The Trial Of The Man Who Said He Was God (43 page)

What a shame that those two clients of the Witness had no time for these divine You-turns, and so got half the story! Which was worse than getting none of it.

And what a good thing it is that, among those who got the whole story, some are at pains to tell it - most beautifully - for our encouragement!

The scriptures say there is in us an outward man and an inner man... Without is the old man, the earthly man, the outward person, the enemy, the servant. Within us all is the other person, the inner man, whom the scriptures call the new man, the heavenly man, the young person, the friend, the aristocrat.

Eckhart

The separate creaturely life, as opposed to life in union with God, is only a life of various appetites, hungers and wants, and cannot possibly be anything else... The highest life that is natural and creaturely can go no higher than this; it can only be a bare capacity for goodness and cannot possibly be a good and happy life but by the life of God dwelling in and in union with it. And this is the twofold life that, of all necessity, must be united in every good and perfect and happy creature.

William Law

He who can instantly realize the truth of Non-existence - yet without departing from lust, hate and ignorance - can grasp the weapons of the Demon King and use them in the opposite way. He can then turn these evil companions into angels protecting the Dharma... This is the nature of the Dharma itself!

Zen Master Tsung-kao

The world of outward forms after he had left it... would seem to him [the disciple] the inverse of what it had been before, simply because the Light of his inward eye had dawned.

Shaikh Al-Buzidi

Unless you make the things of the right hand as those of the left, and those of the left as those of the right, and those that are above as those below, and those that are behind as those that are before, you shall not have knowledge of the kingdom.

The Martyrdom of St Peter

Prosecution Witness No. 27

THE BORN-AGAIN CHRISTIAN

COUNSEL, to Jury: I call now my last Witness, a lady who has recently been ordained as a priest in the Anglican Church. Let us pay particular attention to her testimony, and see for what they are the Accused’s attempts to dodge and distort it. [To Witness] What do you know of the Accused’s teaching?

WITNESS: He doesn’t exactly hide it under a bushel, does he? I know it well. Well enough to understand how dangerous it is.

COUNSEL: Explain to the court what you mean. The conclusions you’ve come to, and why.

WITNESS: He makes out he’s a deeply religious person, concerned above all with God and spiritual things. More and more he uses Christian language. Yet he ignores and has no time or use for Jesus Christ as the sole mediator between God and man. In effect he thumbs his nose at the authentic Christ of scripture and of history. He reckons to come to God directly, on his own terms, according to his own plan, under his own steam. Or rather, he reckons he’s arrived. Arrived, he’s now claiming, not as plain John a-Nokes (which would have been blasphemy enough) but as John a-Nokes become another Christ (which is blasphemy to the nth degree). We sinners are saved by the Crucifixion and shed blood of our dear Lord. Mr Nokes turns down God’s free offer of forgiveness and salvation through the unique sacrifice of His Only Son. Repeat
Only
Son. Are his sins so venial they don’t need forgiving? Is he all right as he is? Is there no danger he needs saving from? I ask you: what more awful insult can be offered to the Almighty than to pooh-pooh His offer of salvation? Which is as good as telling Him He needn’t have bothered, and that Calvary was a superfluous and horribly cruel charade. In fact, Mr Nokes has as little time for God the Father as for God the Son. ‘Whosoever denieth the Son, the same hath not the Father,’ says St John. ‘He is antichrist that denieth the Father and the Son.’ One way or another, Mr Nokes dismisses the first two Persons of the Holy Trinity. You could say he’s two-thirds atheist, at least.

COUNSEL: Why do you think he’s taken up this position? What’s behind it?

WITNESS: He’s exceedingly ambitious, which means he needs to be exceedingly clever. When making a take-over bid for a great business - the Business of businesses in this instance - you first secretly arrange for its devaluation, by as much as two-thirds if you can. Some instinct tells him to dispose of God the Transcendent Father and God the Incarnate Son, who was born in Bethlehem and died at Calvary - even Mr Nokes would hardly claim to be them - leaving only God the Spirit, whom he proceeds to identify with as easy as winking. He figures he can comfortably handle a God he wraps himself around like a boa constrictor and eats for breakfast. A small and contained convenience-product of a God. This is getting God on the cheap, all right. So he supposes. Actually, of course, it’s the Devil he’s getting, and paying the price of everlasting perdition.

