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Esoteric Christianity is an ensemble of Christian theology which proposes that some spiritual doctrines of Christianity can only be understood by those who have undergone certain rites within the religion.
Table of contents
One of the persons who first wrote about Jesus was a man who had been an enemy of the church until he experienced a mystical conversion. Paul saw himself as an apostle one sent on a mission , perhaps "the" apostle, of Jesus. He believed he had actually experienced Jesus in a mystical encounter during which he was commissioned to spread the "good news"--the gospel of Jesus' teaching--presenting a conception of God as forgiving, loving, and wise.
Paul was aghast when he learned that Peter and some of the other apostles of Jesus in Jerusalem and other cities were interpreting Jesus's message as an extension of Judaism, using the Hebrew Old Testament as a major scripture. William Kingsland. Paul insisted that a person could become a Christian without submitting to circumcision or other Jewish religious laws and practices.
Paul defined Christianity as the experience of re-birth in Jesus, a spiritual awakening of the same nature that he had gone through. Both Jesus and Paul made it clear that Christianity was decidedly not an extension of Judaism. Jesus would not have taught that he was the Messiah promised in the Jewish scriptures. That concept of an anointed one, as Jesus pointed out, involved this person becoming an earthly king, a political ruler.
This Christ concept was exclusively a Jewish idea. But the misguided Christian autocrats were trying to graft Jesus' teachings onto Judaism, the creed of one small nation. To carry this out, the church leaders had adulterated and garbled the original sayings of Jesus, adding the phrase "in order that it might be fulfilled" to everything Jesus did, to "prove" that he was the Jewish Messiah-King.
The Christ Concept. If Jesus used the Christ concept in reference to himself it would have been in an entirely new, non-Jewish manner, with different content and meaning.
The koine Greek term Christos simply means "anointed one," and Jesus would have considered himself anointed or commissioned to communicate a specific teaching. Thus in the early church a number of factions had arisen, with Peter and some of the other original apostles preaching a Judaised, sacerdotal Christianity requiring no more than belief, while Paul insisted that Jesus' teaching was about a spiritual rebirth such as he had himself experienced.
Both Jesus and Paul taught that religion is not mere belief in doctrines but practical knowledge gnosis, gnosis of the way to regain one's birthright as a "Son of God" through a radical transformation process. We shall never become it simply by believing that he was that, or that he did all that the Gospels record; or that he did something for us which washes away our sins and gives us a short cut to eternal bliss.
We shall only achieve the same likeness when 'that same mind' or 'word' which was also in Christ Jesus has been 'brought to birth' in us also, i. The original teaching of Jesus was thus passed on through Paul and those whom Paul and his immediate companions taught in the many cities they visited. Pliny the Younger, who was governor of Bithynia in the early years of the second century, wrote to the emperor concerning the troublesome activity of Christians in forming collegia or gilds, and he told of torturing two maidservants in order to get information about these associations.
In joining the Christian movement, they could restrain its more radical tendencies, and utilize its organized strength as a defense against imperial restrictions. The disintegration of the imperial system forced Constantine to abandon Rome and move his capital to Byzantium in order to control the eastern area of trade. At the same time, he had to adopt Christianity, as the best means of maintaining his authority over the urban centers which were the key to the economic existence of the empire. But this was not an easy task. It could not be accomplished without a violent conflict between the patrician class which ruled the empire and the majority who took Christianity literally as a gospel of equality and brotherhood.
By the time of Augustine, the conflict had reached a stage of crisis, which threatened to disrupt the empire. The Triumph of Pseudo-Christianity. If you watch a TV history of Christianity or read a Protestant or Roman Catholic account of the early church, Christianity's becoming the official religion of the Roman state during Constantine's reign is considered a great victory.
The only measure of success for these moderns is whether or not a tradition triumphed over all its competitors. Never mind what distorting of the original message had taken place or what atrocities the Church committed. If a particular religion came out on top, it's to be considered the best.
On the contrary, the formal religion that became known as the Holy Roman Church was and is nothing but a vast repository of false teachings and practices. At the present time, orthodox Christianity, in all its Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant guises, is a horrible deformity of Jesus's original teachings. Whereas the people Jesus befriended were the poor and outcast of society, the bureaucratized "church" began to direct its attentions to the wealthy and politically powerful.
Already by the end of the first century C. As Paul, Clement, Marcion, Valentinus, and Origen made clear, the essence of Jesus's teaching was the esoteric initiation of a select number into the mysteries of the "new being. The counterfeit interpretation of Jesus' teachings became the official, orthodox dogma and the congregations those called together became a monolithic "church," a sacerdotal monstrosity supported by the corrupt Roman emperor Constantine.
Constantine had adopted Christianity merely to provide support for his conquest and rule, so he was furious that there were squabbling factions within his adopted faith. So, in C. The emperor himself, dressed in a purple gown and with a silver diadem, opened the council. The Council of Nicea made it clear that Christianity was to be clearly distinguished from the pagan Platonic heresy. All Christians were henceforth required to believe that Jesus Christ was of the same substance as God in other words, a god and only Christ could bring about humankind's salvation through a person's belief in his sacrifice for their sins.
