feeling happiness, confidence, hope and optimism as being arrogant or 'cocky'; and needing to be taken-down-a-peg  and taught-a-lesson. 

I therefore feel negatively-compelled to think things, and to avoid thinking things, from a fear that someone or some-thing will be offended, prickly, insulted, jealous; it is a fundamentally superstitious attitude of living life among rules - mostly unknown - which prescribe and prohibit and are zealously enforced; and the main business of life as being rule-following and avoidance of rule-breaking - and the servile serving-out of punishments for our inevitable breaches.

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This constraint motivated by fear of reprisal may be realistic in human society - given the endemic nature of spitefulness, and the 'dog in the manger' attitude of so many people who delight in the misery of others and whose main concern is that nobody else should have more or be more than themselves.

(This is, indeed, the case for such high-flown garb as 'equality', egalitarianism, sexual liberation, democracy and so on.) 

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But there is more to it than this. The constraint is also (and perhaps primarily) inner - it is present even in the privacy of my mind, of my stream of conscious thought.

This is not surprising since belief in gods, spirits, ghosts, malicious ancestors at large - belief in 'the supernatural' in general - is spontaneous and natural to humans - we believe that our inner thoughts are to some extent accessible and shared and communicated, and that among those who share them are powerful and malicious entities (something like the Christian concept of demons).

This is a powerful constraint - and I suspect it is a very general factor in human affairs (although I can only observe it indirectly in other people - I and sure it is there). However, although general, spontaneous, natural - I suspect it is anti-Christian in a developed sense of Christianity - for the simple reason that it implies God (who knows our thoughts) is not fully loving, but is prone to the same kind of resentment and revenge as other people - indeed the worst kind of people - in this world.

Yet at the same time (because it is general, natural, spontaneous to humans) this tendency to assume that God really does have a resentful and vengeful attitude is a constant tendency to which individuals and organizations and society tend to recur (for motivations which may be 'good' - e.g. encouraging or enforcing good behaviour - as well as wicked).

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This can be seen even among our own young children, who sometimes act towards us in a way that shows they are afraid that we do not really love them, that we need propitiating.

Sometimes the children are right - because parents are not perfect; but they are fundamentally wrong in that loving parents really are not motivated by resentment and really do not need to be propitiated - indeed a loving parent is appalled and deeply sorrowful to perceive this attitude in his children - an attitude based on fear. 

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So, the situation seems to be that it is (at least to some significant extent) natural for humans to treat God as if he were a demon; and demons (I think) really do want to be treated with superstitious concern, propitiated and sacrificed-to.

Demons (presumably) want us never to be free of the constraining fear to express (or even to feel) an attitude that is positive care-free, hope-full. They want humans to cringe, to be eaten up with anxiety about deflecting bad luck, evil influences, they want us to be hog-ridden by superstitious observations, they want us to be always and repeatedly destroying good things as 'sacrifices' - and to regard this destruction of good things as necessary to deflect divine 'wrath'.

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Unsurprisingly, because humans are error prone and yield to sin, this attitude of constraining fear has been (to varying extents, but sometimes very fully) incorporated into Christianity - the attitude that God watching out for us to trip up, get angry, punish us - unless this is deflected by propitiation and sacrifice - by a general human attitude of pessimism, expressions of misery... an attitude which is in fact and to some significant extent a dishonestly negative expression of our state of mind.

People come to fear - even inside their heads - a full and honest expression of positive and happy states of mind; asif this would trigger the jealous resentment of God! This I feel in myself, and I believe I perceive it in people all around me.

But I believe it is anti-Christian - a flaw, an error, a sin - a consequence of insufficient Christian faith and not a sign of Christian faith: this anxious, superstitious focus on propitiation and sacrifice is itself an insult to God rather than respect for God; deeply saddening to God, rather than what he wants from us.

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Indeed, when we treat God as if He were a demon, it is analogous to someone who falsely accuses her loving parents of 'abusing' her. It is to treat our loving Father in Heaven as if He were an abuser.

That is a measure of how serious an error we are making; how serious a sin it is to feel constrained against expressing - even to ourselves - our happiness, hope, confidence.
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Note: On this view, Christ as a propitiation and sacrifice is a matter of getting all that stuff out-of-the-way; of telling us not to worry about it any more because Christ has utterly and permanently taken care of it.

People through history have wanted God to be everything, to encompass every-thing; but that cannot be so for Christians. 

For Christians God must be partial, because creation has a direction. 

(God is also 'partial' by another meaning of the word; in that the Christian God has preferences.) 

If God is everything, and includes everything, there can be no direction to creation - and thus not point to creation. It Just Is. 

And therefore there can be no values, no morality - neither good nor evil, no truth or lies - things merely are what they are; always such and going nowhere else, because there is nowhere else to go (because God is always, always has been, everywhere possible). 

The Christian God, however, is going somewhere: creation is for reasons, for purposes; and embodies values. Creation has purpose - therefore is not complete, is partial. 

The question is why, then, do so many Christians through history (from very early) try to insist that God is time-lessly everything, complete, self sufficient etc? 

