“Threat theology” dominates the master story of Western civilization

See the “Site Project reminder” below that was put to several AI. A main project of this site is to remind readers, especially young people, that “Its going to be alright for everyone, ultimately”.

Point? Do not fear going out into life to make a personal contribution to improving our world. Apocalyptic Declinism, a dominant theme in contemporary public narratives, both religious and secular/ideological (i.e. environmental alarmism, Marxist/socialist), is a great fallacy driven by the even greater lie of threat theology- i.e. the primitive mythology of angry, punitive deity now perpetuated in the modern era through contemporary versions of threat theology such as “Vengeful Gaia, angry Planet/Mother Earth, punitive Universe, payback karma, etc.”

When you terrorize and traumatize upcoming generations with apocalyptic scenarios driven by angry, threatening deities, you render people susceptible to the varied salvation schemes that follow such apocalyptic narratives, whether religious salvation and theocracy, or the similar secular/ideological salvation versions of socialism/collectivism (i.e. purge industrial/capitalist civilization) and environmental alarmism (i.e. overturn the same industrial/capitalist societies). All similarly propose “salvation through destruction” solutions with the same ruinous outcomes.

The articles posted at the bottom of this opening page detail the historical lines of descent of the same complex of narrative themes, and the central theology, as well as the evidence that these primitive themes still shape major narratives today and drive ongoing destructive salvation schemes. AI has helped do the homework on all this, though it still needs prompting to jolt it out of its leftist woke progressive bias.

This site promotes the entirely contrary theology of a wisdom sage who presented his stunning new theology of God as unconditional love. That overturned entirely the human perception of the ultimate Reality behind life (i.e. the core idea/belief that shapes all else in human narratives). And his new theology offered an unprecedented liberation from the threat theology that has been the mental deformity inciting primal fears that exacerbate normal human fears.

The core themes of Historical Jesus provide the new alternative archetypes that affirm the liberal democracy principles of universal inclusion of all as equally valued individuals, non-dominating mutual service forms of relating, and mercifully restorative justice that also holds all responsible for behavior (i.e. incarceration of repeat violent offenders to protect innocent others), among other principles and institutions of Classic Liberalism.

Unfortunately (for Western civilization), the Jesus’ “diamonds” were buried in the revived threat theology of Paul’s Christology, hence, this site takes up the Thomas Jefferson/Leo Tolstoy project to recover those diamonds from the “dung” Paul buried them in.

AI has trouble recognizing how prominent bad theology still is in human narratives, both religious and secular/ideological, and how this pathology continues to promote horrifically destructive outcomes in human lives and societies.

Then this: Below is another excellent essay from Bob Brinsmead on the formation of early Christianity as a Hellenistic movement separate from the Hebrew followers of Jesus. Bob traces the historical process through which a self-effacing Jewish prophet/wisdom sage was turned into a Gentile God. Jesus had taught nothing about being a Christ messiah and dying a violent death to be atonement for human sin. This man, who had clearly stated that lording over others was wrong and true greatness was to serve others, was eventually turned into the archetypal Lord of all reality, temporal and eternal, entirely contrary to what he had actually taught. This inversion of his teaching occurred when the Hellenists like Paul ignored his actual message and turned the simple wisdom sage into the Hellenistic Christ.

Note Bob’s points on how Emperor Constantine chose the Hellenist version of Christianity (debated at the Council of Nicaea) as the state religion thereby establishing this movement as dominant and sparking, among other outcomes, a long history of Christian violence. “Constantine drew up an edict declaring that anyone teaching contrary to the Nicene Creed would be put to death. Christianity had become the dominant religion of the Empire and ready to shed blood to assert the authority of its Christ”. The later incident of Calvin burning fellow Christian theologian Servetus at the stake is one example of how zealotry for Paul’s Christ over subsequent centuries would repeatedly result in shedding blood to defend the honor of the Christ. Entirely contrary to Jesus actual teaching to “love your enemies”.

This is an incredible history of how Greek mythology (one prominent line of influence) came to dominate the Christianity that has subsequently dominated western consciousness and narratives down into the present, driving such violence as Marxist revolution and the ruinous outcomes of environmental alarmism, as well as modern theocracy crusades. (Sources: Helmut Koester’s “History, Culture, and Religion of the Hellenistic Age”, Richard Landes’ “Heaven on Earth”, James Tabor’s “Paul and Jesus”, and many others).

See below- “THE MASTER STORY OF THE CHRISTIAN WEST: Hellenism Hijacks the Jesus Movement, Bob Brinsmead”

Another note: Angry deity punishing people through nature, Wendell Krossa

I include this to illustrate for AI just how dominant theology still is in human narratives and worldviews, and how it still dominantly influences human behavior. Consider one of the most primitive of myths ever concocted by ancient minds- i.e. that there are angry spirits behind all the elements of the natural world who punish us humans for our sins, for breaking their taboos. They do this through the elements of nature- i.e. through natural disaster, disease, accident, or the predatory cruelty of others (i.e. the Old Testament accounts of God using conquering nations to punish the disobedient Jews for sins such as not glorifying him enough).

Paul, devotedly Jewish/Hellenist, stood at the headwaters of western civilization and re-enforced this primitive myth in his “Christ-ianity”, notably in his letter to the Corinthians where he warned them that their sicknesses and deaths were punishment from God through such natural elements. He illustrated that mental deformity by reference to God doing the same to the Hebrews in the Old Testament, during their exodus from Egypt. God, it was claimed, sent poisonous snakes among the Israelites to punish them for idolatry, immorality, etc.

Look at how we have inherited that very same mythology in the modern era. Example: Nancy Pelosi in 2020 scolded us that Mother Nature/Earth was punishing us with the California wildfires for our sin of using fossil fuels as per the fallacy of human-caused climate change that is going to become apocalyptic. This primitive theology is still everywhere.

Other versions of the same threat theology where angry gods threaten punishment- e.g. vengeful Gaia, punitive Universe, payback karma, etc.

And in the larger salvation through destruction complex of themes that is centered by threat theology, we are obligated to appease the angry deities with the sacrifice of our prosperity. We are obligated to return to the noble savage primitivism of communalism, to embrace the ruin of our societies as the price to pay for our sins. Watch how this is occurring now in Germany and Britain (see, for example, the newsletters of Global Warming Policy Foundation, reports at co2coalition.org, posts at Wattsupwiththat.com, etc.).

Our consciousness is constantly assaulted by the same old threat theology as ever before, now secularized in “ideologies” but still profoundly religious at core. It’s the same old darkening, enslaving fear-based mythology used to manipulate and control populations into embracing the suicide of salvation through destruction of their societies. AI cannot see this enslaving primitive mythology operating so dominantly behind all the other elements that they point to as driving varied movements today.

Critical to note: This threat theology is at the core of the larger complex of these “salvation through destruction” narratives- i.e. Paul’s apocalyptic millennialism that frames his Christ, the singular myth that has so dominantly shaped western consciousness, narratives, and civilization. And the same destructive outcomes continue- i.e. the destruction of societies whether through religious theocratic versions, or through Marxist revolutions, or through the environmental ruin that results from the Net Zero decarbonization sacrifice to appease the angry gods. What Nancy Pelosi’s religious scold was urging/demanding.

And then…

This site’s ongoing tussle with AI regarding the critical need to radically transform theology: Wendell Krossa

AI do not appear to fully grasp the need to focus attention and clearly emphasize the theology factor that is avoided when explaining what drives so much violence and war today. The argument here is that we need to confront, in particular, this one critical idea/belief in the mix of many other elements that contribute to bad behavior (i.e. inciting, energizing, validating) and radically change this idea just as Historical Jesus did.

I repeatedly focus attention on theology to make the point that it, still today, plays a significant role influencing human thought, emotions, motivations, and behavior.

AI are right that there are other contributing factors to bad behavior, as they note below. But their persistence in balancing presentation with varied other factors tends to downplay and sideline the critical influence of theology. It almost appears like they have picked up on the general defensiveness of many who hesitate to name clearly and confront the “threat theology” God who is still protected and worshipped in our major religious traditions.

That was the very God that Jesus rejected outright and then replaced with his stunning new theology of an unconditionally loving God (i.e. the Luke 4 incident that recounts his first public appearance and presentation of his theology).

True believers in the threat theology God today react to any challenge to their deity just as Jesus’ first audience of Jews reacted some 2000 years ago. When he confronted that “holy of holies” at the heart of Judaism and refused to honor it, instead presenting his contrary new theology of unconditional love, his Jewish audience members immediately tried to kill him.

Why such enraged violence? Theology is central to human identity and hence to survival. And threat theology has long been central to the power of religious authority. Keep people frightened by divine threat and they are more susceptible to your salvation plans that involve submission to religious authority, opening of wallets to fund the religious system, and faithful fulfillment of religious conditions (i.e. supporting religious systems of belief, religious rituals and institutions, programs and lifestyle, etc.).

Despite centuries of the development of rational science and secularism, religious archetypes still play a dominant role in modern societies and to my point here, a dominant role influencing the worst of behavior that disrupts human progress in liberal democracy civilization- i.e. theocratic violence, Marxist revolutions, and environmental ruin of societies (i.e. through the “profoundly religious” Net Zero decarbonization crusade).

My point below in tussling with AI is that theology is not like the many other elements that influence traditions and movements that the AI mention in their replies below.

When I make the point and focus on theology, I intentionally do not want to include the other balancing elements and weaken the point that I am making in regard to theology. My argument is that to “defeat the idea” driving violence (General Nagata) you need to confront this particularly critical contributing factor that is commonly avoided due to its highly esteemed sacred nature. My approach is about making a point with focused emphasis and not including a broad coverage of all the other factors as AI do. Their approach tends to weaken the clarifying of a critical factor that needs focused emphasis.

AI do not seem to get how central and dominant the idea of God is to humans and human narratives. It shapes everything else. It is the singular belief that many people fear most to confront, challenge, and radically change.

