In brief: Steiner said that to deny God (be an atheist) was a sickness, to deny Jesus Christ was a calamity, and to deny the Holy Ghost caused spiritual dullness.
I would rephrase this in positive terms:
To believe in the reality of a personal, loving, creator God; is necessary for us to have a coherent understanding of the human condition in the universe - theism enables reason.
To believe in, and accept, the Great Gift of Jesus Christ (his offer of resurrected, eternal, Heavenly life beyond death) is what enables us to grasp the sustaining strength that comes from Hope.
(Hope being a necessary virtue in this world which includes entropy-death and evil, as endemic and inescapable.)
To have direct personal experience of contact with the spiritual person of the Holy Ghost**; is what enables us to know the reality of God and Jesus Christ - rather than merely know-about them.
Put differently; the Holy Ghost is what enables us to know as real-and-true; those intermittent, and perhaps brief, occasions of enchantment and romance in this mortal life.
Or, in other words, without the Holy Ghost the work of God and Jesus would just be theories.
The Holy Ghost is what makes the difference between escapist make-believe or fear-driven delusional fantasy on the one hand - and that magical experience which is a foretaste of the Heavenly condition.
*Note: Steiner's insight is important for Christians to consider, since there is a tendency to conflate the significance of belief in Father, Son and Holy Ghost - as if conversion to one implies all others. But, to my observation, these elements of faith are separable in theory, and often in practice.
**Note: I regard the Holy Ghost as our spiritual experience of the person of the resurrected Jesus Christ.
2 comments:
That's a very good point. Many people believe in one of these but it's not enough because each relates to a different part of our being and alignment with each completes that different part. Non-alignment leaves it incomplete, undeveloped.
@William -
Thanks!
Perhaps I should expand a bit on this.
Of course atheism (and incoherence) is the commonest and most significant problem - but to cure that alone would hardly make a difference - and people would feel just as bad about things.
Someone that believed in Jesus but not God, would probably be one of the "Christians" whose understanding is almost completely social and ethical - because they do not really believe that this is a creation (they probably believe some version of "science" when it comes to creation). So their ethical Christianity would continually be undermined by their (perhaps implicit) belief that the ultimate reality of the universe and earth, is purposeless and meaningless.
Another incomplete belief system is when somebody believes in God and Jesus (all the Christian "ingredients") but in a wholly theoretical way - as a blueprint of practices to which they ought to conform.
Such people implicitly regard Christianity as an abstract system wholly external to their consciousness and not-affected by their participation; and consequently they do not have possibility of direct connection and contact with the Holy Ghost for validation, guidance and encouragement. It's all theory...
Therefore; when the churches (and sources of Christian authority - such as the linguistic and historical mechanisms for Bible translation and interpretation) have-already-been captured by the (evil) totalitarian system...
Then such people have no individual and internal means of resisting corruption or discerning between possibilities; and in practice their bottom-line belief-system is continually being adjusted to fit with evil-totalitarian imperatives.
Another possibility is (in effect) just to believe in the Holy Ghost - i.e. in one's own intuitive and experiential sense of truth and reality; without reference to the metaphysical assumptions of God the Creator, or to the the gifts of Jesus Christ.
This is an option of some in New Age spirituality; and it can easily be seen how this root-less/ foundation-less world-view easily gets conflated with whatever is currently pleasurable or expedient.
So a purely "Holy Ghost" spirituality becomes little more than a self-gratifying technique (and, again, therefore falls into line with mainstream totalitarian manipulations).
Of course, combining Creator/ Jesus/ Holy Ghost is not some kind of guaranteed-recipe for a life of truth and virtue!...
It's more a case that - without *something-like* this threefold combination - we are almost guaranteed to Fail!
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