God, the Bible, truth and Christian theology

Front matter

t.

CHRISTIAN^HEOLOGY

Book_

Preface

Persecutions of Theology.

OEVAL in age with thinking men and women of to-day, as it was coexistent with the lives of the ancient philosophers, is the consideration of the question of, The Unity of God. At every period from the earliest ages of the world, human souls have pondered in a vain attempt to decipher the incomprehensible and intangible forces and powers of nature (God).

C Vainly during the centuries, when theology, orthodoxy, (superstition) priestcraft and petro-paulism have stalked the avenues of human endeavor, following the lives of men and women like an infamous blighting shadow that never leaves them, intelligent investigators have taken upon themselves the task of learning the lesson ** Know Thyself ^' by seeking God within the depths of their own soul, firmly believing that '' God is in us, and always with us/'

^ The acquisition of this knowledge is only to be gained by obeying the words which admonishes all to ^^Seek ye the Kingdom of God within you/' The soul and God are one, merged into a most divine; harmony counterparts of one grand whole,

THE CHUECH IS THE SCHOOL OF SUPEESTITION, WHILE THE NEW GOSPEL, '^KNOW THY- SELF/' TEACHES MEN AND WOMEN TO SEEK GOD WITHIN THEIK OWN SOUL — TEACHES '' THE IMMANENCE OF GOD/'

^ To be brief, those of today can be generally divided into two denominations, or schools of belief, viz. : one creed which believes in supernatural revelation and the Hebrew Scriptures, (theology and orthodoxy), and the other school, which teaches and believes that God is within the soul and always with us, that is to say, God, the soul, and the Universe are One — God alone is life, and life and God are One, as God cannot essentially appertain to two. ^ The church teaches a Gospel of superstitution, and bases its teachings upon the Scriptures, which hold that the Hebrews of Palestine and Jerusalem were God's chosen people, and that He revealed him-

AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY vii

self to them in a very unusual and unique manner; informing us that all the belief and knowledge we should have, is shown in the Holy Bible, the sacred book of God. ^ Intelligent investigators, who refuse to be overcome by the fumes of superstition and ancient mysticism, can most readily observe how pitiful it is for men and women to surrender their soul power (God), up to the teachings of theology and, as a consequence, go through life in a blind stupor and religious trance, a ready prey for bodily disease and mental ailments.

*- Any sensible person believes that all men have ever learned in the school of life, is the result of intuition and experience, and no scientific mind will accept the doctrine of so-called *^ truth of Scripture '' because experience, investigation, and test, prove them fabulous. Every generation that has ever lived in the past ages have had its believers in the Immanence of God. Their interpretation of God is the true and only one which will stand the severe test of experience, observation and science.

^ Every person can, of course, in matters of faith believe as they please, as it is strictly a personal and private affair, but to preach a belief and say it must be viii GOD, THE BIBLE, TEUTH,

accepted, or those who doubt it will be damned is beyond reason and common sense, especially when there is no ground for the belief other than that it is based on ancient Gk)spels which history shows to be spurious and forged.

C The church denies the individual right to think and investigate, and the very minute any person doubts or questions its doctrines they are set upon and denounced as a heretic, or an infidel, and is looked upon in holy horror as if he were some criminal who needed converting by being subjected to the fumes of mysticism and theology until overcome by the blind stupor of superstition and orthodoxy.

f[ Those who believe in themselves (God) concede the right of all minds to think, ponder and investigate; gives an audience to all students and sincere investigators; believing that man's faculty of intuition and common sense is to be appreciated and trusted in affairs of earth life, while the followers of supernatural revelations and Scriptural superstitions oppose and forestall all legitimate investigation, believing common sense and human reason are errant and that all that is known or learned by them, as well as the promptings of intuition are false doctrines which leads only to evil.

AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY ix

fT The church maintains that we must have an unfallible doctrine of ;^ inspiration and revelation'' as revealed m the Bible to live by. 'Tis thus we have it, today as in years past, for there has always been a controversy between those who believe God is All in All, and the church, which believes the opposite.

