Spencer Heath Archive

Item 2803

In March, 1962 several undergraduate divinity students from Pepperdine College made two visits to Claremont Men’s College to interview Heath on his philosophy. This was the first visit and Item 2804 was the second. Spencer MacCallum recorded most of the discussion on both occasions.

March 1962

 

 

 

FIRST CLAREMONT TALK WITH PEPPERDINE STUDENTS

March 1962

 

MacCallum: That would be a good question to start off with here: “What is your philosophy?”

 

Heath: It’s a pretty tall question, it seems. But the more

simple, the more fundamental it is — the closer it is to the heart of God — the less words it should take to describe it. So I’ll do my best to tell you what is my philosophy.

 

 Physically speaking, we are animals. We have an animal past and all that. But humanly and spiritually speaking, we are a wholly different order of being. We live in a world called the subjective world, a world of dreams, a world of imagination. Not the world of sensation. We have percepts; we perceive things, as animals do. But they don’t conceive them. We embrace things within the realm of our imagination, and there we examine them in their spiritual aspect, not in their material aspect.

 

 So man is a living thing that has transcendent powers, a form of life vastly beyond any other form of life that we know of — a true child of God — and as such he has powers that no other form of life could ever imagine. They can’t even dream of possessing it; they haven’t got the dreaming faculty. They can’t image things in their minds and then create them, as an artist does, or as God did in His artistry of the cosmos. So my philosophy is that, as I quoted before, the proper study of mankind is man — as a distinct order of nature, a divine order of nature, having imaginative capa­cities and through the imaging capacity being a creative power, individually and all the more so when two or more are gathered together in Thy name. And that means the contract. We have drawn together, contraho, in Thy name, to do Thy will, which is so simply stated, to practice contract with one another, enter into business if you will, each serving all others in the same manner he would be served and thereby loved, in return. That last is necessary because the cosmos must stay in balance; it can’t get off its rocker. If some do much giving and get little, it doesn’t last long — that’s a high frequency wave, and vice versa. So this golden rule automatically takes care of the reciprocal relationship. In fact the very language itself signifies it — all men do unto all others. Well then it means that the other fellow must do it too. Without that God’s will would become chaos, and God isn’t built on the chaotic plan. God is a thing of mathematics if you like, artistry, beauty, balance, evenness, and on-goingness. And I haven’t told you very much about the on-goingness.

 

 All the events that illustrate God’s work in this cosmos have three elements in them, which we measure by the gram, the centimeter, and the second; the pound, the foot, and the minute. And as events merge and diverge, and crisscross and commingle, new events are always coming out. That’s the process of nature. That’s what makes the cosmos a process — as Whitehead called his book, Process and Reality. I think he had better said, Process is, or as, Reality. Not and. Reality is the ongoing of things. Well now as these events mingle and commingle and diverge and all, some events will be organized so that they can last longer than others. Some of our bodies can last longer than others. And those that can last longer than others will be in the next generation or the next species, and those that have the shorter lives will have disappeared. So progress is built into God’s cosmos, because it is the will of God that the best things should last the longest. And so the better we obey His will, the longer we last. So the cosmos, as a work of God, is always on the up and up, into elements and aspects, or events, of greater time content. And that great event which is supposed to include all eternity is one aspect of God, because it lasts forever. If it only lasted half of forever, it would be half God. And God has the three aspects, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost — Substance, Power and Eternity. And in those three aspects, God manifests Himself. And so far as we can gather into ourselves, in our bodies which are substance, and in motion, and duration, or time, as we can so organize our substance and motion so that it can last longer — the time element is relatively larger — then we are in progress, in process, as reality. We then fulfill Whitehead’s dream of the universe as a progressive universe. And God doesn’t need to be separated from the universe; he wouldn’t be God if there was anything left out. Nor would it be a universe if there were something besides. God is universal.