Why do they - by this insistence - paint themselves into a corner of contradictions from which they can only mistake by asserting bizarre paradoxes about Time and such? 

Potentially there are many reasons, no doubt; but two I would highlight are that - from one side - early Christian theologians from the Greek and Roman (pagan) traditions already brought with them a ruling abstract concept of deity defined in terms of properties, which they then applied to the personal Christian God. Such a deity was an eternal unity - and philosophical attention was primarily directed at explaining (apparent) change within this whole (e.g. explaining illusion within truth, movement within stasis, form within 'chaos' etc). 

And from the other - Hebrew - side of Christian history; there was imposed-on Christianity an idea of God as an incomprehensible absolutist monarch; who would not tolerate dissent or questioning, and who demanded propitiation. 

This God required, above all, obedience: service, worship, submission to His will. 

For 'mere' Men to assert that (or even discuss whether) this God was limited in any way (such as that God was partial, incomplete, had desires, of restricted power/ knowledge/ foresight) was felt as a terrible disrespect, a blasphemy - a terrifying act of (futile) defiance, inviting retribution.  

For such reasons; Christianity saddled itself with an unsustainable yet dogmatic concept of God as complete. But God is not complete, is partial - and only when God is understood thus does Christianity make human sense...

And human sense is what Christianity must make. 

That is the point of what Jesus said, and did! 

Note added: The above can also be understood in terms of the development of human consciousness; which occurs through each person's lifespan and also through history. In particular the relationship between the offspring (Man) and parent (God) as it changes through infancy, childhood, adolescence, and into mature adulthood. The idea of God as complete, and its implications for attitudes and behaviours, is analogous to the way a young child regards his parents - all powerful, all knowing etc. This attitude of primary-obedience to absolute authority is absolutely appropriate at that phase of development; and also of Men in ancient history in relation to God - indeed nothing else is possible is goodness is to prevail. But such an attitude to parents is neither appropriate nor good for the mature adult; who archetypally needs to move towards become something more like a loving and committed 'friend' of his mother and father - ideally living, working, raising a family alongside, and with, his parents; adults among adults. Likewise is such an attitude inappropriate and wrong for modern Christians in relation to deity. As for offspring and parents, so for Men and God - best possibilities and good relationships change with development; as Men become more conscious, more separated from the group, more potentially autonomous and free. 

Further note: It may not be clear why I am saying this stuff. The reason is that I believe that false, incoherent, metaphysics has been a major cause of the massive loss of Christian faith all over the West and for a long time. When the foundations are incoherent, the superstructure cannot be strong - even when people are not aware of the nature of the problem. The contradictions of ancient and traditional Christian theology and doctrines are, by now, mainstream and unavoidable. Christians typically either ignore them; or use complex, abstract, false, and (all too often) at-root anti-Christian arguments to dispose of them. These arguments are not convincing anybody; least of all those who deploy them, who reveal by their attitude, opinions, behaviours - that they do not believe what they assert sufficiently to be strongly motivated. All the major churches have become net anti-Christian. 

The genie of doubt, despair and nihilism is out of the bottle, and cannot be shoved back: the status quo ante (the previous state of affairs) cannot be restored because Men have changed irrevocably, just as an adolescent is irrevocably different from the child he once was. The only way out of painful and conflicted adolescence is forward into adulthood. Likewise, the only way out from cultural nihilism is through doubt and despair - and out the other side.  

 As a young child, aged about five or six, I quite suddenly became afraid of death. That is, I became afraid of other peoples' death - I became afraid that someone I loved, among my family, relatives and close family friends - would die and be lost to me. 

At this point in my life I was not an atheist; but neither was I a Christian. I was, indeed, somewhat hostile to Christianity as it was taught me. And I was (as perhaps all Men are) a natural pagan; therefore I did not love the gods, and I assumed that the gods did not love me; but instead they wanted propitiation, worship, sacrifice. They did not want to be 'asked', but needed to be begged. 

Thus I prayed - whenever the thoughts of death came to mind - with desperate pleading and multiple repetitions. I prayed for the preservation of those I loved; that they would not be taken from me and lost from my life. 

Death seemed like the greatest disaster that could befall me - but at that point I could hardly comprehend my own death; so the worst I could imagine was to be left bereft, unprotected, in a world of strangers who were probably indifferent and uncaring at best; and some were spiteful, hostile, nasty. 

I realized, with perfect truth, that to live within the loving warmth of family was the greatest possible benefit the world had to offer; and that death threatened this happiness and security more - and more irreversibly - than anything else. 

In general; I think that these spontaneous and natural beliefs of early childhood are truths - truths implanted by God or known from our pre-mortal lives. Therefore, not only truths about this earthly mortal life; but eternal truths. 

...Yet, of course, truths as understood by the mind of a child. 

Therefore, our best goal as adults to to return to these spontaneous childhood beliefs, but this time consciously and by choice; and understanding what they really mean in an eternal context. 

I now understand my young-childhood fear of death to be representative of the real terribleness of death when (as naturally) understood as an end to mortal life with loss of the self - loss of what makes each person who they are. 