CThe founders of Christian Theology ever has desired the people to become its dupes and slaves, and exerts every effort to impress them with the belief that its doctrines are founded upon supernatural revelations which are holy and infallible, and for centuries past it has claimed the right to dictate men's belief and forestall investigation by purporting to be the sacred repository of the tenets, doctrines, revelations, word and laws of God.

THE CHURCH THE WHOLE AUTHORITY.

CThe outcome of all this is that the individual opinions of intelligent men, the knowledge gained of human experience, as well as all discoveries by science have been ridiculed and belittled by the church when they failed to agree with this so-called Holy Book, which has become the law book and vade-mecum of all human desires and endeavor ; the sole and entire authority on

X all matters and beliefs ; the Blue Book of Hfe, hope, science and opinion.

Any belief or discovery which failed to agree with the fabulous doctrines of the Bible has felt the heavy cruel hand of the church clutching at its throat in a frantic attempt to throttle and kill anything that might keep it, the church, from having supreme control, and being the ultimate source of authority, and high court of appeal on all affairs and opinions; on all affairs of life both mortal and immortal. ^ The result of all this is that to-day we find the world's foremost minds, its most brilliant intellects, and greatest teachers confronted by Christian Theology, and the modern church with its clan of black robed ministers and priests, who demand that all opinions, beliefs and discoveries must yield to their ecclesiastical authority or be pushed out of existence. ^ The earth's green surface and the rivers' pure waters have been reddened by the blood of those who opposed the church m ages past, prefering to accept the teachings of their own soul, to those question- ^le ones promulgated by the church.

History shows that many great teachers and intelligent men have in the past known the hatred and felt the revenge of the church as will be seen from the follow-

AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY xi

inff, which gives the opinion of a very learned man on the relentless and cruel persecutions of the church toward those

i^ho oppose it : — -^i i. v,

'' Eivers were reddened with nunian blood because men accepted that which godlike reason revealed to them, rather than that which the doubtful authority ot fhurches endeavored to estabhsh as true. **If we recall the names of great souls and noble minds, from the day of Hypatia almost down to the age in which we live, we shall find that the great votaries ot science, the great discoverers and nijentors, were often made the objects ot the fhurches' hatred. o. •

*^ Whether we visit Italy, or Spam, or Germany, or France, or England, or America, this is only too true. When a man put to flight the demons of ignorance and defeated the devils of superstition by scientific discovery, the agents of these demons and devils called him a heretic, and a heretic was a felon, and a felon was a low criminal, and the end of the heretic

w-as death. « , , , j

*^ Dressed in a robe of black, covered with red devils and imps, the heretic was led to the stake, amid the hoots and yells and screams of the mob, sacrificed to the ignorance of the ruling theological class.

PEESECUTION IN THEOLOGY S NAME.

C** There has scarcely been an age, and there has scarcely been a place, in which a man gave to the world a new scientific discovery, but he was made the object of scorn and derision by those robed in the authority of the pulpit.

C*' There has scarcely been an age in which a man came with a new revelation of scientific truth, but the hired agents of theology fell upon him and endeavored to ruin or destroy him.

C^* There has rarely been a man who wrought for liberty of thought, who placed his discoveries upon the altar of human reason, but the agents of some theological system dogged his steps, or made him the object of some brutal inquisition.

f[ **If we recall such names as those with which we are all familiar, such as Bruno and Galileo, or Kepler and Copernicus, or Vanini and Spencer and Tyndall, we shall recall the names of men who were denounced, condemned or punished, whose names were bespattered and whose titles to fame were contested by the hired agents of some dominant theology.

C * * If you read Mr. Andrew D. White 's * History of the Warfare of Science with Theology,' or Dr. Draper's books, *The

AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY xiii

Intellectual Development of Europe/ and the 'History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science/ you will find that the struggle has been age long; and it is not yet over.