 

 And so we shouldn’t be afraid to think of God impersonally. He has all the human attri­butes; we wouldn’t have gotten them from Him if He didn’t have them. But besides having all the human attributes which we know in finite form, and sometimes in all too limited form, besides having all those attributes, God has infinite attributes. God is always as Nietzsche said of life, “Saith Life, ‘I am that which must always transcend itself’” — always have an ongoingness, always a process. So we should not be afraid of thinking of God, as some people do — perhaps Spinoza did — as impersonal. Many scientists grant a God, but He has to be impersonal. God can be both personal and impersonal. With respect to our finite lives, He can be very personal. But with respect to the larger content of lives, if we keep Him personal, we are limiting His powers, His capacities, down to something like ours. We’re not giving Him scope. We’re cabining Him and cribbing Him, or something like that. So in our minds, we shouldn’t try to bring God down to our size by personalizing Him. He’s there, as much as anywhere; I don’t mean to dismiss Him from our personal, finite lives, or to imagine such a thing. But to say that is God and nothing else is God, is to say God is all that and that’s all God is. If God is anything more, He transcends the limits of personality, even in the limits of our rather poor imagination as compared with His. Perhaps I’ve said enough to start you thinking on what I would say is my philosophy. You may have some comments.

 

Questioner:  You mentioned the imagination of God and the way that we should not personalize Him and bring him down to our level in this and that..

 

Heath: Remembering that He is at our level, but that isn’t all.

He_______________ Himself beyond and above.

 

Q: Well what I should have said is, rather than bringing Him

to our level, is trying to put ourselves on His level, to elevate ourselves.

 

Heath: Now that is our pride and joy. We have been endowed with

that — that divine breath that came into the first man. That is

our pride and joy, and that is our opportunity to become like God. And as we act in that manner, we can dream dreams and have visions, and we can build worlds. And we can explore worlds beyond this world even, of late. All of which things are based upon the creative power that comes from men practicing the golden rule. Every atom of energy used in any of these great phenomenal events — human energy I mean by that, with which we exchange services with one another by accountancy — money we often call it — every ounce or atom of it is created, organized, by the practice of men acting under the golden rule, the contrac­tual relation which I mentioned a moment ago, which is the divine command that we do Gods will, become creators like Him through being contracting parties, not covenanting parties. Perhaps I didn’t say then (I may repeat if I did) that contracts are always agreements to do God’s will, to do good to each other, both ways, two-way street. But covenants and treaties are always agreements not to do harm, or not to do evil, and it isn’t in the nature of God that we can do “not things.” God contains no negatives. God contains all things, and they’re all positive; there are no nega­tives. We can at any given stage reverse and have less positive and less life, but we can never have no life. Even material scientists deny the destructibility of matter. Energy can be divided up into more and more bits; Planck’s quantum says there’s a basic unit which you can’t divide up any more, as they used to say of the atom. We’ll see later on whether you can or not. However, you can never reach the absolute, whatever way you go. How did I happen to say that?

 

 

Q:  Well the question I was going to ask, how are we supposed to love God, since we are supposed to fear Him so much? Part of Christian maturity is learning to love and fear, or to respect and reverence .. but for people who are not really mature Christians, which I’m not one and I hope some day to make that, but I’ve often wondered and would like to know from you as to how can you love someone that you fear, or fear someone that you love?

 

Heath: We must never say we are not Christians ..

 

Q: No I said “mature” ..

 

