Spencer Heath Archive

Item 380

Recording by Spencer MacCallum of conversation with Heath

No date

 

    

     Theology is what men know (or believe) about God and about their relationship to Him. It is a matter between man and God, understanding the Will of God. It is subjective, contemplative, conceptual.

     Religion is a matter of man’s action towards men, of doing the will of God with respect to fellow men.

      Commandment presupposes choice, freedom to obey or to disobey. When the choice is to obey, then the will of man and the Will of God are as one. Freedom is not lost but gained — freedom into life more abundant, into security and peace and length of days.

     There is no commandment to do anything but to love. The first is to love God and thereby to live. God gives choice of two ways to men: disregard His Will and remain as creatures, unregenerate; learn and do His Will and be born again, regenerate as creators in company with God, in a creative and thereby spiritual dominion over the world,

     The first commandment is to love God, to learn and do His Will, to create, for to live and be creative with Him we must learn His Will, comply with His terms.

     The second commandment is to love our fellow men by doing the Will of God with respect to them. We must not merely do unto them; we must do unto them in the same manner as we would have them do unto us. This is the golden rule in the practice of which we enter into a new kind of kingdom, a creative kingdom that does not resist or reform the worldly powers or, least of all, employ them. For it is the creative and thereby spiritual and divine alternative to force and war, not by either resisting or destroying but by transcending them.

     To be real, that is, enduring, not passing away, the golden rule must be mutual and reciprocal. It is not one-sided, like benevolence, transitory and merely remedial. It is mutual and reciprocal and thereby creative and enduring, not to save or maintain but for the advancement of life. It is the common denominator of all contractual relationships as against the coercive and political. In the wide ramifications of trade and exchange it can be impersonal and thereby universal, uniting all the ends of the earth in the advancement of life. It is the hidden genius that has given to the Judeo-Christian peoples of the world, and to them alone, such mighty power to create a vastly richer world in which to live securer lives and thereby to multiply their length of days.

     But this creative technology, this spiritual process among men, has evolved almost solely with respect to those services and goods that can be individually or separately and privately owned, for only such as are recognized and treated as private property can be the subject-matter of trade and exchange and thus become instruments of the golden rule. Almost all of those things that man must have and use in common still remain, for the most part, under the arbitrary and coercive administration of the “powers that be.” The great public properties, the political wealth of governments, are not created by them. These public properties are not acquired nor are they administered by any golden rule of consent and exchange, hence have no revenue or profit of their own.

     Whatever governments have, they must take by force or stealth or as conquerors in war. They must draw their revenues out of the properties and values created by the golden-rule relationships of men, and since there is no automatic ceiling on their power to seize, the sovereign powers have always, soon or late, destroyed the wealth and freedom of the world and thus themselves gone down.

     The lives of men can be secure and free only when the golden rule outgrows the iron rule of governments, when the owners of public communities shall be organized and shall administer contractually and for profit the common properties and services of their communities.

     Then will the golden rule prevail, God’s Will be done, His Kingdom come, in the public administration no less than in the private properties and affairs of men.