It is this legitimate fear that Jesus Christ came to save us from. A child could understand it - and indeed a young child is nowadays more likely to understand what Jesus offered than almost anyone else. 

A child's fear comes from the fact that he knows, deep down, that the death of our loved ones in mortal life can only be delayed - and that sooner or later everyone will die. It is indeed, the awareness of death that triggers this stage in childhood. 

Spontaneous human thought (among children, and those whose minds are child-like) cannot get further than this the fear of death and the desire to delay death. The child cannot see past the fact of death. Neither, apparently, could the ancient Hebrews of the Old Testament who regarded all Men's lives as terminated in Sheol, nor the Ancient Greeks who regarded all lives as terminated in Hades - both of which entailed loss of the self. 

The dead were not the people they had been in mortal life; and so there was no consolation in their persistence as 'ghosts'.   

Nonetheless, a Christian knows that he has been instructed Not to fear, that fear is a sin - and this prohibition on fear includes death. So for a Christian the fear of death is just the beginning of the matter - not its end. 

As an adult we can and should realize that the best (and only) possible gift to address this childhood fear of death would be that this mortal life would be followed by an immortal life in which were still our-selves, and could (potentially) live forever with those that we had loved in mortal life. 

In other words, The Answer to death is: that-Heaven promised by Jesus Christ - that Heaven (I would add) particularly as clarified by more recent, more detailed Mormon revelations concerning the nature of Heaven and the continued existence and importance of the family*. 

Unlike paganism; Heaven is not a spontaneous insight of childhood. Its necessity - as the only solution to the problem of death which answers to the desires of a loving young child - could perhaps consciously be derived from the conviction that the Christian God the creator is our loving parent (thus very far from the gods of paganism, and from the abstract deities of some philosophies and religions). 

But the Christian Heaven - that is, of resurrected Men living eternally as 'children of God' (ie. as ourselves creative gods) and in familial 'brotherhood' (i.e. in families and divine friends) and knowing the ascended Jesus... such a Heaven could not realistically be inferred by a child. The child would need to be told; and then he might - or might not - believe Heaven was true. 

I decided (as child of about six, a while later than the above-described stage) that the Heaven I was told-about was not true, but was made up from manipulative motives... 

I would still agree - that Heaven as it was told me (or, as I understood it) was Not true; and that the description had been contaminated by this-worldly motives related to making me behave in certain ways. 

Yet I erred in throwing-out the whole idea of Heaven; rather than (as I should have done) thinking more deeply about Heaven, aimed-at discerning how Heaven really was. 

I disbelieved in the Heaven that I was told-about - but I should have believed in Heaven as it really is; and I should have made it my life's task to comprehend that that real Heaven offers the only full and satisfying answer to the problem of death. 

My suggestion is that others should do the same. You should think upon the idea of Heaven, and how Heaven would need to be in order to answer the problem of death. 

Only when you have grasped what Heaven really would answer that problem, have you discovered what it is that Jesus is asking you to believe... Or, more exactly, what Jesus is offering to those who want Heaven.

And you will find that when the problem of death has been answered; then the fear of death - I mean that inescapable existential angst - is indeed cured. 

At least, such fear is cured whenever we have Faith and Hope based upon Love (or 'Charity'); and even when we don't experience the cure, we can know that restoration of that Faith, Hope and 'Charity' will drive-out our fear. 

*I regard mainstream Christianity as having lost sight of some of these key revelations about the nature of God, Heaven and the Family - which was why I believe that Joseph Smith and some of the other Mormon prophets were inspired to articulate these vital truths in a new, radical, and superior metaphysical theology. This appears in the work of early Mormons and some recent writers - along with other non-essentials and errors; therefore requiring, as always, discernment. But these truths having been articulated was of great value to me. Instead of having to work them all out, I was more easily able to recognize intuitively their truth, beauty and virtue; then (without too much effort) to organize them in my understanding.   

Over the past couple of hundred years, supposed-'parallels' between Christianity and paganism (or other religions) have often been pointed-out -- usually in an anti-Christian context such as trying to prove Christianity is not true; or not different from other religions (merely a derivative copy), or that Christianity is different but an inferior corruption of earlier patterns.

I mean such aspects (beloved of comparative religionists) as the birth to a virgin of the divine hero, the sacrifice of the divine hero (perhaps by something-like crucifixion), death and rebirth of a god... that kind of thing. In other words; similarities between Gospel accounts of the Jesus story on the one hand; and folklore, myth and other-religions on the other hand - parallels that are sometimes reasonably - but sometimes much less! - plausible. 

Nowadays it strikes me that these alleged parallels and similarities to paganism etc. are always to those aspects of Christianity that I regard as either not being core Christian; or indeed tending to be anti-Christian and contradictory accretions to Christianity. 

