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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