Two Critical Concepts

It is my conviction, after a lifetime of studying and teaching the Bible from a traditional Christian perspective and then opening my mind and heart to Steiner’s amazing intuitions, that neither the Nativity nor the Bible can be truly understood unless two concepts new to Christendom are taken by it to heart. The one who cannot look at these as at least being possible will profit little from reading on. The first necessity is to comprehend the true structure of every human being, and the second is to realize that human souls reincarnate. What the Bible calls “destiny,” and in the Orient is called “karma,” is a spiritual reality. The first of these necessary concepts is new to Christian theology. The second, when not rejected outright, has been consensually ignored. But Christendom is presented in our time with the essential cornerstone that its builders have thus far either rejected or overlooked.

Both of these concepts are fully elaborated and biblically documented in my longer work, The Burning Bush. Even the passage in Hebrews, “ ... it is appointed for men to die once, and after that comes judgment,” seemingly so devastating to the idea of reincarnation, is not contrary to it. In truth, it can be seen in my longer work to be even more essential to the reality of reincarnation than to its attempted refutation. That will become crystal clear when the function of the “judgment” it mentions and the distinction between “the judgment of the Father” and “the judgment of the Son” is understood. In this popular version we can touch upon each of these two essential concepts but lightly.

Existing prejudice, especially in the more conservative mind, will doubtless focus upon the second of these concepts, reincarnation and its related karma. It was almost precisely at the time when modern Bible commentaries began to be written (one Alfred Edersheim published his landmark commentary in 1883) that H. P. Blavatsky began to reveal the oriental perspectives of reincarnation in the West. Since that time, most of what has been written and said about reincarnation outside of anthroposophical circles must be taken as false and misleading, for reasons set out in The Burning Bush. We must leave for that larger work the extensive showing that the Bible has buried deep within its hold, and thus eventually mandates the acceptance of, the spiritual reality that the human soul, though not its bodies or earthly personalities, lives again and again, purified between lives by the “refiner’s fire” that burns away its dross. Only through this process of being born again and again can it attain to the eventual perfection required to fully return to its heavenly home. Only then does it not have to “die any more,” as Jesus says to the Sadducees in Luke’s Gospel. To Moses (as Jesus clearly implies in his answer to the Sadducees) it was the burning bush that is not consumed. To Isaiah it was the oak or terebinth whose stump was burned again and again but still retained its vitality to grow. It is of a shoot from just such a stump of the root of Jesse that the Gospels, especially Matthew, speak.

We mistakenly assume that the idea of reincarnation came only from the Orient, for it existed also earlier in the West. We have only to look to Plato, and then to the pre-existence of the soul in Origen’s work. It is simply that the destiny of the West was to delve more deeply into the development of the intellect, overshooting if you will in that direction, forgetting for a time its former knowledge, while the Orient stayed temporarily behind with its fading ancient traditions. Christ walked the Earth between East and West, and the time has arrived when our knowledge of his mission must come to fruition in order that East and West shall again become one.

We must see in the Blavatsky phenomenon merely one of the early stirrings of the divine intelligence, the first rifts in the cocoon of hidden biblical truths, as the right time for new revelations began to dawn, when human beings would be ready for them. What then came forth from Steiner as seed must break forth with the dawning of the third millennium.

We cannot hope to even begin to understand the mystery of the Nativity until we learn something about the structure of the human being. Our thoughts immediately go to matters of physiology and what one might expect to learn in medical training. But thus far this training, as we know it today, deals only with the sensually perceptible body. Even in its ventures into the mind it has been unable to progress much beyond that point.

Steiner has shown us, and the Bible extensively confirms, that the human “body” is threefold, composed really of three distinct bodies, the respective seeds for which were laid in three successive primeval “conditions of consciousness” before Earth evolution even began. Abraham brought with him from Ur (the word Ur itself has to do with origins or prototypes) at least some vague understanding of these, and they became the source of the names of the first three days of the ancient week, Saturday, Sunday and Monday (see 12 Encyclopedia Britannica 555, 1992, under “week”). Earth evolution is the fourth such condition of consciousness, and three more will follow it before the end of the sevenfold conditions when creation will fully return to its heavenly origin. (One might see in the Four Worlds of the Hopi Indian legend something of this ancient insight.)

The three “kingdoms” below humanity, the Mineral Kingdom, Plant Kingdom and Animal Kingdom, are made up of what we might call the beings that fell behind during these first three “conditions” so as to be servants of the highest kingdom on Earth, the Human Kingdom. The human being is not descended from any of these. Rather these are the by-products, so to speak, of the Human Kingdom, representing those that fell behind to progressively greater or lesser extent during the earlier conditions. The human being has in it something of each of these lower kingdoms, but these lower elements must be overcome in the last three conditions, during which creation will also be redeemed.

The human being’s three bodies are the physical body, the etheric body and the astral body. The physical is the form for mineral accumulation. The etheric is also called the life body, and is what gives life and healing. The astral body is the consciousness body. Our senses are the tools of the astral body which is the seat of all passions, desires, pain, joy, thinking, and the like. Our deeper feelings and more permanent disposition stem more from the etheric body. These characterizations are extremely abbreviated, but they are like the “a-b-c’s,” essential to learn at the beginning and challenging in application throughout life. Their relationship to each other may be compared with the relationship of the clock’s hour hand (physical), minute hand (etheric) and second hand (astral). The human Ego, also called the “I Am,” the mind, or the soul, has direct control only over the astral body during Earth evolution. Its influence over the lower bodies is then like that of the second hand upon the minute hand and then the hour hand in turn. As essential as a growing understanding of these bodies is, it is beyond the scope of this shorter work to go into them in any greater detail. They are mentioned here only to permit some comprehension of the Nativity accounts. Unless they are conditionally accepted, these accounts can be neither clarified nor meaningfully reconciled.

A knowledge of these bodies is also essential if countless other portions of the Bible are to come into our fuller understanding. For instance, the one verse parable in the thirteenth chapter of Matthew about “the kingdom of heaven [being] like leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour till it was all leavened” reflects this threefold reality. The Ego that sets the Human Kingdom apart from the Animal Kingdom is the leaven (when the higher Christ “I Am” is taken into it) that must eventually spiritualize the three bodies into their three higher spiritual counterparts. The first of these three higher parts is called manas in the Orient, which is the same as the biblical “manna.” When all is done, heaven is attained.

Luke’s version of this is given in the three verses that tell about a friend on a journey who arrives at the midnight hour seeking “three loaves,” which are “loaned” to him for his further journey. Our three bodies are indeed “loaned” to us in a sense, for they do not move from one life to another. Only the journeying soul does that. It is like both Cain and Job, wandering on, suffering but unable itself to die.

A more complete example is the entire book of Job. Until the three friends are seen as the three bodies, and Elihu as the entry of the soul (Ego or “I Am”), the “youngest” of the group, the book cannot be understood, even as an explanation for why the innocent must suffer. But when seen in this anthroposophical light, then the understanding becomes complete. Job is, after all, simply a longer version of the journey of the Prodigal Son reflected both in Luke’s Gospel and in the Bible as an entirety.

It is well to know that we speak of the eternal soul or Ego that is burned but not destroyed as an “Individuality.” It is “the burning bush that is not consumed.” The “Personality,” on the other hand, is the manifestation of an Individuality in a particular earthly lifetime. With our senses, we perceive today only the Personality. The day will come when we, along with the initiates, will be able to perceive the Individuality. For some this may not be far away.