The situation of becoming a Christian is like the choices of a child born-into a loving family

Jesus Christ offers us the gift of salvation... It is up to us to accept this gift. But, somehow, the gift is only really accepted when we love Jesus. How can this be understood?

It is like a child born into an ideal loving family. 

The parental love is there, as a kind of background reality; and that parental love brings with it all kinds of benefits. What is at issue here is the child's choices in relation to that parental love. 

Jesus's love for us, and the gift of salvation, is a background reality. What is at issue is our response to this reality. 

Somehow or another (and it doesn't really matter how) we become aware of the nature and possibility of salvation. 

What then?

Every child in a (genuinely) loving family must decide whether that love is real - and some children decide it is not, and proceed accordingly. 

It is noticeable that those children who decide their (genuinely loving) parents do not really love them, seem to be children who are themselves rejecting of the significance of love in life. 

The love-rejecting child may be (apparently) himself incapable of love, or may have decided that love should be subordinated to expediency. The un-loving, expedient child may recognize that his parents are indeed loving, but chooses to exploit the situation - to take as many advantages, while avoiding any inconveniences or responsibilities. 

The love-rejecter notices that those who love him will "give him stuff he wants" - and that is the actual basis of his relationship. 

The love-rejecting child aspires to be a successful parasite in relation to his parents. And if the parasite kills the host? No matter - there are plenty of other hosts; the parasite simply moves-on to the next. 

When it comes to gifts; the love-rejecting child aims to "take the best offer" in any particular circumstance. His allegiance is contingent on his estimate of consequent rewards and punishments. 

He is analogous to a love-rejecter who chooses to accept Jesus's gift of salvation - but someone who does not love Jesus. 

The love-rejecting "Christian" regards salvation as a transaction - either a "free gift", without conditions, or else as an offer with conditions that can be "gamed" in a way that yields net-benefit to the parasite.

The love-rejecting "Christian" is half-right; in that salvation is a kind of free gift; but in the same sense that to be born into a loving family is a free gift - and it is striking how many children (often in adolescence, or young adulthood) reject exactly that free gift. 

The plain fact is that it is impossible to participate in loving family life, and also simultaneously to reject love and exploit family love in an expedient fashion. 

(At any particular moment) If you are not in, then you are out. Insofar as family life is a transaction, then it is not a loving-relationship. 

Because we are mixed and mortal beings, in an entropic and evil world; we can (and do) alternate in our behaviour between the Goodness of loving, and the evil of regarding those who love us in an expedient fashion.

In this mortal life, nobody is wholly and under all circumstances affiliated to God and divine creation. We are all "sinners" as Jesus made clear - and it is as sinners we are saved... or not. 

What is at issue is the aspiration of sinners: what do sinners most want for themselves and from themselves and forever? Is it love?

The thing is: salvation is resurrection to eternal Heavenly life: which is a life wholly rooted in love. And forever. And irreversibly. 

Salvation entails the free and voluntary agreement to leave-behind everything of-us that is not harmonious with love. In resurrection we are re-made and transformed into beings-wholly-motivated-by-love. 

But only if we want this, only if we agree to this - and we need to ask: Why would someone want and agree to this?

Salvation therefore entails an everlasting commitment to live forever in a situation of love: salvation offers this choice, and makes the choice a real possibility. 

And how we have-been in mortal life, what we aspire to as our highest values and hopes - these impinge on that (potentially) final choice. 

When confronted by the choice of salvation: either we value love primarily, or not (and instead value... something else). 

When it comes to love there ultimately is no possibility of trickery, or deception; or rather, rejecting love and adopting the aspirations of a parasite is its own consequence. 

It is simply incoherent to suppose that it is possible freely to choose to reject love as primary here-and-now and because other things are valued more; on the expectation that we will later-on make an eternal and irrevocable choice to live only by love! 

The problem is not that repentance is forbidden, but that people don't want it! 

Repentance is always a possibility, and requires nothing more than to acknowledge and reject some evil, something opposed to God and divine creation. 

Yet people are (to all appearances) very strongly resistant to repenting sin; and very much inclined to assert that their sins are virtues, or insignificant, or that their sins are (somehow) out-voted by their virtues!

How can someone agree to leave-behind their sins - completely and eternally; when they have decided that these sins are actually virtues? Or because they suppose they can hold-onto a favourite sin/s because they suppose that their virtues count for more, in some quantitative fashion? 

It's not that Jesus expects us to be sinless, which is impossible; but that - unless we want to be sinless, we do not actually want salvation. 

How can someone agree to live by love - completely and eternally - when he regards love as a means to some other end; when he uses the love of others love expediently. 

And not by lapsing from his ideals, but does this rejection as a matter of principle? 

In the end; I think we can see that accepting the gift of salvation and becoming a Christian is something that cannot be extricated from the primacy of love. 

That - in the end and ultimately - the gift of salvation will not be accepted without us loving Jesus Christ. 

Loving Jesus is not an imposed condition - Not a matter of "you Must Love Jesus or else salvation will be denied you... 

The gift of salvation is not a transaction - it is a relationship; closely analogous to the gift of parental love in an ideal family. 

A love-rejecting child can expediently accept some of the consequences of love; he can exploit his loving family like a parasite exploits its host - but such a child is not, and never can be, a member of a loving family. 

Someone who is motivated to accept Jesus Christ's gift of salvation, but without loving Jesus Christ; will not want, and will therefore reject the complete-and-everlasting state of love that is salvation when the final choice comes to be made. 

(And that is why Jesus places such an emphasis on love, in the Fourth Gospel.)

Note added: Of course, the life-long love-rejecter might nonetheless change his mind, and accept salvation on the basis of wishing to remade from whatever-there-is-of-love in-himself. I believe that the steady background reality of parental love (including from "beyond the grave" can be a factor in this kind of last minute, and perhaps post-mortal, repentance. Because that parental love is always there; anyone who repents, and decides to make love his ideal, can then immediately participate in loving relationships with his parents (whether the parents are still alive, or are resurrected). A love-rejecter may nonetheless be aware that this parental love is still present; and at some point, something may change his mind about the value of this love. So we can never rule-out ultimate hope, because that hope may be operative after death. So even "one-sided" love may have value in inducing salvation. Yet in the end salvation is always and necessarily by an individual's choice and consent. 

Further note: The above assumes that it must be possible to love Jesus in the same personal way that a loving-child loves his loving-parents; which means is must be possible for our love for Jesus to be a matter of personal experience. And must means Must. Therefore knowledge "about Jesus" will not suffice - no matter how abundant and detailed that knowledge may be. To have a robust faith, therefore, each Christian needs to know Jesus and experience love of Jesus for himself. All Christian religious practice needs to eventuate in first knowing Jesus in this experiential way; and any religious practices or rules that hinder or block such experience need to be be bypassed.   

The (ideal) Family is uniquely able to synthesise the individual and the group, on a permanent basis

When I try to imagine the most perfect form of society, I come up with the family: a conscious and creative return to family.


We begin as unconscious family members, taking it for granted and having no alternative. In adolescence our consciousness becomes detached from the family - and we become aware that it is not the only option, that as individuals we are distinct from the family.

Ideally, at the moment of complete conscious separation, we will choose to return to the family in love - and that is adulthood.

The 'utopian' family (which has been, in fact, realised in real-life practice many times - albeit briefly and insecurely) is a 'structure' which forms around individuals who are held-together by love.

In other words, the family is not a structure but a process; it 'dynamically' coheres because of the love between members (the family being defined by this love; and different families linked-by this love - as with marriage or true-friendship). It remains coherent because each family member individually is 'pointing in the same direction', has the same ultimate goal.

Individuals in a family are infinitely-various means to the same end.


In an ideal family we do not pick-from and fit-into a finite set of predetermined roles; but instead (held together by love, aligned by sharing God's purpose) the family adjusts around the actual nature of each individual, the individual doing the same for other family members. This adjustment is always on-going, never fixed; and so long as love prevails, it can accommodate all true developments - that is all developments that come from the real, divine, inner-nature of the members.

If a family member develops in some unique and unforeseen way (and, in a sense, everybody does this, all the time) - if he develops needs and drives - then that individual and the family will make mutual adjustments to accommodate and make the most of this situation.

The family group, together, gets things done; the individuals are each unique and can develop in unplanned, unpredictable ways due to their unfolding inner natures. 

In mortal life, we cannot always attain or maintain this perfection of mutual love. Mortal life is intrinsically changeable, as befits a time of learning. But, having learned this from living; I do not find it difficult to imagine how this is exactly what happens in Heaven - but there, always and permanently.

When family members are permanently aligned in aim and bound by love - that is, when each member has been resurrected to life everlasting, has made the eternal choice of Heaven, and has become permanently aligned with God's creative will through love... then they all can work together creatively; participate with existing creation; work together in extending the divine work.

