Foreword

At sixty-five years of age I look back upon a life filled with many disciplines, including successful professional careers in law and business and amateur ones in music and athletics. I am blessed with a loving family, a wife of over forty-three years, children and grandchildren, of all of whom I am deeply proud. Since childhood I’ve been a regular and active church person, though I put no stock in denominationalism. Along with these things, and having felt from youth that the Bible reflected sacred truths, mine has also been a lifetime of studying and teaching the Bible, in a restless search for its deeper meanings—for the truth, regardless of how popular it might be or how much opposition it might encounter, recognizing that truth is seldom accepted by the majority when first revealed. In that pursuit, in the fall of 1988 I happened across a reference to the Austrian, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925). This book is a result of that discovery. Any person who is unwilling to consider the possibility of dramatic new light—light not yet shining within traditional theological circles—being shed on the meaning of the Bible in our time should read no further.

Recently my book, The Burning Bush, was published by SteinerBooks. It has been described by several in superlatives, recognized by them as being very scholarly and of extensive scope. It is thoroughly documented throughout by extensive references, biblical and otherwise, as well as numerous study helps. But some have suggested the need for a more simplified version of some of its topics—one that contains essentially no citations or footnotes and flows more easily for the average reader. This book is the result, and addresses the first topic from The Burning Bush, namely, “The Nativity.” Those who desire to pursue it and its related topics more deeply may refer to the larger work.

What is presented in this book may appear at first quite bizarre. It might help not to be derailed by that circumstance, however, to consider how bizarre the Bible story itself would appear to one who comes upon it for the first time free of tradition and a society that dares not question it. Moreover, one should consider the number of passages that even to such a society are either entirely mysterious and problematical or totally ignored. Mind you, I accept the Bible as a divinely inspired book. I merely question that it can be understood in the vulgar mode of our common vernacular—at least not in a way appropriate for our stage of human development. It will be helpful to accept some concepts tentatively until the whole story unfolds, recognizing that understanding the whole of the birth story also involves some concepts that can only be touched upon lightly in this shorter work. As the picture unfolds, one can be thrilled to experience the feeling that the Bible then becomes one beautiful, integrated spiritual account consistent from beginning to end, its problem passages no longer being so mysterious.

Finally, several have made the suggestion that the word “anthroposophy,” not yet found in most dictionaries, be defined. The larger work is called “An Anthroposophical Commentary on the Bible.” “Anthroposophy” is the term Rudolf Steiner coined for his intuitive understandings of the spiritual world and its relation to the world we perceive with our ordinary senses. He also called it by the synonymous phrase, “spiritual science.” Anthroposophy is a combination of the two Greek root words, anthropos, and sophia. The latter, with a capital, is defined in our dictionaries as “wisdom,” and given a feminine attribute. The Sophia is personified as the feminine “Wisdom” in the first nine chapters of Proverbs. Our common suffix “sophy” derives from it and means “knowledge or thought,” as in “philosophy,” “theosophy,” and the like.

Anthropos should be distinguished from homo, a Latin word referring to a two-legged primate. We should think of Homo as referring to the body, and anthropos as referring to that which sets the human being above the animal. It represents the higher aspect, the soul or the soul and the spirit, of the human being. Thus, “anthroposophy” is the wisdom of the soul of the human being.

As you read on, you are embarking upon a new spiritual experience.