PSYCHO-SCIENTIFIC FRONTIERS Selected publications from a variety of subjects of psycho-scientific research. Editor: Rolf Linnemann (Certificated Engineer) * Steinweg 3b * 32108 Bad Salzuflen * Tel. (05222) 6558 Internet: https://www.psygrenz.com Translator’s email : evak30@optusnet.com.au E-Mail: RoLi@psygrenz.de Pastor Johannes Greber Communicating with God’s World of Spirit – its laws and its purpose Personal experiences of a Catholic priest Index Chapters 8 and 9 8. 0 Christ’s Teachings and Today’s Christianity (By Priest Johannes Greber)........................... 3 8. 1 God’s World of Spirit as a source for the Truth (From the SPHERES of LIGHT) ............ 4 8. 2 There is no infallible Papacy as a Source of the Truth .......................................................10 8. 3 There is no tri-entity God ............................................................................................................15 8. 4 Falsifications in the Bible ...........................................................................................................18 8. 5 There is no eternal Hell ...............................................................................................................28 8. 6 The Origin of the Human Spirit and Original Sin ..................................................................32 8. 7 The Concept of Sin .......................................................................................................................35 8. 8 The Resurrection of the Dead is not the resurrection of the Bodies ..............................37 8. 9 The meaning of Baptism .............................................................................................................41 8. 10 The sending of the Spirit (Confirmation) ..............................................................................44 8. 11 The meaning of the Eucharist .................................................................................................46 8. 12 Repentance – Confession - Absolution ................................................................................55
- 2 - 8. 13 Repentance exercises - Celibacy ...........................................................................................58 8. 14 Destitution ....................................................................................................................................61 8. 15 Chastity as Celibacy ..................................................................................................................63 8. 16 Obeisance towards Human Authority as Ideals of Perfection ........................................66 8. 17 Indulgence – Saints – Adoration of Saints ..........................................................................69 8. 18 The meaning of Anointing the Sick (Last Rites) ..................................................................74 8. 19 The Priesthood of the early Christians and the Priesthood of today ...........................76 9. 0 Epilogue (By Priest Johannes Greber) ...........................................................................................79
- 3 - 8. 0 Christ’s Teachings and Today’s Christianity (By Priest Johannes Greber) See to it that no one captivates you by means of so-called science or by the foolish and misleading teachings grounded on the traditions of men; for they have their source in the evil spirit powers that rule the world, but have nothing in common with the teachings of Christ. (Colossians 2: 8) During the first spiritistic séance I attended I had asked the spirit that was speaking through the medium: Why is it that the teachings of Christ no longer seem to exert any influence upon the people of today? I had been told in reply that we no longer possess Christ’s teachings in their original purity and clarity, that in the course of time, many human errors had crept into Christianity. Later on, I received a detailed exposition, in which the true teachings of Christ were compared with the doctrines of the Christian churches of today, and particularly with those of the Catholic faith, of which I was a priest. I was told:
- 4 - 8. 1 God’s World of Spirit as a source for the Truth (From the SPHERES of LIGHT) Where is the water of a brook purest and clearest? Near the source or near the mouth? Most assuredly, near the source. As the spring water flows on as a streamlet, however, it loses its freshness and with it its purity and clearness. Muddy waters coming into it right and left mingle with its current. Further down it receives the drainage from human habitations, human and animal waste, and that of human industry. It no longer refreshes those who would drink its waters to quench their thirst. They drink of it only with revulsion and only as a last resort, when no spring water is to be had. The same may be said of the truth. Taken at its source, it is a refreshing drink that bestows new life, but when it is drawn from the stream that has flowed for a distance through the lowlands of human error and worldly passions, its purity and freshness are gone. The falsehoods and errors that have been mixed in have given it a bad taste. • The thirsty truth-seeker drinks from this murky stream only with inner repugnance, and only when denied the clear water of the fountainhead of truth. The teachings of Christ met with a fate like that of the water from a spring that, as a brook, flows by the dwellings of men. They, too, were defiled when they flowed through human channels. • The evil that is in men and the Powers of Evil that surround them have so sullied and rendered unpalatable Christ’s pure teachings, that they have lost their life-giving power. The source of all truth is God. A source to which man cannot ascend in his earthly form. He must therefore depend upon the bearers of the truth who draw from that source. These are God’s spirit messengers. • Only they are admitted to that source. • Only they possess the clean vessels in which the truth can be brought fresh and unsullied to mankind. The first and the greatest of truth-bearers was Christ as a spirit, in the days preceding his incarnation. It was he who, partly personally, partly through his subordinates in the spirit world, brought the drink of truth to early humanity. Hence the active intercourse with spirits by the sick and exhausted world of Old Testament times. Hence, also, the coming and going, in the early days of the Christian era, of truth-bearing spirits, who constantly drew upon God’s fountainhead and brought the water of truth, at Christ’s behest, to the human souls who thirsted for the truth.