(That is the 'job' of Heaven.)


I cannot imagine anything I could want more that this open-ended life of eternal and loving creation - each person contributing what he is uniquely able and wanting to contribute, from his developing nature - which is why I am a Christian, since this is exactly what Jesus offered, and was able to give-us.

On the other hand, I can perceive - with sadness - that such a vision of Life Eternal does not seem to appeal to everyone; and not even to all of the people that I have loved and do love.

So I try to inspire people with a vision of this possibility.

However, love just-is and must-be voluntary, and participation in creation likewise - and that constraint is its strength.

What is the primary form of social organization for a Christian society? Family.

What is the primary form of social organization for a Christian society? 

Certainly not 'democracy' nor a republic - but neither a monarchy, nor a theocracy. 

Not rule-of-law. Not arbitrary rule by a dictator. 

Indeed not anything 'organized' or imposed or abstract. 

Instead a Christian society should be organized by the prime Christian value of love; which means that love of God and Jesus Christ is what makes possible and sustains Christian love of fellow Men; as it generates creation itself...

And the most powerful and lasting form of 'group' Christian love is that which emerges from the fundamental reality and primacy of the family - which ideally means the natural, 'extended' family.

The family is spontaneous, and the ideal family coheres by love. This predates Christianity. 

Then, by free agency, Christianity became possible through the work of Jesus Christ. 

A Man chooses to become Christian. 

When the members of a family become Christian, we get the only form of love-rooted Christian social group.

Christianity is therefore added-to the natural social form that is the family; and because love of God is the first principle; the family cohere by this love of God; and are given purpose and direction by their commitment to follow Jesus Christ to resurrected life eternal in Heaven. 

Families may be extended and joined by Marriage (when marriage is a genuinely spiritual commitment). 

Men and women may move between families by marriage; and 'adoption' into another family - when adoption is a love (not legal) relationship (this is rare - but sometimes happens). 

Or by committed friendship (for example: the love that bound Jesus and his disciples) may become a type of family (albeit genuine loving friendships as strong as family love are rare, and seldom stable - even on a mortal timescale). 

Family is the true and relationship of love; as we each may experience in Heaven (Heaven is 'organized' in families). 

And in this earthly mortal life; the above concept of Christian family is is the partial and intermittent model of the true and mystical church. 

Or, to put matters the other way around; unless a human group is organized on the basis of love; then that group is not primarily a Christian group (even when it calls itself a Church, or a Christian Nation or Empire). 

We are Christians as a spiritual group only in the context of loving familial relations (as defined above). 

Such groups are sufficient for Christian life, and have spiritual priority above all other groupings (Empire, Nation, Church) that lack their origin in love. 

A note on abstract, universal "love" and Jesus

Continuing from the earlier post today:

I have made the observation that some of the people who most vehemently profess abstract, universal love are those who do not exhibit or appear to experience any actual, personal love of specific persons - except their memories of family love during childhood. 

Childhood family love (or even, in some people who lack families, a recognition of the lack of family love and a yearning for it) is a sufficient basis for a Christian life. After all not everybody has a loving marriage, or children and a loving relationship with them. 

On the other hand, some adults reject the ideal of individual and personal love - and instead profess that abstract and universal "love" is a higher value and morality than individual/ personal love. 

I have often heard this argument. The idea that individual love is a childish thing, the sign of an immature, narrow and selfish personality. 

...That the higher love is impersonal, embraces everybody equally (or perhaps loving unknown strangers more that family - to compensate for natural 'xenophobia'); maybe embracing all animals; maybe indeed every living thing; or, maybe The Earth itself (and this love of Earth considered not as loving an actual, conscious, purposive individual such as an angelic being - but as abstractly loving a deific abstraction).  

What did Jesus say on this matter? 

As so often the Fourth Gospel can be a touchstone for Christians. Here, in what some call "the Gospel of love", Jesus is always described as loving specific persons, and never as expressing abstract, universal love. 

My understanding is that Jesus wanted Christians to be a family, that is not 'organized' by abstractions, but as individual persons bound in presumably extended-family-sized (and overlapping, especially by marriage) groups cohering by personal love. 

Be that as it may; I think Christians can be confident that Jesus did not regard abstract, universal love as a higher ideal than personal love - quite the opposite. 

The 'problem' of love and Christianity (gnosticism is an unavoidable consequence of organisation)

Love* is the basis of real Christianity; but in practice Christianity is seldom real.

As I said yesterday, if we regard gnosticism as the replacement of love by knowledge, as the focus of Christianity; then this form of pseudo-Christianity has been and is usually dominant.

It is much easier to have a religion of knowledge than of love; and the less spiritual a society becomes - the more that this is the case. With knowledge at the centre; Christianity can become the subject of organisation - hierarchy and specialisation; of education and training, of initiation and ordination.

Churches often exclude, discipline and expelled people for inadequate or incorrect knowledge - but seldom or never for insufficient love; or for the opposite of love such as excessive fear, resentment or pride. Converts and aspirants are tested on their knowledge, not their love.

Christians, especially Christian leaders (and aspiring leaders), may falsely claim to be motivated by love. When asked for proof of love, people either suggest that it is wholly subjective, private and inaccessible - and therefore cannot or should not be judged and evaluated.

Or else (in trying to avoid such 'relativism') they invent 'proxy-measures of love', and thereby ignore the reality of love. Thus, people 'prove' their motivation-by-love, by (for example) doing impressive works of public charity, or performing extreme ascetic feats. In other words, but in a different way; they replace love with... knowledge... again.

What we can see is that any kind of institutional structure requires 'objective measures' and that real love is unsuitable to be such a measure. Therefore, any and every form of organisation is intrinsically gnostic.

(Of course, love and knowledge of love are two different things; a young child may love, but not know that he loves. Love may exist without knowledge. Nonetheless, Christianity can only be discussed if love can be known.)

It is a strange business and very different from the rest of life! For a Christian, love is not just real - but the reallest things of all; not just the proper focus of mortal life, but the actual basis of the creation of everything.

(Note: One who cannot love, cannot be a Christian - the implications of the two great commandments (to love God and neighbour) and the whole of the Fourth Gospel make that fact crystal clear. This formulation is seldom stated, perhaps because many people - unlike Jesus - have tried to make Christianity universal. Whether people actually exist who cannot love is a separate matter - but if they do exist, then they cannot be Christian, and could not have life everlasting - 'could not' simply because they would not follow Jesus through death to resurrection.)   

And yet love is apparently not amenable to detection and measurement... and yet it actually is. Love is knowable, indeed for a Christian love must be knowable; because the alternative is that love is subject to unlimited self-deception and unbounded false assertion.

As so often, all this mystery and problem is a consequence of inappropriate abstraction. Because love is a matter of common sense and common experience - within the family situation.

We may know of another's love, when that is a spouse, parent, sibling, son or daughter... We know of another's love when we are in a loving situation. Indeed, such known-love is as certain as anything can be, it is (when present) the most powerful motivator in the world - leading to extreme, even ultimate, forms of self-sacrifice and self-abnegation.

But love is not open-endedly scaleable. We can know of love in a loving family situation, and some analogous family-like situation; but can know of love only in such situations.

Love is straightforwardly knowable, and indeed 'measurable', within the family situation; but becomes an insoluble problem - is made an insoluble problem - when we try to make love the focus of an institution, a legal system, a polity...

In this sense gnosticism is an unavoidable consequence of organisation. 


*Love needs to be understood in a 'metaphysical' sense that includes 'creation'. It was Love that both motivated and enabled divine creation; love that enables creation both to have novelty and to cohere; to develop and evolve and remain aligned in purpose; love that enables many beings (each with free will, with 'agency') to participate in the unity of creation - and so on.

Love is about families - about *generation*

*

If, as Christians (must) believe, Love is the most important thing there is - then of course Love cannot actually be defined (because that would be to define the more fundamental in terms of the less fundamental) but what can be said about it?

One distinction is to ask what kind of a thing Love is.

To which several answers have been given.

*

Modern culture regards love as a psychological state - but clearly that won't do; because psychological states are evanescent, and constantly changing - and have such individual applicability that they cannot convincingly be extrapolated to be the most important thing in the universe.

To regard Love as a psychological state inevitably trivializes Love; and is therefore intrinsically anti-Christian.

(...Which is why Love as a Psychological State has become so popular in secular modern culture - and why this belief has now been made mandatory, and why this belief is now imposed by coercive force. Modernity is Leftist, and Leftism is built-upon anti-Christianity.)

*

Classical medieval theology regards Love as something physics-like - something which (for example) keeps the stars and planets in their orbits.

