World of Love Sess18 - Tracing God's Trajectory in the Age of the Spirit

If it is the individual who matters most in the sense that he is the maker of history, the next important force and the strongest organizational unit in the world's story would appear to be the thing which we call a "cell"; for it is a remorseless self-multiplier; it is exceptionally difficult to destroy; it can preserve its intensity of local life while vast organizations quickly wither when they are weakened at the centre; it can defy the power of governments and it is the appropriate level for prising open any status quo. -Herbert Butterfield¹

A 21st century theology for the age of the Spirit should be able to see the method in God's action in history more clearly. It peers down from a higher point on the mountain.

God does not act differently in the age of the Spirit from the way S/He does in any other age. It is our growing maturity which helps us see through the lenses of other paradigms how and why God acts. This new perspective demands that we trace anew God's redemptive pathway through history, seeing both scripture and historical events in a radically new way.

We draw a line from the beginning, following the trajectory of agape, and then project it into the future as far as we can.
This is a story, mainly, of God’s failures, which are also humanity’s failures, but they are failures which reveal little by little the innermost nature of God’s love.

Revelation

Revelation -- God's direct and indirect influence in history -- has to start somewhere, in some individual, in some specific time and place, or it does not start at all.

Revelatory events usually start with the dissatisfaction of an individual, often within the context of the unrest of some minority "internal proletariat" (to use Toynbee's phrase) of which she is a member.

This reminds us of the dynamics within the individual psyche described by Piaget, wherein the move to a higher stage of cognitive development begins from the abrasive rub of discontent with the way the present operative skills no longer can solve the problems being met. But in this case the main conflict is between the god-self within, and its desires, and the demonic self-systems. Nature (the awe-inspiring "starry heavens above" of Kant) introduces a conflict between the universal concern for all persons and the particular self-interest in self-preservation and self-enhancement. This is a dimension of the god-self, as at the other extreme, is the mother's caring for her baby and the extension of that into empathy for others.

The content of the new revelation arises from an innovative new paradigm or word picture which alters significantly an element of the existing faith of the larger community. In the analysis of II Isaiah below we see how the prophet's situation, emotions and experience in an alien land and his vision for the future produce a new and revolutionary paradigm. As with other visions in other ages, this was fortified within him by an inner assurance of rightness provided by the Holy Spirit in rapport with his god-self.

Israel presents a prime example of how changing circumstances can repeatedly make a nation's view of God outmoded. The concept of Israel as a special chosen people changes from the Exodus and entry into the land, where God is the war god of the invading tribes. This view evolves all the way to the understanding of II Isaiah who saw God as an all-forgiving, passionately loving Parent who takes Israel's suffering on herself as a mother suffers bearing a child, and who calls Israel to be suffering servant, evangelist to the nations for God's justice and compassion. There were intermediate stages. These stages can be roughly summarized as follows: war god, king, patriarchal father, all-forgiving parent, suffering servant God. The images often coexisted; there are not clear stages where one replaces another.

This apparent expansion of God's compassion takes place alongside expansion of the conscience of Israel, and in the midst of the violent expansionism of empire-building. It is the universalization of the conscience of Israel.

Unfortunately, this revolution of conscience takes place only in only a few individuals and small groups scattered across centuries. In this, Israel was not so different from us. In so many of our pitifully eclectic, pack-rat theologies the reactionary images of God as war god, king, and patriarchal father continue to exist alongside those centering in self-giving, nonviolent love, the kind we see in the cross. With us, as in Amos' Israel, if one wants to go to war or to cheat a neighbor, he dips in and finds a rationale in some element of this conveniently multi-faceted, potpourri deity.

In the process of new revelation the new paradigm (which may or may not be a better one) is declared to be a new Word of God. To the extent that it reaches toward an increase of compassion and universality, it is indeed such a word. It becomes then, in effect, a seed of revolutionary change.

Such revelation usually has come first to an individual. It is then planted in a small community of faith, as for instance, a school of prophets or the followers of a particular prophet.

The inhospitable environment of violence and greed has usually buried these new seeds of revelation so deep they could not flourish in the first generation. It sometimes instead prospers a false word of false prophets, such as happened with those who melded Yahweh with the Baal fertility deities.

The substantial harvest from the true seeds of the Spirit did not come until decades or even centuries later, though the seeds continued to flourish within history in a few individuals or small communities and thus remained an irritant to the principalities and powers in each generation.

