Thoughts about Jesus and God

Jesus the Creator and Fulfiller

Jesus is the creator and fulfiller of Time. When understanding past time and future time we are not dealing with two aspects of the same object. The Theology (God-Talk) of the End Time (called Eschatology) is related to the particular historical situation. Thus the apocalyptic end of Revelation is meaningful in the end of a historical era, eg the change from the Dark Ages into Feudalism or from Primitive Communism into Tribalism. When the old world is being destroyed we understand the language of the End, not in the sense that it refers to some specific historical object, but that it adequately expresses the spirit of the times. The creator/redeemer. Time NOT the same when referring to BEGINNING as to END. The End Time (Eschatology) is contingent upon a given historical situation (eg ecological collapse, late capitalism, exterminism etc or bourgeous revolutions or rise of industrial over commercial capitalism etc) but the beginning time expresses the Ur-relationship (the ontological beginning) of psychic structures such as mind, truth, being, language etc. Such stories might be that good and evil are eternal, woman came from man, man came from god, both man and woman came from a Tree, man gave names to all the animals, language is a punishment from god, fire is captured from the gods, god is our ultimate Father, the monkey is a higher stage than the monk etc. The language of Time is myth, but the structure of End Time Myth is determined by the political/historical situation whereas the Beginning Time Myth is more an attempt to express how things should/could be, the Ultimate Relationship of things.

Jesus and GOD

The idea of children and madmen (eg paranoid schizophrenia) only knowing the truth is important as it reminds us how much of our ideas are conditioned by experience, and not addressed to the raw data of our senses. Feelings such as 'belonging','fear','guilt' and 'being normal' censor our responses to life and stop us breaking through to reality.

This tells against the idea that humans have 'innate' animal passions: such as greed, violence, justice, belief in God, sex etc. for it is only responses learned within the social environment that we are able to enact within that environment. There is no innate human nature or natural woman or natural justice. Worldly belief in God is the reification of insestuous feelings in infancy, reinforced by the power games of adolescence and adulthood. The capitalist obsession with private property convinces us through repetition of the existence of the individual in possession of his/her body. We only know of God through his revelation in Jesus. The implications of this are:

GOD cannot be known through reason or natural theology. The GOD of natural theology is the jealous God who is ignorant of the Higher God, this GOD is an idol, an image made by man, and must be rigorously criticised on the ground that it makes the revelation of the True God by Jesus irrelevant, and hence is a deception.

The Word of God is not the Bible, but Jesus. Often it is said that the Bible is the Word of God, but this repeats the heathen heresy of God's revelation being given in a Holy Book, which can then be controlled and quoted by the priests as an instrument of oppression. Jesus specifically said that HE was the New Testament, hence it is blasphamy to give an earthly object the title of Christ. This is a difficult concept for people to grasp as the Bible has been used by the church as God's revelation, but the original message and meaning of Jesus is wholly opposed to this idea.

God is revealed in History. Thus God is NOT revealed in our reasoning or logic, or everyday experience, or supernatrural happening, or special revelations given to 'select' individuals. To be revealed in history means to become an object of history, like Churchill or Cromwell, and hence be multi-sided, a real person with different facets of personality. To exist in history means to subject oneself to historical enquiry, which is critical and provisional. God's revelation is human AND divine, the GOD in HISTORY, we are witnessing the ultimate, but not through magic glasses but rather the critical reasoning of the historian.
God can only be discovered through the uncertainity of historical inquiry- the uncertainity of the historical object.

The progressive understanding of history, through new evidence and re-evaluating the old ideas means God's revelation does not change, but the meaning of it does. It is the difference between evaluating the person of Julias Caesar and Shakespear's play. The play is what it is, it cannot change, but we can always find new evidence on Caesar, or re-evaluate the existing evidence, or critisise his actions from some new perspective.

The implications of the Suffering Servant, the crucifixion, the gospel to the poor and weak etc tells us God is not a God of power, but a God of powerlessness. He does not resist, he oversomes through suffering, not through its destruction. It is the realisation that the flesh is nothing.

Jesus is LORD

We call Jesus LORD when the spirit is speaking through us. We WORSHIP Jesus as LORD because he is good, not because he is powerful (we do not have a prior meaning of God apart from the revelation in Christ, INCLUDING THE MEANING OF GOD IN OTHER RELIGIONS, hence just because the God of the philosophers is all powerful, or the God(s) of the Hindus or the God of Islam or the God of Israel is all powerful therefore the God revealed in Jesus must be all powerful. Rather we only know the truth about these other Gods because of what we know about the real God revealed through Jesus, and we know this God's essence partakes in the Suffering and Death of this world as well as the creation and life (of the souls) of earth). The power of God is expressed through FAITH not through KNOWLEDGE, there is no ultimate apart from God.