This is much better, but such a way of speaking (such a metaphor) strongly tends to make Love into some kind of impersonal force - something much like gravity or magnetism.

And thereby this renders God into an impersonal force. By regarding the universe as created and sustained, as held-together by Love, Love (if it was really real) becomes something we would expect to detect and measures with sufficiently sensitive instruments. And when this doesn't happen, we may lose faith in love.

Although this kind of abstract conception of Love would be appropriate for impersonal religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, an abstract metaphor is the opposite of what is needed for Christians where God is our Father and Jesus is our Saviour.

*

My suggestion is that we regard Love as being about families - as a thing which happens primarily in families; ; and families as being organized-around the process of generation.

This means that the paradigm Christian Love is the love of husband and wife (where the marriage relationship is a sanctified sexuality); and the love of parents for their children; and the love between siblings; and the love between the whole network of such relations - the extended family, the clan, a 'people'.

All these are properly considered as different inflections of the same basic kind of thing.

*

The love is about 'generation' in the double sense that it is about (organized-around) the procreation of new generations and that it is about (organized-around) what binds different generations. 

In divine terms, the emphasis is that all people have at least a parent-child relationship with God, and therefore sibling relationships with one another.

(And as well as this minimum Love, some people are united by different forms of more-than-this love - husbands and wives, brothers in families and so on.)

But this universal minimal Love of God for Father and all Men as siblings leads to the 'adoptive' aspect of Christian love (sometimes emphasized by St Paul)

http://charltonteaching.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/adoption-as-sons-of-god-what-does.html

...Which I would interpret as implying, on the one hand, that the fullness of Love is necessarily a voluntary choice. We just are God's children and united by brotherly love, like it or not; but this real relationship may be acknowledged and embraced; or (perhaps dishonestly or ignorantly) denied and rejected: that is a choice.

And on the other hand, that the revelation of the sibling relatedness of all men means that there is a mystical 'transferability' between earthly families. In other words, earthly 'genetic' relatedness - such as the genetic links of a family, clan or a people - is ultimately superseded by a larger Heavenly concept of Christian sib-ship - universal Brotherhood and Sisterhood.

Which simply means that family is NOT reducible to genetics; and generation is NOT reducible to reproduction - they are of course about this things, but there is (vitally) much more to the concept of family and generation than merely 'science'.

*

What would this idea of Love as being about families and relational mean in terms of the physics of the universe?

The answer would depend on the basic metaphysical understanding.

One answer could be that Love 'works' to bind and run the universe in the sense that everything (everything) is alive (more-or-less alive); and that there is an affiliation between the living.

So what we call gravity would be, in transcendental terms, something like an extremely weak and impersonal form of love.

*

Another answer could be that at least some of the 'physics' of the universe (basic matter, and what we recognize as the 'laws' of physics - what things are and how things interact) may be a 'given' - that is not a part of God's creation but something God works-within.

For example, it seems to me that Time just is linear and sequential - it can go faster or slower (e.g. along the lines described by Einstein, but not necessarily constrained by Einstein's discoveries); but there is nowhere outside of Time, and Time cannot be reversed - nor is Time travel possible (and any physics theory which states that such things can happen is ultimately wrong; no matter if such theories have some pragmatic value).

Thus Time is a constraint for God as for us, it is a 'given', something we live 'within' and within-which Love and Families and Generation happens.

And therefore Time (and by extension 'matter' and 'the laws of physics' are not a part of the economy of Love; but are the backdrop to the drama of Family Love which is the meaning and purpose of the Universe.

*

But however we fit families into all of reality (or all or reality into families) - families provide the vocabulary, the metaphor, the best and truest way of talking about Christian Love.

*   

Family is the "master metaphor" for divine creation - William Arkle revisited

I was re-reading the Introduction I wrote for the second edition of William Arkle's A Geography of Consciousness (2019). 

In this writing I am explaining Arkle's spiritual philosophy, to the best of my ability - and Arkle has been a significant influence on my own understanding over the past fifteen or so years. 

Despite these large debts; to avoid reader-confusion (!) I should point out that my own understanding differs from that of Arkle in several significant ways. 

Nonetheless, it was helpful to revisit one of the main things that I learned from Arkle, which was that "The Family" is the best metaphor for divine creation... 

Indeed, Family is not just a metaphor, but describes the deep reality of what God aspires to in the work of Creating. 

Because ultimate reality consist of living Beings, and creation "works" by means of loving relationships between Beings; therefore an ideal Family-type relationship between Beings (an extended ideal Family, as it were - related by the commitment of marriage as well as by heredity, on the assumption that such commitments can be mutually-eternal in Heaven) may be recognized as the aim of divine creation. 

Since writing the Arkle essay in 2019; I have more recently reached an understanding of Jesus as having made possible a Second Creation which is resurrected eternal life in Heaven. 

And this can be understood as the possibility of Beings opting-in to join a fully-loving, therefore actually ideal, Family of Heaven.  

I mean that the relationship between the Beings of Heaven can helpfully be conceptualized as that of an ideal Family; and part of this is that all members have actively and consciously chosen to join this Family...

Chosen also to be remade (in resurrection) such that they will always be motivated by Love* for all other members of this Heavenly Family. 

*(I will capitalize the word Love to emphasize that I am using it in the distinctive sense described below.) 

One point of talking in this way, is to try and enable us to grasp that Love is not only an emotion, but can be regarded as structural. 

...Almost as we might thing of an attractive "force", but Love is always personal, always the attribute of a living Being, always voluntary, necessarily mutual and between individual Beings.

It is Love by which creation began and by-which creation coheres, and it is Love that (combined with our innate and unique selves) provides the energetic-dynamism for further and open-ended creating.  

So, although Heaven is ideal, and although I talk of an ideal Family - those ideals must not be regarded as a static state of perfection. 

The ideal Family life is not a stasis, not even a blissful stasis - it is instead always developing. 

In this mortal world, we do not Love always nor fully; therefore in this-life dynamism is infected by selfishness, manipulation, and evil. 

But an ideally loving Family would always cohere, because the mutuality of Love would spontaneously ensure that everything which happened in Heaven came from Love and was aimed-at Love. 

Everything that everybody wanted to do would arise and operate in the context of Loving relationships. 

And the Heavenly Family will, because its mutual Love is everlasting; therefore both eternally cohere and eternally develop. 

I find it quite easy to imagine this in an ideal Family. I can imagine that such a Family would always stick-together from Love; and also that Family members would each always be pursuing personal projects of many kinds. Things would always be changing, and the loving commitments would always remain strong. Members would only desire to pursue loving projects; and not (as in this-life) often merely-selfish or coldly-manipulative projects! 

Many people imagine Heaven in such a way that it is boring, or even demeaning. But when The Family is a concept which includes all Beings - and when Beings are understood to be of many kinds (e.g. human, animal, vegetable, "mineral" etc) and each Being as unique - then Heaven represents an ideal situation for an everlastingly creative, hence interesting, living. 

Yet, no matter how appealing is this vision of Heaven for me; I must acknowledge it does not appeal to everybody - some people don't want that kind of thing - they want something else. 

Some even loathe Heaven to the extent that they want to discredit Heaven, and to persuade as many Beings as possible to reject Heaven. 

This is why following Jesus has never been for everybody, not when Jesus was alive as a mortal nor after his resurrection, and not since. 

"Christianity" probably never will be for everybody; but only for those who want... what Jesus offers. And that may be a minority, even a small minority. 

However, we should not reject the offer of Heaven until we know what it means. 

And Arkle's work provided me with vital clues to how Heaven can be understood in a way that I find to be ideal. 

And he does so by means of using The Family as his master explanatory metaphor. 

Habits and Love - in relation to Christian life and the churches

We cannot develop a habit of "following Jesus", any more than I could develop a habit of loving my wife/ kids/ siblings. Insofar as it is a habit, it isn't love.  

This is because the best analogy/ metaphor for the Christian life (the best, because literally true); is that of family and love. 

Family and love are primary - anything else (including habit) is secondary. 

Habit is indeed an aspect of System, and there are various aspects of System when it comes to family: one habit is rituals. 

(The relevant analogy here is with church rituals - gathering, prayer, sacraments etc.)  

Ritual can certainly have a valuable role in sustaining family love. For example taking meals together, going for walks, family holidays, and celebrating festivals such as Christmas. Such habits can be helpful in service to family love.  

But these rituals are just a potential basis for love, each particular ritual is inessential - and can indeed be counter-productive. Thus; it is vital to subordinate the ritual to the love - ritual must serve love. 

So that Christmas rituals (cards, presents, the meal etc.) must Not (as happens all too often!) become so complicated, rigorous, effortful; that they lead to argument, accusations, resentment... 