As the doctrinal orthodoxy decreed by such Councils as Nicea became the official ideology of the Romanized church, the genuine teachers of Jesus' original message of transformation found it necessary to go underground. This hidden tradition is what we now call Esoteric Christianity. The official view is that the sacraments are both necessary and sufficient for salvation; any talk of higher truths or initiatic knowledge, however circumspect or deferential to Catholic doctrine, is considered subversive.
The church tends to regard the esoteric inner circle not as a deeper dimension of the external church but as an inimical fifth column. Even though the Holy Roman Church dictated what dogmas were official, there was still the difficulty of a large number of writings about Jesus which painted very different pictures of him.
As the Roman Empire took over the outer, distorted husks of Jesus' teachings and turned the church into a tyranny, it selected only those writings which would support its autocratic power. In the fourth century C. At that point, the books outside the Official Scriptures were known as non-canonical scriptures.
Mary Ward Centre
They included material which was not in the orthodox New Testament as the official scripture came to be called. Many of these writings come from the non-orthodox tradition of Christianity, especially from the Gnostic strain. If we are to understand the esoteric tradition in Christianity, it is essential that we take into consideration these extra-canonical sources.
Many parts of the New Testament are dogmas added by later sectarians to support their personal prejudices.
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For example, many references to Jesus' actions as fulfillment of the Old Testament prophecies were added by persons trying to prove that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah-King. As we examine the New Testament discerningly we discover elements which do not ring true, certain supposed "miracles" and mythological events that cast Jesus in an unfavorable light. It is our responsibility to determine what is genuine and what is counterfeit in the early Christian writings, just as we must discriminate in regard to all teachings.
Some of the New Testament and other early writings constitute a record of spiritual experiences which are reproducible in our lives. This is especially true of the central teaching of all these writings: rebirth into a higher consciousness. Jesus' teachings concerning the necessity of spiritual rebirth unmistakably parallel the Hermetic and Platonic writings--as well as other embodiments of the Perennial Tradition such as alchemy and Sufism.
Plato saw philosophy the search for wisdom as the actual achievement of a higher state of consciousness, gained through self-discipline and mystical contemplation.
According to Plato, philosophia is the actual practice of learning to leave the body and live in the soul, the spiritual body. Many of the genuine followers of Jesus' teachings, such as Clement of Alexandria, Marcion, Valentinus, and Origen, were profoundly influenced by Plato's mystical concepts. It would be correct to say that they were as much Platonists as Christians. When the Christian faith became a secularized, sacerdotal autocracy supporting the depraved Roman emperor Constantine, the hierarchy of priests and potentates of the Church found it necessary to concoct a system of dogmas which would separate Christian theology from Platonism.
Thus the councils of Nicea and others and the resulting doctrinal monstrosities. As we examine the New Testament and relevant extra-canonical writings, it becomes clear that Jesus' original teaching declared that man was a son of God and could realize his divine sonship through a special initiation into an experience of spiritual re-birth. This teaching was unmistakably within the Perennial Tradition. The word used to describe this revolutionary transformation in humans was metanoia , which the Roman Catholic translators mangled into the Latin-based word "repent.
It involves a person ceasing to cling to her ordinary life; old ideas and feelings lose all value for her.
Esoteric Christianity
The whole course of her experience takes on a new meaning and leads in a totally different direction. She DIES completely to her old way of being and becomes--literally--a new person as she experiences re-birth. The esoteric re-birth experience could produce the right effect upon the neophyte's soul only if she had previously changed her lower world of experience and consciousness. If she were to be inducted into the Life of the Spirit where she would behold a Higher World, this required a prior total, radical transformation in her way of thinking, feeling, acting--being in general.
For most people, the empirical world of shoes and ships and sealing wax is the only one; any idea of a higher world is simply a fantasy. They have no reality. We can't touch them or hear or see them. They're not "real. The Mystery-schools of antiquity, at least before the days of their degeneracy, possessed and administered it; it was the raison d'etre of their existence, as was well known to the public of the time, any member of whom, prepared to abandon secular life and apply himself to the higher vocation, could seek admission therein.
The Christianity of the first two centuries took over the doctrine and the science, confirmed and expanded as they became by the advent of Christ, but eventually lost them and put in their place the ecclesiastical machinery and dogmatic theology which have ruled throughout the subsequent centuries of European history, with the result that popular Christianity has for long known nothing of them. With the enjoinder of the assured necessity for regeneration proclaimed by the Master of their faith it and its theologians and pastors are well familiar.
But can it be said that 'Ye must be born again' means for them more than a vague, mysterious, metaphoric counsel of perfection capable of being satisfied by living the ordinary natural life as far as possible in accordance with the standard of conduct indicated in the Gospels? Are the words accorded more than a value for ethical purposes, to the total neglect of the possibility of their literal practical fulfilment? Somehow another idea has to come to us, a message by a person who knows of a Higher World. She explains that a totally different relationship to reality is possible--if one changes his entire way of thinking and acting.
A person who clings at all costs to the ordinary conception of reality can't grasp such ideas; he won't even be interested in hearing about them.
Subcategories
In regard to such people, Perennialist teachers such as Jesus explain that they have ears to hear but will not hear and eyes to see but will not see. So initiation into the re-birth experience is not provided to them because it would be wasted, ignored, or misused. But some people do want to hear about such ideas; there is a kind of divine discontent in them.
They want to understand their lives in a more comprehensive way.