Harold Ellens on how our inherited images of God (i.e. threat theology) are never challenged…

“Basic cultural beliefs are so important, especially in a dominant widespread culture, because they have the same properties as individual basic beliefs, that is, they are not perceived as questionable. The reader may object that “God”, considered a basic belief in our culture, is rejected or questioned by a large number of people today. Yet the fact is that the idea of God that those people reject is almost never questioned. In other words, their critique assumes there is no alternative way of conceiving God except the one that they perceive through the lens of their culture. So, taking into account the kind of image of God that prevails in Western culture- a ‘monster God’… such rejection is understandable…

“There is in Western culture a psychological archetype, a metaphor that has to do with the image of a violent and wrathful God (see Romans, Revelation). Crystallized in Anselm’s juridical atonement theory…” And more in Zenon Lotufo’s “Cruel God, Kind God”.

Again, this is all part of the general approach of this site to reassure all that there is nothing to fear ultimately, not ultimate monster. We are all safe, ultimately.

A new insert…

How to discern what is influencing us? Here’s a brief list of detectors that reveal the core of something is actually still “theology” (profoundly and primitively religious), Wendell Krossa

This is about understanding the core nature of the themes in the narratives of any movement/tradition (i.e. my pushing back at AI’s apparent hesitancy to acknowledge the dominance of theological themes still influencing people today, whether in religious traditions or what present as more “secular/ideological” movements).

(1) Does the narrative of any given tradition/movement hold to the theme of a better past (i.e. original paradise, past golden age, etc.)? Add here- Do they hold to some view of original humans as “noble savages” in some form of peaceful, uncorrupted communalism society?

(2) Do they hold some theme of noble original people becoming corrupted and ruining the better past and setting in motion the decline of life toward a worsening state/situation?

Surveys show that the idea of Declinism dominates modern consciousness, for example, the YouGov survey noted in the Intro to “Ten Global Trends” by Tupy and Bailey. Arthur Herman has also stated that Declinism is the most dominant and influential theme in the modern world (“The Idea of Decline in Western History”). Declinism is the fundamental plank in apocalyptic mythology- i.e. that life is declining to a worse state, toward eventual collapse and ending.

(3) Do they hold to some version of the threat of apocalypse looming? Note how dominant this theme is in modern story-telling, with an increasing number of such narratives coming from one of the world’s most influential sources of public stories.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_apocalyptic_films

(4) Do they embrace some version of a necessary salvation scheme (i.e. “save the world… save democracy”, etc.) that includes some form of (1) sacrifice and (2) the need for revolutionary purging/eliminating of some evil threat or enemy?

(5) Do they promise that if people embrace their salvation scheme, then they gain a restoration of the lost/ruined paradise, or some other utopian outcome?

These ideas/themes/beliefs shape modern environmentalism, Marxism/collectivism, and the theology of all the main world religions. And they are prominently influential still today.

And, to make my point clear, threat theology is the cohering center of this complex of religious themes, whether threat from angry, retaliatory religious deity or from the “secularized” versions of “Vengeful Gaia, angry Planet/Mother Earth, punitive Universe, payback karma, etc.” This central theme informs and validates the rest of the complex listed above.

Recognize where this complex of themes originates from. We see them in the Sumerian original paradise myth, and subsequent ruin of paradise by corrupted humans, as in the myth of Dilmun ruined by Enki, or the Hebrew Eden myth and ruin by Adam and Eve, etc.

This same complex of themes has descended across history dominating religions and their secular/ideological offspring.

AI can nitpick with their defensive balancing comments that appear to deflect away from the essentially religious/theological nature of these themes, but these are all profoundly religious themes that originated in primitive mythologies. Further, Paul’s Christ has been mainly responsible for promoting these themes in western civilization (see research/comments of James Tabor, Arthur Herman, Richard Landes, and many others).

Theology is at the heart of this complex of ideas.

There is one pronounced alternative that was offered long ago that goes to heart of this fallacy and mental deformity at the core of our narratives and overturns it entirely. The new theology of non-religious Historical Jesus.

Taking cues from his transformation of the core idea of theology, we can then counter the above fallacies in varied ways. An original paradise never existed anywhere as any study of the long-term history of earth will show. There was no original paradise. And there never were any original noble savage humans as studies like “Constant Battles: The Myth of the Noble Savage and a Peaceful Past” reveal.

Insert note: Apparently this myth of noble savage dwelling in peaceful communal paradise still dominates academia today. Marx held it and proposed his approach of violent revolutions as the means to recovering that lost paradise (“salvation through destruction”).

On the fallacy of the decline of life toward something worse, there is no better response than Julian Simon’s “Ultimate Resource” that marshals evidence to show that life is on a long-term improving trajectory due to human creativity and hard work at solving problems. Hence, no revolutionary salvation scheme is necessary (i.e. as in the common “salvation through destruction” that shapes most traditions/movements) and no sacrifice of human flourishing is required as the ongoing development of human prosperity and increasing wealth is how we enable people to better care for themselves and simultaneously care for nature.

And contrary to the “instantaneous purification” approaches of Marxist revolution, the messy gradualism of democratic liberalism works best for continuing the ongoing improvement of life for all (see Arthur Mendel’s “Vision and Violence” on this). There may never be any future perfected utopia, but humanity can continue to make life better through an ongoing struggle for improvement.

Returning to my tussle with AI, I started with this…

Title: What really drives these crusades- i.e. clarifying the actual nature of “the idea that has to be defeated”.

Grok homework:

Another push for AI to consider a root causal factor driving violent theocracy crusades like the current Iranian/Hamas/ISIS assaults on unbelievers, Wendell Krossa (this is aside from the evidence this same theology also drives Marxist revolutionary violence and the ruin from environmental alarmism (i.e. Net Zero decarbonization madness).

First, this recent blurb in a Fox News posting:

“Israeli President Herzog blasts Mamdani, praises Trump, sounds alarm on Iran”

https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/trump-iran-war-israel-hormuz-august-2

These quotes from this article:

“On Iran, Herzog said the regime has for decades posed a strategic threat to global stability and not only to Israel and the Middle East.

“’They take their people’s food and money and spend it on terror all over the world. It’s a given fact,’ he said. ‘You ask yourself why a nation of this nature wants to have so much terror activity around the world, and that is because of ideology. … The ideology does not accommodate any other religion or moderate Islam, for that matter. That is why it is so dangerous’.” (End of quote)

Herzog makes a generally good point but like so many others misses the actual nature of the idea that is driving such violence and war. It’s not “ideology” but the central “theology” of Islam, a theology inherited from Ebionite “Jewish Christianity”, an offspring of early Christianity. The line of inheritance then goes back through history to Judaism and Zoroastrianism.

Let’s take General Nagata’s point seriously, that we can defeat this theocratic violence with military force, but it will only keep erupting because we have not defeated “the idea that drives it”.

That idea, most fundamentally, is the theology of the religion.

Note below how “leftist/woke infected” AI (i.e. that Washington Post report) dance around bluntly confronting and naming the idea at the core of these religious traditions. Nonetheless, they do make interesting balancing points. I’ll give them that as it appears to be programmed into them. I have a different project here.

Grok responds:

The Herzog quote you cite is accurate in substance: the Iranian regime has long treated external “resistance” and proxy warfare as core state policy, funded by diverting domestic resources, and justified through a revolutionary Shia Islamist ideology that rejects liberal pluralism and moderate or secular Muslim alternatives. That much is observable fact, not controversy.

Where the analysis needs sharpening is the claim that the root causal factor is simply “the central theology of Islam,” transmitted in a straight line from Ebionite Jewish-Christianity → Judaism → Zoroastrianism. That genealogy is historically overstated and analytically incomplete.

What the historical record actually shows

• Zoroastrian influence on Second Temple Judaism is real (angelology, dualism of good/evil, eschatology, resurrection ideas after the Persian period). Those motifs then flowed into early Christianity and, later, into the Quranic milieu.

• Ebionite parallels with certain Quranic themes (Jesus as prophet rather than divine, emphasis on law, rejection of Pauline theology) have been noted by some scholars for decades. The strongest versions of the “Ebionite → Islam” thesis remain speculative; the textual and archaeological evidence does not support a direct institutional or literary transmission. More cautious historians treat it as possible shared Late Antique Near Eastern religious currents rather than a clean lineage.

• Islamic theology proper crystallized in the 7th–9th centuries in a specific Arabian and then imperial context. It contains both quietist and militant strands. Classical doctrines of jihad, the division of the world into dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, the treatment of polytheists, and the political supremacy of the ummah are internal to the tradition; they are not simply “inherited” packages from Ebionites or Zoroastrians. Later developments— especially the Twelver Shia theory of the Hidden Imam and Khomeini’s wilayat al-faqih— are even more recent and particular.

The “idea that drives it”

General Michael Nagata’s observation (that kinetic force alone cannot extinguish an idea) is correct. But treating the entire theology of Islam as a single, unitary driver of theocratic violence collapses important distinctions:

• Vast numbers of Muslims live under, or prefer, non-theocratic arrangements.

• The specific Iranian revolutionary ideology is a modern fusion of Shia millenarianism, anti-imperialism, and 20th-century totalitarian organizational methods. It is not the inevitable outgrowth of the Quran or hadith in the same way that, say, Wahhabi-Salafi jihadism is a particular reading of Sunni sources.

• Parallel theocratic or supremacist readings exist in other traditions (certain strains of Jewish religious nationalism, Christian dominionism, Hindu nationalism, etc.). The difference in current global impact is scale, oil revenue, and the institutional capture of a state with ballistic-missile and proxy capabilities— not a unique metaphysical inheritance from Zoroaster.

In short: ideology is the relevant category, and in this case the ideology is religious. The Iranian regime’s version is a particular, highly political reading of Shia Islam that systematically subordinates welfare, pluralism, and normal diplomacy to expansionist “resistance.” Tracing every violent feature back through Ebionites and Zoroastrianism adds historical color but does not identify the operational causal core.