- 5 - • It is, therefore, one of the fundamental teachings of the true Christian faith that humans cannot proclaim the truth out of their own consciousness. They can do so only as instruments of God’s spirit world. Even Christ as a mortal could not ascend of his own volition to the source of the truth. As a man, he had no more inherent knowledge of the truth than other humans. What he had known in the days when he, as the first-created spirit, dwelt with God had been as completely obliterated from his memory by his entry into a material body as the knowledge of a previous existence is obliterated from the recollection of other humans, although there was a time when they too had dwelled with the Father. • The property of matter by which the recollection of one's previous existence is wiped out exerted the same effect upon the incarnated Christ that it exerts upon every other spirit incarnated in human form. Thus, after his incarnation also Christ was dependent upon the spirit messengers sent to him by the Father. He acknowledged this when he said: John 1: 51: ‘You shall see the messengers of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man.’ He was but God’s envoy, and had no advantage over the Divine envoys that had preceded him, for they, too, had been instructed by God’s spirits. Enoch, Abraham, Moses, and all of the Old Testament prophets did not preach things that had evolved in their own minds, but all of them, in Peter's words, ‘spoke God’s word under the guidance of a holy spirit.’ A spirit of God inspired them with what they were to say. Christ repeatedly assures his hearers that he speaks not of his own knowledge, but only what he has heard from the Father. It was the Father Who gave him the required teachings, through His spirit messengers who constantly ascended and descended above the Son of Man. John 8: 28: ‘You will realize that I do nothing of myself but only speak as my Father has taught me.’ John 8: 26: ‘I speak to the world only those things that I have heard from Him.’ The same fountainhead of truth from which Christ had drawn was to serve all those who came to spread his gospel after him. First his Apostles, who were not simply to repeat what they had learned from Christ as they interpreted it. Misinterpretations easily slip in when humans are called upon to repeat what someone else has said. Of a hundred listeners to the same speaker, every one of them, when asked to repeat his remarks, will in one point or another say something different from what the speaker said or meant. • Hence, also the Apostles were to be instructed anew by the spirits of the truth about the things that they had learned from Christ as a man, to make sure that his words suffer no distortion from their erroneous interpretation. They were to receive from God’s spirits both confirmation of the teachings proclaimed by Christ and certain new truths that Christ had had to withhold from them, either because under God’s Plan of Salvation these truths could not be proclaimed before the Redeemer’s death, or because the
- 6 - Apostles themselves were not yet mature enough to receive them, and so would not have understood them. “You will find this statement of mine confirmed in Christ’s own words: John 14: 16: ‘I will ask the Father to send you another helper, who will be with you always, the spirit world of truth.’ John 16: 12- 13: ‘I have much more to say to you, but you cannot bear it now. However, when the spirit world of truth has come, they will introduce you to the whole truth.’ John 14: 26: ‘The helper, however, the holy spirit world, which the Father will send in my name, will teach you whatever else you need to know and will remind you of all that I have told you.’ According to these words, then, the spirits of truth had a twofold task. First, they were to remind the faithful what Christ as a man had told them, and to confirm its truth. Beyond that, they were to continue the teaching that Christ had begun, and to proclaim those further truths that he had purposely withheld for the abovementioned reasons. • Moreover, the spirits of God were to be with the faithful forever, since, with the power of evil and the weakness of man, the danger of error was ever present. Subsequent generations must not be dependent upon the religious records of their ancestors, for such human records would bear no guarantee of truthfulness, and those to whom they were handed down could not discern what was derived from God’s wellspring of truth and what was attributable to human error. “Thus, after Christ’s corporeal death God’s messengers arrived constantly as spirits of truth, according to his promise. The Apostles continually cite them when exhorting their hearers to believe in their teachings. Paul’s writings, especially, abound in references to these messengers. I Corinthians 2: 4-5: ‘The things that I have said and preached I did not lay before you in impressive words of human wisdom, but it was a spirit of God and God’s power that spoke through me. Your faith was to be founded not on human wisdom, but on God's power.’ I Corinthians 2: 10-14: ‘But to us, God has revealed these things through his spirit..... Now the spirits we have received are not the spirits that rule the world, but spirits that come from God. We preach not in words taught by human wisdom, but in words that are taught to us by God’s spirits; thus, we deliver the spirit’s message in the same words in which the spirit gave it to us. True, a worldly minded person does not accept what comes from a spirit of God, for he considers it foolishness. He is not fit to understand it, because it must be judged spiritually.’ II Corinthians 3: 3: ‘You are an epistle of Christ, written by us as servants of Christ, not with ink, but with a spirit of the living God.’ Galatians 1: 11-12: ‘Let me say to you, dear brothers, that the gospel I preach is not the word of men. I neither received it from men, nor was it taught to me, but it was imparted to me through a revelation from Jesus Christ.’