We do not call Jesus LORD in the sense that we are less than human, as though in some way we were unable to think, reason, feel or judge apart from what we are told to do. We do not accept the faith that censors all feelings until they might be 'correct' for this is repression, not liberation, and life in the spirit is liberty.

We do not call Jesus LORD but really mean our Super-Ego, the elevation of Correction and Punishment into an Ultimate (thou shalt have no other Gods before me). The positing of something human (either Id ('God is the Unconscious' fallacy of mystics and Jungians), Ego ('Man is God' fallacy of various atheists and Eastern religions) or Super-Ego (Fundamentalists of all shades, whether Evangelical Christians or Islamic Fundamentalists)) as Ultimate is a source of illusion and idolitary.

Jesus the Messiah

Jesus is the Christ, or Messiah, in the sense that he is the bringer (teacher) of Spiritual Knowledge (gnosis). The knowledge he brings already exists within us ('the kingdom of God is within you' etc) he simply brings this truth to our consciousness.

The concept of the world being in darkness and Jesus as the bringer of light is gnostic/Johannine way of expressing Althusser's dualism of Theory/Ideology or the Platonic World of Forms/World of Images, the names of this world are deceptive, Jesus says in the Gospel of Philip, only the names in the Aeon are true. Our bodies are part of the earthly corruption, the soul is our true self whose destiny we decide.

The 'secret' of this gospel is the same as the secret Jesus keeps from the crowds in the Gospel of Mark. There is a 'truth' for the masses, but this is a lower truth than gnosis. It is given in parables that they may not understand, the masses take truths literally, but the gnosis reveals that spiritual stories reveal inner truths. This secret is not like the passwords and magic words of secret societies or Freemasons, its possession presupposes a psychic depth able to hold the meaning, not just the words. Hence the idea of teachers and spiritual masters (Avatars etc) are incompatible with gnosis, which is possession of the New Being, the new humanity. This is a maturity which disallows 'overruling' by Bishop or Priest, the soul has direct knowledge from God and hence has no less 'authority' than the Pope.

'Religion' thus holds a similar definition of truth as Art. A piece of music is 'true' if it is 'whole','balanced' and crafted, and it is in this sense gnosis is true. Additionally enlightenment comes from participation in the experience of the subject - for example Godard's "Je Vous Salue, Marie" or Derek Jarman's "Caravaggio" but also Baroque, High Renaissance or Counter-Reformation art. The existences of Jesus (the Historical Jesus, Jesus the Christ, Jesus the Magician, Jesus the Saviour, Jesus the God etc are not various alternatives but a 'whole' part of religious art, not separate from or preceeding etc.

The different images of Jesus (RE: protestantism, Eastern Orthodox, Catholicism, cults, the early church(judaic, gnostic and catholic), mystic, imperial etc) is not a problem over the identity of Jesus if Identity is seen as itself problematic and unreal. Take for example the Catholic Image: this breaks through the Sin and Guilt language of Catholic Theology and generates a new meaning of piety and love. This image from Michaleangelo and Bottichelli is never FINAL, the multiplicity of meaning makes it live. It is part of the historical figure of Jesus (magician, hypnotist, healer, preacher etc) . The Christ is a fire, a breaker, iconoclast, destroyer, nihilist, the new wine that breaks the old wineskins of all tradition and accepted values. It was Jesus the Messiah who brought about THE DESTRUCTION OF THE TEMPLE. The name 'religion' is a deception (see Karl Barth on Jesus as the opposer of Religion, which is a man-made thing) the true religion of the Aeon means destruction and subversion of the old beliefs.

Jesus and Religion

Jesus criticised the religious institutions of his time, his only known allegience is with another fierce religious critic, John the Baptist. However the criticisms were not made from an athesitic standpoint, rather from an experience of God outside of religion. Jesus clearly sided with the heros of the Judaic religion, but saw the institution of religion as breeding only hypocracy. To counter this his teaching emphasised the importance of personal experience of God and grounding the certainity of one's beliefs on (objectively) the concrete revelation of God and (subjectively) the experience of that revelation. The guiding principle here is that knowlegde of God is NOT disseminated through an institution. The old gods are must in general be seen as paradoxical: Jesus often sees 'gentiles' as closer to God than the Jews, but still insists on using the Jewish discourse on describing God. In Job we see the good and bad sides of God: the angel and devil as he both tempts Job and punishes him. The gnostic critique of Judaism does not generally extend to the old gods (eg Isis and Baal as well as Jehovah) but becomes less contradictory if we take the christian response to Judaism as a paradigm for all religions (including Christianity).