In other words, I feel that these may well be pagan survivals into Christianity. More exactly (I strongly suspect) the simple truth of Christianity was paganized from very early by those who 'inserted' the Christian message into a variety pre-existing pagan beliefs (just as an analogous process "Judaized" Christianty). These pagan framings ranged from the abstract and intellectually-complex 'omni-God' of the philosophers, to the 'primitive' and pagan idea of God as a tyrant-king who demands sacrifices as propitiation. (Sacrifice and propitiation were also a part of the Ancient Hebrew idea of God, as depicted in the Old Testament.)  

Very unfortunately; mainstream Christianity was never cleansed of these alien and contradictory accretions - quite the opposite! They were often made into mandatory dogmas! 

But the simple truth of Christianity - that those who follow Jesus may be resurrected to eternal life in Heaven - is absolutely unique to Christianity. 

'Rebirth' is not resurrection! To attain eternal life via mortal-death is not the same as never-dying. To be resurrected into embodied form, and with our-selves preserved, is not the same as becoming eternal spirits, nor the same as living in an inert, unthinking and self-less bliss. 

And the timeline of Christianity, with a start and end-point - beginning with Jesus, and achieving its objective with our post-mortal resurrection - is different from the timelessness and unchanging/ undifferentiated nature of abstract paganism; and from the cyclically repeating worlds of other religions. 

And whether Jesus was born to a virgin, or died painfully by crucifixion, are not of the essence...

Maybe the lesson that modern Christians ought to have drawn from the attacks by comparative religionists and "anything but Christianity" neo-pagans, eclectics, and perennialists; should-have-been to set our house in order...

Christians can candidly acknowledged that mainstream Christianity, as well as various unorthodox and 'heretical' versions, have over the centuries included many pagan and Jewish elements, and these elements have, at times, dominated. 

But Christians here-and-now can and should clarify, and expound, and make focal the simple essence of Christianity; and push to the edges (ignore, or make personal and voluntary) inessentials and the contradictory elements...

Because the supposedly-pagan aspects of Christianity are exactly the ones that - whatever the original reasons behind their association with Christianity, and whatever the reasons for their continued presence - don't fundamentally matter to the reality of Christianity: i.e. to what Jesus Christ offers us, personally, now.  

Note added: I regard paganism as the spontaneous spirituality (not necessarily a religion) of ancient people and children. We (probably) all go through a phase of spontaneous paganism in our early life, whether or not that is overwritten by some other religion. But modern Man moves beyond spontaneous paganism; and while he may advocate neo-paganism and identify as a pagan - it cannot be a strong motivator, as evidence by the mainstream, or globalist-totalitarian, or merely self-gratifying, socio-political views of neo-pagans. This happens because the neo-pagan negative rejection of God's creation, is far more powerful than any positive spirituality - so de facto alliance with the dominant, worldwide, value-inverted Satanic leadership is highly likely. 

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We might worship God (one God) because of His power, greater far than the power of any other entity - greater far than any 'other god' (as it gets phrased in the Old Testament); indeed, so much greater as to be immeasurably and greater.

This worship may be based upon fear of such power, and the hope that worship will be understood as a submission and a propitiation.

This sees the primary reality as legalistic - in other words, the universe is structured by relationships - and the relevant type of relationships are those which pertain in a 'state' - the relationships between a monarch and his subjects, and the relationships between subjects (of various ranks and roles).

To disbelieve in this concept of God is an act of rebellion against the legitimate monarch; and an anti-social act. 

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We might worship God because he created everything - including the other gods - which is perhaps an extension of worshipping God because of His power.

However, if we were to worship God because he created everything out of nothing, this potentially induces a different flavour to worship. Worship may then be akin to a recognition of fact. The recognition that everything is from-God, part-of God, sustained-by-God.

This is perhaps analogous to recognising and acknowledging that we are inside God. 
So 'worship' may get a more scientific ('physics'-like) flavour - of stating, swearing-to and living-by quasi-scientific propositions that represent this reality.

To disbelieve in this physics-like concept of God is seen as a factual or logical error, due to ignorance or insanity or a lie: a denial of what actually IS. Its harm comes from its dysfunctionality.

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The idea of God as Love is qualitatively different from the above - because it implies that we should love God because He loves us. But why love Him, and why Him above others and as God? What makes love of God different from love of a specific Man?

The answer comes from Him being our Father and us His children,and the value attributed to this primary fact - so, by this 'argument', family relationships take on and replace the 'structural' role which used-to come from God's creation of everything from nothing, or the relationships of monarch and subjects in a state.

To disbelieve in such a God - God as Loving father - is therefore primarily to exclude oneself from God's family - an act of self-exile - a decision to 'go it alone'.

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Whereas a God who is creator of everything from nothing 'ought' to be worshipped as an acknowledgement of the reality that everything depends on Him and everything is inside of Him; and God as legal monarch 'ought' to be worshipped as a matter of good order and proper deference; God as loving Father 'ought' to be worshipped as an acknowledgement of the reality that derives from relationships.

In other words, when God is (primarily) Love; the universe is conceptualized as structured by family relationships. These family relationships become the primary reality and the reason for doing things.

For Christians who regard God as Loving Father, it is relationships which provide the 'ought' that used to be provided by power or status.