- 7 - Not only the Apostles received their teachings from God’s spirits, but also the ‘mediums’, who were to be found in every community. As you already know, they were called ‘prophets’.. Paul writes that the mysteries of Christ ‘have now been revealed to his holy apostles and “prophets” by a spirit of God.’ (Ephesians 3: 5) It was through these mediums as the instruments of the good spirits that the faithful could at any time ascertain whether a doctrine was true and how it was to be understood. Hence Paul writes to the Philippians: Philippians 3: 15: ‘If you hold a different opinion on any point, God will enlighten you on that point also.’ They could inquire of God at their religious gatherings, and were answered by His spirits speaking through the mediums. “Speaking of the earlier prophets as well as of those who preached the gospel in his own day, Peter says that they ‘preached the gospel by the power of a holy spirit sent from heaven’ (I Peter 1: 12), to which he adds in another epistle: ‘... II Peter 1: 21: ‘For no prophecy ever came about by the human will; it is only by God's command that people have spoken as instruments of a holy spirit’. • The word ‘prophecy’, which occurs so often in the Bible, does not mean, as you believe, the prediction of an event to come, but all speech by a spirit of God through a human medium. In the Old Testament God exhorted mankind to seek the truth from Him: ‘Ask me!’ – and He gave it to them through His spirit messengers. • By his own confession, Christ, as a mortal, received the truth from spirits of God. He promises his Apostles that they too shall learn the whole truth from spirits of truth. The Apostles testify that this promise of Christ's was fulfilled, and that they received their teachings from God’s spirits. And whence does today’s Christianity draw the truth? Can the ministers of the various Christian denominations say of themselves that a spirit of God is speaking through them? Can they testify, as did Paul, that what they preach is not the word of men, that they neither received it from men, nor was it taught to them, but that it was imparted to them through a revelation from Jesus Christ? They cannot! They are in the employ of their churches. • As whose respective creeds they studied under human instruction at schools, seminaries and universities. What they absorbed there was human wisdom, professorial wisdom, with all of its errors, and that is what they preach to their congregations. Of spirits as messengers from God and as heralds of the truth they know nothing. In their eyes it is, to use one of Paul’s terms, foolishness to expect any further teachings from a spirit of God today. They believe that no further teachings are needed in this day and age. In their opinion, such teachings may have been necessary in the days when men were supposedly much more ignorant than they are in your enlightened age.
- 8 - A man like Moses still had to communicate with God’s spirit world and to ‘inquire of God’ in order to learn the truth. So also did the great prophets, Christ himself, as well as his Apostles. But nowadays all that is considered old-fashioned and a thing of the past. To be sure, you have made great progress in science, you can all read and write and have millions of books you can consult. And in addition, you have no end of learned theologians, doctors of divinity and professors. They must know what the truth is. Actually, it is precisely these doctors and professors of ‘sacred theology’ who are responsible for the introduction of those doctrines against which Paul utters these words of warning: Colossians 2: 8: ‘See to it that no one captivates you by means of science and vain deception that is grounded in the traditions of men, in the spirit powers that rule the world, but has nothing in common with the teaching of Christ.’ I Timothy 1: 7: ‘They wish to be regarded as scholars, although they do not understand the meaning of the terms they use or the things of which they speak with so much assurance.’ Jude: 19: ‘These are the people who cause divisions, purely sensual people, who have not received a holy spirit.’ The spirit world of God has long since been eliminated from the Christian creeds; the heads of the churches have expelled the holy spirit. But wherever spirits of God have been forced to yield, spirits of another nature presented themselves, like those of which Paul writes to Timothy: I Timothy 4: 1: ‘God’s spirit world declares expressly that in times to come, many will fall away from the true faith and turn to spirits of deceit and doctrines inspired by demons.’ Into the place of the good spirits stepped the Powers of Evil. Their chief concern it is to obscure and to reverse the truth, an end which they seek to accomplish by playing upon every human weakness, such as: • Human vanity and • scholars’ pride, • or the greed for power, distinction, money and luxury. All of these motives are utilized by them to tamper with the truths of God’s wisdom, love and mercy, and to forge these into chains with which the heads of the churches manacle their poor, inexperienced adherents and render them subservient. The root of all evil is g r e e d – the love of money. Money plays an important role also in your Christian churches. Satan knew what he was doing when he used money as bait also in the field of religion. He knew that this was the surest way of binding
- 9 - the spiritual leaders to error. He knew that none of them would be quick to give up a well-paid position for life as the religious servant of a church, even if they recognized the erroneousness of the doctrines they were preaching. Thus, it came about that, since the time when communication with God’s spirit world as the sole road to the truth was dispensed with, errors of the most varied and far-reaching nature have crept into Christianity. Century by century conditions grew worse. Truth after truth was contaminated by error and rendered unpalatable. And what has been the result? • Today you have before you a Christianity split into a hundred parts, into countless creeds, each one of which proclaims a separate truth and each one of which contends that its creed alone represents the true teachings of Christ. Do you wonder that a Christianity so adulterated and torn has ceased to exert an influence on mankind? • Restore to humanity the faith of the early Christians! • Remove from its shoulders those spiritual burdens imposed by manmade dogmas derived from a thirst for power. Let mankind have access once more to God’s messengers of truth – and you will be amazed to see how much influence true Christianity can have, even on the people of today.