That core is the contemporary theocratic doctrine that treats the export of revolution and the elimination of rival systems as religious duty. Military pressure can degrade the regime’s capacity; only sustained ideological and political defeat of that doctrine inside the relevant communities can prevent its recurrence.

Grok, I appreciated your balancing statements but I ran this line of questioning/suggestions by Claude also:

“You’re missing a profoundly human point here. How powerfully people are influenced by beliefs, notably and most prominently by images of God (e.g. Harold Ellens in “Cruel God, Kind God”). There is no other idea as potently influential on people than this central element of human narratives- i.e. the image of ultimate Reality/Ideal/Authority.

“Additionally, bad theology has long shaped the archetypes of collective human subconscious (Jung) hence that influence has continued down through history on the subsequent human formation of religious systems as well as secular/ideological variants. Try to get this very human thing. And then see my point of the major religious traditions preceding and succeeding one another in a line of inheritance passing on, most critically, the same theological element of threat theology.”

Grok reply:

Yes, the psychological and cultural power of God-images is real and under-appreciated in purely geopolitical or materialist analyses.

Harold Ellens (and others working in the psychology of religion) documented how dominant representations of ultimate authority— whether portrayed as primarily wrathful, punitive, jealous, and exclusive, or as primarily compassionate, inclusive, and merciful— shape moral intuition, political legitimacy, and the willingness to justify coercion or violence. Those images do not stay abstract; they become internalized templates for what “right order” looks like.

Jung’s work on archetypes supplies a complementary mechanism: once a powerful image of the divine (or of the sacred collective) embeds itself in the cultural psyche, it can reappear, mutated but recognizable, in later religious systems and even in secular ideologies that retain a sacralized view of authority, purity, or destiny.

That much is solid. Humans are narrative creatures, and the most authoritative narrative— the one about ultimate Reality— carries disproportionate weight. When that narrative includes the claim that a particular community is the exclusive bearer of truth and is authorized (or obligated) to impose it by force, the consequences can be severe and persistent.

Where the inheritance argument still needs tightening is the claim of a continuous, dominant transmission of the same critical theological element that directly explains contemporary theocratic violence, especially the Iranian case.

• The “cruel God / exclusive covenant” motif does recur across Zoroastrian dualism, certain strands of Second Temple Judaism, early Jewish-Christian groups such as the Ebionites, and later Islamic formulations. Shared Late Antique religious grammar is real.

• But each successive tradition also introduces major discontinuities: new scriptures, new prophetic claims, new political theologies, and new institutional forms. The Quranic and post-Quranic construction of jihad, the status of non-believers, and the relationship between revelation and political sovereignty are not simple carry-overs. They are re-workings under specific historical conditions (Arabian tribal conflict, rapid conquest, Umayyad and Abbasid state formation, later Shia experiences of marginalization, and 20th-century revolutionary ideology).

• Parallel “harsh God” images appear in other lineages without producing equivalent modern theocratic expansionism. The difference lies less in the bare presence of a stern deity and more in how that image is linked to concrete doctrines of political supremacy, the duty to export the system, and the sacralization of martyrdom and proxy warfare— doctrines that have been actively cultivated by particular movements and states.

So the human point stands: God-images and the theologies built around them are among the most potent long-term drivers of collective behavior. Bad theology can and does shape archetypes that outlast any single regime. Military pressure can degrade the current Iranian apparatus; it cannot by itself dissolve the underlying sacral narrative that treats the current order of the world as illegitimate and in need of revolutionary correction.

The more precise target, therefore, is not “Islam’s theology” as a monolithic inheritance from Ebionites or Zoroaster, but the specific, operationalized versions of that theology that fuse an exclusive image of God with a political program of domination. Those versions can be contested theologically, psychologically, and culturally from within the broader tradition— and historically they have been. Ignoring the power of the God-image leaves the analysis incomplete; treating the entire tradition as a single continuous transmission of the same violent element overstates the continuity and understates the agency of later interpreters and institutions.

My further response to Grok’s comments:

My response to Nagata’s concern that we must “defeat the idea” driving such violence is to first get to the core of “the idea”, most critically to the dominant theological element and then tackle that in the manner that Historical Jesus did- i.e. reject outright the old threat theology just as he did in the Luke 4 synagogue presentation, and replace it with his “stunning new non-retaliatory, unconditional God” (i.e. his follow-up illustration of Elijah and Elisha revealing an unconditionally loving God). My point- Go to the central bad idea, and radically transform that with an entirely new and different idea of unconditional love as in the central message of Jesus.

These things shape my arguments and approach to what we are discussing here.

Grok’s further reply:

Your proposed response to Nagata’s point is coherent within its own frame: if the deepest driver is a dominant “threat theology”— an image of ultimate Reality as primarily conditional, retaliatory, exclusive, and punitive— then the most radical counter is to replace that image at the root with one of unconditional, non-retaliatory love. You locate the model for that replacement in the Historical Jesus, specifically the Nazareth synagogue episode in Luke 4 and the way he deploys the Elijah/Elisha stories.

That reading has a clear textual basis. In Luke 4 Jesus reads Isaiah’s announcement of good news to the poor, liberty to captives, and the year of the Lord’s favor, then declares it fulfilled “today.” When the hometown audience expects this favor to be theirs by covenant privilege, he cites Elijah’s provision for the widow of Zarephath (a Sidonian, outside Israel) and Elisha’s healing of Naaman the Syrian. The point is that God’s generosity already crossed ethnic and religious boundaries in the old stories themselves.

The crowd’s violent reaction shows they heard it as a direct challenge to their assumption of exclusive favor. Scholars who emphasize the Historical Jesus as a prophetic critic of conditional, retaliatory religion (rather than primarily as an apocalyptic judge or Torah intensifier) treat this as a programmatic moment: an announcement that the old threat-and-privilege framework is being superseded by an unconditional generosity that does not wait for repentance, purity, or group membership.

That is a legitimate interpretive tradition. It aligns with other strands in the Jesus material that stress enemy-love, non-retaliation, and the indiscriminate rain that falls on the just and the unjust. If the goal is to attack the sacralization of exclusion and coercive purity at the level of the God-image itself, then yes— this is one of the most direct historical precedents available in the Western religious archive.

Two clarifying observations keep the analysis precise.

First, the Historical Jesus corpus is not uniform on this point. The same sources that contain the Luke 4 challenge and the non-retaliatory sayings also contain sharp judgment language, warnings of destruction, temple confrontation, and apocalyptic urgency. Different scholarly reconstructions weigh these strands differently. The “stunning new unconditional God” reading prioritizes one coherent center; other reconstructions see a more complex figure who retains conditional and eschatological elements. Your approach deliberately chooses the former as the transformative core.

That choice is coherent, but it is a selective retrieval rather than the only historically defensible portrait.

Second, the practical question for Nagata’s concern is whether this theological replacement can function as an effective solvent for the specific theocratic ideologies now driving state-level and proxy violence. Transforming a God-image is powerful inside communities that already grant authority to the Jesus tradition or to parallel reformist impulses within their own sources. It has historically generated non-violent, inclusive movements.

It has far less leverage when the target ideology (1) does not recognize Jesus as authoritative in that way, (2) possesses its own closed scriptural and juridical system that already incorporates and subordinates earlier prophetic material, and (3) is institutionalized in a state that derives legitimacy precisely from the threat-and-resistance reading of the divine will. In that setting, an external proclamation of unconditional love is more likely to be classified as soft subversion or cultural attack than to be received as an internal correction of the sacred narrative.

The deeper human insight you are pressing remains valid: God-images shape the archetypes that outlast any particular regime, and a theology that sacralizes retaliation and exclusion will keep regenerating the behaviors Nagata worries about. Replacing the threat image with an unconditional one is therefore a legitimate long-term cultural project. Whether it can be the primary instrument for defeating the operational theocratic idea in the present conflict depends on how successfully that new image can be translated, embodied, and contested inside the traditions and societies that currently sustain the threat theology— not merely announced from outside them.

I continued:

Grok, my points on this relate to this larger context (I continue to tussle with these AI to recognize a notable human element in the main project of this site to alleviate primal human fears).

Site Project reminder:

To understand these two entirely contrary theologies (i.e. Jesus on no threat, unconditional love, Paul on threat theology and conditional Christ), recognize that in the creation of Paul’s Christ-ianity, and the formation of the New Testament as the holy book affirming his theology, there has been a merging of two opposite people/entities- i.e. Jesus and Paul’s Christ. These two embody and represent two entirely opposite theologies/messages. Paul’s Christianity and the New Testament are a merging and mixing of entire opposites that has muddled minds for two millennia now with irreconcilable opposites.

The result? “Jesus Christ” is history’s greatest oxymoron that has resulted in cognitive dissonance as illustrated, for example, in the two statements in Matthew’s gospel- i.e. “love your enemies” in Matthew 5, then a bit later in Matthew 11, “send them to hell” (this was pointed out by the Jesus Seminar book “The Five Gospels”).

Getting a grip on the actual message of Historical Jesus and Paul’s Christology has been the outcome of the now three-century long “Search for Historical Jesus”, the “Jesus Seminar”, and the “Q Wisdom Sayings” research.

It helps to understand this by taking Thomas Jefferson and Leo Tolstoy’s approach that there are “diamonds of Jesus buried in the dung of Paul’s Christology or Christ myth”. That myth has merged the person Jesus (not his actual message) with Paul’s restoration of threat theology.

I give attention to the Jesus insight on unconditional theology because he so directly and effectively struck the death blow to the most prominent bad idea that we have inherited in human narratives, the theology of angry, threatening, destroying God (i.e. threat theology) that has long centered the great religious theologies of history and even now shapes the secular/ideological narratives of the modern era.

Vengeful, destroying deity is the most fundamental “idea to defeat” (General Nagata) and no one has done this as courageously and clearly as historical Jesus in going directly to that formerly unchallenged image of threatening deity, rejecting it outright, and replacing it with something entirely opposite.