Jesus pointed to the people around and said to his disciples that the fields were ripe for the harvest. We have, in our individualistic post-Enlightenment way, distorted that into a call for plucking individual souls off the brink of hell. This was far from what Jesus had in mind. He was saying that the time had come to challenge Israel to put up or shut up, to either fulfill II Isaiah's call to be a suffering servant to all the peoples of the world or get out of the way and let somebody else do it. If they were not going to be wheat, they would be weeds and somebody else would be the wheat.

Remember, as said earlier, the truth of a revelation is not established through formal philosophic or theological analysis nor its immediate pragmatic results. In this respect we continue, in every generation, to live by faith, hope and love, not by the security of certainty that we are right.

However, we can say now, in the light of the trajectory we see in the past, that the criteria for the test is whether or not the new revelation serves human liberation. And here liberation is a summarizing symbol for the release of all human creative powers within the god-self and the institutionalization of the liberating rule of God within history. This happens, as we have seen, by successive stages, although the former stages remain with us in the demonic self-systems of individuals and the institutional principalities and powers which they worship.

Let us look for clues at several points in history as to how the beliefs and actions of individuals and small groups affected history decisively, that is, planted in history the seeds of a future qualitative change, equivalent to the movement from one stage in ego development to another in the individual. We are also looking for clues as to how God works through the god-self to remake humanity into her own image, that of the divine love, and to restructure social orders into that reality of the future which we call the rule of God.

This ends up being a session on failures in history, aborted revolutions, like the Sermon on the Mount. I could have chosen other examples to develop; there are many. I chose these because each of them seems to me to be pivotal, an axial change, the planting of a seed crucial to God's strategy for victory.

1. The Mother Who Failed

A study of nuclei of human cells taken from all over the world reports that all people everywhere share one most primordial genetic bit; it is identical in all of us. This suggests strongly that every one of us springs from the same mother who lived in East Africa or China. If these scientists are correct, then all other strains of humanity who were not descendants of her daughters and their daughters, before and after, simply died out. This mother of ours did not spring from Adam's rib; she came into being as culmination of a process of evolution. 2

What, then, can we say about the nature of the Fall into evil? Let's extrapolate from our own experience and do some creative guessing, more in the spirit of poetry than science.

The survival of this tribe and Eve's children suggests that she may have been a product of mutation. Perhaps her brain was one of the first which had both right and left brain function as well as superior reasoning power. Perhaps, as some suggest, the brain had not yet completely separated these powers of linear thinking and gestalt-formation. Perhaps the brain was much more of a unity, with the unconscious and its visions and dreams closer to the surface of consciousness, more subject to control. Perhaps there were ESP powers as well as the trances, visions and prophecies attributed to women in later generations. Perhaps fellow tribespeople were in awe of her because her children always lived. Perhaps she was considered a sorceress.

If some early tribes such as this were matriarchal, why did the tenderness and empathy of a mother in her relations to a child not prevail? Why did anxiety harden into distrust and lead to make violence into public policy?

A harsh life produces harsh, cruel people, out of the requirements for survival. Family/mother love evidently was not strong enough.

The mother-child relationship is constant and recurring. The human infant, whose beauty and helplessness evoke empathy and compassion, was there in all the generations of humankind to say, “There is a better way than hate and violence. Take it!”

Perhaps it is at this point we see the beginning of the human schizoid personality. I am referring to the splitting within between the wholistic god-self and the fragmented demonic self-systems. The love of a mother for her child with its implications of empathy for all people, could not survive alongside the violence and cruelty the tribe saw around it and felt obligated to practice in order to survive. Yet, neither could it disappear or the race would have committed both spiritual and physical suicide.

Brutality and compassion had to be put into different compartments. The gestalt-forming functions of the brain created a separate compartments for incompatible beliefs. To bring these together day by day required declaring outsiders heretics and enemies, Becker’s scapegoating mechanism was at work. “We love our children but we won’t hesitate to kill yours!”

If a higher level of morality is possible for us than our mother Eve’s tribe, it is due only to the institutionalization of higher stages of morality which are the gifts to us of the dedication and sacrifice of a few men and women in each generation.

2. The King Who Failed

King David is the first person in history about whom we have a somewhat reliable biography. Granted that parts of it are dressed up a bit, still the outline and most of the events are accurate. Partly this is because it was recorded during his lifetime by some able court historians. But more important, it was the nature of the kingship in Israel itself which made this innovative bit of historical accuracy possible.

The king operated under Yahweh's authority and not by his own descent, ability or charisma. Therefore, it was possible that the story of his weaknesses, sins and failures be chronicled along with his virtues and successes. And this was done. This was in significant contrast to the kings all around Israel.