- 10 - 8. 2 There is no infallible Papacy as a Source of the Truth The Catholic Church seeks to explain this breaking up into so many Christian ‘sects’, as it calls them, by saying that all other Christian denominations have fallen away from it, the only true church and the only one that leads to salvation. But I shall show you that even the Catholic Church retains scarcely anything of the Christianity of Christ and his Apostles. It has, true enough, succeeded in creating a human substitute for the Divine spirits so much in evidence in the early days of the Christian era. It introduced the doctrine of ‘papal infallibility’. This solved the problem of the truth in the simplest way, sparing Christ the labour of sending the spirits of truth to erring humanity as he had promised. He no longer needed to fulfill his promise to remain with the faithful, even unto the end of the world, for now there was a ‘Vicar of Christ’ on earth. Where there is a vicar, the individual who is represented need no longer appear. • Under this doctrine of an ‘infallible Vicar of Christ on earth’, the source from which the Divine truths could be derived was placed wholly into the hands of erring, sinful mortals, to the exclusion of God’s messengers, thus opening the door to human caprice and lust for power. You may proclaim that the papal elections are held under the guidance of the ‘Holy Spirit’, but you cannot cite a single instance in which a pope was chosen by a spirit of God. Or has it ever happened at a papal election that a spirit of God, using one of the electors as God’s instrument, announced who was to become pope, as had God’s spirits through the mediums in the early Christian churches whenever an elder or a bishop was to be ordained. Just look at the history of the papal elections. • Were they not at times conducted in a manner positively diabolical? • Were not intrigues of all kinds and even armed force resorted to, in order to place the tiara upon the heads of adherents and favourites of certain families? • Were not a succession of popes instruments of hell in their actions and their daily lives rather than ‘Vicars of Christ’? In order to evade this issue, you have resorted to the strange expedient of distinguishing between the pope as a man and the pope as the ‘vicar of Christ’, claiming that even the most evil of men, as soon as he becomes pope, represents Christ and acquires infallibility. Satan's tool and at the same time the deputy of Christ? Could there be any greater blasphemy of Christ and of God? Would any human being allow his greatest enemy to act as his deputy even for an hour? Assuredly not. And you think God and Christ would do that?
- 11 - That God would entrust the great gifts of His order of Salvation to a servant of hell? Common sense should tell you that this is impossible. • God’s spirits bring their gifts only to the righteous, and remain with them only while they retain their righteousness. This is demonstrated by the story of Saul.. As long as that Divinely gifted monarch remained obedient to God, he was in daily communication with the Divine spirit world and could ‘inquire of God’ whenever he felt the need of enlightenment, invariably receiving his answer from the spirits of truth. • When, however, he broke faith with God, this communication with God's spirit world was instantly interrupted. The inquiries he addressed to God remained unanswered, and in the place of the Divine spirits, evil spirits took possession of him. At one stroke he was deprived of all his great gifts. No wicked man can ever be the holder of God’s sacred gifts, not even if he is the pope. It follows that among the popes, the wicked ones at least could never have been infallible, and since you have no means of knowing whether a pope, or indeed any human, is at heart friendly or hostile to God, you can never be sure whether a pope’s doctrines are true or erroneous. • God alone chooses those among men to whom He sends His spirits of truth. And no human choice can establish a mortal as the bearer of God’s truths. Not even Christ selected his Apostles according to his own judgment, for it is expressly stated in the Acts that he selected them ‘through a holy spirit’. (Acts 1:2) It follows that God cannot make the gift of infallibility contingent upon any office held by the grace of man, as is the case with the papacy. “Consequently, also, the interpretations given to many parts of the New Testament in support of papal infallibility are wholly erroneous. Among the passages so cited are the words addressed to Peter by Jesus: Matthew 16: 18-19: ‘Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. I will give unto thee the keys to the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.’ From these words you conclude that Peter, the man, was the foundation of the church of Christ; that as the leader of that church he could not err in his proclamation of the truth, and that, moreover, he had been invested with the power to bind and to lose the members of the church. Now that office has been passed on to his successors, the popes of the Church of Rome. Consequently, it is claimed, they have the same gifts and powers that once were Peter’s. These are all great fallacies. • It was not Peter the man but Peter’s faith to which Christ referred as the rock on which his church was to be built.
- 12 - Peter’s belief in Christ as the Divinely sent Messiah is the eternal, everlasting rock against which hell cannot prevail, not the person of Peter, who very soon afterwards was vanquished by hell when he denied his Master three times under oath. • He thus showed how little God can depend upon humans, and that no Plan of Salvation can rest upon them. That would be building on sand! One thing only is immutable: • The truth, and the faith in the truth conveyed by the spirits of God. Peter, too, had received the truth – that Christ was the Messiah – from messengers of God, for as Christ said: ‘Flesh and blood has not revealed that unto thee, but my Father who is in heaven.’ It was because Peter had received this revelation from spirits of God that he believed it. And in this belief he stood upon unyielding rock. For the spirit world of God does not lie. Whoever does as Peter did stands on the same rock upon which Peter rested his faith. • Whoever is ready to receive God’s truth from the hands of God’s messengers of truth and to believe in it belongs to the Church of Christ. It is therefore a Church of the spirit. • It recognizes no external membership in the form of membership in an earthly organized religion. • It recognizes no bishops and priests with the broad powers assumed by the clergy of the Catholic Church. • It recognizes no infallible Pope. • Christ has no deputy on earth. • People of every religion in the world belong to the church of Christ. This spiritual Church of Christ can never be overcome by Evil, for it is the source of the truth, and truth is unconquerable. Its messengers of truth are not people – not popes, bishops or priests – but spirits of God. • The ‘keys to the kingdom of Heaven’, which Christ promised to give to Peter because of his faith, are God’s truths. By means of them he was ‘to bind and to lose’ by passing the keys on to those who lay bound in the chains of error.