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All metaphysical reasoning involves a decision or choice, whether that decision recognized and explicit or unconscious and implicit. the choice is to put some assumption at the root of things: and that fundamental assumption cannot be analyzed or critiqued exactly because it is the primary assumption, and everything else is secondary to it.

When it comes to understanding and conceptualizing God, we are in the realms of metaphysics; and the advent of the Christian revelations of God as Love led to a metaphysical revolution - with the transformation of God as Power, or God as Monarch into God as Father.

And the ultimate rules of this new Christian universe were not physics-like structures, nor were they like laws - but they were like the relationships in a family. 

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So, the primary, bottom line understanding of the structure of reality for a Christian is now family-relational, rather than quasi-scientific or national-legal. 

And the 'worship' of God naturally takes on a different primary flavour - because the proper attitude to God who is primarily understood as our loving Father, is different from the proper attitude to a monarch, or to an infinite power.

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The truth is that Christianity (properly understood!) says that this mortal life is of vital importance - and this importance derives-from the destination of personal, resurrected eternal life. 

But the idea that this temporary and sin-ridden mortal life is unimportant apparently entered Christianity very early; and I believe it came along with the idea that salvation is only available by means of each Christian adhering to stringent behavioural criteria (e.g. and especially, membership of and obedience to the requirements of The True Church). 

I regard this kind of (de facto) anti-Christian Pharisee-ism as ultimately a consequence of some early decisions to make (the one true) Church an essential mediator between each Man and Salvation; without which damnation was the default. 

It never was metaphysically essential for Christians to be obedient Church-obeyers; but there was a practical reason why churches became regarded as essential - which was that human individuality was much less in the early years (probably at least 3/4 of the years) of Christian history. 

Since individual Christians were essentially communal and social beings; in practice they had-to be Christians via churches.

But now, humans are individuals (like it or not) and it is not just possible but unavoidable that we each take personal responsibility for our faith, and behaviours. We can no longer obey external authority (such as churches) spontaneously and unconsciously; and we should not try to do so - precisely because we now Can take personal responsibility.

(*In particular, it is overdue that Christians ceased to spend their lives circling around-and-around a perpetual and unassuageable worry about their own salvation, sometimes returning to this theme every time they pray, like a hamsters trapped a wheel - or, worse, like being chained to a never-stopping treadmill of pleading, propitiation and rumination on the same theme. Read again the Fourth Gospel - is there the slightest indication that Jesus wanted us to live this way?) 

I am confident that the original teaching of Jesus Christ was that anyone who truly desires resurrected eternal life in Heaven can have it, after our physical death; through the simple means of following The Good Shepherd who will guide us to that destination; and - at that time - doing whatever is required of us to follow Him. 

This means that salvation is Not A Problem for those who want it, and 'believe-on' Jesus as The Way to achieve it. 

The difficult thing may be getting people to want it, or to believe the claims of Jesus as The Way - although the Truth about Jesus should become apparent after death, to anyone who really wants resurrection. 

When salvation ceases to be our primary concern; then we can and should focus on living well this mortal life; which (in a nutshell) means learning from the teachings, the life-lessons, that God the Creator will provide for each of us during the time He sustains this life. 

In other words; the importance of this mortal life is learning from it; and such lessons are important only because they have relevance to us (personally) for eternity. 

...After all, mortal life-lessons are not very important for someone whose individuality is extinguished by death - such as atheists on the one hand, and on the other those who believe the individuality is dissolved into 'the divine' after death. 

Far from Christians regarding this mortal life as un-important; Christians are just about the only people who regard this life as genuinely important: as vitally important, everlastingly important; and important to both the individual and all the other 'inhabitants' of Heaven.   

(*Note added - see above)

I personally find the near exclusive masculinity of traditional Christian theology, and of church organization, obviously inadequate in a spiritual sense. 

Introduction

The book is designed to present the paintings in such a way that the reader can look at these as pictures without becoming involved with the message which they carry. But, in order to supply an answer to the questions which arise from the pictures, explanations are offered to correspond with the quantity of the concepts involved. Some of these are long and others brief. In among the pictures are a number of poems which are intended to help with the overall attitude of the book which is trying to push communication beyond the usual limits.

In order to amplify the message which the pictures are trying to convey the book also includes a number of essays on philosophical and psychological subjects of a spiritual nature. These are in the main edited versions of recordings made in the course of conversation, or sent to my friends in reply to questions.

Finally the book includes an essay called 'Letter from a Father', which is written in such a way that it suggests how the Creator may feel in His attitude towards the purpose of creation. This letter is written as though from our Divine Father to us, one of his children. Thus it gives a view of reality which is 'from the top down' instead of from the position we are used to which is 'from the bottom looking up'.

To many these pictures will seem very strange. They are going out into a world in which the idea of a God, who is a Divine Person, will feel incongruous beside the materialistic and scientific culture of our times.