The critical event which became one of the hinges of history occurred at a routine hearing in his courtroom one day.

David had been caught up in a passion for a beautiful woman and had gotten her pregnant. To make the situation worse, he had engineered her husband's death, and then had taken her into his harem.

David was safe in doing this. He was so popular that he could not have been unseated, not even by the prophets of Yahweh. The people loved him. He was a great warrior, who had beaten back the enemies of his country and made a secure space for the people for the first time in their history. He was a great poet and religious leader, known for his piety.

Also, around David was an officer's corps of military men who had been with him through the long years of exile and guerrilla warfare, while Saul was king. They idolized him. They would kill for him. They would and could be counted on to cover up any scandal. They might be worshippers of Yahweh but they loved David more than life itself.

So, when the prophet Nathan stood before David, he took his life in his hands. He told the story of a poor man whose one lamb was taken by a rich man. David became angry. He promised justice would be done. Nathan pointed his finger at David and intoned, "You are the man!"

David didn't have to repent, not even to admit any wrong. He could have gestured to his guard and Nathan would have been taken in hand, his head cut off, and his body dumped into some conveniently distant ravine. David had the power, he had the means, he could not be unseated. By all precedent of any monarch of his time or before, this was what kings did. A cover-up was in order. The kingship itself, its dignity, its perpetuation, were beyond question to be held more important than an injustice against one citizen.

What David did was not due to fear of losing his kingship. The memory of Saul's madness which was credited to Yahweh's Spirit may have been a factor, but certainly not the deciding one.

Nathan had on his side some formidable power.

There were the sheep. David had been a shepherd, had guarded and protected his sheep against wolves and lions. He had thought of himself as a shepherd king. Was he now to join the wolves and become a devourer of the sheep rather than their savior? The sheep gathered around Nathan's legs.

Nathan also had Jonathan, Saul's son, and David's dear friend, who had given up his crown and his life in the belief David was more worthy. Jonathan stood at Nathan's shoulder.

And there was another face looking over Nathan's shoulder, that of David's friend, a mercenary warrior but one who fought out of belief in the king, Bathsheba's husband, Uriah. was one of the sheep David had sworn to protect.

It was not just David against Nathan, or even David against Nathan and God. Nathan brought an army David could not fight, an array of witnesses which marshaled David's own conscience, his own god-self, against him. If David put Nathan to death, he went against everything he had believed in. He would become a hollow king, no longer the one psalmists called son of God.

David repented. He abased himself. The story of his great sin became part of his biography and an enduring influence in history.

One measure of David's failure and his sin was in the mess he made of his children's lives. Absalom rebelled and Bathsheba’s son Solomon engaged in foolish ostentation and fathered the splitting of the kingdom.

His successors' failure was that they did not become shepherd kings, but instead took the same murderous glory trail of the other monarchs around Israel.

The measure of David's success is that the notion of a kingdom under God's rule and dedicated to justice and mercy toward its subjects, all of whom were seen to be equally beloved of God, passed into the underground steam of grace which continued to feed the god-selves of all of us and remained a possible choice for every ruler from then on.

The “Camelot” dream of David undoubtedly fueled the writings of the mysterious prophet we know as II Isaiah.

3. The People Who Failed

We do not even know the name of the most profound prophet of the Hebrew scriptures, who is also one of the greatest poets of any nation and author of an exalted picture of God perhaps unrivaled in any scripture. This view of infinite power and unlimited compassion comes as close as anything else in the Bible to articulating a stage 6-7 view of God.

We call him Deutero-Isaiah or II Isaiah. There is fairly wide-spread agreement on these educated guesses about him:

--He wrote chapters 40 through 55 of the book we call Isaiah.
--He lived and wrote a couple of hundred years after Isaiah.
--He lived part of his life as one of the Jewish exile community, the people who had been taken away to Babylon after the fall of Jerusalem in 586 BCE.
--He foresaw the fall of Babylon and the return of the exiles under Cyrus before these events happened and preached urging the return of the Jews to Palestine.
--II Isaiah is also the author of four magnificent poems which are embedded like jewels in the larger writing: 42:1-9;49:1-7; 50:1-11; 52:13-53:12. These are called the Servant Songs, and from them we get the term suffering servant.
--Chapters 56 to the end are the work of a third prophet (or perhaps group of prophets), III Isaiah, who may have been a disciple of II Isaiah, but whose writing had a less profound and somewhat different message.

II Isaiah is, for me, the linchpin which binds together the highest in the Hebrew scriptures and the highest in the Christian.