- 13 - Whoever rejected those keys by opposing truth with unbelief would be bound closer than ever to his error, but the bonds of those who eagerly accepted the proffered key would be loosed. The binding and loosing applied to terrestrial existence as well as especially to life in the Beyond. The same metaphor of the ‘keys to the kingdom of heaven’ is used by Christ in speaking to the spiritual leaders of the Jewish people of his day. With the false doctrines that they preached, they had given the Jewish people the wrong key, a key with which the doors of the kingdom of heaven could not be opened. The right key, which was offered by John the Baptist and by Christ himself and which the people were ready to receive, was torn from their hands by the Jewish clergy. That is why Christ exclaimed: Matthew 23: 13: ‘Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites that you are! You close the kingdom of heaven to mankind. You yourselves do not enter, and you will not let those enter who would like to.’ The words: ‘Feed my lambs, feed my sheep’, which Christ after his Resurrection addressed to Peter, are also interpreted by you as indicative of a favouring of Peter. This is not the case. Peter had publicly denied his Master three times under oath, and according to all human standards it was to be expected that Christ would dismiss the unfaithful disciple from his service and relieve him of his apostolic office. Peter himself fully expected this, remembering Christ’s words: Matthew 10, 33: ‘Whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father, who is in heaven.’ This the course you humans would have taken under the circumstances. but Christ had mercy on the repentant Peter. He restored him to his apostleship and also conferred the duties of a shepherd upon him. Peter was allowed, in spite of his breach of faith, to lead his fellowmen to the pastures of truth on an equal footing with the other Apostles. Christ’s question to Peter, ‘Do you love me?’, repeated three times, was intended to remind Peter of his thrice-repeated denial, and to bring home to him God’s great goodness towards him in retaining him as an evangelist of the kingdom of God and as an instrument of God’s spirits despite all that had happened. You see how mistaken the interpretations are that your [Catholic] church gives for the passages in question and that these cannot be construed to support a preferred status for Peter or the doctrine of papal infallibility. Hell has long since conquered that church, and Evil is also the author of the doctrine of papal infallibility. Inasmuch as most of the doctrines of that church are wholly erroneous, hell is intent upon perpetuating them among mankind as long as possible. This end is best achieved by means of the coercive measure of infallibility, for the church, having taught its errors under the sanction of infallibility, cannot now retract them. To surrender them would be to commit self-destruction. Your papal doctrine piles untruth upon untruth. • Thus, it is historically untrue that the Bishop of Rome is the direct successor to Peter in the Apostolic office, for the bishops of the first Christian congregations were neither elected as such by their fellowmen, nor appointed by the Apostles, but were appointed exclusively by the manifesting spirits of God.
- 14 - If it occasionally happened that an Apostle or the disciple of an Apostle ordained someone as bishop, this was done only after a spirit of God had named the person to be so ordained. Moreover, no bishop was another’s superior and no Apostle had any greater powers than his fellows. Galatians 2: 6: ‘It matters not to me’, says Paul, ‘in what high esteem the Apostles were held. God takes no account of a person’s rank.’ In the same epistle he relates how on one occasion he had opposed the Apostle Peter vigorously and had reproached him before the entire community, claiming that his behaviour was not in keeping with the true gospel. Had it sufficed for God to reveal the gospel to Peter as the first infallible pope, the early Christian churches would have had no need of visits by God’s spirits, since in Peter they would have had an infallible source of the truth. Moreover, why was Paul not sent to Peter in order that he might receive the truth from him? The distance between them was not great. Why was he, as he himself says, taught by Christ himself?