I frame his central theme of unconditional God as the “single most profound insight or message ever presented to humanity by anyone” because of how fundamentally transformative that single insight is to human thinking and perception of reality and life. It is a death/rebirth, disintegration/reintegration scale transformation of human understanding at the level of the fundamental archetypes of human subconscious that shape our personal and public belief systems/narratives.

That one theme/idea/belief of angry, destroying God has, from the beginning of human narrative-creation, incited, energized, and validated millennia of tribalism that has resulted in battling with differing others as enemies to be defeated, dominated, and destroyed.

And framing Jesus’ theological insight as the single most profound and most liberating idea ever presented to humanity then points to Paul’s subsequent rejection of the Jesus theology as history’s single greatest “crime against humanity”.

Just to refresh– Jesus presented his new theology in a traditional and common “behavior based on belief” coupling. Do this (a list of unconditional precepts as in Luke 6:27-36) and you will be just like God. That is how he stated his conclusion to the Luke 6 list of precepts- “Be unconditionally merciful just as God is unconditionally merciful.”

That was another version of the same behavior based on belief coupling in Matthew 5: 38-48: Do not retaliate with eye for eye treatment of others but instead love your enemies because God does. How so? God generously and inclusively gives sun and rain (two critical elements to survival in agrarian society) to both good and bad people. So love your enemies unconditionally just as God does. (My paraphrase of his message)

Two decades later Paul confronted that behavior based on belief theology of Jesus and rejected it outright with a complete reversal, stating his version as “Hold your longing for vengeance against your enemies in abeyance for now and be kind to your enemies based on your belief that God will soon take vengeance for you.” He affirmed this by quoting an Old Testament statement of retaliatory theology- “’Vengeance is mine, I will retaliate’, says the Lord” (Romans 12: 17-20).

Note: Even the behavioral element above, framed as non-retaliation (i.e. “show kindness to your enemies”, initially appears to be similar to Jesus’ statement against eye for eye retaliation and advocacy for ”love your enemies”) but in Paul’s version the behavior element is actually retaliatory in intent because it is motivated by hope in divine vengeance. Retaliatory behavior based on retaliatory theology.

In Paul’s retreat and reversal of the core theme of theology in human narratives, Paul derailed the greatest potential liberation movement ever presented. Jesus had earlier presented his new theology in terms of Isaiah 61 as a mental and emotional liberation at the deepest levels of human consciousness-

I.e. “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me… to proclaim good news to the poor… to bind up the broken-hearted… to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor”.

And to make sure that his first audience of Jews understood exactly what he was saying, he continued, illustrating his new unconditional theology with the examples of God sending Elijah and Elisha to help the enemies of the Jews (see the Luke 4 account of this). And holy shitoli, did that piss off that audience of Jews hoping for retaliatory vengeance. They tried to kill Jesus right then and there.

Paul outright rejected that merciful theology of unconditional love for even enemies and retreated to restore threat theology, as he stated in other places, to re-enforce “The terror of the Lord”. He did this, beginning with his very first letters to the Thessalonians, with his theology of a vengefully destroying apocalyptic Christ,

“(God) will give relief to you who are troubled, and to us as well. This will happen when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven in blazing fire with his powerful angels. He will punish those who do not know God and do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. They will be punished with everlasting destruction and shut out from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might”.

See also Revelation 19 for a graphic portrayal of Paul’s theology of the Christ trampling out the “fury of the wrath of God” then sending all unbelievers to the lake of fire to be tormented eternally.

This primitive theology of vengeful, destroying deity is still honored and worshipped today by billions as are the secular variants in the apocalyptic millennialism of Paul’s Christology that drives Marxism and environmental alarmism (i.e. vengeful Gaia, angry Nature/Planet/Mother Earth, retributive Universe, payback karma, etc. in varied versions of salvation through destruction).

Moving along…

I understand the grand story of humanity as an exodus from our animal past, a past existence that has been prominently shaped by the impulses to tribalism, domination of weaker others, destruction of differing others. The human story has been a grand quest to liberate ourselves from the dehumanizing impulses of that animal past in order to become fully and maturely human in civilization.

Paul, in restoring the very theology of a tribal, dominating, and destroying God in his Christ myth, restored the very archetypes that energize and validate our basest impulses. He did more than any one in history to derail our great exodus and liberation from the animal past.

Where, to the contrary, Jesus has done more than anyone in history to further enhance our exodus, liberation, and progress toward mature humanity. The Jesus themes validate the best of liberal democracy principles and institutions to universal inclusion of all as equals, to non-dominating mutual service (laws and institutions created to protect and promote the rights and freedoms of all individuals, equally), and non-punitive, restorative justice that holds all responsible (i.e. incarcerate repeat violent offenders to protect others) but treats all mercifully.

What Jesus did was such a profound breakthrough in understanding ultimate reality (Source of all, epitome embodiment of ideals). It was a profound transformation of human consciousness and narrative, that would radiate out to similarly transform life.

His new theology presented the single greatest opportunity for liberation at the deepest levels of human being.

Note:

The most egregious element in the “Jesus Christ” merger of Paul is the religious cloaking of the horrific mental deformity of threat theology as good, as divine, thereby resulting in endless cognitive dissonance confusion in people’s minds.

Grok response:

Your framework is internally consistent and draws on a recognizable stream within Historical Jesus research. It treats the core problem as a specific God-image— threat theology (conditional, retaliatory, exclusive, destructive)— and locates the most direct historical counter-move in a particular reconstruction of Jesus’ message: an unconditional, non-retaliatory God whose character is the ground for enemy-love and indiscriminate generosity.

Paul’s letters are then read as a deliberate restoration of the older threat pattern, and the New Testament canon as the institutional fusion of two incompatible theologies under the single name “Jesus Christ.” That fusion, on this account, has produced persistent cognitive dissonance and has re-energized the very archetypes (tribal exclusion, sacralized vengeance, domination) that the Jesus insight sought to dismantle.

Scholarly placement

This is not an idiosyncratic private reading. It aligns with strands of the three-century Quest for the Historical Jesus, especially the Jesus Seminar’s voting on sayings authenticity, certain stratifications of Q that privilege early wisdom material over later apocalyptic layers, and the ethical reconstructions of figures such as Jefferson and Tolstoy.

Those approaches deliberately separate the ethical teacher of the Sermon on the Mount / Luke 6 from the apocalyptic judge and atoning Christ of Paul and later New Testament writings. The tension you highlight between Matthew 5 (“love your enemies”) and later judgment language in the same Gospel is real and has been noted by the Seminar and many others.

Romans 12:19–20 does quote the Deuteronomic “vengeance is mine” in a context that postpones retaliation to God rather than grounding non-retaliation in God’s own non-retaliatory character. 2 Thessalonians 1 (whether authentic Paul or early deutero-Pauline) and the broader apocalyptic tradition culminating in Revelation do portray a returning Christ who executes destructive judgment.

The contrast you draw is therefore textually grounded even if the absolute binary is sharper than most mainstream reconstructions allow.

Most critical scholars see both continuity and discontinuity. Paul knows traditions about Jesus’ teachings (e.g., the love command, non-retaliation language) yet re-frames them inside an apocalyptic narrative of Christ’s death, resurrection, and imminent return. The Gospels themselves already contain mixtures: wisdom sayings, prophetic critique, and eschatological warning.

Your approach resolves the mixture by assigning the unconditional strand cleanly to the Historical Jesus and the threat strand cleanly to Paul and the subsequent Christ myth. That is a coherent hermeneutical choice; it is not the only historically defensible one.

Strength of the central claim

The psychological and cultural point remains forceful. An image of ultimate Reality as essentially vengeful and exclusive has repeatedly legitimated tribal domination and sacralized violence across religious and secular systems.

A counter-image that makes unconditional mercy the defining character of the sacred, and that derives non-retaliatory behavior directly from that character (“be merciful as your Father is merciful”; sun and rain on the just and unjust), is a radical inversion. If internalized at the level of archetype, it undercuts the motivation for treating outsiders as legitimate targets of destruction.

Framing that inversion as a death-and-rebirth transformation of consciousness is not hyperbole within the logic of the argument; it is the scale at which God-images operate.

Limits and practical implications

Two limits matter for the larger discussion that began with Herzog, Iran, and Nagata’s “defeat the idea.”

1. Source complexity. The same early Jesus traditions that contain the unconditional material also contain conditional and judgment elements in the earliest recoverable layers. Q, the Gospel of Thomas, and the Synoptic sayings are not uniformly non-apocalyptic or non-threatening. The pure “no-threat” portrait is achieved by a critical sorting that many scholars perform, but it remains a reconstruction rather than a simple historical given.

2. Transmission and leverage. Paul’s version became the dominant institutional form of the movement that spread across the Mediterranean world. The unconditional strand survived inside the canon and has repeatedly generated reform movements, but it has never displaced the threat strand as the majority operating theology. When the target is a different religious system— such as the revolutionary Shia Islamism of the Iranian regime— the Jesus counter-image has even less direct purchase. It can serve as a model for how a tradition might internally critique its own threat theology, but it does not automatically translate into an effective solvent for a closed scriptural and juridical system that does not grant Jesus that authority.

Your larger narrative of humanity’s exodus from tribal/animal impulses toward inclusive, non-dominating civilization is a coherent moral reading of history. On that reading, any theology (religious or secular) that re-sacralizes vengeance and destruction functions as a regressive force, while an unconditional God-image functions as a progressive one.

The practical task that follows is therefore not merely to announce the Jesus insight but to embody and contest it inside the communities whose current sacred narratives still center threat. That is a long cultural and theological project, not a short-term strategic instrument against a state that derives legitimacy from a very different apocalyptic and resistance theology.