THE SERVICES OF SCIENCE.

€ ** Science has been the handmaid of religion, although theology recognized it not. Science has been the friend of man, although his enemies would not admit it. Science has brought healing to the sick and strength to the weak. Science has been the great illuminator. Science has taken the sweat drop and, placing it under a boiler, has made a giant machine do the work of giant strength, while sparing man. Science has taken the lightning flashes and bidden them do man's work. It has added to the fertility of the soil.

C *'It has added light to the day and made the night shorter. Science, the boon companion of mankind, has declared the glory of God, and taught us to conceive of Him, not as a little king sitting on a throne in the heavens above a blue dome made of glass, but as the Eternal, of whom it may be said, 'Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of Hosts, the whole world, the whole universe, is full of His glory.' ^ ''Science has been the persecuted; it has never been the persecutor. Science has been chained; in return it has loosed fetters. Science has been hated ; in return it has done the work of love.

' * Science has been hooted at ; in return, in^stentorian tones, it has announced a gospel of love and liberty. Science has never harmed a human being, never denounced a child of God, never been guilty of a crime. Science has understood the great message of the psalmist, * Because they regard not the works of the Lord, nor the operation of his hands, he shall destroy them, and not build them up.'

^* Science has been the great interpm;er. It has shown us God in little things as well as in infinite space. With the help of the microscope, it has shown God to us in things infinite simally small; with the help of the telescope it has revealed God at the ends of the world, as it were.''

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY NOT THE DAEK

AGES.

The church in the years that have pafsed with its Eomanizing, secretive, evasive and traitorous priests * on one

*If any reader thinks this language is harsh and overdrawn, he is advised to read Chapters 22 and 23 of this work, as contained in Part 3, referring to "The Secrecy of the Eitualistic Confessional," where he will receive

AND CHRISTIAN THEOLOGY xv hand, and the ^* f rocked divines ^' of Protestantism on the other have doomed to an awful fate any who would dare question its doctrines; the scaffold, the dismal funeral pyre, the dungeon, and other tortures have been heaped upon those who dared differ with the religion of the church.

^However, the church of to-day must awaken to the fact that when it tries to deny some of the assertions made here that it has a bad case to defend — at least as far as dealing with this book is concerned — for it must realize that its tactics of centuries ago will not be tolerated today, that the Dark Ages are not with us to-day, and that things are not now as then, when a priest ^s bare word was sufficient to awe a community or settle all disputes.

^ Orthodoxy must not forget that we are about on the eve of the twentieth century and that there is arising a protest against priestcraft, theology and ancient superstition which, let us all hope, will do away with the absurd reverence intelligent men and women have been paying to sacrificing

full and authentic information concerning "Auricular Confession ' ' and other particulars regarding confessional scandals, as the ''Auricular Confession" is always a secret thing among priests.

priests * and f rocked divines who pose as God's agents, and that they will cease to be brought by the church, into the condition of those of whom it is written : —

Rome's Hook and Bridle.

% ''THEY MUST GIVE THEIR SOULS TO TRIPLE CROWNS

AND COPES AND SCARLET HATS; — THEMSELVES — AND NOT THEIR IDOLS — TO THE MOLES AND

TO THE bats; THEMSELVES, THEIR HOMES AND SUBSTANCE, THEIR BODIES

AND THEIR SOULS, TO THE BLIND WHO LEAD THE BLINDER — TO THE BATS AND

TO THE MOLES.

1[ **POR LIBERTY OF MIND AND WILL — FOR BOLD UNFET- TERED THOUGHT, —

THEY MUST THINK AS THEY ARE BIDDEN, AND BELIEVE WHAT THEY ARE TAUGHT;

THEY MUST SHUT THEIR EYES AND OPE THEIR EARS, FAST BOUND BY SLAVISH LAWS,

ROME'S HOOK WITHIN THEIR NOSTRILS, AND HER BRIDLE ON THEIR JAWS/'

—Walter Walsh.

