Think how Steiner told us, and it was not unique to him, that the thirty years preceding his Light Course (in 1919-1920) had shaken the very roots of scientific thinking since the "Enlightenment" days of Newton and the so-called "scientific" revolution. Those early geniuses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been followed by others, but the net result has been, as we have seen, to produce as our millennium turns a condition in which even our most reflective scientists recognize there are forces at work they are unable to identify save by a method (i.e., quantum theory, for instance) that still sticks in their craw, particularly as it applies in the realm of light. In spite of their intellectual genius, materialistically speaking, they simply do not know what light is. Nor do they know how we come by our consciousness of being, on which see, for instance, Penrose's noted Shadows of the Mind (SHAD). Yet their work has been immensely important, for it has brought us, as Steiner said and some of them have also expressed, to the point where a higher intelligence must lead us onward and upward.

Most of our theologians, from ultraliberal to ultraconservative, have not advanced so far, but still wrestle in the arid deserts of either documentary hypotheses or literal, parochial understanding and welter in the same type of moribund, institutionalized scriptural interpretation that afflicted the scribes and Pharisees at the time of Christ. Any thought of reliance upon the intuition of prophets since Christ and the "end of (Old Testament) prophecy" is unthinkable in the solidarity of their ranks. One must have "recognized credentials" to be given credence, credentials bestowed by those of like thinking. The shepherds in our pulpits, trained in such theology, engrossed in daily duties, and constrained by institutionalism, preach and teach within these walls. And while there is a tangible chasm between academic theology and pastoral administration, both suffer from an unwillingness to "leave home" in search of such vast treasures as have been revealed by the unsung, sometimes vilified Rudolf Steiner, courageous, intellectually gifted and spiritually intuitive servant of the Archangel Michael and the Christ.

In what I have just written to open this summation, I make no personal claim to intuition, nor to any divine insight other than, as a result of a lifetime of study of the Bible and whatever unknown karma I represent, having recognized in the works of Rudolf Steiner insights deemed higher than any other I've encountered about the meaning of the entire biblical message. What I have said about pastors applies alike to those whom I have loved and served in churches all my life to this very day, and what I have said about theologians applies to those whom I have admired greatly and still admire. We are told that even Christ chastens those he loves (Rev 3,19), and what parent, or understanding child, would say otherwise?

Conclusion

The scientific revolution that began with Newton and the Enlightenment in the sixteenth century brought forward, unconsciously, the ancient concept of the etheric world. Only it was tainted by the idea that, however fine, it was part of the material realm. It had to be, so it was thought, if it was to carry light, for clearly the analogue of sound is carried by waves in the material air. And so light, it was thought, if it is to impinge upon our retinal nerve must itself have some materiality however tenuous. Thus light was alternately, and in more recent times simultaneously, viewed as being particle and/or wave as it traveled swiftly through space. Moreover, light was thought, and still is, to define the outer limits of velocity of matter. Insofar as it applies to matter, that thought is correct to the best of our knowledge.⁵⁹ Yet we are met in our investigation with seemingly credible evidence that light is a material particle and thus cannot travel by a transverse wave through other matter; while at the same time we are met with seemingly credible evidence to the exactly opposite conclusion. Thus, we decide that light is at one and the same time both particle and wave while our intelligence otherwise tells us it cannot be so. And we are told that what we call the little photons of light can talk to each other over vast geographical distances and change their performance or relationship to one another, and even their own character, based upon these conversations. We can calculate what their mutual decision is, but there is no way of understanding the meaning of our calculation, or why it is right, except that it simply comes out right.

We are told in John's prologue that the Christ, the creative Word, is our light, and we repeat it with deep religiosity, but we still seek it in the material realm, and it is not there. "He is not here" (Mt 28,6a; Mk 16,6b; Lk 24,5b). We must return again and again to the portrayal of the schematic of the tree of life in I-22 where we see that fire (at once both matter and ether) is the dividing line, the meeting point, between all matter and spirit. We can tell neither the origin nor the destination of the wind because it is the movement of matter created in the image of the light ether. We feel it and we hear it, but we know neither its source nor destination because we know not the light ether that separated from it long ago (Gen 1,3; Jn 3,8 and Job 38,19-20). So also even earlier were the chemical/sound ether and the life ether separated from their earthly counterparts in the descent of humanity and the rest of creation into materiality. Only when Earth evolution (see I-1) has run its course and the holy city of the new Jerusalem, the Jupiter Condition of Consciousness (again, see I-1), has been gained by humanity, eons (ages) hence, will the light ether be again joined with its counterpart, but then in a nonmaterial astral condition. The light, then being within humanity (the one-hundred forty-four thousand discussed in "Fire"), there will no longer be need of Sun nor Moon (Rev 21,23; 22,5).

Let us look at what we rather glibly call the phenomenon.

Steiner was totally antagonistic to the Kantian philosophy that there was a limit to human knowledge, claiming instead that any such limit was imposed only by the lack of development of the spiritual potential for human perception. Further, Steiner insisted that there was innate in every human being the potential for unlimited perception. His own horizon, of course, stretched further than his fellows, and that of his fellows he saw as stretching far beyond what they themselves understood with their limited views of the evolution of individual and collective consciousness over the ages.

According to Kantian philosophy there are phenomena and there are noumena. Phenomenalism, is thus the philosophic theory that knowledge is limited to phenomena, either because there is no reality beyond phenomena or because such reality is unknowable (WNWCD). According to this Kantian philosophy, a phenomenon is anything that can be observed by the senses, whereas a noumenon is "a thing as it is in itself, unable to be known through perception but postulated as the intelligible ground of a phenomenon" (WNWCD). A noumenon is thus a kinetical (theoretical or calculated) postulation—reasoning rather than direct observation.⁶²

It is at once apparent that the world of quantum physics is within the world of noumena, not phenomena. The calculation itself might be called a phenomenon; the object of the calculation cannot be. And it seems further apparent that light itself, as distinguished from consciousness of its presence, is in the same noumenal domain. We simply cannot see the light. We see objects only because light illuminates them and we postulate theories about the light. But as John says, the darkness (and as materially incarnated beings we are still within that expression) comprehends not the light (the better meaning of Jn 1,5, rather than that the darkness has not "overcome" the light, though both are permissible translations of the Greek).

Previously in the text I have mentioned in passing my alienation from the big bang theory so widely espoused by science and theology in our day. The position of the "scientists" is in keeping with their "noumenal" (i.e., calculated; not observed) vision of the universe. The position of the theologians is substitutional at best because they (at least most) have no intuitive vision in our day and even abjure its possibility. What an irony, since they profess a revealed religion! Abdicating their rightful domain and accepting the noumenal pronouncements of the scientists, the general attitude is "Anything is possible with God. If he chose to create the universe by the mechanism of the big bang, who are we to question it?" Perhaps, theoretically, the Christ could have entered the three bodies prepared for the Individuality whose personality we knew as Adolf Hitler, but the Father God did not act in that way. The bodies prepared for the entry of the Christ Spirit were those of the most highly qualified human being who had ever lived, the one who, until his baptism, was properly called Jesus of Nazareth (Heb 10,5c; see "The Nativity" in The Burning Bush, as well as its popularized version in The Incredible Births of Jesus). Shrugging off the reality that all things were created by the spiritual world through the agency of light, our theologians, through lack of vision, go along with the noumena of our scientists to accept the view that the universe as we know it was created by and through the darkness of materiality so dense that it was beyond all human comprehension—so dense that it can be described only in the exponentials of noumenal (mathematical) reasoning.