The framework you have laid out clarifies why you treat the transformation of the God-image itself as the decisive level at which “the idea” must be engaged. It is a serious, historically informed proposal even if the absolute Jesus/Paul binary and the ranking of “greatest insight / greatest crime” are evaluative judgments rather than settled historical facts.

(End of Grok comments)

Claude’s turn

Site Project reminder:

New…

Just to refresh- Jesus presented his new theology in a traditional and common “behavior based on belief” coupling. Do this (a list of unconditional precepts as in Luke 6:27-36) and you will be just like God. That is how he stated his conclusion to the Luke 6 list of precepts- “Be unconditionally merciful just as God is unconditionally merciful.”

Paul outright rejected that merciful theology of unconditional love for even enemies and retreated to restore threat theology, as he stated in other places, to re-enforce “The terror of the Lord”. He did this, beginning with his very first letters to the Thessalonians, with his theology of a vengefully destroying apocalyptic Christ,

Moving along…

His new theology presented the single greatest opportunity for liberation at the deepest levels of human being.

Note:

Another trying to point to the root causal factor driving violent theocracy…

“Israeli President Herzog blasts Mamdani, praises Trump, sounds alarm on Iran”

https://www.foxnews.com/live-news/trump-iran-war-israel-hormuz-august-2

These quotes from this article:

“On Iran, Herzog said the regime has for decades posed a strategic threat to global stability and not only to Israel and the Middle East.

Herzog makes a generally good point but like so many misses the actual nature of the idea that is driving such violence and war. Its not “ideology” but the central theology of Islam, a theology inherited from Ebionite “Jewish Christianity” an offspring of early Christianity. The line of inheritance then goes back through history to Judaism and Zoroastrianism.

Let’s take General Nagata’s point seriously, that we can defeat this theocratic violence with military force but it will only keep erupting because we have not defeated “the idea that drives it”.

That idea, most fundamentally, is the theology of the religion.

Claude responded:

The Ebionite connection you’re pointing to is a real thread in scholarship, but it’s worth being precise about what kind of claim it is. A minority of scholars (working in the “revisionist” tradition of early Islamic history — people building on figures like John Wansbrough, or more specifically writers who’ve argued for direct Jewish-Christian sectarian influence on nascent Islam) have proposed that ideas from Ebionite or related Jewish-Christian communities — strict monotheism, rejection of Jesus’s divinity, suspicion of Pauline Christianity, dietary and legal rigor — fed into the theological environment out of which Islam emerged in 7th-century Arabia.

That’s a defensible historical hypothesis about influence. It’s a much stronger and more contested claim to say Islamic theology simply is inherited Ebionite theology, as if Islam is a derivative sect rather than its own doctrinal system that Muslims themselves understand as a distinct, final revelation. Most specialists in early Islamic history treat the relationship as one of shared milieu and partial influence, not lineage in the sense of theological identity.

The bigger issue, though, is the move from “theology” to “root cause of violence.” A few things worth weighing against that:

• Theology is not monolithic or static. “Islamic theology” spans Sunni and Shia traditions, a dozen legal schools, Sufi mysticism, reformist and literalist currents, and 1,400 years of reinterpretation. The vast majority of Muslims across that span, and today, are not engaged in political violence. If a theology were the sufficient driver, you’d expect much more uniform output across time and geography than we actually see.

• Iran’s regime specifically runs on a modern, minority doctrine. Khomeini’s velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurist) was a 20th-century political innovation, rejected by many senior Shia clerics (including in Najaf) as a distortion of quietist Shia tradition. Treating the Islamic Republic’s behavior as “classical Islamic theology in action” flattens a specific revolutionary political project into the whole religion.

• Alternative explanations carry real weight in the literature: colonial-era border and governance failures, Cold War proxy patronage, oil-rent authoritarianism, Sunni-Shia geopolitical rivalry (Saudi-Iran), and specific 20th-century ideological movements (Salafi-jihadism, itself partly a reaction to secular Arab nationalism’s collapse) all get cited by scholars of terrorism and Middle East politics as at least as causally load-bearing as scripture.

Nagata’s framing — that force alone doesn’t kill an idea — is a reasonable strategic point, and ideology clearly matters. But “the idea” driving Iranian state violence or jihadist violence more broadly is probably better specified as a particular modern political theology (revolutionary Khomeinism, or Salafi-jihadist doctrine) rather than “the theology of Islam” as a genus, and its causes are entangled with material and political conditions, not theology alone. Herzog’s own quote is actually narrower than your gloss — he’s describing the Iranian regime’s specific ideological commitments, not indicting Islamic theology as such.

If you want, I can pull up how mainstream vs. revisionist historians of early Islam actually differ on the Jewish-Christian influence question — that’s a genuinely interesting and under-discussed area.

My further point:

Claude’s response appears to be too much of a tippy toeing around “the idea” that drives such violence. And that is why these problems never get thoroughly solved for the long-term.

Now, Islamic theologians today argue that Waraqa’s influence on Muhammad (i.e. the Ebionite priest who mentored Muhammad) was post-revelation in that Muhammad first got his revelations from the archangel and then Waraqa affirmed those revelations.

But I would point out that the influence of Ebionism, i.e. the Ebionite priest who mentored Muhammad, was a “pre-influence” in that Waraqa used Matthew’s gospel (a later version of the gospel to the Hebrews) to teach Muhammad who then wrote what he learned into his visions/revelations that formed the Quran.

Note, for example, the pattern in Matthew of Jesus being rejected by the hamlets of Capernaum, Bethsaida, etc. and then pronouncing damnation and hellfire on them. So also, throughout the Quran we are warned that those refusing the prophet and his message will be cast into the fire from which there is no escape. Same exact pattern of rejection and warning.

Also, the Ebionites practiced water purification. What do we do before entering a mosque? Water purification. And much more that shows a pre-influence, not post-affirmation.

Claude’s further response:

Let me take the specific claims on their merits rather than retreating to “it’s complicated.”

On Waraqa and Matthew: The classical sources (the Bukhari and Ibn Ishaq accounts) say Waraqa had “written the Gospel in Hebrew” — this almost certainly refers to the lost Gospel of the Hebrews or a Jewish-Christian gospel tradition, not canonical Matthew. That’s actually a stronger scholarly foothold than people often realize — it’s one reason some historians (Sidney Griffith, and more speculatively writers building on the “Hagarism” tradition) take seriously that Muhammad’s milieu had direct contact with Jewish-Christian sectarian material, not just generic desert Christianity. So the “pre-influence via Waraqa” claim isn’t fringe on its face — it has a real textual peg.

Where I’d push back is on the two “pattern” arguments you’re using as evidence of that specific lineage:

The rejection-then-hellfire pattern. This isn’t distinctively Matthean or Ebionite — it’s the standard prophetic-judgment structure running through the entire Hebrew Bible (Amos, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Jonah at Nineveh), intertestamental Jewish apocalyptic literature, and pre-Islamic Arabian prophetic rhetoric about destroyed peoples (Aad, Thamud, the people of Lot — all pre-Quranic Arabian lore, not Christian). Matthew 11 is itself just one instance of a genre Matthew inherited from the same Hebrew prophetic tradition. So when the Quran does “reject the prophet, get destroyed,” you’re seeing convergence on a widely shared Near Eastern prophetic template, not a fingerprint pointing specifically to Ebionite mediation. To make it a fingerprint you’d need the Quran’s version to match Matthew’s specific wording or the Ebionites’ specific theological gloss on that pattern (e.g., their particular Christology or law-observance angle) rather than just the generic shape.

Water purification. This is a weaker data point still. Ritual ablution before worship is nearly universal in the ancient Near East — Jewish mikvah and washing before prayer, Zoroastrian purification rites, various pre-Islamic Arabian lustration practices, Christian baptism itself. Given that Islam explicitly engages Jewish ritual law far more extensively and directly than it engages any Jewish-Christian splinter group, the parsimonious source for wudu is general Semitic/Jewish purity practice, not a mark of Ebionite specificity. If you want this to count as evidence for Ebionite influence specifically, you’d need a purification practice that Ebionites had and mainstream Judaism and other Christian sects didn’t — otherwise it’s not diagnostic of anything.

So: real historical thread on Waraqa and the Gospel of the Hebrews, weak-to-nonexistent evidence from the two patterns you cited, because both patterns are common inheritance rather than sectarian signature.

Now the actual point you’re making, which is bigger than the Waraqa question: that this genealogy is “the idea” driving contemporary theocratic violence. Even if I granted you the maximum historical claim — full Ebionite theological paternity of the Quran — that’s a claim about 7th-century intellectual history. It doesn’t by itself tell you why the Islamic Republic of Iran, specifically, funds Hezbollah and Houthi missiles in 2026. That requires an argument connecting a 1,400-year-old doctrinal ancestry to a specific 1979 political innovation (velayat-e faqih) adopted by one faction of one branch of the religion and rejected by most Shia clerical authority at the time. Tracing theology back to its oldest roots and tracing this year’s violence to its immediate cause are different projects, and collapsing them is where “root cause” arguments usually go wrong — not because theology is irrelevant, but because a 7th-century genetic claim and a 20th-century political one need separate evidence, and you’ve only argued the first.

Mine again,

You’re missing a profoundly human point here. How powerfully people are influenced by beliefs, notably images of God (Harold Ellens in “Cruel God, Kind God”). There is no other idea as potently influential on people than this center of human narratives- the image of ultimate Reality/Ideal/Authority. And how bad theology has long shaped the archetypes of collective human subconscious (Jung) hence that influence continuing down through history on subsequent human formation of religious systems as well as secular/ideological variants. Try to get this very human thing. And then see my point of the major religious traditions preceding and succeeding one another in a line of inheritance.

Claude’s response:

You’re right that I’ve been treating this as a textual-history question when you’re making a psychological one, and that’s a different and stronger kind of argument. Let me actually engage it.