*If the reader cares to learn how men and women fall prostrate at the feet of priests, fearing the eye and voice of these individuals, let him read "The Power and Dignity of Sacrificing Priests," as contained in Part Three of this work.

EDITS FUTURE LIFE OUT OF GOSPELS

Du Sharman of \J* of C* Declares Jesus Never Uttered Teachings Credited to Him*

BOOK ISSUED BY COLLEGE

Declarations Regarding Immortality and Eternal Punishment Called Interpolations*

Dr. Henry Burton Sharman, instructor in Biblical and patristic Greek at the University of Chicago, has published, on the University of Chicago press, a book in which he disputes the authenticity of nearly every utterance attributed to Jesus in the New Testament dealing with eternal life.

Coming from John D. Rockefeller's pet university, the book is sure to create a profound sensation. The title of it is "The Teaching of Jesus About the Future."

Dr. Sharman says that Jesus did not promise eternal reward or eternal punishment ; tliat he did not institute the Lord's supper or the rite of baptism ; that he did not promise to come again in glory and power and that he never said "There shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth."

After a profound, and oftentimes involved, study of the three gospels, Matthew. Mark and Luke, in which his attitude is that of the hermeneutist as well as the higher critic. Dr. Sharman gives it as his conclusion that virtually all of Jesus' supposed utterances regarding futurity, as understood in its religious sense, are mere editorial interpolations of the authors of the gospels.

DISCUSSES HIS ASSERTIONS.

"Jesus did not promise eternal reward or eternal punishment." said Dr. Sharman in an interview last night, summing up the conclusions to which his study has led him and which are rather submerged in the analys'is of the book. * ,

' "In all that he said and all that he laught he was remarkably reticent on this po,int. His answer to the Sadducees when they asked him if there was a resurrection after d«>ath T believe to be genuine, but in that instance he specifically stated that there was no resurrection of the body and that eternal life would not be life according to our conception of the term.

"Matthew and Luke were not produced by eye witnesses, but by men who utilized written material already in existence. Comparison shows that in many cases the reports of what Jesus said have been affected by the thoughts of the age in which they were produced. Practicallj- all the passages in the synoptic gospels that sketch the Day of Judgment can be shown by comparative study to be nongenuine utterances.

"Those passages in which Jesus is reputed to have asserted that He would be present with His disciples after He had left the earth are apparently not from Jesus, but are the expression of the experience of his disciples, and these experiences may be otherwise explained than as due to Jesus."

UTTERANCES CALLED SPURIOUS.

On pages 205-0 of the book Dr. Sharman gives a reconstruction of the final discourse of Jesus, in which he sets out in separate columns such portions of it as he considers interpolations or editorial utterances. Here are some of the utterances which he sets down as spurious.

"But first must he suffer many things and be rejected of his generation."

"Whosoever shall seek to gain his life shall lose it ; but whosoever shall lose his life shall preserve it."

"Watch, therefore, for ye know not the day nor the hour."

"And the gospel must first be preached unto all the nations."

"But that he endureth to the end, the same shall be saved."

"Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

"Take ye heed, wntch and pray."

Dr. Sharman declined to commit himself as to his views on the divinity of Christ, or on any other phase of his life and work "not properly within the scope of the book." He has been at the university founded by John D. Rockefeller for two years. He was graduated from the I'niversity of Toronto in 1891 and took a doctor's degree three years ago.

— From the Chicatjo Examiner.

Puts Religion In Dodo Class

That the rehgions of orthodoxy are as obsolete as the Dodo, so far as their applicability to everyday existence in a working world is concerned, is the startling assertion made by Professor George Burman Foster in his new book, "The Function of Religion in Man's Struggle for Existence," which is off the presses today.

Blind, unreasoning religious dogma is declared to be the cause of grievous moral injury inflicted by the churches on the men of today, the former upholding ancient fable as fact and picturing the God of the universe as the Bible God of the Book of Genesis.