Our civilisation is trying to do without God and without Divine Aspiration, and I believe this will diminish the value of life and destroy our spirit. My own hope is that this is only a clearing phase which will loosen the old and somewhat rigid attitudes towards life's purpose and give way to a more beautiful understanding of our God than we have ever had before. It is impossible to love an unlovable God, and I would like to think that this book will go some way towards redressing that situation by enabling us to consider the possibility that we are being given a more deeply beautiful gift by that God than we have prepared ourselves to expect.

I am afraid that the commentaries will seem to be at times rather arbitrary or even dogmatic, such as the mention of God the Son-Daughter as the third part of the Holy Trinity in the painting of the Divine Family. A more complete description of these and other matters will be found in my book 'A Geography of Consciousness', also published by Neville Spearman, which Colin Wilson kindly wrote an introduction to, and in which he also refers to my music which is another part of the overall expression I am trying to communicate.

The theme of the book is approached again and again in the paintings and the writings, and the reader who understands what I am pointing towards may well find this tiresome. But it is my experience that many people are glad to have the main issues repeated and thoroughly aired. On the whole, the book is designed to help those who feel a need for what it is endeavouring to supply, and it may well seem inappropriate to those who do not have this need.


I regard William Arkle as one of my primary mentors of Romantic Christianity - right up there with Blake, Coleridge, Steiner, Barfield - and perhaps even more inspiring to me personally. At any rate, over the past five years I have studied Arkle's work with the most detailed intensity.

At first glance his writing appears either extremely abstract and symbolic (e.g. when he is using analogies from physics or engineering to 'explain' the spiritual structure of reality) or else the opposite: over-simple and naively optimistic.

These aspects long put me off engagement (and by 'long' I mean for more than 30 years, when I knew of his work but skimmed it merely). Nowadays I realise that the toughness is worth slogging through, and the simplicity reflects the fact that Arkle succeeded spiritually to an extent attained by extremely few other people of whom I know.

Anyway, I will often take a short passage such as the above, and brood on it in an almost sentence by sentence way.

The key passage for me is this, italicised; my comments are interspersed:

Our civilisation is trying to do without God and without Divine Aspiration, and I believe this will diminish the value of life and destroy our spirit. 

A fact and a prediction (written more than 40 years ago) - both correct.

My own hope is that this is only a clearing phase which will loosen the old and somewhat rigid attitudes towards life's purpose and give way to a more beautiful understanding of our God than we have ever had before.

This is my hope too. There is a sense in which this 'clearing' is made necessary by the failure of 'the West' but England specifically, to embrace Romantic Christianity in the early 1800s. So there are a couple of centuries of accumulated wrongness, especially the attitudes and assumptions. And these wrong attitudes and assumptions are on both the Christian and secular (political and ideological) sides - because the two have diverged so much.

We have a dominant secular culture that is trying to do without God and the spiritual - and a small minority Christian side that has a wrong and confused idea of God, and is failing to address the most deeply felt problem: the destruction of spirit ('alienation'). Arkle then moves onto the Christian problem... 

It is impossible to love an unlovable God, and I would like to think that this book will go some way towards redressing that situation by enabling us to consider the possibility that we are being given a more deeply beautiful gift by that God than we have prepared ourselves to expect. 

This is gently expressed, but a very sharp and unyielding criticism of the way that - through its history, and continuing, Christians have treated God as unloveable, by assuming God has all kinds of un-loveable attributes (such as wanting to be worshipped, demanding obedience above all and in all circumstances, demanding sacrifice and propitiation, refusing to recognise individuality etc).

They say God is love - but have made a God who is less loving the the best humans; and excuse this with saying God is incomprehensible to men... Thereby stripping all meaning from the attribution of love; and assuming that God the creator of all, somehow could not make matters such that we would understand the essentials.

Arkle asks - how can Men be expected to love a God which is not loveable? And answers that God has been made unloveable, by 'Christians': firstly from the many unloveable motivations they attribute to God; and secondly God has been made into a deity unloveable, due to regarding God as inhuman, abstract, and mystically incomprehensible.

And further, Christians have not taken seriously their assumptions that a loving God created and sustained this world; because if we did we would regard this world as a 'deeply beautiful gift' - designed for our benefit - each and all of us.

I mean, by our assumptions (that is created, by a loving God, who is each of our parents) this world Must Be 'Fit for purpose', and for each person - yet Christians recurrently regard creation as a botch-job!

This is a terrible error, and negates much that is good about Christianity, and somewhat explains its many historical failures - even (sometimes especially) when the religion was being sincerely believed and diligently implemented.

Here, as so often, Arkle's mildness of manner conceals a sinewy, spiritual strength; his simplicity conceals great depth of experience and thought!

Fear is a sin, and indeed one of the very worst of sins - a sin that is capable of singlehandedly wrecking the whole of a human life.

I don't mean fear as an emotion - that is just a matter of an evolutionary adaptation to threats... I mean existential fear: that is, fear as a mind-set, fear as a basic stance towards life.

For Christians, to live in a mind-set of fear is to deny the basics - to deny that God the creator is our loving Father. Fear is, indeed, a variant of despair - which is the assumption that God has placed us in a hope-less situation - which would mean that God did not love us or was not the creator of this world.