II Isaiah drew on the Pentateuch (Torah), the 8th century prophets and the Psalms. But the pieces he took from them, he put together in a way which was revolutionary.

He laid the foundation for Jesus' understanding of his own mission.

The heart of II Isaiah's Reformation is in these four points:

1. God is seen as a servant God of forgiving, parental love. This is not wholly new. Hosea had presented God as a doting parent, spooning cereal into the mouth of a rebellious toddler and unable in his love to punish him too harshly. See Hosea 11:3-9. But for Hosea wrath and love struggle within Yahweh as they did within the prophet himself. II Isaiah, 200 years later, presents a God who comes almost entirely in forgiveness, welcoming love, and salvation

2. God is the Creator of the whole universe, is Sovereign of nature and all peoples and nations. This is also not wholly new. Yet, II Isaiah's vision of God's infinite scope and power is unrivaled.

It is the mysterious and sudden rise of Cyrus, ruler of the ascendent Medes and Persians, to world power, II Isaiah says, which makes this clear and will prove to the Jews, as well as to all nations, that there is but one God, universal and all-powerful.

II Isaiah goes on and draws a conclusion from this which is truly revolutionary. Not only is God Creator and all-powerful, not only is God sovereign of history, but God cares about all peoples. Everyone is his subject. Although this is suggested in the a few other places in the Hebrew scriptures, it is II Isaiah who puts it at the center of his theology. God is no longer, ever again, to be seen merely as the tribal God of Israel.

3. The New Israel is to have a new mission; it is to be the servant of God to make known Yahweh's justice and love to all peoples.

If Yahweh is parent of all and all people are one family, what is special about the Jews? Why go back to the land? Why rebuild? II Isaiah is aware that he is answering these questions for a people who have seen all their faith and meaning collapse around their ears. It is a crisis unrivaled in history for them until the 70CE destruction of the second temple and the scattering of the people.

II Isaiah's answer to this crisis of faith is that God has a mission so much more glorious than mere nation-building that it will rejuvenate the people and set them on a higher pinnacle of importance than ever dreamed before. It will not be the pinnacle of a conqueror, but of those who are lifted up by others as worthy of respect because of their example of love and justice.

Of his own calling II Isaiah writes little, and those few lines indicate that he saw the call to mission as coming first to himself and then being extended to the whole nation:

(The Lord) says: "It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the preserved of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth." (49:6)

4. The suffering of the servant. What will convince the world of the caring of God is the willingness of the servant nation to suffer in the cause of justice.

The mission is to be carried out by the living of the message. "It must go forth in gentleness and in love and not on the point of a sword: He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break ..."

As usual, God is revealing truth through the prophet's own life and experience. No doubt, living in Babylon, he had met worthy people of many lands. Were not these too God's children, brothers and sisters? Perhaps he found, too, that some of them were far more willing to listen to words concerning Yahweh and his law from one who was unarmed and came bearing stripes rather than a sword. This is the way we should understand the mysterious words of the fourth Servant Song:

Yet it was the will of the Lord to bruise him;
he has put him to grief
when he makes him an offering for sin
he shall see his offspring,
he shall prolong his days;
the will of the Lord shall prosper in his hand;
he shall see the fruit of the travail of his soul
and be satisfied.
By his knowledge shall the righteous one,
my servant, make many to be accounted righteous;
and he shall bear their iniquities ...
he poured out his soul to death
and was numbered among the transgressors;
yet he bore the sin of many,
and made intercessions for the transgressors. ((53:10-12)

Those Jews who had been faithful to Yahweh and yet were suffering the exile are bearing the sins of all those of their nation who went before. Now, having paid the price, they are forgiven and are to be returned to the land. But now their suffering can, by their wisdom and example, also bear the sins of those yet unborn, also those of other nations.

Well, who can preach to the imprisoned better than an ex-convict? Can you preach a servant God if you're a lord? Who can convict of sin like a sinner? Whose words for peace carry such weight as an ex-soldier's with scars that testify to the suffering and futility of war? In their suffering, they have borne the sins of many and by their stripes we can be healed, if we hear what they have learned through their suffering.

The Jews of Jesus' day thought Isaiah had prophesied that a single Messiah would appear. It was unthinkable to them, though, that suffering would be integral to his mission. Both the Jews and the later Christians were wrong. II Isaiah was not prophesying the coming of an individual. He spoke of himself as servant, but also included all the righteous who had suffered for sins they did not commit. And he included the whole of the New Israel as the servant of Yahweh, the one whose sufferings in exile would prepare them in understanding and reputation to make a witness to all nations.