The book is likely to create as wide a discussion in and out of the ministry as was caused three years ago when the same author's "The Finality of the Christian Religion" attacked the authority of the church. Calls God a Symbol.

Professor Foster says that God is a symbol to designate God in ideal-achieving capacity, also that:

1. God was made by man — not man by God.

2. Modern people who do not go to church often remain away, not because they are bad, but because they are good.

3. God did not create the world by magic — nothing was ever made from nothing.

4. The orthodox idea of religion must be relegated to the clairvoyant, the astrologer, the card reader and the spiritualist.

5. Modern experience would not create the trinity God of the church any more than it would the Messiah of the primitive Christian community.

6. I am now trying to show the church that it has been on the wrong

j track with its instinct of self-preservation dogging the steps of 'science — with its love for dogma rather than its love for

Strays From Humanism.

Professor Foster declares that becaiise of the worship of dogma in the pulpits of the world religion has come to be clericalism far more than humanism, and adds:

"It is for this reason that there has grown up in many circles something akin to contempt for the three words, 'church,' 'sermon,' 'dogmatics.'

"Church — a whited sepulcher, full of dead men's bones, a place where death is treated as though it were life and life as though it were death.

"Preaching — proof that there are still such things as sounding brass and clanging cymbals.

"Dogmatics — that science whose only right to be is that men may see what a science ought not to be; that science which clarifies what the heart would fain keep as a mystery and mystifies what the head would fain clarify.

Conflicts in the Bible.

" 'I am a Bible believer. My faith is the faith of the Bible.' That is a common boast. But precisely what does it mean? Is there a single sharply defined unitary faith in the Bible that you can appropriate? He who calls himself a Bible believer has not weighed his words. He must choose from among the Bible faiths that which he wants. There is not a single Bible believer today among the theologians, because they know the contents of the Bible, and thus they know how often the faith of the Bible changes and how often new and old fight each other.

"In one way and another men have so long regarded human nature as damned that any opposition to the view is regarded as iconoclastic. But from all this paralyzing pessimism we must conquer some honor for the human capacity of initiative and achievement,

"There is only one thing that will save religion — that is, the freedom of rehgion — the freedom of faith. This alone is the inner living religion of the heart,"

— From the Chicago American.

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CHAPTER I. The Kingdom of Satanas

How poor are the thrones of the kings, if we compare them with those majestic heritages or powers within the soul to which all may happily aspire. How contemptible are the biblical books, with their absurdities and cruelties and frightful pictures, if we contrast them with the original teaching of The Master, Jesus. Who that is in his senses will believe that there was a first and a second and a third day, with evening and morning without sun, moon, and stars, and the first without a heaven! And who is such an idiot as to believe that God, like a husbandman, planted trees in paradise in Eden, towards the east, and planted a tree of life in it, a visible and palpable tree, so that anyone eating of it should receive life; and again, by eating of another tree should receive knowledge of good and evil ? And as for God being said to walk in paradise, with Adam being hid under a tree, I conceive that no man doubts that these things are said by scripture in a figurative sense. Yet bishops and priests who are editing what is called ^^The Speaker's Commentary on the Bible'' treat them all as dry, hard, literal facts, and no fables at all. It is melancholy to think that so many millions, in what is called *^an enlightened age, ' ' should be gravely asked by high prelates and dignitaries to believe in such fables; but so it is. We are taught to put faith in the most foolish nonsense of the past ages, because, forsooth, the Jews are said to have believed it. Yet, what did their belief achieve! So shocking were the corruptions which that cancerous creed was scattering widely in the days of Jesus, as petro-paulism is at present, that the Basilidians held that the God of the Jews was Satanas himself, all whose favorites were the most infamous of mankind; that to subvert his power, one of the Celestial ^ons was sent by the Supreme being to enter into the body of the man Jesus in the shape of a dove; and that Jesus thus conquered the Kingdom of Satanas.

UNITY OF GOD.