Fear is so basic, so pervasive, that it is a primary motivator for many people much of the time - whole religions, whole civilisations are built primarily on fear: fear of the gods or God, fear of Life, fear of reality...

Christians have often - and still do - deliberately create fear - and I mean existential fear, the worst kind, the worst kind of sin - as a way of supposedly enforcing faith. This is crazy if it is sincere... certainly it is wicked and counter-productive. When this happens, something has gone terribly wrong - sin has overcome the Christian message, the Gospel has been perverted.

Our lives can become absolutely dominated by fear; and this can even feel like a moral imperative. Morality gets mixed up with fear of hubris, superstitious fear that if we do NOT fear, then the fates will be revenged upon us...

Life, by this account, ought to be a continual submission, a continual propitiation, a continual attempt not to offend the tyrannical and jealous and vengeful forces that are assumed to control things... If we do NOT fear then we will be crushed, to teach us not to presume, teach us not be pride-full... The idea arises that continual and expected and mandatory fear is the core way of avoiding pride. Fear becomes a duty.

The fear-full are prone to inculcate this same existential dread in others - perhaps on the excuse that people need to be afraid or else they will not avoid sin... But this is an appalling thing to do to others - fear can rapidly and permanently get out of control, grow like a cancer in a person or a community - and kill it. Eternally kill it.

Systematically to inculcate existential fear is a double sin - because, unlike personal sins, it is deliberate and avoidable - and this requires repentance even more than fear in oneself. 

Existential fear is NOT Christian, it is a failure of faith...

If we do fear then it must be repented; and I mean must - not because we will be punished by God if we don't repent our fear, but that by fearing we have already rejected God implicitly... we have already rejected the God of love and rejected our relationship with him... We have specifically rejected the fact that he is our loving Father and we are instead insisting that God is a tyrant who requires that we live in continual and systematic terror. 

So fear is a sin, and a terrible sin which can destroy everything: it must be repented. We need to want to be free of fear, we need to aspire to a sublime confidence about life: that is what God wants from us.

We can analyse paganism, monotheism and Christianity from the perspective of the implied relationship between Man and the divine (and an understanding of the nature of divine). 

Paganism is hugely varied, each tribe and locality having its own version, and most are fluid and loosely defined - with no real attempt to hold it constant. The gods (the many little 'g'-gods) are more powerful than, but not qualitatively different from, Men. The gods are subject to the same virtues and sins as Men; have the same kind of strengths and weaknesses - therefore the religion is one of divination and propitiation - of Men discerning the will of the gods, and attempting to influence the gods by flattery, sacrifice etc
 
Monotheistic religions (such as Judaism and Islam) have a creator deity - a capital-G God; and the practice is underpinned by obedience to that God (obedience to laws/ rules/ rituals as revealed by prophets who are merely mouthpieces of the divine). The relationship between Man and God is one of the infinitely-lesser submitting to the incomprehensibly-greater - and how people feel about this is pretty irrelevant. The religion is therefore one of practice, not belief; and the ethic one of strict adherence to the rules of practice.

(There is no divination or sacrifice in monotheism, as such - since God is so infinitely removed and great; that it would be impossible to understand, predict or influence such a God.)

What of Christianity? Well, although self-identified Christianity is often corrupted by Monotheistic or Pagan elements - the intrinsic nature of Christianity is different from either.

Christianity focuses on Jesus - and on the one hand Jesus was not 'a god' (as he might be in paganism - e.g. a god in human form) - because, for Christians, Jesus lived in a reality where there was a unified creator deity - a prime God who was not Jesus.

But Jesus was divine, and brought the teaching that all Men could (by following him) also become divine (via death and resurrection).

In what sense was Jesus, the Man, also divine? Because by some means - such as the divine spirit impregnating Jesus's Mother, or the divine spirit descending upon Jesus at baptism - Jesus the Man was made god. But not just made-into 'a' god; but made a god-creator who could, and does, work-with God the prime creator.

Therefore Jesus became 'fully divine'; that is, he eventually joined-with the divine creator in the work of creation, while remaining a Man; and Jesus made it possible for other Men to do the same.

So, Christianity takes the understanding of God as the single, original prime creator from monotheism; and takes the continuity between gods and Man (the possibility of a man becoming a god) from paganism, and made a new category of god-creator - the two being brought-together in and by the centrality of Jesus Christ.

(Of course, I am assuming here that Christianity is Obviously Not a type of monotheism; which many theologians have always asserted it is - fudging the issue by Trinitarian incoherence. Evidence for the wrongness of the idea of Christian monotheism is that when Christianity has been so regarded, it takes on the qualities of monotheism - becomes essentially like Judaism and/ or Islam; that is a religion of obedience, law, ritual, submission - as contrasted with being distinctively 'Christian', as Jesus was and taught.)

The primary creation was imposed-upon the pre-existing and eternal Beings by God. 

This imposition was by necessity. Before creation, Beings existed in isolation and without relationships - thus direction, purpose and meaning in a creation based-upon Love emerged only after primary creation. 