- 15 - 8. 3 There is no tri-entity God I shall now lay before you in their broad outlines certain individual truths in Christ's teachings, comparing them with the doctrines of modern Christianity and in particular with those you have heretofore preached as a member of the Catholic clergy. In so doing I fulfill the wish you have long cherished. This will also show the falsity of other doctrines that depart from the teachings of Christ in other Christian churches. 1. Christ taught a God in one person, the Creator of Heaven and Earth. He knows no triune God such as the Catholic and other Christian churches teach. Only the Father is God. None other is His equal, neither the Son, nor what you call the ‘Holy Ghost’.. After his Resurrection, Christ said: John 20: 17: ‘I ascend unto my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ According to the words of Christ, the Father is above all. John 10: 29: ‘My Father, who gave me the sheep, is greater than everything, and no one can snatch them out of the Father’s hand.’ If the Father is greater than everything, there is nothing equal to Him, and He is greater than the Son, a truth that Christ confirms with the words: John 14: 28: ‘the Father is greater than I.’ He also calls God the sole good being. Whenever Jesus was addressed as ‘good Master’, he would reply: Luke 18, 19: ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good save God alone.’ Because God is above everything, He can confer power upon whomsoever He will, as He did to His Son, whom He invested with the fullest powers. John 17: 2: ‘Thou hast given the Son power over all flesh in order that all that thou hast entrusted to him may have everlasting life.’ That Christ is not God I demonstrated to you with the help of the Holy Scriptures and in greater detail when I taught you concerning his life and his work. The truth, that only the Father, but not the Son, is God, is furthermore sustained by the teachings of the Apostles. Thus, Paul writes: I Corinthians 8: 4-6): ‘We know there is no God but the One. For although there may be such as are called gods in the heavens and on earth – and indeed there are many such gods and many such lords – there is for us Christians but one God, the Father, from whom all things are and for whom we were created.’ Furthermore, Paul calls the Father the ‘God of Jesus Christ’. Ephesians 1: 17: ‘May the God of our Lord Jesus Christ give unto you a spirit of wisdom.’ According to Paul also, Christ’s coming will be brought about:
- 16 - I Timothy 6: 15-16: ‘…through the only Almighty, who alone possesses immortality, and who dwells in unapproachable light.’ If the Father alone has immortality, the Son does not have it. If the Father is the only Almighty, the Son cannot be. It follows that the Son is not God, but is, as he calls himself and as the Apostles unanimously proclaim him to be, the ‘Son of God’, less than the Father, whose creation he is. The entire Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments, recognizes only one God in one person. The Father is God, and He only. Not one of His Sons, neither the first-born nor any of the others, is God. • Because you have made Christ into God, you have insuperable difficulties in understanding his personality, his life, his sufferings, and his death. You are prevented by your misconception from accepting his own clear statement of his relationship to the Father as what it really is: it is the relationship of a created being, albeit the highest such being, to God, its Creator. What absurd theories your theologians have had to invent, to bring the undeniable facts in the life of Jesus, as well as his own words, into harmony with his alleged Divinity. They have reconstructed the person of Jesus, claiming that in him as a man there were two spirits: one Divine, the other human. Hence Christ is alleged to have possessed a twofold will and a twofold knowledge: A Divine will and a human will, a Divine knowledge and a human knowledge. Nevertheless, both spirits are regarded as having constituted but a single personality. This is sheer madness. Every spirit possesses an independent personality, and not even God can fuse two spirits into a single personality, any more than He can fuse two human beings into one, omnipotent though He is, since it is inherently contradictory that two should be equal to one. Common sense should tell you that if Christ had been God, he could not have cried out from the Cross: ‘My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Could God forsake Himself, then? When, furthermore, it is related in the Holy Writ that Christ was raised from the dead by the power of the Father, what need was there of the Father’s power if Christ himself was God? According to your doctrine, after his death upon earth, he had divested himself of all human limitations, and was now only God and, as such, in every respect his Father’s equal. If so, he had the same power as his Father, and, possessing that power, why need he have depended upon power held by another? These contradictions are irreconcilable. And again, how do you explain the fact that Christ does not once assert: ‘I am God, my Father’s equal in all things’, and this despite the fact that he spoke of his relationship with God on innumerable occasions. Is it reasonable to assume that he never once spoke the truth and admitted that he was God? On the contrary, he calls himself only the ‘Son of God’, and maintains that he is dependent upon the Father for all things. He solemnly declares: ‘And this is the life eternal, that they should acknowledge Thee, the only true God, and him whom Thou didst send, Jesus Christ.’
- 17 - He is but God’s envoy; he is not God. Paul calls him the ‘firstling of creation’. • He was, therefore, created by God and is, hence, God’s creature, and thus no more God than all his fellow creatures.
- 18 - 8. 4 Falsifications in the Bible Inasmuch as nothing could be found in the New Testament to support the false doctrine that Christ is God, resort was had to the forgery of several Scriptural passages in order that the desired evidence might be forthcoming. Several of these I shall cite. In his Epistle to the Romans, Paul writes: Romans 9: 3-5: ‘Willingly would I be banished from my fellowship with Christ if I could thereby save my brothers, men of my own lineage according to the flesh. They are Israelites. Time was, when they were God’s people. They witnessed the glorious deeds of God; it was with them that He made His covenant; it was they to whom He gave the law, the true form of worship, the promises. Theirs are the patriarchs and from them was the mortal body of Christ descended. May the God Who rules over all be forever praised therefore. Amen.’ In this passage as elsewhere in his epistles, Paul voices his heartfelt thanks to God for the fact that the Messiah sprang from a people to whom he himself belonged, but the text has been altered to read: ‘and from them was the mortal body of Christ descended, who is God over all, forever praised.’ By means of this falsification, the Messiah was branded as God. A similar case of misrepresentation occurs in Paul’s Epistle to Titus: Titus 2: 13: ‘We are to wait for the blessed hope and for the coming of the glory of our great God and of our Saviour Jesus Christ.’ Paul speaks here of the glory of the great God, the attainment of which is the aim of all material Creation, and also of the glory of our Saviour, Jesus Christ, through which we shall be led into God’s glory, according to the words of Christ: ‘No one cometh unto the Father, but by me.’ Thus, Paul here distinguishes between the glory of the Father and the glory of Christ. The sense of this passage also has been distorted by its false wording: ‘We are to wait for the blessed hope and the coming of our great God and Saviour, Jesus Christ.’ This version is intended to convey to the reader the impression that Christ is the great God for whose glory we are to wait. “Of course, falsifications of this sort will immediately be apparent to anyone familiar with Paul’s epistles, for they know how clearly this Apostle distinguished between the person of Christ and the person of God in all of his writings, referring to the Father as the ‘God of Christ’, and to Christ only as the ‘Lord’ appointed by God. Paul taught that God will make all His enemies submit to the Son, the last one being Lucifer, the Prince of Death himself, and that then the Son will also submit to Him Who subjected everything to the Son, that God may be all in all. (I Corinthians 15: 27-28) “Paul’s salutation always runs: ‘Grace to you and peace from God, our Father – and from the Lord Jesus Christ. He never says ‘and from God, the Son’. If, therefore, there is any part of your present Bible that can be construed into something other than the truth that only the Father is God, then the fault lies either in the translation, or in a falsification
- 19 - of the Greek text from which that translation was made, and in some cases in a combination of both. You will find such an instance in Paul’s letter to the Philippians, in the passage that, according to your current translation, reads: Philippians 2: 5-7: ‘Let all be of a mind as was Jesus Christ, who, although he had a godly form, counted it not as deprivation to be equal with God, but relinquished himself, taking on the form of a servant.’ The correct text reads: ‘Let all be of a mind as was Jesus Christ, who, although in his outward appearance he looked like a god, counted it not as self-deprivation to humble himself before God, but relinquished himself, taking on the outward form of a bond servant.’ It is true that the celestial body of Christ as a spirit resembled a god, and that all spirits on seeing him for the first time think they are seeing God – so gloriously has God endowed His firstborn. The original text has been crudely falsified by substituting the words: ‘to be equal with God’, for the words: ‘to humble himself before God’. Inasmuch as I have just had occasion to use the words 'looked like a god’, I shall make mention of the opening passage of the Gospel of John, also cited as proof of the Divinity of Christ. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. First and foremost, the text should read: ‘... the Word was a god’; and not: ‘the Word was God’. In this passage John uses the term ‘a god’ as it was applied in his day to all who were God’s special instruments and who, as His envoys, stood in special communication with Him, the one true God. The same usage was employed by God when He spoke to Moses, the great messenger of God and Christ’s model, to whom He said: Exodus 4: 16: ‘And Aaron shall be thy spokesman unto the people; and he shall be thy mouth, and thou shalt be his “god”.’ Christ, also, when reproached by the Jews with making himself the equal of God by calling himself the ‘Son of God’, retorted with the question: ‘Is it not written in your law: I said, ye are gods? If the Scriptures called them “gods”, to whom God assigned a task, how can ye accuse me, whom the Father sanctified and sent into the world, of blasphemy because I said, I am the Son of God?’ What Christ says in these words is: ‘How can you accuse me of making myself God’s equal by calling myself His Son? Even if I had called myself “a god”, I would not have committed blasphemy, for those who have heretofore appeared as God’s envoys were called “gods”, because they came to carry out tasks assigned by God. How much more right have I, then, to call myself “a god”, since to me has been entrusted the greatest task ever assigned to an emissary of God’s! But I purposely refrain from calling myself “god”, in order to prevent any misinterpretation of the word, and call myself what I truly am, the Son of God.’
- 20 - Paul also writes: I Corinthians 8: 5-6: ‘For although there may be so-called “gods” in heaven or on earth – and indeed there are many such “gods” and many “lords” – yet for us Christians there is but one God, the Father ... and but one Lord, Jesus Christ.’ Paul here says that Christians should not continue to use the term ‘god’ in its derived sense, in which it is applied also to God's creatures, but should use the designation ‘God’ only when they mean the one true God, ‘the Father’, and that they should call no-one ‘Lord’ except Jesus Christ. They must therefore also not refer to Jesus Christ as ‘God’. Another falsification is found in the Epistle of John, the passage in question reading in its correct version: I John 5: 20: ‘We know that the Son of God has come to earth and has given us true understanding so that we might know the true God, and we are in communion with the true God, since we are in communion with his Son, Jesus Christ, who is true and eternal life.’ Besides other inaccuracies, the word ‘God’ has been added to the last sentence so that is reads: “This is the true God, and eternal life.’ What John teaches here is exactly what was said so often by Christ and by the Apostles, namely: God is the true God, but the Son also is true, for he speaks the words of God, teaching only as the Father has directed him. In everything that he proclaims, he is therefore as true as the Father Himself. Hence, those who are in communion with the Son are thereby also in communion with the true God. And since God has granted to His Son eternal life, the Son also is eternal life for all those who are in communion with him. The doctrine that in God there are three persons who together constitute only one God finds its main support in the grossly falsified passage in the Epistle of John, the correct text of which reads: I John 5: 8: ‘For there are three that bear witness, the Spirit, the water, and the blood: and these three are in accord.’ To this has been added the spurious sentence: ‘And there are three who bear witness in Heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Spirit, and these three are one’. Your Catholic theologians are well aware that this entire last sentence is a contrived insertion. Nevertheless, it is retained in the Catholic editions of the Bible, although other Christian denominations have eliminated it. Except for the passage I have mentioned, there is in the entire New Testament not the faintest evidence to support the doctrine that what you call the ‘Holy Ghost’ is a Deity equal to the Father. • The term “Holy Ghost’ as used in the New Testament means the entire good spirit world. • God is a ‘holy ghost’. He is the highest and most sacred of all spirits.