There is only One God. He is Uncreated and Infinite; and He alone can say, I am He that is. Hie is Life; because He is everything ; He alone is Life ; Life is One, and it cannot essentially appertain to two, otherwise there would be two gods.

Unless God were One, the Universe could not have been created or preserved. The Universe is a coherent and uniform work from first to last, and depends upon God, as does the body upon the soul. It is so created that God may be everywhere present, and keep the whole and all its parts under His government and observation.

THE INFINITY OF GOD.

As the mind, in the course of Philosophizing, peers into and courses over finite Nature, it cannot but at last arrive at the utterly Unknown and Inexplicable, that is, at the Infinite ; and, as the Infinite is identical with the nonfinite, the mind there stops; there finds an insurmountable and impenetrable difficulty, a Gordian knot. The Philosopher, then, by a thousand curious efforts labors to know what the Infinite can be ; what the Infinite God is like ; what can be the nature of an Essence without end or boundary ; and what that Something is, of the qualities of which Philosophy is doomed to perpetual ignorance; whether the Infinite is identical with the divine; whether there be aught in Nature which can be said to be Infinite; whether the Infinite is beyond Nature, and whether the qualities of the Infinite are to be discovered by means of Nature. The Philosopher, impatient to solve the difficulty, whets his mind, consults all the oracles of Reason, and collects a thousand arguments from his Memory. Yet it will be observed that the Philosopher, his Eeason, his Memory, and all the powers and knowledge he can command, are Finite, and being Finite, can make no approach to the Infinite. He may come, indeed, to the conclusion that Nature and God are One, but that is to deny the Infinite, for Nature is Finite. I will admit, he continues, that by no comparison with things Finite, and by no similitude, and by no force or faculty of the understanding can we penetrate into the Divine Infinity. I will also go further and grant that not even Angels can penetrate to the Infinity of God. To narrow the discussion, he asks his reader to accept the conclusion that in Nature the Infinite is impossible. Nature is composed of Finites, and Finites, though multiplied indefinitely, can never become Infinite. Admitting, then, that the Universe, Nature or Creation, is finite, he next inquires, by whom was the Universe created, caused, or finited ! If it be answered that Nature crecated or originated itself, a reply is made which is repugnant to Eeason; for that is saying that it existed before it did exist; that it created itself. If it be said that God created Nature, and God be thought of as finite, the question is not answered, but evaded or deferred; for if God be finite, we renew our inquiry and ask, by whom was God finited, created, or caused? We have here the child's question, following the instruction that God made him: *^Then who made God"?" Thus driven in-

N — t wards from Finite to Finite, from Cause to Cause, we are at last compelled to stop and own a first and Original canse, uncaused and unfinite, and therefore Infinite.

HOW GOD BECOMES VISIBLE.

God is Infinite, and the Human mind cannot discover what is the quality of the Infinite. We can only define it as the Infinite All, and that is subsists in itself, and is thereby the Very and the One only Substance ; and since nothing is predicable of the substance unless it be a form, that the Infinite is also the very and the one only Form. It is vain, then, to desire to know God in His Esse or in His Substance. It is enough to acknowledge Him from things Finite — that is, from things created, in which He infinitely is. These passages should satisfy even metaphysicians. Now comes the question. If none can see God, how does Swedenborg explain His manifestation to himself? Thus: Though God, inasmuch as He is Infinite, transcends finite apprehension, He conjoins Himself with Humanity through finite appearances.

He is seen by the Angels as the Sun of Heaven, the Source of their heat and light. Ever apparent to their eyes as a Sun, yet when they think interiorly, they do not think of God otherwise than in themselves. Let not anyone cherish the error that the Lord is among the Angels as a king is in his kingdom. To appearance He is in the Sun above them, but as to reality He is in them.

They who do not think beyond the sense of the letter cannot believe otherwise than that the Creation described in the first and second chapters of Genesis means the Creation of the Universe ; and that within six days sky,* and earth, and Sea, and all