The ritual has become counter-productive; the attempt to develop a habit of family love has led to its erosion.

This happens with churches - and indeed with any kind of organization that uses System to pursue higher goals. For instance, when the correct conduct of ritual becomes the primary mode of evaluation of the higher goal, pursuit of that higher goal becomes impaired and may be prevented. 

As when the "objective" behaviour of a church ritual dominates Christian evaluations; meanwhile Christian motivation (being subjective, hidden) is in practice ignored (or mere "lip service" paid).   

To clarify the metaphor: ritual is an aspect of System - and churches develop Systems that are intended (initially) to serve and sustain the Christian life of love: the aim of following Jesus Christ to resurrected eternal Heavenly life...

Church Systems then try to develop "good habits"; but the tendency is for habits to become primary - and this usually whether their in-practice effect on love is helpful, or an obstacle - much like those overcomplicated and intrusive arrangements on Christmas Day actually lead to the opposite of what is hoped-for and intended.  

The fact is that habits in particular, and System in general, are just means to an end; and that end must come first. 

And unless the end of Christian life is made explicit and distinguished from the habit/ System - then it will get squeezed-out; and "Christian" churches will become (have, mostly, already-become) hostile to Christianity.  

Love is a world realm (for Christians)

Since Christianity puts so much emphasis on Love; putting it, indeed, as the very core value - it is essential to understand what is meant by Love.

Currently, most mainstream Christians have adopted mainstream society's post-1960s idea that Love is (merely) a feeling or emotion - as such, a subjective phenomenon, usually ephemeral, and ending at death or before. Such a definition defines Christians as idiotic dupes; and renders any sin into a virtue simply by claiming that it is based-on Love.

But Christians have not been very effective at explaining - even to themselves - what Love actually is if it is not merely a temporary emotion.


This is probably because Love is not taken seriously enough by Christians. If Love is primary, it must be located at a primary level, as one of the fundamental (metaphysical) assumptions of creation - Love needs to be what makes-possible this creation, this world.

First, this world, this creation, is alive and conscious, made of Beings (not things). But Beings tend to be fissile, to pursue each their own self-centred gratifications - Love is the choice, the ultimate commitment, by which Beings align their methods and goals. 

Indeed, I would say that Love is God's realm - the world of creation.


Inside the realm of Love, there is possibility of creation; because Love is what makes for coherence, cohesion, the attractive 'force' that does not just hold-together the disparate Beings of creation; but intrinsically-harmonises their aspirations and motivations.

For example; a group of people without Love will relate to each other 'instrumentally' by means of various compromises between selfishness and altruism, between short-termist gratification and long-term survival etc. This situation is familiar in the workplace, and in public life generally.

By contrast; a group of people inside the realm of Love (for example, an ideally Good Family; which we can all imagine, even when we have not experienced it) will find that their aspirations, goals, methods are all developed within the context of Love; so that they will 'automatically' be aligned; and will continually be adjusted (as things develop) in light of that Love.

These alignments and adjustments are not compromises, nor are they experienced as compromises; they are instead just exactly what the Family members most want to do.


And that is the difference made by Love - the difference between (on the one hand) life being, at best, a compromise of long-termist mutual exploitation; and (on the other hand) a life in which Love is a medium within-which individuals may live positively, creatively.

Without Love there can only be indirect communications; each requiring cycles of many unreliable steps such as encoding information, transmission, perception, analysis, understanding etc. But Love is a communion of Beings, and Love makes communion possible by enabling a direct and unmediated, immediately apprehended, knowledge - each of the other.


So Love does not merely 'bind', it transforms the very nature of the situation; in exactly the way that a loving Family is different from a random collection of people trying to function-together according to various and labile sets of objectives, rules and practices.

Christians identify this realm of Love with the fact that we live in a creation, made by a creator whose children we are and who loves us.

By means of our brother, Jesus Christ; we are invited to join the eternal realm of Love after biological death; where we will participate as resurrected Beings.

Christians are those who believe in the reality of this eternal realm of Love, and who wish to inhabit it; who joyously accept that invitation.

Note added: The difference between Love in this mortal life and in Heaven, is that of permanence. By accepting the offer of resurrection into Heaven we (as immortal, indestructible Beings) make a irreversible commitment to Love. This solidity of Love is what then makes eternal positive creating a reality. By some contrast; here on earth our condition is one of learning primarily, one characterised by innumerable sources of change: sin, corruption, disease, degeneration... Yet we all experience Love, and can learn from that experience, if we so choose. 

The new meaning of Command and Commandment in the Fourth Gospel

There is a sense in which the nature (and history) of Christian churches hinges upon understanding the implications of command and commandment. There is a sense in which the Fourth Gospel (of 'John') amounts to a redefinition, a change in meaning, of command/ ment, and thereby of the nature of what Jesus intended to happen after his death.

If we focus on the use of command/ ment in the Gospel, we can see than the early Old Testament assumption about what this means is subverted by its usage, until it is gradually made clear that the OT assumptions of the Master-servant, Law-obedience model of the relation between God and Men; needs to be replaced by a new 'model'.

In a nutshell: obedience unfolds and is redefined through the course of the Gospel. As Jesus explains (really very clearly, with repetitions in different words) just how he wishes his followers to behave and how they should relate to him, and to each other.

The wishes of Jesus are actually very obvious; but also very different indeed from how 'things turned out'. 

12: 49-50 - For I have not spoken of myself; but the Father which sent me, he gave me a commandment, what I should say, and what I should speak. And I know that his commandment is life everlasting: whatsoever I speak therefore, even as the Father said unto me, so I speak.

This first mention of commanding sounds much like the OT Master-servant relationship - command means law, law implies obedience - blind obedience when the reason for command has not been understood. A top-down model. But...

14:15 and 21 - If ye love me, keep my commandments... He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him.

So far - what Jesus says is still compatible with the OT - but wait!... Jesus introduces love; and this ought to make us suspect something new and different is going on; because love is not something that can be 'commanded' in the sense of ordered: a command to love cannot be obeyed. One cannot (think about it...) rationally make a Law to love.

The simple fact that we cannot obey an order to love is (I think) obvious once pointed-out; but has failed to register because (it seems) that the Ancient Hebrews operationalised 'love' as 'obedience' - and people (apparently) ceased to notice that obedience isn't really love... 

But Jesus is about to change this. What that fact of not-commandable-love means is that the first and primary two commandments - to love God and neighbour - cannot be 'commands' in the sense in which people usually tend to understand them. The concept of 'command' being used must be different from 'order' - and this is made clear later in the Fourth Gospel. 

From Chapter 15: 12-17 - This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. These things I command you, that ye love one another. If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love...

Here is Jesus's new understanding of what command means. To 'abide in love' means something like a harmony of purpose, based on mutual love. And this is clarified by Jesus telling the disciples explicitly that their relation is one of loving friends and Not of Master and servant; that they are not supposed to obey blindly without comprehension - but that he will provide the understanding that is necessary for the disciples to obey from loving harmony of purpose.  

Jesus is asking for love, faith, trust, friendship and loyalty - all of which is distinct from the obedience of a servant due to his Master. Duty may be ordered - but love cannot. 

Therefore, a man must want to be a member of Jesus's 'family'. The community of Jesus's followers is being envisaged as a group of mutually loving friends who mutually love Jesus - that is, as a Christian family, a family of Christians - whose harmony of purpose derives-from this love. And the disciples are specifically told that the proper relationship is not any more to be in the old command-and-obey; Master-and-servant form.

As things happened, a Christian Church was formed, a legalistic organisation based on the assumption that love could be commanded in the sense of being ordered by a Master, and that people could and should obey (if necessary, without comprehension) - like servants.

But it certainly looks as if Jesus went to considerable lengths to explain that this was not what he wanted from his disciples - and that he envisaged his followers as cohering like a family, not as an organisation (legally regulated); growing-from loving personal relationships and a high vision of (family-like) friendship.

Jesus seems to be instructing his discples to discard the OT Master-servant, order-obey, uncomprehending, legalistic relationship; and for it to be replaced by a harmony of purpose, based-on loving friendship, knowedge of Jesus (provided to each individually by the Holy Ghost) - and presumably 'enforced' by mutual loyalty (rather than duty) deriving from the characteristic loyalty among loving family members.


Note: from the above one can certainly see why it was decided to demote the Fourth Gospel to a subsidiary and dependent role - implicitly inferior to the Synoptics and Pauline Epistles. Because when I regard the Fourth Gospel as the most authoritative source on Jesus's life and teachings, and read it in isolation, it does seem to contradict a lot of what has come to be taken for granted - and presumably that fact or problem was noticed by the compilers of the Bible and early scholars - who decided implicitly to disregard the internal evidence of the primacy of the Fourth Gospel, in favour of embedding it in a mosaic of other authors.

