Who is the King of Glory? part deux

Below is another selection from Alvin Boyd Kuhn's book, "Who is the King of Glory?"

Hope you enjoy!

In sober earnest we have claimed that the unimaginable cosmic might of the Logos that swings the
galaxies through their orbits came to earth and was a man of flesh! Jesus, the second Person of
the Trinity! That millions have for centuries been made to "believe" such folly is a sickening
realization. This was one item in the catastrophe that was precipitated on half a world for sixteen
centuries as a result of turning myth and drama into alleged "history." A heavy price to pay for
bad scholarship! The pious faith of the ignorant Church Fathers did not save them from
precipitating the Western world into the Dark Ages, the blame for which has been laid at the
door of an innocuous "paganism" of the northern lands of Europe, whose systems of a
profounder esotericism were ruthlessly destroyed by advancing "Christianity" of the literalized
variety.
Perhaps it is now possible to round out the argument as to the comparative psychological
influence of a historical Christ and a dramatized typical Christ figure. Since the indwelling
activity of Christos is the basic indispensable factor in salvation, anything that weakens it must
be held detrimental to critically vital values. The great struggle in the human breast between the
impulses of the natural man and the implanted seed of divine growth is ever so critical, the forces
of "evil" resident in the carnal man so persistently powerful, and the issue of the conflict at all
stages so delicately balanced, that any influence which in the least degree lessens the developing
strength of the inner god, or which detracts from the personal effort to exercise its powers,
dangerously imperils the outcome and the individual’s evolutionary destiny. As the worship of
the historical Jesus does, by the very measure of its sincerity, divert attention from the culture of
the inner spirit, it becomes perilous to that degree. In the end there is no dodging this issue in the
moral field of our life. It is incontestable that the exact amount of psychic energy that we expend
in actualizing our reliance upon a historical savior is so much less available for our task of
developing the inner deity. While the outer savior is receiving our devotion, the inner Christ is
permitted to lie unawakened. Mankind is so constituted psychologically that by so much as it can
lean upon extraneous help it will not exert itself in its own behalf. The purpose of life in the flesh
is to force souls who have come here from the empyrean to exert themselves against pressure,
stress and strain in order to develop their greater potential divinity. It needs to be said in clarion tones for the benefit of overweening piety and uncritical faith, that any influence which in
the least degree diminishes the individual’s conviction of the necessity of reliance upon his own
hidden divinity must inexorably be calamitous for his progress. The image of Jesus the man and
the theological teaching of his power to save us intrude to break the force of the knowledge that
our only savior is within. And never will the mortal man be able to bring the full resultant of his
living experience in the world to bear upon the problem of his evolutionary growth until he
divests himself of all artificial props and stands squarely on his own feet, making his fight alone.
Only when he meets the exigencies of his life here by calling upon the resources of his potential
savior within him will he be fulfilling the conditions requisite to cultivate that savior’s dynamic
possibilities. If in the stress of experience he habitually looks to a hypothetical power outside
himself, he lets the real powers of his own divinity lie fallow.
Much so-called "spiritual science" of current development has worked on the assumption that a
technique adequate for attainment of consummate results in this field involves only subjective
effort. In the wake of the popularization of Hindu mysticism in the West practice has taken the
direction of an inward retirement. Values in consciousness are sought by way of detachment
from sensual experience and contemplation of purely spiritual things. But this movement stands
sorely in need of the reminder that the seed power or sheer potentiality of Godhood in man
requires for its development something more than mere meditation upon divine things. The spirit
might dwell eternally in the world of abstraction if it could follow its own inclination, as a man
might choose to lie comfortably in bed instead of getting up and exerting himself for desirable
ends. But if it did so it would never achieve its evolution. It would never grow. God could have
no children if his spirit did not go forth into an intercourse with matter, the eternal Mother, and
implant the seed of a new birth in her universal womb. For the birthing of his progeny, the gods,
archangels, angels, heroes and men, there is needed the conjunction of spiritual potentiality with
the active energies of what the Greeks called physis, or nature. Clear down the diapason from
God to atom every power of mind or soul has to be linked with its sakti, or physical energy, if it
is to implement its ideal structure for creative purposes. Spirit can not evolve when not in
relation to matter. It lies static, inactive; it is sheer ideal abstraction. To actualize its thought structures, to bring its creative designs to pass, it must
be wedded with matter. It must use the energies loaded in the atom of matter to realize its
entelechy (Aristotle), or final purpose. The whole flow of evolution, therefore, depends upon the
stimuli provided by the contingencies arising in and from the soul’s experiences in material
body. Without matter spirit can have no experience. Not the transcendent but the immanent deity
grows. Says Emerson, "The true doctrine of the Omnipresence is that God exists in all his parts
in every moss and cobweb."
The conditions of experience bring latent spiritual capacity to active expression under the impact
of the strong forces at play in the world of nature. Spirit awakes and exerts itself by virtue of the
necessity of responding to the incidence of blows from the side of matter. Even the dangers
threatening the existence or welfare of its own body, its instrument, on the good state of which
its own unfoldment depends, elicits its unexercised powers.
The concept of world salvation by a personal redeemer not one’s own inner deity is thus
inexpressibly wide of the mark for the basic meaning of religion. If the one and only begotten
Son of God performed the racial redemption, the god within each man would be deprived of the
opportunity for growth which is created only with the dawn of full consciousness of its own
entire responsibility for the consequences of acts. Any influence that depletes the utter reliance
of the outer personality upon the inner deity is an interference with the planned economics of
moral and spiritual evolution. It should have been noted in the study of homiletics that
manifestations of divine help, as if coming from an outside savior assumed to be Jesus--in olden
times the tribal god--generally occur when one has exhausted all known or available helps and is
forced by dire anguish to call upon some spiritual or cosmic agency in last despair. From this it
might be assumed that a degree of inner agony is just the stress needed to arouse sleeping
divinity to active exertion. Thus the exigencies of the outer man in mortal experience prove to be
the agencies of the divinization of the inner man. And the Christ of the age-old ritual dramas was
the type of the divine Self in humanity undergoing the strain, stress and strife requisite to bring to
light the grand epiphany of his solar glory.
What can be said for the psychological influence of the historical
Christ is that the concept has engendered in Western civilization for sixteen centuries a massive
emotionalism and sentimentalism arising from thought of his personal life and sufferings, which,
if it can be shown that the Gospels are not histories but spiritual dramas, that their contents were
in existence thousands of years before his alleged date, must be seen at last as the most
prodigious waste of psychic force, the most devastating hallucination and the most stinging
humiliation of pride in human history.