In this sense, also, freedom and the capacity for an agency based on distinguishing the self from the not-self was only possible post-creation. 

(i.e. We cannot know we are a self until after we know of other selves.)  

Therefore it was impossible for any Being to opt-out of creation, until after creation, because there could be no consent to creation, nor of 'opting', until after creation had-happened -- hence the necessity for its imposition. 

But Love is by mutual consent only; and this meant that Beings were 'incorporated' into primary creation without consent; and (it seems) some of them withdrew consent almost immediately. 

To be clear: all the Beings of creation (even Satan, the first rebel against God) have been, even if briefly, subordinated to God's creation. 

Probably some who withdrew consent - who rapidly opted-out of creation - were incapable of Love; probably others were capable of Love, but did Not wish to make Love the basis of 'organization'... 

Those who opted-out include what we regard as Satan and the demons - in other words these were never-incarnated spirit Beings. 

Because primary creation cannot be undone or reversed (because now Beings Know about each other) the 'rebels' ultimate or distal 'goal' (insofar as they are explicitly aware of it) is a power-based reality; in which Beings are in a situation of antagonism and attempted domination or exploitation - which themselves (and, maybe, some recruits?) as the dominant exploiters. 

In a nutshell; the demons, and all others who have rejected Love/ God/ creation at some later point - aspire to a reality based-on relationships of power and selfishness. 

Thus they have chosen to opt-out of primary creation.

In primary creation (which was all of creation before the advent of Jesus Christ) God operates as a power acting-upon us, i.e. upon Beings. 

In a sense; God does creation to us. 

Living in creation is therefore the default situation; from-which we would need to opt-out if we did not want it.  

This imposed-creation situation was recognized by all the old religions, and still is recognized (at least implicitly) by those religions that have a supreme God but do not recognize the truth and desirability of Jesus Christ. 

Therefore the Old Gods, and the understanding of the ancient monotheistic God of the Hebrews or the later God of Islam - regard God as primarily power. 

And such a God of non-optional imposed-creation demands of us obedient service above all else - which goes-with a relationship as essentially one of awe, fear, submission, propitiation etc. That is; a relationship analogous to that of an ignorant peasant towards the absolute Emperor of vast domains. 

As I said; this attitude is a natural consequence of the primary creation in which creation was done to us. Our understanding-of and relationship-to God is of one who is done-to - who is insignificant; not one who participates-in, or who himself contributes something of substantive value. 

The secondary creation was made-to-happen by Jesus Christ; and this fundamentally changed our relation with God. 

The second creation was (for the first time) an opt-in situation, and made God (potentially) the supreme beloved Father of a vast family -- rather than King of 'a people'. 

Since the second creation; God no longer requires or desires us to regard him as primarily a power, but a loving parent; God no longer requires our obedient submission to His imposed authority, but invites our loving participation in his continuing work of creation. 

The secondary creation involves Beings that are already free agents, and who know about other Beings; it involves making the choice of an eternal commitment to live harmoniously with other beings guided by, and in a condition of, mutual love. 

This secondary creation mode-of-Being is achieved by the willing transformation that is resurrection - and the second creation is called Heaven, a situation where we go by our own active desire.  

In the second creation; we are Not supposed-to regard God as remote, incomprehensible, as like a Monarch or a Judge before which we ought-to abase ourselves in submission and obedience... 

And we are Not supposed to regard our-selves as insignificant, superfluous, functionless... but as irreplaceable and able to add some-thing worthwhile to what-is - across eternity.  

We are instead supposed to have an attitude to God of love, gratitude, joy, positivity, energy, excitement; a desire to bring the best of ourselves to the work of God's divine family; to join-in with the plans of divine creating.  

Because the second creation is opt-in; some who reject God include those who opted-out after becoming incarnated into this mortal life. They lived in primary creation as pre-mortal spirits without opting-out; but after they were born as Men, they made the decision (whether before or after death) "not to opt-into" the second creation.

To clarify: Because the second creation is opt-in; there are those who positively reject the second or the first creation (presumably Satan and the demons, but probably others too), but also those who negatively do not want the second creation. These may still be prepared not to opt-out from the first creation - these would include many religious but-not-Christian people, including some self-identified Christians who actually don't want what Jesus offers!.   

The difference between dwelling in the first and second creation is therefore a vital difference for Christians to grasp; if they are not to fall-into an attitude to God that fits the opt-out primary, but not the opt-in secondary creation.

"Christians" who get their idea of God from the pre-Jesus era of the Jews of the Old Testament, tend to have the 'negative' attitudes of the first creation (e.g. the primacy of obedience to power), but fail to understand or embrace the essential qualitative difference that Jesus made. 

Such people are sometimes therefore de facto non-Christians, in terms of their attitudes and expectations, and their desires. 

But the reality is that Jesus Christ changed the fundamental possibilities of reality; things are possible since Jesus that were not possible before Jesus.

The Big Question is whether we personally want what Jesus made possible - or not? 

If we want it, we each must choose it. 

We must then opt-in...

H/T - Loic Simond for a comment that triggered the thinking that led to this post.