Spencer Heath Archive

Item 438

Taping by Spencer MacCallum from conversation with Heath about the Christian Articles of Faith, beginning with the virgin birth.

September 21, 1955

 

 

 

I have no quarrel with the idea, because Christ gave us an important message, an absolutely divine, spiritual precept because it is a precept the following of which will give us abundant and eventually the eternal life.

Whether he was of virgin birth or not, he was if you like, he wasn’t if you like — any way you want to take it. I’m not to say that this isn’t true, that you people are wrong about this, that he wasn’t born of a virgin. Have it your way if you want to. I’ll agree with you. He was born somehow; maybe she was a virgin. I’m not competent to say.

His blood atonement. If some people think that’s true, I’ve no objection to it. And his bodily resurrec­tion. If you think he went up to heaven in his flesh and blood, that’s all right by me too. That doesn’t make me think any more or any less of his doctrine. His personal ascension back to the Father, and his coming again, all that is perfectly good poetry to me, and if you let me interpret that in my own way, then it makes good sense. I would take it like this:

     The actual deity of Jesus consisted in his spirituality, that he intuited the spiritual power that men have through associating with one another under the golden rule. It takes a spiritual quality for a man to perceive that, to have it intuitively, as a poet gets his intuitions — and as he got it, doubtless, because he never undertook to explain it in any logical or rational fashion.

His virgin birth. So far as that signifies something like freedom from contamination — immaculate conception — from mire and mud and all that sort of thing, I think very likely a man of his character would have been born, not out of the gutter, but out of a rather more exalted relationship.

His blood atonement. Why, if he had not died on the cross, it is highly improbable that his memory would ever have lasted at all. His teaching would probably have gone largely into discard, or gone into what was considered secular teaching. But by his dying on the cross, it emphasized it. It appealed to people’s emotions, people’s feelings and sympathies and all that, and it fitted in with the old tradition of the Jews that they were going to have a Messiah who would come and rule over them after many vicissitudes.

     So his blood atonement is a good symbol of how he took away the sins of the world, because through his life and death he showed men how they can live sinlessly, that is to say, how they can walk in the way of life instead of in the way of death.

His bodily resurrection. I don^’t feel any confidence that actually his body levitated and went up contrary to the force of gravity, but I have no doubt that his followers believed it themselves — and that they told honestly when they reported that the heavens opened and he rose in his glory and all that — because they supplied that with their imagination, and they believed it just as Saint Paul believed that the heavens opened and the voice of Christ spoke to him out of the sky.

     His personal ascension back to the Father might be placed in the same category as his bodily resurrection. It is a figure of speech that he went back to the universal whence he came — and he was particularized in this life as we are, and he came out of a universal, spiritual nature of the cosmos, and returned to it — and that he and his spirit will be embodied again in other men. Christ in respect to his doctrine would be born again — would rise again. Being God’s immortal truth, it couldn’t be killed; it would be sure to arise again. It’s all fine poetry.

/Re The Christian Articles of Faith:/ I like this succinct statement of exactly what they believe. Then we can say, now we have no quarrel about that, but he had another jewel in his crown, another gem in his diadem:

     He taught men how to act, not just what to think and what to believe. He offered then something besides the magic of a miraculous faith that was going to do wonders for them — not denying that this miraculous faith could perform miracles, not gainsaying any of that. He gave us something more practical that all men can understand easily and don’t have to doubt. Nobody can question it. It only needs to be stated, that when men treat other men as they would have other men treat them, and this process is general, then men will live better and longer lives. And if they keep on doing that way, they will enter into a new kind of relationship which makes them citizens of a new kind of kingdom, different from the kingdoms of this world: a spiritual world, and spiritual because in that kind of world they will be able to dream dreams, and see visions, and then create the thing which they dream.

I think it’s a fine thing to get it right down in black and white exactly what the theologians believe and want everybody to believe. And I believe it, if you let me take it in my own sense, my own interpretation. I see no reason why everybody shouldn’t believe it if he interprets it for himself. The only thing I object to is having other people interpret things for me. The orthodox Christian creed embodies this: “the deity of Jesus Christ, His virgin birth, His blood atonement_, His bodily resurrection_, His personal ascension back to the Father, and His coming again.” I think it’s good to get it down in a nutshell_, and I don’t see any reason why anybody should find any fault with it if they have a sufficiently high regard for the precepts of Christ — pay some attention to that in addition to all this.

“Then would you say that the only fault in the ‘social action’ people_, the socialists, interpreting Jesus’ precepts to their own ends, is that they want to use the element of force?” /Heath’s reply to this question was recalled and may not be verbatim./

 

Christ’s precepts do not lend themselves to that interpretation — to interpretation as precepts of force. That is not founded in the Gospels.