Forgiveness necessary even in Heaven? Yes.

There is a point of view that regards the requirement for forgiveness as sub-optimal, in the sense that 'If God knew his business, there would be nothing to forgive'. In other words, there are some who think that life ought to be perfect, and if so then there would be no need to forgive, because nothing even sub-optimal (let alone bad) would ever happen. 

And some people see Heaven that way. As a place of always-perfection. With zero need for forgiveness.

 

But I see Heaven as a place of Love, and Love is creative, creation (like Love) is dynamic - and if heaven is a dynamic situation, a place of doing; then it does not make sense to regard Heaven as the kind of perfection that is unvarying, unchanging.  

That ends-up with something more like a blissful/ static 'Nirvana' than Christian Heaven - which is made by a personal and loving God for his divine children - who remain persons (and are resurrected, presumably with unique bodies). 

 

My understanding of Heaven is that our main 'work' there (which is also the highest form of play) is to participate in God's on-going loving-creation. Thus Heaven is a place where there are many creators, in addition to God; each an unique person. 

This means that all these individual creators need to be brought into harmony; or else there would be a clash and opposition of creative activities - as there is on earth. 

My understanding is that this Heavenly harmony of multiple creation is quite naturally achieved by Love. If we have experience of a loving family, we already know that the individuals are continually - quite naturally and spontaneously - making their (creative) contributions to family living within this imperative of Love. So the many acts of many individuals are, over time, harmonised by Love. 

But at any given moment-in-time, there are dissonant aspects. 

Individuals are motivated by Love - nonetheless, the distal consequences of their love-motivated actions are not wholly predictable - and things may turn out worse than intended, errors will be made; there is need for compensatory correction. 

 

Here in mortal life on earth; our creations are temporary, because every-thing is temporary. So many mistakes and errors of creation just disappear over time. But in Heaven, all the creation is eternal. What then happens to the inevitable errors? 

Well, in Heaven errors cannot be erased - but they are compensated. I believe that compensation must be a divine principle. 

Of course, compensation is important here on earth as well. As a family member, we may do something, and it turns out badly - we have made an error. Often this cannot be undone, and so we do our best to compensate for it. 

 

That - I assume - is the nature of creation. Creation is full of errors, and full of conpensations. 

Over time, mistakes are compensated - but they are still present. Still woven into the fabric of reality... 

And this is the reason why forgiveness is vital for Christians.  

 

Love does not lead to perfection, Love cannot prevent all errors. Therefore we can, should - and in Heaven we Do - compentate for our errors (repentance in action!). 

Yet those errors remain, and therefore need to be forgiven. 

Forgiveness is integral to the functioning of Heaven - Forgiveness is, indeed, integral to Love. 

 

The same happens here in mortal life on earth. There are no 'perfect' parents, siblings or children - and we should not want any such nonsense. But there are (within earthly constraints) Loving family. 

(If you must have perfection; then 'the perfect family' is simply a perfectly-loving family.) 

Loving parents, sibs or kids will make mistakes - they surely will... 

And therefore these mistakes must be forgiven if Family Living is to be maintained - on earth as it is in Heaven. 

Indeed loving errors are forgiven, quite naturally and spontaneously, when Love is present and effective. It is only the incomplete and transient nature of love in this earthly life that causes problems. In Heaven, we shall be resurrected to eternal life, with a permanent commitment to Love. 

Eternal Love between all persons is what makes Heaven heavenly - and forgiveness is just one of the many consequences. 

Gemeinschaft not Gesellschaft: In the Fourth Gospel Jesus tells the disciples that Christians should grow as a loving 'family', not as a formal institution

One of the most striking, and indeed shocking, aspects of reading the Fourth Gospel as the primary and most authoritative source about Jesus- is that Jesus tells the disciples to propagate the faith as a 'family' of believers and says nothing about setting up a church.

To use the old German Sociological terminology: Christians ought to be a Gemeinschaft, not a Gesellschaft - a loving community, not an institutional society.

In a long section (Chapters 13-17*) describing the night before the crucifixion; Jesus instructs the disciples on the meaning of his teaching and what they should do after his departure. What he seems to be saying is that the disciples have (since the departure of Judas Iscariot) a mutually loving 'family'; and that future Christians should be the same.

The themes (here and elsewhere in the Fourth Gospel) are all about love between Christians; in effect, a group cohering by a web of love. Love cannot be imposed. A loving group can and does grow, as a family grows by marriage and children - but only one person at a time, and only by mutual consent. It is clear that this is the consent of friends, not of master and servant.

Is there then to be no structure to the Christian community? It is not explicit, but the structure of family is sustained throughout the Fourth Gospel - including that between Jesus and his Father. The family of Mary, Martha and Lazarus (who is himself the author of the Fourth Gospel) is a major feature of the Gospel; Mary's marriage to Jesus in indicated in three places; and Lazarus (Jesus's brother in law) is made the son of Jesus's Mother at the crucifixion.

I assume, therefore, that the Christian community would have the same kind of internal structure of authority as an ideal family.

What I take from this is that Jesus intended for his followers to be structured and operate like a loving family - a family that adopted new members, as well as marrying and procreating them.

*John 15: [7] If ye abide in me, and my words abide in you, ye shall ask what ye will, and it shall be done unto you. [8] Herein is my Father glorified, that ye bear much fruit; so shall ye be my disciples. [9] As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love. [10] If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love. [11] These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. [12] This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you. [13] Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends. [14] Ye are my friends, if ye do whatsoever I command you. [15] Henceforth I call you not servants; for the servant knoweth not what his lord doeth: but I have called you friends; for all things that I have heard of my Father I have made known unto you. [16] Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. [17] These things I command you, that ye love one another. [18] If the world hate you, ye know that it hated me before it hated you. [19] If ye were of the world, the world would love his own: but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hateth you. [20] Remember the word that I said unto you, The servant is not greater than his lord. If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you; if they have kept my saying, they will keep yours also.

Understanding the Final Judgement

*
A lot of modern people find it difficult or even impossible to square the basic and overall nature of Christianity with some descriptions of God's final judgement; in which our perfectly-loving Heavenly Father seems to be taking delight in consigning great masses of people to everlasting and unimaginable torment for what seem like rather trivial errors, incompetence, gullibility, ignorance and minor misdemeanours.  

They are not necessarily wrong: some descriptions of the Last Judgement are clearly based on such utterly different premises and ways of understanding that they really don't make sense at all in light of what sincere and real modern Christians can understand of the nature of their faith.

So, unless we can come up with a better while still valid description of Judgement, then this will be a very serious stumbling block for some of the people who would potentially make 'the best' Christians - those people naturally abundant in love, compassion, and fairness.

Here goes:

*

Judgement is when resurrected Man, after death, is confronted by reality, and is made to understand it.

Then Man must choose - and this choice is God's judgement.

Either choose to acknowledge the primary authority, truth, beauty and virtue of God, to submit to the judgement of reality; and to join with God in pursuing His divine plan. 

Or Man will choose his own primary authority; each Man therefore locating truth, beauty and virtue in himself - and judging God and the divine plan by his own lights, and resolving to pursue his own individual plans.

Man has the power to reject God; God respects that power and gives Man what he has chosen. In one sense Man judges God and rejects Him; in another sense God judges Man by accepting that rejection.

*

There is nothing strange or difficult about this understanding. A loving mortal human parent, and earthly father for instance, does much the same with his children when they grow-up. The analogy is close (although not, of course, exact in all respects).

A grown-up child can choose to remain part of his loving earthly family, and joined to the adventures and aspirations of that family in the world - he can remain a part of that loving network; or else the grown-up child can reject his family, cut himself off from the family, live existentially separate from the family, cease to love that family.

A good earthly father must respect that grown-up child's decision, yet without ever ceasing to love the child who has rejected him and his love, and the love of all the family.

And that father may become angry if the rejecting-child tries to poison the minds of the family, torments or exploits the family; the earthly father may need to be stern, and may need to exclude the rejecting and malicious child (whom, nonetheless, he continues sorrowfully to love).

The rejecting child has, in effect, chosen to live in a hell of pride, ego and isolation: perhaps a state of eternal torment. The loving father accepts this choice with sorrow...

- however the father's angry and stern judgement may insist that the chosen hell in which the rejecting child dwells is segregated from the family, is elsewhere than the family home - that the rejecting child is excluded from the family - and that the loving and innocent are to a sufficient extent protected from the direct and insatiable depredations of those who have chosen to dwell in hell.

*

Why final judgment? Because it may be final - a choice may never be reversed.