The returned exiles were not able to lift their eyes high enough to catch and hold this vision. They were exhausted and in shock. They were afraid. Instead of opening up to the people around them, they withdrew into themselves even more tightly. They rebuilt their walls, crouched within them, and clung to the belief that holiness means separation from others for the sake of purity. They even believed they were superior to their half brothers and sisters, the Samaritans.

Jesus seems to have seen his mission through the eyes of II Isaiah.

4. The Failure of Jesus

By the time Jesus appeared, the Zealots, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Herodians and the Essenes were setting the agendas of the Jews. While they disagreed with one another, they all understood God's purpose and Israel's destiny in ways II Isaiah would have hated.

There were individual Jews, like Nicodemus, who were dissatisfied with all the interpretations and proposed agendas, who longed for a greater hope and a better answer.

It fell to Jesus, then, to try to recapture what II Isaiah had preached and to live it. It is interesting to note that within a few weeks he had thoroughly antagonized all the above-mentioned groups, except perhaps the Zealots who did not know what to think of him, and the Essenes who paid little attention to anyone outside their closed community.

It is important to note that those who followed him were the ones farthest away from the Temple of Jerusalem and its power, wealth and enforcement of the official channels of biblical interpretation. Those who responded were, for the most part, the poor and uneducated, the ritually unclean like tax collectors and prostitutes, the humble. They were the economic or culturally marginalized, the outcasts.

Jesus was, then, actually, the last remnant of the II Isaiah's New Israel, at least the one whom the poet-prophet would have endorsed. Whatever others believed and hoped for, Jesus was the one who chose to act out the witness II Isaiah had tried to lay on Israel.

It is not strange, then, that the writers of the New Testament simply assumed that Jesus had been the suffering servant II Isaiah spoke about.

Perhaps the name Son of Man which Jesus used of himself meant that he knew he had learned from the god-selves of all those who had gone before, including II Isaiah.

5. The Church That Failed

It was not mainly the weakness of the people which caused the fall of the early church. It was the drift of their theology away from nonviolent love.

When Constantine declared Christianity the religion of the Empire, legions of soldiers were baptized. Priests standing above showered them with water as they marched by. This is symbolic of the prostitution of all that was best in the church to the Beast-State of the book of Revelation.

6. The Reformation That Failed

Rufus Jones, the great Quaker philosopher, in The Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries, (MacMillan, 1911, 1928) describes a fourth reformation which took place alongside the Lutheran, Reformed and Anabaptist movements. It was a reformation which failed. Its way was too gentle, too tolerant, to succeed in a violent and bigoted world. It defined Christianity too much in terms of love and too little as dogma to have succeeded in the times and places where it was born.

Perhaps these were the truest heirs of II Isaiah and Jesus. Let's look at what they believed. Numbers in parenthesis in this section indicate the pages in Jones' book for each reference.

The leaders of the reformation that failed began to appear in the early 16th century in Germany (Hans Denck, Sebastian Franck); Silesia (Caspar Schwenkfeld) and Austria (Johann Bunderlein). In the latter part of the 16th century and beginning of the 17th, there were Sebastian Castellio (France); Dirck V. Coornhert (Netherlands); and Jacob Boehme (Silesia). Still later, according to Jones, there were Francis Rous, Durant Hotham, John Sparrow, Sir Harry Vane, Thomas Traherne, Benamin Whitchcote and others in England.

These people were never a unified movement. There were isolated individuals and a few small groups. They sprang up largely independently of one another over a century and a half.

The similarities in their views is striking. There are a half-dozen beliefs of importance that all of these men (and undoubtedly many able but unsung women) held in common. It is fascinating and significant that these basic beliefs they came to, largely independent of one another, now are almost routinely held by most progressive and radical Christians, not only Quakers but by significant minorities within every denomination and the Catholic Church.

The Setting

When Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Wittenburg, he broke open the shell which was barely containing powerful spiritual discontent throughout the Holy Roman Empire. The forces which had been gathering underneath burst out in all directions.

The influences on which the leaders of the reformation that failed drew, according to Jones, were: 14th century German and other mystics such as Eckhardt, Tauler, Nicholas of Cusa and The Imitation of Christ; the new humanism of Erasmus and others based on reason; and the pietistic side of Lutheranism which emphasized a warm personal individual faith.

Jones should have emphasized more a fourth basic element, the influence of a Bible liberated from church control. When the Catholic control of Bible and dogma was successfully challenged, the spiritual reformers, along with many others, rushed back to the scriptures and looked at them afresh. Each set out to restore the apostolic purity of the early church, along with its enthusiasm, starting with the attempt to understand the written accounts of that first fresh energy and certitude.