Heath:  ..or mature Christians. We may say we are not complete or perfect Christians. But so far as we act like Christ, we are Christians. Now the other aspect of what you asked me … You know the very primitive man had very little understanding. I don’t imagine that Adam ever went to Harvard Graduate School or anything corresponding to it. And so he had at first very little apprehension of God. He was afraid of everything around him. And so he built up demons in his mind, primitive gods, so-called. He had such little understanding of God in the beginning. It had to grow in him. And in his early period, he thought of God as something of wrath, and something of destruction, some­thing to fear. In course of generations, he learned better. So instead of being demon-like, as nearly all primitive gods are, not creators but destroyers, his god became more Godly — as he understood Him better. So the New Testament tells of the divine, creative God, much more distinctly and definitely a God of love, whereas the early Old Testament tells of a god relatively demon-like and of wrath, and He would destroy His people. He would flood the world and drown them all nearly. And then put a contract in the sky not to do it again? A covenant. As nations do, a promise not to do harm. He made a covenant. And so some people like the Russians today make covenants, lots and lots of them. Can they keep them? Can they do anything about a covenant? Promises not to harm, not to aggress? If they do anything, what must they do, if they do anything about a covenant? They must break it. There’s nothing else you can do, if you do anything about a covenant. And so with our treaties and covenants, the virtue that they have, if any, is that we don’t do anything about it. Because if we did anything about an agreement not to do harm, we would simply have to break the covenant itself. Or do nothing. We mustn’t ask of ourselves the impossible, but we must learn to love and practice that which is possible, the creative powers of God as manifested in men when they love one another through trading with one another. A primitive people couldn’t trade very much in very early history because they had monarchies and monarchs and kings and emperors and Pharaohs and things that didn’t allow trading. And when the sovereign powers, the war-making powers, the tribute-taking powers, consolidated by warring on one another and accumulated enough, they had the whole known world in one empire, the Roman Empire. And it had one function — to keep order by the sword and not let any nations fight one another. That would impair the tribute-collecting. Not let any rioting go on in Jerusalem or in any other place where the local authorities have got local wars, or among nations. Rome kept the Pax Romanum, the peace of the world. Pretty ruthlessly too, for the one purpose of seizing people’s property and keeping them in order for that purpose. At least that’s how it functioned, whatever men might have in­tended at the time. And so today, whatever men intend, it is to be deplored that they would think that by repeating the Roman experience of putting all the military power in one organization, that that organization would keep any different kind of peace in the world from the Roman organiza­tion. Of course the result of the Roman United Nations was that it pulled all the nations down, just as taxation is pull­ing us down today. It pulled them all down. While it was doing it, it kept order, the iron order, the slave order. And do you think it allowed any pirates to roam the seas? It hunted them down and rooted them out. But when it consumed its own substance — consumed the people over whom it ruled — the pirates had a chance to learn how to trade. They found they lived better and longer lives that way. And so it didn’t take them long to practice it, and so they became traders, because they lived better and longer lives that way. And that’s the foundation of all the trade we have in the world today — mostly maritime trade. Similar things happened on land — we can’t talk about all the details in a moment. But we had a United Nations, and we were pretty sorry for it. Now we have a United Nations under God, which is a United Nations under the golden rule. All international trade, so far as it is permitted by the sovereign powers, the political powers of the world, whether they are consolidated in one or many, trade can only go on, the divine relationship of serving one another can only go on, within the scope and permission of the political powers of the world, the principalities and powers. And Christ never had a good word for them; they keep men from loving one another by serv­ing one another. Insofar as this trading spirit established itself far and wide, men live longer and better lives.

 

 Now, how to have less government? A lot of people would like to know that answer, wouldn’t they. Well how to have less of any deficiency — government is a deficiency of the golden rule, isn’t it? It’s archaic, it’s animal-like. It’s not idealistic, not divine — although some claim to be. So the way to get rid of animal practices is to practice the human and the divine. Therefore, resist not evil, but overcome evil by doing good. So the escape, the way out of all of our modern troubles is to find the royal road to goodness, to divine creativeness — to find the depth and breadth and potentialities of this loving rule of serving one another as we would be served. And as we extend that, then we are moving into the kingdom of heaven.