But the two situations of salvation and damnation are not symmetrical. Salvation cannot in principle be reversed - because of its nature salvation is a one-way ratchet of spiritual progress; while damnation is a self-chosen doom of a type that our earthly experience shows may in practice be irreversible (the miserable, hate-and-resentment-filled addict to drugs, sex, or violence may in practice never repent).

The choice of salvation therefore caanot be reversed, while the choice of damnation may not be reversed.  

*

Choice and judgement: Two sides of the same coin. Love and sorrow; anger and sternness - likewise.
*

  

The stumbling block of loving God above all else

*
The first of all the commandments is, Hear, O Israel; The Lord our God is one Lord:
And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength.

Mark 12:29-30

This was a stumbling block to me as a child at a Christian school. Not only did I not love God more than my family, I did not want to love God more than my family - and I felt it was wrong to love God more than my family. I can distinctly remember thinking this during a prayer when I was about six years old, and mentally denying the doctrine.

Even now, I think it is quite wrong to highlight this teaching, and try and compel young children to assent to this doctrine of loving God more than anything - because many of the best of children will usually interpret the command as that they are supposed to feel more love for God than for their parent, grandparents or siblings - and in practise this could only be achieved by loving their family less.

Furthermore, the doctrine - in the mind of a child - can easily become one of terror rather than love: fear of reprisals from God from failing to love him enough.

*

Indeed, this first and greatest commandment is a subtle teaching - and not one to be taken in isolation. It is perhaps a thing which needs to be true indirectly and implicitly; rather than made a matter of explicit and specific assent.

For many or most people, including children, the love of God can not - in this mortal life - be as direct and straightforward a matter as love of actual people. Attempting to force the issue, by trying to think about God as much as possible, praying as much as possible, repeating words about loving God as much as possible are all strategies that can easily 'backfire'.

Yet, of course, this is essential to Christian life. So what is the answer?

1. To regard the first commandment as a part of theosis or spiritual progress, something towards which we strive throughout life; rather than a basic essential requirement for all Christians.

2. To regard God our Heavenly Father as a person, as our actual Father, whose primary and always-present characteristic is love. This makes Him easier to love and may reduce the chance of mistakenly regarding Him as a tyrant.

3. To focus on our love for the person of Jesus Christ, rather than God the Father - this is stated to be sufficient according to scripture. It is, of course, the mainstream strategy of 'evangelical' Christians - who focus almost exclusively on the New Testament, especially the Gospels. This is reasonable, since Christ is the essential focus of Christianity - while God the Father is not.

So, it seems not absolutely necessary for any one of us to attend to God the Father in daily life; His vital role is to explain the nature and mission of Jesus Christ.

*

Furthermore, love is not best considered as a feeling, it is not necessarily something at the forefront of consciousness. For many people, their deepest love is something which structures their life, rather than being at the front of our conscious deliberations for most of the time. Some (I am one of them) are very expressive of love - but this is not a necessity; and some very loving cultures and families and marriages do not go in for statements, hugs or tears.

*

My understanding of the absolute necessity of loving God above all else is metaphysical rather than psychological - that without this, all other loves (including the love of Jesus) lose their meaning and function.

The supremacy of our love for God is that it makes all other loves possible - it makes other loves a matter of eternal significance.

*

Passive/ static/ abstract love versus active/ dynamic/ personal love (from William Arkle)

Edited from the essay Divine Love in The Great Gift by William Arkle (1977)

We can realise for ourselves that love can be passive or active. We can know for ourselves that it is possible to sit down and simply radiate love, like a light bulb radiates light, in all directions but not directed in any particular way to any particular thing. This is passive love. 

We can feel that love becomes a more active if we begin to direct it onto an object, say a stone; but we can feel a difference if we direct this loving attention onto something more fully alive, such as a plant or a flower. 

This time we recognise a relationship which has a wider range of responses in it, and it is easier and more satisfying to love such a responsive thing. But now, if we look at how we feel if we direct our loving attention to even more living objects such as pet animals, human beings and children we realise that our love and relationship can grow again and become even more valuable. 

And if these human beings are of a more deeply beautiful and gracious order, then the activity of our love leaps into higher and higher expressions which are more valuable and delightful. Finally from the experience of our love directed actively to a most valuable human being, we can move again to a situation in which we are able to love a perfectly beautiful and gracious person, and this is our God of love. 

Because our God is the most alive and responsive being, this experience of actively directed love can be the most sublime. 

In this highest form of active love we must therefore have the one who loves and the one who is loved in order to arrive at a responsive situation. So we have two individuals, our God of love and the one who loves God. In this situations, the one who loves God enters into a Divine relationship in which both individuals are of the same order, even if God is far more mature than the individual who is loving him. 

So, at the moment that the individual really loves God as another individual who can be loved, then the two of them become friends in the Divine nature to which they both belong. 

This means that God no longer has to be God, but can become a friend to the one who loves Him and can love his friend back again in the way that love must if it is to express the fulfilment of its nature. 

The one who loves God also gradually realises that he is loving a real responsive individual with whom he is now a friend, and this experience is confirmed by all the other experiences of love to be different from worship. For worship is a sort of one-sided love which does not allow for a response and therefore cannot move into friendship, because in worship we do not relate to God as a living being but we idealise God in a fixed image that we have in our own understanding and thus we prevent Him coming alive. 

We do this, no doubt, out of a diminished sense of our own value and adequacy and out of a sense of modesty. But we only have to look at the nature of love for a moment to realise that the truest form of love does not have to behave in this manner. In fact it is unkind to worship others, rather than to love them, because it fixes them in a mould they do not wish to be fixed in; in fact by worshipping people we imprison them. 

But love does not wish to imprison the one it loves, above all, love longs to give expansion and enhanced beingness to the one it loves. Love longs to be in a creative and growing relationship with the one it loves. 

Love is the highest expression of life itself, and life is never static, but always wishes to be aspiring and developing towards new and untried possibilities ties. 

So what I feel the term a loving God really means, is that this God is trying to develop us to a stage where we can become His friends in this deeply loving, active, personalised way which allows the creative fruits of a friendship to arise between them which constantly keeps pace with the liveliness and creative aspiration of the living spirit of our common Divine nature. 

Note from BGC

This passage from Arkle, and some others on a similar theme, worked on me over time to create a powerful recognition of validity; that we ought not to aim to worship God, but to become 'divine friends' with God; because this is what God most wants from us, and there is an answering desire from deep within us.

God ultimately does Not want to be 'worshipped' by his grown-up children, any more than any Good Man wants to be worshipped by his grown-up children. That is, worship is accepted as a normal and necessary phase of maturation; but it is not the eventual or permanent ideal. The hope is that it will give way to a relationship of complementary, each-different, and loving, friends - both of whom are united in loving God and participating (with God and each other) in the ongoing work of creation.


Another way this passage affected me, is that there is a personal and directed love which is higher and more active, more dynamic than the 'passive' love which radiates out in all directions. This distinguishes between the personal active love idealised by Christianity - which is as strong as our strongest and most personal love; and the passive, impersonal, static state of abstract love that is the ideal of 'Eastern' religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism.

Such love has more recently been adopted (in a materialistic and distorted form) by the modern advocates of Leftism. In terms of the 'universalist' ethic of equal altruism - mainstream modern Leftism supposes that we love everybody and everything equally regardless of response or outcome. This kind of 'universal' love is passive and cut-off; implies a static state of being - rather than an active and developing relationship; and is as weak as our weakest affection.

The secular 'Right' (which is actually just a subset of the Left) may modify and restrict the universalism of love to some category as nation, race, party - but are also abstract and passive in terms of the nature of this love.

Religions other than Christianity (and Christians who have missed the point) fail to recognise the primacy of love in God's nature; and develop theologies that may include love but - again - love of the universal, abstract, static and passive type. 


For Christians, only love that is personal and active/dynamic will suffice; and this love is spread only as far and as fast as networks of personal love may link us; that is, person by person within families (including especially our divine family) and among real (divine) friends.

The dividing of sheep from goats - an essential part of God's work

Why is the Western world getting worse; why is materialistic-Leftism triumphant; why are we being incrementally crushed by the imposition of totalitarian bureaucracy? What meaning can such experiences have for us, in terms of God's plan of creation?
 

My assumption is that God's motive for creation is love, and that a major aim is to enable people to choose to join with God in the 'project' of loving creation. So, the hope is that some people will choose to learn from their experiences to make the choice of Heaven.

Since Heaven is a place of love, only those who can love can dwell there - or indeed would want to dwell there. An analogy is a loving family; because that is the ultimate basis of Heaven - God's family. For those who love the loving family, it is the best possible situation - but for those incapable of love or who reject love, the family is an abhorrent situation: oppressive and boring.   