Religious Freedom and Tolerance

The spiritual reformers watched with deep personal hurt as Luther, Calvin and the Anabaptists seemed to repeat all the mistakes of the early history of the church. They promptly began to codify new rigid dogma and church forms and, most serious of all, to condemn and actively persecute those who disagreed. Most of the spiritual reformers, at one time or another, were hounded out of their jobs and homes, arrested, imprisoned, and in some cases put to death. The first conflicts were followed by the terribly destructive religious wars which devastated Europe. It is not strange that the spiritual reformers came to think of this as a "second fall" of the church.

The brilliant scholar, Sebastian Castellio, went to Geneva and became a protégé of Calvin's. But soon Calvin was unable to tolerate the free-ranging mind of the young Sebastian who had to flee to Basle.

The difference between Calvin and Castellio is dramatically illustrated by their separate appeals sent to King Edward VI of England. In 1548 Calvin wrote, "Under the cover of the Gospel, foolish people would throw everything into confusion. Others cling to the superstitions of the Antichrist at Rome. They all deserve to be repressed by the sword which is committed to you." (93)

Three years later, Castellio wrote to the same king, in the dedication to his translation of the Bible into Latin, "I address you, O King, not as a prophet sent from God, but as a man of the people who abhors quarrels and hatred, and who wishes to see religion spread by love rather than by fierce controversy, by purity of heart rather than by external methods." (Page 93)

Two years after this, Calvin burned "unitarian" Servetus at the stake in Geneva for heresy.

The spiritual reformers lived and wrote over a century and a half. With all their differences, shared a core group of basic beliefs to a remarkable degree, in addition to and related to their passion for peace, toleration and a nondogmatic approach to the scriptures.

Six Core Beliefs

1. Religion as Inward and Spiritual Religion is seen as an inward transformation rather than an external transaction based on an exactly right faith or an objective Atonement.

These views moved them strongly in the direction of free will as against predestination, and to a belief in an abiding and untarnished core of good in every human being in contradiction to the then popular notion of "total depravity."

2. The Inner Light or Seed. Connected with the above, was the belief that there is something of God found in every human being. They often spoke of it as Quakers do, as an Inner Light, a Seed of the Divine or Word within, and so on. Yet there is no evidence of direct influence on Fox by any of them with the possible exception of Jacob Boehme.

Salvation was not to them a matter of infusion of Grace as with the Catholics. Nor was it restoration of an almost totally lost Image of God through faith and God's declaring one righteous as the Protestants believed. Rather, salvation was seen by the spiritual reformers as a reawakening and growth of the Seed of Christ which had always been present within and could not be put to death.

Sebastian Franck, influenced by the 14th century German mystics, wrote, "No man can see or know himself unless he sees and knows by the Light and Life in him, God the eternally true Light and Life; wherefore nobody can ever know God outside of himself, outside that region where he knows himself in the ground of himself." (53-4)

Valentine Weigel wrote, "He who hath the inward Schoolmaster loseth nothing of his Salvation though all preachers should be dead and all books burned." (147)

The priority is given to inward spiritual experience, to actual inner change rather than the outward new formal relationship of justification and forgiveness.

"Thou thyself," Jacob Boehme wrote, "must go through Christ's whole journey, and enter wholly into his process. ... We become children of God in Christ, not by an outward adventitious how of appropriating Grace, not through some merit of Grace appropriated from without, or received in an historical apprehension of being justified by another, but through an inner, resident Grace, which regenerates us into childlikeness, so that Christ the Conqueror of death arises in us and becomes a dominating operation in us." (195)

3. Heaven and Hell. One of the reasons these gentle people could sit loose to the Bible and dogma and be more tolerant was that they tended to believe that Heaven and Hell are not places a person goes, but are conditions of the self. They are not reward and punishment but reflect the ability or inability to become heaven and to get hell out of the self.

This belief is of vital importance, evidently, in freeing Christians from fanaticism, defensiveness, conflict over territory and doctrinal detail, as well as manipulative forms of evangelism.

Valentine Weigel held that when Christ is in our hearts then there is heaven. (147-8) This was paralleled by his belief that God "is nearer to us than we are to ourselves." (149) If we literally swim in a sea of God then our only distance from the Divine Being and heaven is our own alienation and resistance to agape.

Several of the spiritual reformers held that the notion of a God of Wrath who punishes arises from the alienation and wrath within our owns hearts. This is what psychologists today call projection.