 

 Now the most conspicuous place, the vital center of the golden rule is in the performing of services that we have to have in common. Between smaller numbers of people, they can practice trading relations and get along very nicely with it. They don’t have to shoot one another to trade with one another, you know. Or anything of that kind. But when it comes to things that we have to have in common, widespread, like police protection, fire protection and thousands of other things, we’ve been carrying them on under the iron rule, and none too successfully. We haven’t been very proud of that. And none too prosperously, either, except in some exceptional cases where we got away from the Old World governments and got a chance to function freely with one another — for a while at least. Now there’s our dilemma today. What we need is to learn how to practice our public services under the golden rule, which profits everybody, streng­thens and lengthens the lives of everybody wherever it’s prac­ticed. And for lack of that golden rule, that’s the only trouble why we have wars and taxation and that sort of thing. It’s a lack, it’s a deficiency, it’s a primitiveness, govern­ment is, force is. When men learn to do things by contract and consent, then they don’t have that same deficiency. They trans­cend it. We have to outgrow the organizations that carry on wars and collect taxes and perform pretended services, which always serve in reverse however much we may deceive ourselves in thinking that public authority can hand back to us more than it takes, that is political public authority, can hand back to us more of our goods than it takes away from us — more benefits than that of which it deprives us

Civilization is founded on the Bible. It can’t rest on anything else. We’ve got to get back to the Bible and the pre­cepts of the Bible and do the will of God as so fre­quently and sometimes so clearly expressed there. So when we learn to conduct our public affairs for a profit — because all contracts make profits, nobody makes a contract without profit, or he doesn’t make it a second time. And if he makes it with a loss, one party has lost something, he has lost his power to serve other persons. Profit must become accumulated, so it can become an instrument in our hands as the world is an instru­ment in the hands of God. To create things. And if my neighbor loses property, loses his wealth, how is he going to trade advantageously with me? How much can he do for me out of his losses? But if he makes gains, then he can use his gains under the golden rule, and benefit me. So to lose money is a sin. You are reducing your spiritual power to love, benefit, your fellow men in the same way you’d have him benefit you. We shouldn’t degrade, denigrate the instruments that God uses to carry out His will among men, nor the instruments that men use in carrying out God’s will towards one another. We must learn to understand them. When we understand these relation­ships, how they’ve given us all the civilization we’ve ever had, certainly all modern civilization, and how they supply all of the energy, all of the wealth and all of the means — tools, capital — for going to the moon or for blasting other nations with atomic energy or preparing the means for so doing, all the energy comes out of the practice of the golden rule, and is seized by the practitioners by the political power who uses the iron rule. It doesn’t make contracts, can’t perform them. It doesn’t own anything, because everything it has it hasn’t created. When man creates things, God has created them, whether

man is the agent of God____________________________ . And those things are divine things. And those things can be used to divine purposes. But those same things can be seized by organizations, the same as any organizations of bad men can seize other people’s property. Bad-acting men I mean; I don’t mean bad men. Bad-acting men. Iron-rule men. The way is all provided for men to redeem themselves into their divinity. When they stray back into the animal world, as they do whenever they rob or steal or make war, when they stray back into the animal world they suffer for it. And we are suffering for it today, but only to the extent that we have strayed back into the limitations of the animal world, failed to practice our potential divinity. The remedy? Learn what our potential divinity is. How it operates. Appraise, examine our gifts. Look the gift horse in the mouth if you wish; God won’t mind. Understand the gifts of God. Don’t solve problems — embrace opportunities. Because God didn’t create this world as a problem; He created this world as an opportunity. Anybody disagree with that? And how do we prac­tice God’s will then in this world? By conjuring up problems, sinking back into the animal limitations and acting like animals? Cannibals on each other as animals are necessarily? Or do we practice God’s will by doing the things that enhance the lives of each other and carry us further and further in joy towards immortality — never arriving, but always approaching. Asymptotically, don’t they call it? Always room to go and to grow. And since life is always going, going, and growing, and all joy comes from life, then we get our joys measured out to us to the extent that we enhance our lives through loving and thereby serv­ing one another. Not sentimentally, but by doing the will. Not sentimentally alone, because when we do God’s will when we build a great material world, we become free in it

 

                                      /Recording failure?/