Another assumption is that Men are free agents, and God does not know who has capacity for love or who will make the ultimate choice that love is primary. Therefore such matters can only be decided by experience. In other words, who wants and who does not want love is something that emerges as creation proceeds - creation is a situation of testing and development, during which each person's attitude to love becomes apparent.

More exactly, each person is brought to a point of decision, from which is determined whether he is a sheep - who chooses Heaven, or a goat - who rejects Heaven. Of course, such a decision can be and is often deferred, but the point of decision is at least when Heaven is chosen permanently.

It seems that resurrection into Heaven - made possible through Jesus Christ - is an eternal commitment, and the possibility that this commitment to love is eternal is a vital aspect of Heaven.

So there is a sense in which the ongoing processes of God's creation are a means to the end of self-sorting ('assortative partitioning') into sheep and goats: more exactly a means to self-sorting of sheep into Heaven eternally; and goats into some-other-destiny (not Heaven, maybe not eternal).


Let me provide an analogy based upon my thirty-something years of working in universities. The situation of universities became more evil over this time, mainly due to the progressive introduction of bureaucracy which was also the imposition of leftist-materialist (ultimately anti-Christian; thus anti Truth, Beauty and Virtue) ideology.

In this context of step-wise increase in evil, people reacted variously. Some people disagreed-with and reacted-against bureaucracy; other people saw its evil went along with it for selfish and short term reasons (e.g. careerism); others simply did not regard creeping totalitarianism (towards omni-surveillance and micro-control) as being bad or evil... They liked totalitarianism, materialism, the inversion of morality and truth... they wanted more of it.

People who perceived the evil and repented it correspond to the sheep. These are the people who comprehend and share God's values, and who want to dwell in a situation where such values prevail, which includes being a situation among others that have made an eternal commitment to God's values. Heaven is a place where Men participate with God in the work of loving creation.

The goats, in this analogy, are those who respond to experience of creeping totalitarianism with approval. They are either not capable of love or else have chosen to reject the primacy of love and put some other values in its place - for example leftist political values or the sexual revolution; and these values trend inevitably towards inversion of Christian-values.

Those who see the evil of bureaucracy but go along with it for the time being, for careerist reasons; correspond with those who are not yet sorted into sheep or goats. They have not yet decided. Their decision is being deferred.

What happened and continues to happen is that the situation continues to get worse; universities become more bureaucratic and totalitarian and evil. Their original-residual Christian values become more destroyed, subverted and inverted. And one consequence is that the unsorted are put under increasing pressure, as evil impinges upon them more and more obviously and potently.

Under this increasing evil - individuals will either repent and rebel; or else it will become revealed that they approve of bureaucratic totalitarianism: they will be self-assorted into sheep and goats.

Those sheep with loving natures will, sooner or later, come to the point of rejecting The System. Those goats who lack the capacity for love, or actively reject the primacy of love, will actively, consciously, choose to join with the strategic evil of The System... they will live to succeed in the ever-less-loving, ever-more-materialistic inverted-world of totalitarian bureaucracy. 


The above example is, therefore, a microcosm of what is going-on in God's creation. It is also an explanation of why - in some times and places - it is valuable that 'things' get worse. The most-good sheep are able to learn from 'mild' experience that they want to choose love. They don't benefit from harshening (more evil) conditions.

But there are other sheep with more mixed motivations, less naturally good, who require the kind of increasing evil, increasing pressure, increasing clarity of creeping-totalitarianism - for them to awaken, repent and rebel - and choose Heaven.

This is, therefore, a possible explanation of the meaning why 'things are coming to a point' in the modern West.

Alternatives to Heaven - active and passive evil or love

'Regular Readers' will know that I have an understanding of Christianity that sees God's creation as emerging from Chaos; that God made creation from a disorder of pre-existing primordial beings, which were already and from eternity somewhat alive and conscious.

Creation therefore began with God, grew from God's work, and is a dynamic and expanding thing. 


God's creation is made with love as its glue; creation 'uses' (to be materialistic) love as the attractive force that orders chaos into creation.

This is, ultimately, why Christians regard love as primary - because love is that which makes creation. Without love there is chaos.

So, creation (or Heaven) is ultimately an opt-in thing. because love is not compelled, we can only opt-into Heaven.


Creation has-been set-up, and is an ongoing project; and our primary decision is whether to join this project or not. To join the project we must share its aims. To share the aims entails joining the web of love which binds the participants, as creation continues to grow.

Love is what enables creation to be dynamic and open-ended, while not flying-apart or drifting off-course - love is what gives direction and coherence' and this love is the interpersonal love of beings.


For this to work, creation needs to be ruled by love; to be ruled by love means that the participants in creation must have chosen it - and that choice must be both freely made and irreversible.

(We must be able to assume that this is indeed possible: that part of free agency is the freedom to make irreversible commitments based on love.) 

So creation is much like an ideal family - in that when a family loves one another; they can continue to hold together through time, while constantly and permanently growing and changing. 


This view makes evil a very different thing from traditional Classical Christian metaphysics. For me, most evil is a form of parasitism; it is the choice to feed-off creation without making the commitment to love.

There is an alliance of evil (the devil, demons and other beings) - but ultimately this alliance is merely a temporary - because expedient - mutual exploitation. The purposes of evil are not aligned, there is no commitment to evil; there is merely a shared motivation to favour self over creation.

Different evil beings may be more selfish on the one hand, or more motivated by a negative, destructive hatred of creation.

Probably self-interest - that is 'using' creation for pleasure - is the commonest evil. But at higher levels of strategic evil there is a hatred of creation that goes beyond selfish, emotion-based hedonism in taking an abstract delight in the destruction of creation; turning creation against-itself.


I think there are two strands at work in evil (distinguishable; but not fully separable and tending to converge over time)*. There is the kind of Luciferic selfish hedonic evil that seeks not to destroy but to 'farm' creation for personal gratification. This is evil as a parasite; and insofar as it is strategic, the goal is to get as much personal pleasure as possible for as long as possible. All of creation is to be used.

But, like any parasitism, there is no real balance point between maximising the short and long term; and the innate tendency is, sooner or later, to take too much from the host (especially when competing with other parasites) over the immediate and short term; and thus 'accidentally' to destroy the host, like a cancer.


The cold hatred of Ahrimanic evil is more purely destructive. The motivation is resentment rather than pleasure; negativity rather than desires like pride, lust, greed, or sloth. For the satisfaction is in reduction.

The ultimate goal is destruction of all creation (including God); reducing it down to the level of unconscious chaos. Implicitly, the goal is to kill everybody and smash everything until one is the last conscious being; and then to kill oneself. The desire is to undo creation.

(In practice to destroy one's own consciousness; and return the universe to primordial disorder; but minus God. This may be impossible, but is the implicit ideal of the purest form of evil.)   


There is, however, a third strand - another alternative to Heaven; which is Nirvana. The key to Nirvana is the obliteration of consciousness, the loss of awareness of the self. It is a total opt-out from both Heaven and selfishness in the only way possible - since being is eternal. Thus it aims at total unawareness of anything - mere simple being.

Total lack of consciousness may be impossible for eternal indestructible beings. But it seems that God can gift people a minimal, here-and-now, awareness of a blissful kind; if they are willing to commit them-selves to an impersonal, abstract and non-specific or general love of creation.

This, I take it, is what happens when Hindus or Buddhists achieve their religious goals.


I think these three - Heaven (active personal love), Evil (exploitation or destruction of creation) and Nirvana (passive abstract love) are probably the only possible alternative 'destinations' for our souls.


Love must actively be chosen - so, in this sense, evil is the 'default choice' - it is where we begin. But in another sense, we are all born-into God's creation - inside the web of love that sustains creation.

So the choice of love may be seen as simply the choice to remain where we already are, that is 'in' creation. Therefore, in another sense, evil is also chosen actively, since it involves rejecting our actually-existing situation.

In sum; for those who love, evil involves an active rejection of that love; for those who do not love, evil is the natural default choice. Since most love is personal, love is what draws us to Heaven.


*Note: Ahrimanic and Luciferic evil can also be understood in terms of Morgoth's versus Sauron's evil; according to a distinction Tolkien made in some unpublished later writings, which are quoted here. 

New Age energies or Christian love?

*
New Age spirituality mostly boils down to some concept of energy - this is a terms that comes up as the bottom-line explanatory concept in many of the alternative therapies,and in much of the speculation about the future of humankind - the evolutionary future is seen in terms of new energies, higher frequency vibrations or energies, a new high frequency consciousness.

This stands in contrast to the bottom line personal God of Christianity, especially the evangelical Jesus centred Christianity and Mormonism; which sees the bottom line as Love, and Love as (not an energy) a personal relationship.