Englishman John Everard wrote, "Beloved, were you once to come to a true sight of God, you would see Him glorious and amiable, full of love and mercy and tenderness -- all wrath and frowns blown clean away. We should see in Him not so much as any shadow of anger." (292)

Benjamin Whitchcote, of the 17th Century Cambridge Platonists, preached, "All misery arises out of ourselves. It is a most gross mistake, and men are of dull and stupid spirits who think that the state which we call Hell is an incommodious place only; and that God by his Sovereignty throws men therein. Hell ariseth out of a man's self." (302)

The spiritual reformers, then, tended to see God as wholly benevolent; people as having an irreducible good core of godlikeness which needs to be uncovered and brought to life; and of salvation and heaven to mean becoming like God, partaking of the Divine Being, rather than being objectively justified and declared righteous because Christ has retired the debt of sin on behalf of those who have a right objective belief.

4. The Bible. Obviously, to hold these views, the spiritual reformers had to break free both from a literal interpretation of the Bible and the straitjacket of Catholic hierarchy and dogma.

They did this through two beliefs: (l) that the Bible is the greatest source of truth and guidance but not the literal or infallible word of God. Truth is in the Bible but is found and authenticated by the authority of personal experience and the Spirit within. (2) And the other is that there are stages in God's revelation, that this is necessary because ignorant and sinful humanity had to be brought along step by step and educated stage by stage.

Hans Denck said, "The Holy Scriptures I consider above every human treasure, but not so high as the Word of God which is living, powerful and eternal, for it is God Himself, Spirit and no letter, written without pen or paper, so that it can never be destroyed. For that reason, salvation is not bound up with the Scriptures, however necessary and good they may be for their purpose, because it is impossible for the Scriptures to make good a bad heart, even though it may be a learned one. A good heart, however, with a Divine Spark in it, is improved by everything, and to such the Scriptures will bring blessedness and goodness." (28-9)

When Jacob Boehme attacked the notion that some are predestined to salvation and others to damnation, he concluded, "Should Peter or Paul seem to have written otherwise, then look to the essence, look to the heart. If you lay hold on God you have ground enough." (164)

The spiritual reformers were pleading the authority of love and the new being -- its actuality -- over anything which contradicts them. They felt they were in harmony with Jesus, who declared that love of God and neighbor sum up the Law and the Prophets, and that the Spirit would lead us into all truth.

5. Progressive Revelation. The spiritual reformers speak of religion as being revealed in stages, of a progressive revelation by God of the Divine nature and purpose. They diverge on the way they describe these stages.

Johann Bunderlein, inspired by Denck, was also a scholar of Hebrew, Latin and Greek. He saw revelation as moving from the external pictures and ceremonies a wise Teacher-God uses in the infancy and adolescence of the race to the inward and spiritual appropriation of truth so that external aids are no longer needed. (37) He says, "When the Kingdom of God with its joy and love has come in we do not much care for those things which can happen only outside us." (39)

Coornhart in the Netherlands thought of all previous forms of religion as preparatory, as "outward and external religions. They are all temporary, pointing and leading toward the true religion of the inward Spirit characterized by love." (111)

6, Church and Sacraments. A corollary of this understanding of the Bible of the unfolding self-revelation of God, especially for the movement from external form and ceremony to internal reality, was the way in which these reformers downplayed the external visible church and its sacraments. To some, they were useful but optional. A minority (as later with Fox and the early Quakers) saw them as apostasy and to be avoided.

As he lay dying, Hans Denck wrote, "Ceremonies themselves are not sin, but whoever thinks that he can attain to life either by baptism or by partaking of bread, is still in superstition." (Page 27) And he insisted, "All externals must yield to love, for they are for the sake of love and not love for their sake." (28)

A recurring theme of these gentle folk is the invisible church as the true church. For a number of them, the new church includes not only all true Christians, but also those of other religions and races who have the Spirit of Christ whether or not they know his name.

The Spiritual Reformers in Perspective

These people lived lives remarkably consistent with their beliefs. They were gentle, compassionate, held firm under persecution. But they appeared before the world was ready to put peace above formal correctness or love above ecclesiastical uniformity and authority. So this reformation failed and most of the communities of these leaders were persecuted out of existence or faded away.

How different the world might have been if this reformation had prevailed rather than the others. As with the earlier failures of God, these gentle souls planted seeds and watered them with their blood. Today, we are seeing the core beliefs of these people of peace begin to prevail to a remarkable degree in the existing churches.