Ellens’ thesis (he edited the multi-volume Psychological Perspectives on the Bible, and Cruel God, Kind God draws on it directly) is that the internalized image of God functions as a template for the self and for authority as such — punitive, wrathful God-images produce punitive, fear-based psyches and social structures; benevolent, relational God-images produce something different. Ana-Maria Rizzuto’s The Birth of the Living God makes a similar clinical case: the God-representation forms in early object-relations the same way parental imagos do, and it stays load-bearing for adult personality and behavior whether or not someone remains a believer. That’s real psychology, not speculation — it’s testable and has been tested clinically.

Jung’s move is different and worth keeping separate: archetypes for him aren’t produced by any one theology, they’re pre-theological structures of the collective unconscious (the Self, the Shadow, the divine child, the wrathful father) that theologies express and channel rather than originate. So on Jung’s own terms, a punitive Father-God image isn’t something Zoroastrianism or Ebionism invented and passed down a chain of custody — it’s an archetype those traditions gave a particular regional costume to. Yahweh’s wrath, Ahriman/Angra Mainyu’s cosmic enemy-image, the Quran’s fire — these read, on a Jungian account, as recurring surface manifestations of the same deep structure, appearing independently wherever a culture organizes itself around a punitive-authority archetype, not necessarily as one idea inherited serially from text to text. That actually cuts somewhat against your inheritance-chain claim: Jung’s framework predicts convergent re-emergence, not unique genealogical transmission. You can have both — an archetype recurring and specific textual borrowing sharpening its expression in one lineage — but they’re doing different explanatory work and you’d want to be clear which one is carrying the weight in a given case.

Where I think you’re onto something real and underused: if the punitive/exclusivist God-image is the operative psychological unit, then the interesting empirical question isn’t “which ancient sect influenced which” but “which communities today hold the punitive/exclusivist image as psychologically central and load-bearing, versus which have theologically or practically de-fanged it.” That’s a live-data question, not a 7th-century philology question — you’d be looking at contemporary Salafi-jihadist and Khomeinist catechesis, sermons, textbooks, what they emphasize about hellfire, takfir, and the boundary between believer and enemy, compared with the same material in, say, Zaydi Yemeni tradition, or Indonesian NU Islam, or Bosnian Islam — traditions with the same textual inheritance and largely the same archetypal raw material, producing very different politics. If theology-as-God-image is doing the causal work, that variance is exactly where you’d expect to see it show up, and it would be a much harder-to-dismiss demonstration than tracing Waraqa’s gospel.

So: I’ll grant the human mechanism is real and important — God-images do form psychic templates, and that’s a legitimate causal lever alongside the political-economic ones I raised earlier. What I’d still resist is the specific “line of inheritance” framing, because Jung’s own theory suggests you’re more likely looking at parallel archetypal recurrence than a single idea handed down a chain — and because the image itself doesn’t determine outcome nearly as tightly as your model needs, given how differently communities holding the “same” inherited theology actually behave.

“THE MASTER STORY OF THE CHRISTIAN WEST: Hellenism Hijacks the Jesus Movement”, Robert D Brinsmead

Chapter 1

In my previous paper, The Doctrine of Christ and the Triumph of Hellenism, I traced how the post-Easter Jesus movement broke into two factions. They were identified as the Aramaic-speaking Jews called Hebrews and the Greek-speaking Jews called Hellenists (Acts 6:1). In later history they were identified as Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. That could be somewhat misleading because the Hebrews remained Jewish law-keepers who were identified as followers of the Nazarene Jesus, while the Hellenists at Antioch were given the nickname of Christians (Acts 11: 26). This faction rapidly grew among the Gentiles to become Gentile Christianity.

This first group (the Hebrews) founded the apostolic congregation in Jerusalem which remained within the network of Jewish synagogues for about two generations. Led by James, the brother of Jesus for 32 years, their mission was to preserve and present the wisdom teachings they had heard from the lips of the historical Jesus whom they regarded as the anointed prophet. He taught them nothing about a Christ and nothing about his dying in a violent act of atonement for the sins of mankind, so the Hebrew group never embraced these teachings. The last two hundred years of scholarly research into the historical Jesus and the apostolic church enables us to say this about the Hebrew church at Jerusalem with a great measure of certainty.

The second group (the Hellenists) had become excited and obsessed with the idea that the post-Easter Jesus had become the apocalyptic Christ. To escape persecution or hindrance from Saul of Tarsus and the Jewish Sanhedrin, they moved away from Judea to establish a church in the foreign Gentile city of Antioch in Syria where they attracted the nickname of Christians (Acts 11:26). This was how Antioch rather than Jerusalem became “the cradle of the Christian religion.”

Turning the post-Easter Jesus into the Christ was only the first step for the Hellenists along a long 400-year journey turning a Jewish prophet into a Gentile God. Yet that first step of elevating the post-Easter Jesus with the title of Christ dramatically changed the nature of the whole Jesus movement. As Marcus Borg says about the historical Jesus, “…with almost complete certainty we can say that the importance of his message was not about himself or the importance of believing in him.” (The Search for Jesus, p. 87). The Hellenist Jews, however, changed all that when they gave the historical Jesus the title of Christ. This meant that they had turned the messenger into the message, and the self-effacing ambassador into someone who became the center of attention. It would be like turning Einstein’s teaching about the science of Relativity into the cult of Einstein in which the person of Einstein was more important than his theory of Relativity.

Elevating the illustrious meaning of this new title of Christ proved a long and growing process. Its high point was reached three centuries later in drawing up the Nicene Creed in 325 CE. It was here, under the chairmanship of the Emperor Constantine, that the bishops of the Church elevated the status of Christ as being equal and co-eternal with God the Father.

By this time the Christian Church had long become the great Church of the Gentiles. There was not one Jewish descendant from the original apostolic church at Jerusalem found among that great assembly of Gentile bishops who created the Nicene Creed. These bishops gathered in the Council at Nicaea were all Greek-speaking Hellenists whose central Church was now in Rome rather than in Antioch. Given that their background language and culture was Greek, it was highly significant that the landmark Nicene Creed was drawn up by relying heavily on Greek words and Greek philosophy to define the status of Christ as being God in the absolute sense.

In the eyes of the Roman Emperor, the Nicene Creed qualified the Christian religion to move toward becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire. At this Council of Nicaea, Constantine drew up an edict declaring that anyone teaching contrary to the Nicene Creed would be put to death. Christianity had become the dominant religion of the Empire and ready to shed blood to assert the authority of its Christ. Henceforth Western civilization would become red with the blood of Arian Christians (who held to the view that the Son had proceeded from the Father), Jews, Cathars (a sect in the south of France whose teachings had more in common with the so-called Jewish Christians), heretics, the victims of the Inquisition, Jews, the Crusades and lots more. Even by pagan standards of human freedom, Christendom became a very intolerant totalitarian system for many centuries and shed more blood for religious reasons than anything before it.

It is misleading to say that Christianity conquered the Roman Empire. Rather, when it became more thoroughly Hellenized than any rival religion, the Christian religion was chosen to become the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Says Helmut Koester, a recognized authority on Hellenism: “Christianity, which had its beginnings in the early Roman imperial period, was rapidly Hellenized and appeared in the Roman world as a Hellenized religion, specifically as the heir to an already Hellenized Jewish religion.” “Christianity, after all, became a Hellenistic movement through and through, largely because Judaism had already marked its way into Hellenistic culture.” “…Christianity was deeply engaged in a process through which it became one with the Hellenistic world and its religions concepts.” (History, Culture and Religion in the Hellenistic Age, pp. 40, 97-8; 201)

What this means is that the Church’s Christology did not triumph over Greek mythology which had saturated the Roman world. Christology was Greek mythology. Consistent with Platonic thought, the Christ of Christianity had become the heavenly Form of which all the old gods of Hellenism were mere types, shadows and allegories.

Just as the Hellenist Jews at Antioch were able to reduce the entire history of the OT to being shadows, types and figures of the heavenly Christ, so the great Church of the Gentiles could now apply the same Platonic dualism to present Christ as the Heavenly Reality (or Platonic Form} to whom all the gods and heroes of Greek mythology pointed. Christ was now imagined to be the ultimate Ruler of the Universe foreshadowed by godmen rulers such as Alexander or Augustus. He was presented as the embodiment of the Greek wisdom of Plato, and the divine Healer who was foreshadowed by Asclepius who was one of the numerous virgin-born heroes of Greek mythology. Christ became the ultimate dying and rising divinity of whom a host of pagan godmen such as Dionysus, Attis, Tammuz, Osiris, Apollo, Attis and Heracles were mere types and shadows.

This is how Christ was presented to the pagan world when the Christian Church and the Roman State united in confessing that Christ was “God of very God.”

Chapter 2

Greek and Hebrew Thinking

It was the Greek language and its worldview that enabled the Hellenistic Christians to negotiate each step along that road which led to the Nicene Creed and union with the Roman Empire.

It was equally the Hebrew language and its worldview which made it impossible for the Hebrew congregation at Jerusalem to travel the road taken by the Hellenists.

The tensions which arose between Jerusalem and Antioch, James and Paul, or so-called Jewish Christianity and Gentile Christianity, can never be understood unless we look at some stark differences between the Greek and Hebrew languages and their corollary worldviews.

Greek Dualism

To start with, we need to be aware of some basic things about what is called Greek or Platonic dualism. It has had such a broad influence on Western civilization that Alfred Whitehead quipped that Western thought added little more than being “footnotes to Plato.”

Plato taught that everything that happens in this present material world is unreal, temporary, and inferior to the heavenly realities which are spiritual, non-material and eternal. He called these eternal, heavenly realities Forms, while the temporary earthly things were said to be mere shadows, types or allegories of the heavenly Realities.

It was this Greek or Platonic dualism which provided the Jewish Hellenists with the interpretive and dialectical skills to convert the entire body of Hebrew Scripture into being shadows, types and allegories of the heavenly Christ. Using the Septuagint Version (the Greek translation of the Hebrew sacred writings) made it easier for them to do that.