*

New Age spirituality is generally animistic, in the sense that everything is seen as having the same kind of energy - but of different frequencies or types; however this style of animism makes the whole universe im-personal, abstractly spiritual, physics-like types of energy. Thus New Age 'holism' is a holism which obliterates persons - which is a very Eastern kind of perspective; therefore even Christian New Age people have a highly abstract, impersonal, physics-like, Buddhist-like underlying explanation.

Christian love, by contrast, pushes in the opposite direction - towards explaining everything that happens in terms of personality, of selves, and Love - or Love's negation.

When Christianity becomes animistic and holistic (includes everything), instead of explaining things in terms of energies and vibrations and frequencies and the like - Christianity would tend to explain everything in terms of aware, purposive, person-like entities engaged in relationships. Instead of energies there is relationship - and relationship is considered as ultimately Love (and Love is considered as a matter of personages of different levels).

Love is necessarily, at some level, a matter of agency and choice; of embrace or rejection, of harmony or breakdown - with these metaphors seen like societies (not like physical energies) - the network or web of everything is ultimately seen by Christianity as a network of voluntary loving relationships - and Christianity is not like a network of electric circuits and attractive energies.

*

The fact that Christianity is based on Love, and for Love to be comprehensible implies persons, has always been difficult for intellectuals to accept: it seems too childish, too simple minded - it is (frankly) an embarrassment.

Thus intellectuals have always tended (as a class) to pull Christianity away from Love between people and personages; and push Christianity towards abstraction: to the use of 'physics' metaphors akin to energy, frequency, vibration...

And the more holistic, animistic types of Christianity that get written about tend to be of the very abstract and impersonal types.Even when people talk about being 'at home' in the universe, the depiction is seldom at all home-like - because an ideal home is a place of loving people, not of abstract forces.

However, my sense is that the true tendency and distinction of Christianity is in the opposite direction - that the template for metaphors of how the universe works should be taken from human relations, human society, human Love.

The primary metaphors of Christianity should be like actual love as we have all (without exception) experienced it - and taken to a visioned perfection: family love, married love, the love of true friends, of a church or club, guild, village.



*

Love and consciousness from the assumption of Being as primary

We are ultimately, and in reality, beings among beings - and human destiny entails becoming fully aware of this fact and freely embracing it in our thinking.

We began (as young children, and in the early days of Man) as un-consciously living as beings among beings - and with our personal being (our self) not-fully-differentiated from the beings around us.

You know what I mean, because you were once a young child. A young child (in an ideal or best possible situation, which can be imagined even if - especially if - not personally experienced) lives in a world of beings related by love - and his own being is not distinctly separable from those of his mother, father and close family... For a young child, his parents are always present, and their love is a constant fact which contains of of life and experience.

Expressed abstractly, like physics: our primordial experience is that love contains consciousness - love is the medium in which consciousness exists, and in which consciousness develops.

But in reality this situation is not abstract, but personal. Abstract is a simplified summary; being is actual.  

In terms of love, a young child's love is perfect - he inhabits a world of living and loving beings. If love was the only thing life was about, we would (and probably should) remain as-children. But because not-differentiated, the child is not free. The child cannot act from-himself, because that self is essentially passive. The child is so embedded-in, permeated-by, the loving relationships of his family - that he is almost-wholly-responsive rather than active or agent.

God wants Men to become gods, like God - and this involves passive and unconscious children becoming free and conscious agents. Therefore there must be a developmental growth from the state of childhood to adulthood. And this developmental growth need primarily to be in consciousness - because love doesn't grow.

So... Christianity is primarily underpinned by love: love is primary - that is a fact. However, in this sense Love is qualitative - Love is not the kind of thing that grows, develops, evolves. Mortal life is Not about growth in love - but about growth in consciousness.

Love is somewhat like a growth-medium, the essential medium in which the hoped-for growth of consciousness may happen. That which grows in the medium of love is consciousness - development from passive/ unconscious child to agent/ conscious adult consciousness...

In general terms we begin as unconscious of everything, just-being and taking everything 'for granted' - the aimed-at divine situation is to be conscious of everything: being-aware-of-being...

In sum, abstractly the child and the adult are potentially identical in love but different in consciousness - and the adult consciousness is higher because more-individualised, more-free, more-agent.

Adolescence is the transition between child and adult consciousness - a necessary, unavoidable transition - but a transition and not an intended end-point. In adolescence what is inevitable is the development of consciousness, what should not change is the medium of love. Adolescence ought-to happen in a medium of love.

The ideal development through mortal life is therefore a transition of consciousness into agency; always and continuously in love: agency changes, love doesn't.

In terms of being (which is the reality) we ought-to (are divinely destined/ intended to, hope/ aspire to) grow-up in loving families - and the growing-up-bit is a matter of consciousness.

Final Participation as the goal of human evolution of consciousness - what did Owen Barfield mean by it? Ideal married love as the exemplar

Owen Barfield claimed not to be very clear about the nature of that Final Participation which he saw as the destiny of human evolution of consciousness.

(Original Participation is that immersive and unselfconscious living in-the-world of hunter-gatherers and similar tribal peoples, and modern man is detached from the world, and even his own thoughts, in the Consciousness Soul).

But I think that sufficient clarity can be arrived at by considering the phases of human love through human life as an analogy (or rather, as more than an analogy - since the one is an example of the other).

Infant and young childhood love is an Original Participation; immersive and undifferentiated - the child is hardly aware of himself as distinct from his parents and family; his experience of the world is of a world alive and sentient because he is himself a part of everything he perceives. Love is everywhere (in an ideal childhood) like a sea in which everything is immersed, or like a gas in which each individual thing is merely a slight concentration of the element. We know everything, but we hardly know our-selves, and everything blurs into everything else.

With adolescence comes self-consciousness, which intensifies until the Self experiences itself as detached from the world. Indeed the Self experiences most mental activity as detached from itself - our Selves are cut-off from all experience, looking out upon the world, such that they world seems uncertain and unreal (how do we know that it is real), and indeed the Self is also experienced as perhaps unreal - since it changes, and can only rely upon itself for validation.

The point of Consciousness soul is 'freedom' in the sense of agency: to be free we need to be able to live from our-Selves (our true Selves). The consciousness soul is the condensation and concentration of the self, such that we can work from it. This is, indeed, a divine state of being - and that is what this phase is necessary to human spiritual progression.

To evolve towards a fully divine state of being, we must pass-through the Consciousness Soul. But it is meant to be a transitional phase, a short-lived phase - a phase we merely touch upon in passing...

This Consciousness Soul state of consciousness is also the state of modern culture. Modern culture is stuck, arrested, in stasis in the consciousness Soul - so intensely subjective that subjectivity itself is destroyed - experiencing the external world only via perceptions and instruments, and unsure about the reliability of these senses and mechanisms... THE problem being epistemological - how do I know if I really know? No answer forthcoming (because the assumption is of a gulf between the self and the world) and Modern Man is stuck in Consciousness Soul - held, trapped, imprisoned by the assumptions of modern culture.

Modern Man is stuck in Consciousness Soul - and that was not, and is not, meant to be - the CS is meant to be just a phase (albeit a necessary phase) on the way to Final Participation. Being stuck in the Consciousness Soul is a precise analogy to being stuck in adolescence, unable to grow-up, paralysed in that state of alienation, in which uncertainty erodes all potential solutions - and unable to move on.

Final Participation is like the ideal of spouse - indeed married love is a type of Final Participation.

In married love at its highest, each individual retains the full self-consciousness of the Consciousness Soul, but has a certainty of contact with another, distinct, self-conscious human being. There is no problem of communication, indeed there is a certainty of communication. Each party is not trapped in the nutshell of their own skulls but is able to share, participate in the life of the other, but with full self-integrity and self-awareness.

On the one hand individuality is assumed and valued, and is part of the essence of married love; on the other hand there is no problem of communication between these individuals - because the universal immersive state of Original Participation still is real and exists as much as it ever did. We are still part of each other and of everything - but with Final Participation our individuality, our Self, has been clarified, strengthened... has become a free, autonomous agent.

Final Participation is Original Participation plus the Consciousness Soul - it is the sea of infant family love, plus the individual island of adolescent self-awareness. 

There is no desire among loving spouses either for a return to the detachment of the Consciousness Soul (the state before love) or to return to the immersive and undifferentiated love of childhood family. They have the best of both worlds. The differentness and individuality and self-awareness of the other is essential, and so is the given background of universal communication.

In conclusion, when married love works as it is meant to, then it is a species of Final Participation - which is to say a state beyond Consciousness Soul, a moving-forwards and not a regression (or atavism).

Culturally, human destiny is to have an analogous relationship to ideal married love, but inclusive of all reality - and that is what Barfield meant by Final Participation.