Monday, November 7, 2016

Does the Bible mean that all who do not believe in Jesus as their savior will end in condemnation?


Does the Bible mean that all who do not accept or believe Jesus as their Savior, will be condemned? Or, does it mean that whoever does not realize himself as one with the universal Christ is condemned to live and think as a struggling mortal, limited by his senses, because he separated himself from the Eternal Principle of life.

Jesus never referred to his son of man consciousness, or his body, as the only savior throughout all time. Abraham and many others were saved even before Jesus was born. It is the Christ intelligence that is the universal redeemer, the sole reflection of the Absolute Spirit (the Father).

Jesus was referring to this Christ consciousness or Christ Intelligence, which was fully manifest within him and all God realized masters throughout the ages and is latent within every soul.

Some history of early Christianity, and how Jesus became known as the ‘only begotten Son of God’

The writings of many Gnostic Christians from the first two centuries A.D. including Basilides, Theodotus, Valentinus and Ptolemaeus, similarly expressed an understanding of the “only begotten Son” as a cosmic principle in creation, the divine Nous (Greek for intelligence, mind or thought, rather than the person of Jesus. The celebrated church father Origen quotes from the writings of Theodotus that “the only begotten Son is Nous” (Exerpta ex Theodoto).
In Gnosis: A selection of Gnostic Texts (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press 1972), German scholar Werner Forester quotes Irenaeus as saying:” Basilides presents Nous originating first from the unoriginate Father.” Valentinus, a teacher greatly respected by the Christian congregation in Rome around 140 A.D. held similar views, according to Foster, believing that “in the prologue to the Gospel of John, the Only begotten” take the place of Nous.”


At the council of Nicea (325 A.D.), however, and at the later council of Constantinople (381 A.D.), the church proclaimed as the official doctrine that Jesus himself was, in the words of the Nicene Creed, “the only begotten Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, light of light, true God from true God, begotten not made, homoousios (of one substance) with the Father.” After the council of Constantinople, writer Timothy D. Barns in Athanasius and Constantius: Theology and Politics in the Constantinian Empire (Harvard University Press, 1993), “the emperor enshrined its decisions in law, and he subjected Christians who did not accept the creed of Nicaea and its watchword homoousios (A Christian supporting the Council of Nicaea's Trinitarian doctrine that Jesus, as Son of God, is consubstantial with God the Father. Late Latin homoūsiānus, from homoūsius, of same substance, from Greek homoousios: homo-, homo- + ousiā, substance; see Homoiousian) to legal disabilities. As has long been recognized, these events marked the transition from one distinct area in the history of the Christian church and the Roman Empire to another”.  From that point on, explains Richard E. Rubenstein in When Jesus became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome ( New York: Harcourt 1999), the official teachings of the church was to not accept Jesus as God was to reject God Himself. Through the centuries this view had enormous and often tragic implications for the relationship between Christians and Jews.

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