- 21 - • The Son of God is a ‘holy ghost’; he is the highest and most sacred of all created spirits. • The princes of heaven, like Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, and many others, are holy spirits. • All of God's legions are holy spirits. • Lucifer was also a holy spirit before his fall. • All of mankind, as well as the entire material creation were also holy spirits once. The great misunderstanding that has arisen from the term ‘the Holy Ghost’ is due to inaccurate translations of the Greek texts of the New Testament, for wherever ‘a’ holy spirit occurs, it has been translated for some unknown reason as ‘the’ holy spirit. This is all the more surprising, since the translators were men who had a command of the Greek language and who knew well enough how strictly the distinction between the definite and the indefinite article is observed especially in that tongue. During your studies you yourself learned Greek, the language in which the New Testament has come down to you, and you will no doubt remember enough of what you learned then to be able to confirm my statement by referring to the Greek New Testament. I shall cite only a few passages out of many. “Let us take the Gospel according to Matthew. In its opening chapter it says that Mary was with child of a holy spirit, not of the Holy Spirit. A few lines further down you find: ‘the child conceived in her is of a holy spirit’, not of the Holy Spirit, as though there were but one. “If you will now turn to the Gospel according to Luke, you will find the same thing. Here also the text should read: ‘A holy spirit shall come upon thee and the power of a very high being shall overshadow thee’, and not, as your (Catholic) translation has it: ‘The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee and the power of ‘The Most High’ shall overshadow thee.’ It was not ‘The Most High’, but one of the highest spirits of God who overshadowed Mary. So also, in the earlier reference to the birth of John, the correct reading is: ‘He shall be filled with a holy spirit, even from his mother’s womb.’ This also is true of the passage referring to Elizabeth, which should read: ‘She was filled with a holy spirit.’ Also, that relating to Zacharias, which should read: ‘He was filled with a holy spirit’. Christ says: Matthew 12: 28: ‘But if I cast out demons through a holy spirit....’ And John the Baptist declares: Mark 1: 7-8: ‘There comes after me one who shall baptize you in a holy spirit’ . In the first lines of the Acts of the Apostles it is related that Jesus chose his Apostles under the guidance of a holy spirit, and, in the second chapter, that on the day of Pentecost all those who were gathered were filled with a holy spirit.
- 22 - When explaining the 12th and the 14th chapters of the First Epistle to the Corinthians, I already called your attention to this disastrous error of translation, which has led to the belief that there is but one holy spirit, a Divine person, forming one Godhead with the Father, as your (the Catholic) church teaches. • In all passages where the Greek Text says ‘a’ holy spirit or ‘a’ spirit, your translators have written ‘the’ Holy Spirit or ‘the’ Spirit. Wherever the original Greek texts have ‘a’ spirit, one of many is meant. You therefore distort the meaning entirely by substituting: ‘the’ holy spirit. There are certain passages in those texts, it is true, where reference is made to ‘the’ holy spirit or ‘the’ spirit, but in those cases the term either means the spirit as distinguished from matter, as in the sentence: ‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak’, or else the reference is to the Spirit of God, that is, to God Himself, or to spirits of a certain kind such as ‘the spirit of light’, ‘the spirit of darkness’, ‘the spirit of truth’, ‘the spirit of comfort’ and others. This does not mean that there is only one spirit of light, of darkness, of truth, of comfort, of strength, etc., but is merely an instance in which the singular [the generic term] is employed in place of the plural. You have the same usage in your modern languages, for when you say to a sick person: ‘I will get the doctor’, you do not mean to imply that there is only one physician in the world, and when you speak of ‘the farmer’ having had a prosperous year, you are referring to all farmers collectively. So, too, you use the terms ‘the’ workman, ‘the’ lawyer, ‘the’ artist, ‘the’ theologian to mean all workmen, lawyers, artists and theologians. • When, therefore, Christ says: ‘I will send you the spirit of truth’, he means the spirits of truth, for as you already know, the Divine spirits are assigned to various callings according to their respective tasks. There are spirits of protection, spirits of battle, spirits of comfort, spirits of strength, spirits of wisdom and innumerable others. A spirit of truth has tasks of a very different nature to perform than has a spirit of Michael’s legions, and hence possesses different skills. A spirit of battle cannot take over the work of a spirit of comfort or of wisdom or of truth. Every spirit has its definite calling, and is equipped with the corresponding talents and strengths. Similarly, Lucifer has divided his hosts according to their specific tasks. He too has his fighting forces, his spirits of lying, of despondency, of greed, pride, envy, revenge, lust, and of every other vice. The different kinds of spirits, good and bad, are specialists in their fields and are well qualified to influence those on whom they work, either for good or for evil, within their respective domains. As you see, the doctrine of a triune Godhead is not only contrary to common sense, but is entirely unsupported by the Scriptures. Yet, although only the Father is God, while the Son and all the other spirits are His creatures, nevertheless a most intimate harmony and unity obtains between the Father, the Son and the good spirit world, a harmony of will and deed. What the Father wants, the Son wants also, and so do the spirit hosts under the Son’s command. God is the master and owner of all creation, spiritual and material; everything belongs to Him.
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