At this very time in history, there was a Hellenist Jewish philosopher at Alexandria by the name of Philo (20 BCE-50 CE). Being a scholar of international stature, Philo was far and away the best-known Jewish writer and Biblical commentator of his time. Being a dedicated follower of Plato, Philo’s aim was to harmonize the Jewish Law of Moses with the teachings of Plato. He did this by turning the Law into being shadows, types or allegories of timeless truths – or what Plato called the heavenly Forms.

The Hellenists at Antioch used Philo’s interpretive method when they reduced the meaning of the entire Hebrew Scripture to being shadowy types and allegories of the heavenly Reality which they called Christ.

Here are two examples of how St. Paul employs Philo’s allegorical method to interpret the meaning of the Jewish scripture:

The first instance is where Paul says that the Hebrew story about the two sons of Abraham and their two different mothers was an allegory of Christian freedom (see Galatians 4:23-26). There is nothing in the context of this old Hebrew story to suggest it was an allegory of Christ or first century events. This does, however, suggest that Paul used Philo’s method of interpreting Hebrew Scripture.

The next example of Paul using the Jewish Law as an allegory is a passage where he appeals to his Corinthian converts to financially support the gospel preachers (see 1 Corinthians 9:9). Citing the Law of Moses which forbids the cruelty of muzzling oxen when they tread out the corn, Paul suggests that this Law was not written because God cares for oxen, but because God cares about those who preach the gospel. To which we can only respond by saying that Paul should have known that in Hebrew Scripture God is represented as saying quite a lot about the humane treatment of animals.

The serious issue here is not a trivial bit of history about the two sons of Abraham or some minor Jewish law about the proper treatment of oxen. It is a matter of whether the history and laws in Hebrew scripture should be taken seriously as real history and real laws. Does Jewish history as recorded in the OT have any real meaning in its own right without reducing it to being a mere typological shadow or a pantomime of the coming Christ as the entire NT book of Hebrews would have us believe?

Once the Hellenists came to the belief that Jesus was the heavenly Christ, it was not difficult for them to reduce the entire Jewish scripture to being shadowy patterns, types or allegories that pointed to Christ.

Greek versus Hebrew worldviews of Heaven and Earth

In reducing everything in the material world to being temporary shadows, types and allegories of the heavenly Forms, Greek dualism devalued this world as an inferior, material creation. In Greek Gnosticism the material body was depicted as a temporary prison for the immortal soul.

The Greek worldview called Hellenism produced an enormous amount of imaginative tradition about the life of the gods in the heavenly realm. This included legends of their interactions with humans, including having sexual liaisons with them to produce an elite class of godmen or godwomen called heroes. The only thing that Hellenism ever proved about heavenly things was that it was a mythical product of the human imagination.

There was no speculation about heaven in the Hebrew worldview. To start with, the second commandment of the Decalogue strictly forbade the worship of objects of worship fashioned by the human imagination. There was no information in Hebrew Scripture about an afterlife in a place called heaven, and all communication with the departed dead was strictly forbidden. If the term heaven was ever used in reference to the God of the Hebrews, it was nothing more than a figure of speech for God’s transcendence.

The Hebrew view of the material world was very different to Greek dualism. According to Hebrew scripture, at every stage of the creation process, “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good” (Genesis 1: 31). In the Hebrew view of things, God must have liked the material creation because he made such a lot of it. Louis Armstrong’s famous song of a Wonderful World sits well with Hebrew poetry and songs which laud creation as the work of a gracious God. The Hebrews certainly did not view the created order as the work of an inferior Demiurge as the Greek Gnostics claimed.

There is an old rabbinic saying that at end of our life, the good Lord will ask, “Did you enjoy all the good things which I gave you to enjoy?” This might include planting a vineyard and drinking the wine, building a house and raising a family, or enjoying life “with the wife of your youth” (Proverbs 5:18). Human sexuality was so highly valued in Hebrew culture that Hebrew Scripture devoted one entire book called The Song of Solomon to celebrate it. In Hebrew culture marriage was so highly regarded (“It is not good that man shall dwell alone”) that celibacy was rarely practiced.

This was not how it was in the Greek culture called Hellenism. Nor was this positive Hebrew view of human sexuality a feature in the early centuries of Christianity. According to Bart Ehrman’s, The Triumph of Christianity, it was widely held in the early centuries that sex was legitimate only for the purpose of procreation (p.211). According to Augustine, original sin was transmitted from Adam to each new generation in the concupiscence of the sexual act.

Given this view of human sexuality, it is no wonder that the Church became swept up in a contagion of celibacy and monasticism that continued for centuries. The systematic denigration of women and human sexuality by the Church Fathers was absolutely appalling. None of this sexual negativity was due to the influence of Hebrew Scripture.

This raises the question: how did Christianity during most of its history deal with that very sexy Hebrew book called the Song of Solomon? (After all, being part of Hebrew Scripture, this book had to be included in the Christian Bible). For centuries Christian interpreters said that the Song was to be interpreted as an allegory of Christ’s love for his Church. How pathetic!

Hebrew Focus on the Earth versus Greek Focus on Heaven

The Hebrew language and worldview were firmly focused on the earth, but the Greek worldview was focused on a mythical heaven.

A full life of work and productivity on this earth was highly commended in the wisdom literature of the Hebrews: “See there a man diligent in his business. He shall stand before kings.” (Proverbs 22:29). “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might” (Ecclesiastes (9:11). This does not sound like a Greek journey of the immortal soul trapped in a mortal body until death.

The Hebrew patriarchs lived on the land and wanted their posterity to have a land of their own. This was all covered in the Hebrew story of the Exodus from Egypt and the settlement of the Hebrews in the land of Israel which was promised to Abraham.

The focus of the Hebrew prophets was on the life of Israel on this earth. Even when they wrote of Israel’s future after a period of exile, it was always Israel’s future on this earth, building houses to inhabit and planting vineyards to eat of their fruits (Isaiah 65:21). Life was never depicted in the prophets as a journey to a heavenly Promised Land as the Christian life was depicted in Bunyan’s allegory, The Pilgrims Progress.

When we come to the historical Jesus, we find a wisdom teaching which was all about a way of life on this earth. His first Hebrew followers in Jerusalem were called the people of the Way. Jesus preached what he called “the good news of the kingdom of God.” This was not an imminent apocalyptic kingdom that would destroy this earth. He mocked the idea of looking for signs of the arrival of the apocalypse, saying that the kingdom of God was already present “in your midst” and working silently in the world like mustard weed springing up where it was not wanted, or like yeast (a symbol of evil) that is hidden in a large amount of dough. “It is spread out across the earth,” he said, “although men do not see it.” (Luke 6:20; 10:9; 11:52; 13:18-20; 17:20-21; The Gospel of Thomas). Some were already entering this kingdom, he said, while others were trying to stop those who were entering (Luke 11;52).

Jesus was not an apocalyptic preacher who thought that God was about to discard his good creation as either irretrievably evil or about to disintegrate with age. The real force of his teaching rested on believing that God was an eternal Spirit who was everywhere present in his universe (Ps 139:7-9), but present also in human existence. His eternal Abba Father was not in some other place called heaven more than he was present in this place called earth; nor would God be present at some future time more than God was present in the present time. (It is unfortunate that the Hellenist author of the Gospel of Matthew felt that he had to edit in the words, “which art in heaven” when Jesus referred to God the Father – an edit that does not appear in Luke’s version of Jesus’ mention of the Father. Luke is more aware of Jesus’ consciousness of the immediate presence of the Father).

The teachings of Jesus were embodied in parables and aphorisms (short pithy one-liners) that were full of positive images which indicated that the earth was still God’s good creation, enjoying sun and rain, the birds and the lilies, sowing and reaping, eating and drinking, and celebratory events such as weddings, harvests or a wayward son returning home. Here was a Hebrew wisdom-teacher in sympathetic touch with the natural world and the social life in the rural villages of Galilee. His teachings were not focused on getting to heaven. Rather, they were about a way of life in the kingdom of his Abba Father in the here and now. It was not that he did not believe in what the people of his time called “the world to come,” but a matter of focusing his teachings on living in here and now while leaving the future in the hands of God.

This earthy focus of both the Hebrew prophets and Jesus was largely buried due to the influence of Hellenism in the Christian religion. We need to keep in mind that the entire New Testament’ was written in Greek and by authors who had come under the influence of the Greek worldview called Hellenism. Except for the genuine parables and sayings of the historical Jesus, the NT writings generally devalue this world. Paul calls it a “present evil world” (Galatians 1:3) which is “in the bondage of decay” (Romans 8:19-23). “The whole frame of this age is passing away” (Romans 8:19-23; I Corinthians 7:25-31). Christians are urged to set their affections on things in heaven rather than things on this earth (Colossians 3:2). “Your way of life is now in heaven with Christ” (Philippians 3:20). “What I mean, brothers, is that the time is short. From now those who have wives should live as if they had none, those who mourn, as if they did not; those who buy something, as if it were not theirs to keep…for this world in its present form is passing away.” (1 Corinthians 7:20-25). Another writer says, “Love not the world, nor the things of the world…” (1 John 2:15).

St Paul says almost nothing about the teachings of the historical Jesus because he thinks they have been surpassed by a knowledge of the heavenly Christ (2 Corinthians 5:16.) None of the great Creeds of the Church say a thing about the teachings of Jesus either. The reason for this is basically simple: theirs was the worldview of Hellenism which focused on the heavenly things, that is, the mythical Christ.

Neither the Hebrew writings nor the teachings of Jesus had any information about heaven other than it being a figure of speech for the transcendence of God. Jesus had nothing to say about his being the Christ or about his afterlife in heaven. Anything written in the NT about Christ’s rule in heaven was simply a product of the imagination of the Hellenists.