Maybe the time has come for the Fourth Reformation. When I think of Hans Denck, Sebastian Castellio and Jacob Boehme, as well as that courageous 14th century forerunner of theirs, Meister Eckhardt, I am always reminded of the words of the author of Hebrews: "And all these, though well attested by their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had foreseen something better for us, that apart from us, they should not be made perfect." (Hebrews 11:39,40 RSV)

7. The Constitution which Fails

As Kohlberg and others have noted, the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights are essentially stage 5 documents, setting up what amounts to a stage 5, democratic institutions.

Unfortunately, tests have shown that the overwhelming majority of the American people, even today, are able to reason and function most of the time at only a stage 3 or 4 level. The American people aren't up to sustaining and realizing their own constitution.

A good argument can be made for the fact that the Constitution came into existence as what appeared to the framing assembly as the only viable way to avoid much worse alternatives. They were determined to avoid another king; there were to be no more monarchs. Power would have to rise from the people; not all the people, of course, from educated people, property owners, white people.

So the separation of powers was to protect not just democracy but property as well, and the conflicting interests of various interest groups who agreed it would be better, at least no more risky, to settle their conflicting claims for a larger share of the pie of power and privilege within a congress rather than competing for the favor of a king.
Similarly, the separation of sectarian religion from the State, which came later by amendment, sprang not from a lessening of bigotry, not in the least. It came from the conviction of the framers -- who fortunately were more secular minded or Deist in their thinking than the religious leaders -- that if such pluralism were not embodied in law then there would be no enduring union and there would probably be a repetition on the new continent of the religious wars which had devastated Europe less than two centuries before.

Thus, fear of any of the several alternatives to the Constitution became, alongside the power of new currents of thought, the impetus to a major step forward in history -- the first national government based upon stage 5 concepts.

A seed of universalism planted by II Isaiah and others, lived by Jesus, pushed by the spiritual reformers, had at last flowered in an imperfect but practical institutional embodiment, new in history and powerful in its impact.

8. The Failing World Community

The example of a stage 6 document is also with us: The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. And has been for half a century. We stand now upon a cusp of history, deciding whether we will embody its demands for equal, humane treatment for every human being everywhere into institutional form or will continue sectarian or nationalistic battles.

The United States has too often been an obstacle rather than an advocate of this ideal. Other important covenants of the UN await approval by the US Senate.
John Howard Yoder gives us, in passing, a list of a few of the failures and losers in American history who, though they refused to grasp for power, yet had great transforming influence on American history:

There were William Lloyd Garrison and Alexander Campbell holding together abolitionism and nonviolence. There were William Jennings Bryan and Norman Thomas and Harold Stassen, perennial near winners, seeing their victors soon defeated and some of their causes winning. There was Judge James E. Horton, who in 1933 sacrificed a judicial career in the attempt to give a fair trial to a black man. There was Martin Luther King, Jr., utterly Baptist when almost despite himself he became the most important churchly instrument of cultural change in our century. Most of them Baptist, most of them pacifist, most of them who would rather be right than president; they were the heralds of the agents of creative cultural change on a national scale precisely because they did not conceive of national power as their goal, but kept their eyes on the higher loyalty of the Kingdom citizenship.4

Conclusion

When will the stage 6-7 social institutions and churches come to be? The task waits upon our vision and courage. The seeds of the next advance are already in the ground, though the effort to make them grow will again be watered by the blood of a few heralded and many uncelebrated suffering servants.

Questions for Thought

Consider or discuss: Is it better to strive purely for an ideal and lose, or to work within the system for small incremental changes? What is your own strategy? What is the strategy of your congregation? Over the long haul which is more effective? Reflect on one successful revolution in American history: the civil right struggle of the mid-sixties in the South? Who played the key roles and why was this struggle a success when so many have failed?

Contact the author at: vjross22@hotmail.com

1. Herbert Butterfield and C.T. McIntire, editors, Herbert Butterfield: Writings on Christianity and History, Oxford University Press, 1979, page 25
This quotation continues as follows: “Whether we take early Christianity or sixteenth century Calvinism or the French revolutionary period or modern communism, this seems the appointed way by which a mere handful of people may open a new chapter in the history of civilization. And the men who form cells are pursuing a higher strategy than those who seek immediately to capture governments; for those who make a direct bid to capture a government must bow before existing gods and existing tendencies in order to open a path to power; while those who form cells have no need to dilute their purposes or to purchase favor from the superiors of the status quo.”
2. See the lead story in Newsweek, January 11, 1988
3. The Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries, Macmillan & Co., NY, 1911, 1928
4. The Priestly Kingdom, Social Ethics as Gospel, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, 46556, page 181

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