Whether Christendom or Islam, no body of thought expresses anything other than structures of power imposed upon genuine (virgin) experience. This includes Karl Barth's comment that genuine christianity is not a religion. But perhaps to avoid HUBIS (pride) we should say that it is LESS than a religion, in the sense that it it does not compete with religions and better them (ie it is not better organised or more consistant with reality) rather it is a proto-religion that refuses to progress/evolve and so to contaminate itself. "The thought expressed is a lie", "only madmen and women know the truth" is this some sort of Zen Koan ? No, is shows that religion is the temptation to express spirital truth in the same way political or moral or mathematical truth is expressed - with creeds, equations, laws, spiritual truth may use these forms of discourse to shown their INADEQUACY but not as a valid expression of the inner form of spirituality. Christianiy is essentially Post- Structuralist. It flows.

Jesus the Saviour

The concepts of The Fall, Sin and Evil can only be understood in the context of Light/Darkness, Spirit/Flesh and Birth/Death dualities. These must be radically re-understood to break through the 'names' used to keep the spiritual truths secret. We are saved from the flesh in the sense that we are given the knowledge (gnosis) of the soul/ flesh duality and hence may come to an understanding of ourselves in the light of this Ontological certainity.

The words 'Heaven' and 'Hell' are uncertainties in the World, only the true meaning of these words is known in the Aeon. In the beginning was 'Nous' (Mind) from which came thousands and millions of other powers. The Lord of this World believes himself to be the Supreme God, but in this he shows ignorance of the Higher World from which he came. We may gain knowledge of this Higher World - the Aeon - and hence escape (be SAVED) from the illusion of Life. Our lives must be ones that show we are not decieved by the Flesh, the flesh means nothing and any attempt to 'purify' or 'make it holy' shows we have fallen into temptation.

The resurrection is the mystery of life and death. In his resurrected body, no one recognised Jesus, it was how he acted and the marks in his body that convinced them of his identity. What are we to make of this ? He was crucified on the Friday, yet on the Sunday his body had completely changed. This is a new body, not an old body brought back to life - the eternal Soul, reincarnation, NOT the eternal flesh. The resurrection reveals the mystery of life and death. This mystery is not the mystery of Salvation, it is not for this reason that we call Jesus Saviour.

It is the Blood of Christ that saves. This is why the genuine Blood of Christ is used in the Eucharist, if it were a mere memory of his blood it would be the memory that saved us, but because we partake of His Blood our Souls partake of the Eternal Soul within all matter. This mystical link to the Next World insures our Destiny.

The word 'Devil', what does it mean ? If we are to locate a source of Evil we could locate it within the Gods of religions, the God of Islam, the God of Judaism, the God of Christianity, the God who DESIRES to be worshipped. The God beyond these demiurges does not Desire, She simply IS. Is the Centre of Evil conscious of itself ? Can we build some conspiracy theory out of history, whereby people deliberately and in full knowledge of their actions act against the People of God ? This cannot be, for the primary sin or error (sin is error, not action) is the claim to be God, hence IGNORANCE of the True God means there can be no deliberate action against that God.

Jesus and the Holy Spirit

The concept of the Holy Spirit must be employed for three reasons:

To prevent Spirital Masters- priests, avatars, holy men etc giving instruction. Again, perhaps they may be employed to reveal their failure, but then they must undergo a ritual of humiliation to show their actual nature and prevent people taking them seriously. Through Revelations to the Right-Hand side of the brain spiritual "truths" are revealed, they may come through Nature, the Bible, other People, TV, violence, art - it is the Way of Looking that determines how images are received, and possession of gnosis is that way of looking.
To enable Worship to live and not die. Worship is essentually sexual and hence to worship Christ we need both the anima and animus (feminine and masculine souls) present, this is achieved with the presence of the Holy Spirit ('Sophia'). The paradigm of worship is speaking in tounges (see I Cor. 12-14) but gifts of the spirit in general (healing, prophecy etc) are all crucial aspects of worship, and we must seriously question the reality of worship that does not contain these. In addition to worshipping 'in the spirit', revelation from God may be made in literature, music, art etc while being 'in the spirit'. New gospels, sounds from heaven, pictures of an angel's memory (which does not exist) may all appear under divine inspiration.
LOVE is the libido of worship, it is not forcing the ego via the super-ego (bringing on the return of the repressed etc), it is NOT some bland ideal rather it is an ecstatic sense of at-one-ment only occasionally attainable, it is a state of mind, not an ideal not a law and not a power.
To prevent a moral code. This is not a-moralism, antinomian, nihilism etc because 'all things are permitted' (ie only the impossible is forbidden. Explanation: one must learn what is possible, being 'in the spirit' does not prevent the law of cause and effect, does not prevent hangovers from drinking too much or feelings of hubis from praying too much. The central concept to ethics under the spirit is maturity => no one else being in an inherently superior position morally, but does not prevent mature ethical discussion (rather should encourage it, with the emphasis on mature) eg on optimum expressions of justice etc. The New Life of Christ is freedom from the heavy Wheels of the Law.