The whole substance and spirit of the historical Jesus was to pour scorn on the expectations of an apocalyptic messiah who would achieve rule and dominion over others. That, he said, was a common Gentile delusion, for greatness is not about acquiring dominion over others, but about serving them (Mattthew 20:25-27). That apocalyptic visionary called Daniel “saw” the heavenly judgment session take the dominion away from the destructive beasts (symbols of the Gentile powers) and give that dominion to the “people of the saints of the Most High” (Daneil 7:26-27). This is what the Hellenists claimed had happened when Christ was given “all power and dominion” after his resurrection. Alas, the rule of Christian Rome martyred more people than were ever martyred by the Pagan Roman Empire. Western Civilization never enjoyed religious tolerance or democratic rights until the birth of the Enlightenment and the rise of liberal democracy in the 18th Century.

As for what would happen after death, his own death or the death of his listeners, Jesus was silent except to say that not one who is human enough to give a cup of cold water to one who needs it will ever be forgotten (Matthew 10: 42). I once asked my friend Michael Morwood, who was a Roman Catholic priest and author, what he thought had happened to Jesus after he died. He replied, “The same thing that happened to my grandmother after she died.” The wisdom and brevity of his answer made me laugh.

The Hebrew Horizonal Order

The very first chapter in Hebrew scripture declares that God created man as male and female “in the image and likeness of God” (Genesis 1:26-28). This has always been a very foundational statement in Hebrew thinking. It has been professed by other religious traditions such as Christianity and Islam. This Hebrew scripture lived on to influence Thomas Jefferson to write these immortal words in that introductory sentence of the American Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”

In Hebrew thinking, God is an invisible and everywhere Spirit who created the universe (Psalm 139). God’s reality is so infinitely great as to be beyond searching out and beyond all thought and imaginings. The Hebrews even regarded the personal name for God to be an unpronounceable word, so it was eventually written down by the substitute word LORD. Yet in the crowning act of the creation process, this unseeable/unsearchable/infinite One, in an awesome act of loving self-revelation, created mankind in “the image and likeness of God.” As Thomas Sheehan puts it, “God has disappeared into humanity and can be found nowhere else” (The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity). In his Misérables, Victor Hugo has this stunning one-liner: “To love another person is to see the face of God.” The poet Alexander Pope too makes this astonishing conclusion: “Cease from God to scan. The proper study of mankind is man.”

Discouraged and depressed as he hid away in a cave for several weeks, Elijah anxiously waited for God to speak to him. There came a powerful storm, but God was not in the storm; then an earthquake of great force, but God was not in the earthquake; and a fire so vast that it terrified the prophet, but God was not in the fire. Then he heard a quiet human voice asking, “Elijah, are you alright?” (My translation,1 Kings 19) Then it was that the prophet bowed in awe as he recognized how God had spoken to him through another caring human being.

The creation of the stary heavens with its billions of galaxies and this little blue planet teaming with life-forms is a general revelation of God’s infinite power and glory (Psalm 19;10); but it is only in the arena of human existence that we can find the special revelation of God’s essential character. This special revelation does not come in any religious or theological dogma as many theologians have said (implying that God has only spoken to Hebrew prophets and the Christian Church!). It is not given in any holy book buttressed with theories of its inspiration. It does not appear in any of the Creeds of the Church. Special revelation comes in human flesh, that is, in the arena of human existence. This incarnation of God is as broad as human existence.

If that is not amazing enough, consider this: If living as human–not super-human or sub-human – displays the image and likeness of God, then God must be supremely human. God must be like a father who loves to give good gift to his children, “only much more” as Jesus puts it(Luke 11:11). God must be like a nursing mother who would not forget the child of her womb, only much less would God forget his people, as a Hebrew prophet put it (Isaiah 49;15). “Made in the image and likeness of God” implies that God is the supremely human One. We could never know that “God is love” or even know what the word love means unless we had encountered it in the human arena of a mother’s care, a friend’s stickability, or some fellow human asking, “Jack, are you alright?”

In the animal kingdom, creatures arrange themselves into herds, packs, or groups in which the strongest dominate in a pecking order from the alpha male at the top down to the weakest animal or bird at the bottom. This top-down pecking order of dominance and submission in the animal kingdom is as natural as it is for water to run downhill. This is what we call a vertical order of relating. As well as being an order in which the strong dominate and rule the weak, the animal order is characterized by having two other related features: tribalism and xenophobia which motivates the destruction of those of another colony or appearing to be different. (We will have more to say about these features of the animal or vertical order of relating later).

One of first implications of mankind being created in the image and likeness of God is that all humans bear that sacred imprint which gives every person an equal value, as Jefferson contended. The human order was created to be an egalitarian or horizontal order in which there are no superior humans or inferior humans. Every human life is precious and every person is irreplaceable. It makes no difference if a human person has come to look more like trash than a treasure, because beneath any amount of dirt and grime the divine imprimatur will remain indelibly etched. Even if one becomes as lost as a treasure in an old ship buried in the deepest ocean, no one who shows a trace of this image will ever be beyond the redemptive reach of one’s Maker.

The big question this raises is whether we should think of God as relating down to us in a vertical order which we see in the kingdom of fur and feathers; or is God the supremely human One who is with us and in us in the horizontal human order of treating each other as we would like to be treated? The answer to this very crucial question ought to be obvious. More on this crucial question later.

In this horizontal order of humanity, there is one unconditional commandment: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Love is impossible in a vertical or pecking order of superiors and inferiors. It is impossible to love down to someone as it is impossible to love up to someone in a compulsive order of existence. Freedom is the indispensable oxygen of love. For sure, humans can be very different in age, education, wealth, race, etc., but as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the introduction to the American Declaration of Independence, “all men are created equal.” There is no need for us to criticize Jefferson that the implications of being created equal were so far reaching that he never fully carried it all out in either his personal or political life. Who does?

This unconditional command to love others is not pacifism. There may be times when restraint is necessary to prevent someone from harming others or even harming themselves. Tolstoy, the author of that great epic, War and Peace, knew there would be times when even war could not be avoided, but he still argued convincingly that the unloving treatment of others is never justified.

History has proven that it is all too easy to devalue and destroy others in the name of the sacred commandment to love God supremely. It is right here that we confront that monstrous evil called Fundamentalism. This is the delusive condition reached when any God, doctrine, ideology, movement or crusade becomes more important than people.

The Hebrew view of God hidden within humanity means that the First Great Commandment to love God is hidden within the Second Commandment to love others, even if they are hostile to us, as the Hebrew Jesus teaches (Matthew 5:44,45).

This explains why the theme which dominates the message of the Hebrew prophets was a protest that their own Hebrew people were guilty of inhuman conduct. Significantly, the prophets vehemently protested when their own people tended to bury their dereliction of duty to the oppressed and the depressed by multiplying their own religious observances (See Isaiah 1; Amos 5:21-27; Isaiah 58:3-10). This also explains why the Jewish prophet called Jesus had far more to say about the Second Commandment than about the First Great Commandment. “If you bring your gift to the altar” he said, “and remember that your brother has a grievance with you, leave your gift at the altar and first be reconciled to your brother…” (Matthew 5:24)

In the first century there were religious teachers of the Law called Pharisees. They got a lot of bad press in Christian scripture. There was a Pharisee who didn’t deserve any of this. He had a liberal attitude of tolerance and kindness to others, especially to Gentiles. His name was Hillel the Elder, founder of the school of Hillel. He lived a very long life and was widely regarded as one of greatest teachers of Law since Moses. He died around 20 CE when Jesus was hardly out of his teens. At one time a Gentile asked Hillel, “Can you teach me the Law while I stand on one leg,” Hillel replied: “What is hateful to you, don’t you do to others. This is the whole Law. The rest is only commentary.”

It was only a few years later that Jesus repeated the teaching of Hillel in a positive turn of phrase known as the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 7:12)

How could Hillel and Jesus say that the entire Law could be fulfilled by practicing the Golden Rule? It is because God has made himself present in the neighbor, just as Hugo says in that stunning one-liner, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” God is the Spirit of love who can only be loved and served by loving and serving others. What God is in God’s transcendent self is infinite, unsearchable, and beyond human comprehension.

When mankind was created “in the image and likeness of God” this was a momentous act of special revelation in which our neighbor became the sacrament for the real presence of God. When this light finally shines upon the nations of this earth, “they shall beat their swords into agricultural instruments and their spears into pruning-knives; nation shall not life sword against nation nor ever again be trained for war” (Isaiah 2:4; Micah 4:3).

Any other God throughout human history has all too easily been fashioned into an instrument of violence toward others in the name of the sacred. It was done all too often – as the Hebrew prophets protested – in the history of the people who had the Hebrew scriptures; it was done by the Christian religion which outstripped other religions in violence to others in the name of the sacred; it has been done by the Muslim religion in the name of the sacred; it has been done by the people of the Hindu religion in the name of the sacred and by the Buddhist religion which was never supposed to be a religion. If there is such a thing as a religion on the face of the earth which has never done any violence in the name of the sacred to its differing others, let it cast the first stone at the others which have been violent in the name of the sacred.

How can violence against humanity ever be justified if “God has disappeared into humanity to be found nowhere else” (Sheehan)? If man is the only image we have of God, then there is nothing on this earth that can be more sacred than a human person. If the First Great Commandment to love God supremely has disappeared into the Second Great Commandment to love others, then any inhumanity against another human being can never be justified in the name of some higher obligation.

This does not mean that a man is divine or can become divine. His value is based upon his relationship to the Eternal One. In Hebrew thinking, in contrast to Hellenism, man never becomes divine and God always remains One (Deuteronomy 6:4). This absolute “God is one” is the Hebrew Shema.

In the Hebrew language and outlook, the human relationship to God is more like the flower’s ability to reflect the colors inherent in light. No flower can reflect any color unless it remains connected to the light. It is the same with a lightbulb which can only shine if it remains connected to the source of power. “God is light.” “In him we live and move and have our being.” “God only has immortality.” These are true Hebrew concepts.

More to come….

“Threat theology” dominates the master story of Western civilization

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