Spencer Heath Archive

Item 624

Dictation at request of Spencer MacCallum at Elkridge, Maryland to formulate some thoughts for the Bross Foundation competition for a paper relating Christianity to other fields of knowledge

September 1957

 

 

 

 

Christ came into a world wholly dominated by Govern­ment — a totalitarian world. He came to deliver men from evil and show them how to achieve the abundance of life.

To accept His word and follow His way was to be reborn into a different kind of kingdom from the kingdom of the world as He knew it — into a heavenly Kingdom in which all men would be related one to another as brothers ideally are.

To enter this Kingdom, He commanded that men should not only discontinue their allegiance to worldly power, their alliance with evil, but they should begin as a mustard seed or a lump of leaven begins, by each doing unto others as he would have them do unto him. In following this divine command to enter into contractual and cooperative instead of political and coercive relationships, they would build a new kind of kingdom transcending all the material sovereignties of the world.

Thus Christianity brings the element of religion into that field of knowledge which is called economics and is therewith potent to transform that field into a divine blessed­ness instead of a “dismal science” that, without this religious understanding, it has been so fitly called. The relation between the Christian religion in its purest and simplest form, and that of what has been built up in modern times as economic science, is like the relation between a physi­cal body and the inspiration of life with which it is ani­mated. It is a transcendent relationship in which mutual love, objectified as mutual services by exchange, can lift mankind out of its poverties of the flesh and of the spirit and its destructive rulerships and wars into a unity with the divine principle which animates the universal cosmos, causes the stars to sing together and carries all things forward into higher and diviner evolving forms.

Another great field of knowledge is in the realm of art. This, too, has its dismal as well as its spiritual and creative side. To the primitive man, the highest dream was to ward off what he believed to be the agencies of des­truction and death. His art sprang from his fears, and its practice took the form of appeasements offered to deities who were more demons than gods. As he learned through hard experience to adjust himself to environment, he achieved greater security and length of days. As his condition improved, so did his religion. His gods became benevolent whom he could worship as well as fear, and in his art, however crude, that benevolence was reflected. The grotesque was neglected and the beautiful raised on high. Inspiration in place of des­peration came into the body of man. Hope rose supreme above despair. Those who were least inspired in early days, as of today, employed the techniques of art in their several fields to reflect the despair, the unbelief, the subservi­ence to death that weighed upon men’s spirits and minds. Only among those few persons and classes who rose above the purely necessitous life could art become inspirational and flower into classic beauty, until its foundation in human slavery and the religions which it expressed crumbled away.

The Christ, above all prophets, brought a new vision not only of hope but of faith, a new inspiration not from death and despair but of light and life, of ever increasing degrees of immortality available to the life of man through the new kind of non-political relationships which he proposed and did divinely command. He sensed the beauty explicit in the created world and implicit in the hearts of men, ready to burst forth into fulfillment in an ever-growing freedom from death and despair through ever lengthening days.

The religion of Christ, like all true and positive religion, is a religion that recognizes the beauty and thereby the inspiration that serves life and makes death ever more remote. So far as it is accepted, so far as men are born again into inspirational reactions, it redeems the whole realm of art from its prepossessions with darkness and death and to one of ever mounting aspirations and realizations of the divinity whence all things spring and to which all in love and gratitude is due.

The relation between the Christian religion and other fields of knowledge is the relationship that light has towards darkness, that love has towards hate, that the organic has to the inorganic, that life has to death. For truly there is no value in any knowledge but the know­ledge of life and the ways of life which Christ came to reveal and did reveal to mankind — a knowledge transcending all the powers of the then all-political world and laying the spiritual foundation for all the power and beauty that modern mankind has begun to achieve and under the guidance of His Word must continue to achieve for all time to come.