Though this is blasphemy of the worst kind, it wouldn’t be so awful if he kept quiet about it, if he held it in quarantine. What brings him into court today is his determination to spread the virus by every means at his disposal. I say he must be stopped by every means at the court’s disposal. I don’t say this out of hate, but out of love. I pray for John a-Nokes every day - pray that he may at last give in to the love of the only true Saviour, the Lord Jesus, who gave His life for him and for us all. Then my friends and I will be the first to take John a-Nokes to our hearts.

Defence:
I Am What Christ Is

MYSELF: Most of your testimony has been about the Second Person of the Trinity. For the benefit of the court will you please describe briefly His nature as you understand it.

WITNESS: I believe the Son is perfect God and perfect man, and in him these aren’t two but one. One, not by the conversion of the Godhead into flesh, but the other way round. God, in the Person of His Son, was crucified for our salvation, descended into Hell, and rose again the third day from the dead.

MYSELF: You are paraphrasing, I think, part of the Athanasian Creed, so-called, which (let me remind you) also describes the Son as eternal, uncreated, incomprehensible, coequal with the Father and the Holy Ghost, begotten before the world.

WITNESS: That’s right. It sums up my faith.

MYSELF: Did you know that St Athanasius said ‘God became man so that man might become God’? And that Christians for centuries have looked on him as the authority on this subject of deification - a term which the Fathers of the Church used freely?

WITNESS: No, I didn’t know that.

MYSELF: Thank you. No more questions from me.

COUNSEL: Please stay in court, in case you are required for reexamination.

MYSELF: Members of the Jury, I think I understand why the Witness imagines I’ve no time for God incarnate in the Jesus Christ of history, for God the Son come down into the world two thousand years ago. If there’s a fault here, it’s largely mine. Before this Trial I’ve made few public references to him. However, that’s not because he leaves me cold, but the reverse. How could I ever forget that young man crying in the garden? Nothing has been nearer my heart since childhood than the true story of the Highest who came down out of pity and love, was born in that very special place, and lived that very special life, and died that very special death. So far from holding him in contempt, as the Witness asserts, I find him altogether adorable. I didn’t intend to unload on the court my deepest thoughts and feelings (my tears also, I fear) on this subject, but she has left me no alternative. It will be for you to decide whether they are in any sense blasphemous, or (as I believe) the very opposite.

Fortunately, in seeking to get my experience of Christ over to you, I have the unusual advantage of three media - one verbal and two non-verbal. In addition to these words there is the little - but crucial - experiment I shall ask you to do shortly, and there is our Diagram No. 32. Please turn to it now, and keep it before you till I have finished replying to this Witness.

Diagram No. 32

Here we have an indication of how Jesus looked
to himself
on the Cross, upside down and turned round to face all creation. A sketch of what he was as First Person on the day when he had in every sense come to the World’s End and Hell’s Bottom Line, had come down all the way to the cellar and pit of his Father’s lofty universe. There were his mother Mary and those soldiers, gazing not up at him but down upon him. Look carefully at the sketch, and you’ll see why I say
down.
And there was he gazing not down upon them, but up at them, and at those foreshortened legs and nailed feet so small. And gazing out at those immensely wide arms embracing the world he was dying for, and those nailed hands so small, reaching on either side beyond the horizon.

I’ll not speak of the pain, but of this supreme instance of the reversal of values that we were noticing earlier. Members of the Jury, just look at this. Look at what man did to God out of hate, and what God did for man out of love. That the Power and the Glory back of the universe should be
this
kind of Power and
this
kind of Glory, transmuting the worst into the best - this, you might be tempted to say, is so beautiful and so good that it has to be true. You would do better to say, along with me, that a universe which comes up with such a design for Deity - a design which has moulded two thousand years of human history - is that sort of universe. The sort that produces, in the fullness of time, what all along it had up its sleeve. I’ll go much further than that, and say that our life and all life is modelled on Golgotha. The crucifixion of the First Person is built-in. It’s the price of a world. The world can be had no cheaper. Oh, yes, the agony and the bitter humiliation are there for keeps (not for long will we be allowed to forget that), but so is the alchemical love of the God who transmutes that poisonous lead into twenty-two carat gold. How thorough is His reversal of values, and what it costs Him!

COUNSEL: I trust, members of the Jury, that you won’t be taken in by these crocodile tears, this touching eleventh-hour conversion. (I almost said this last-minute confession on the scaffold.) And by this temporary consecration of the dock as a pulpit. If it’s a pulpit, it’s one from which blasphemy continues to flow forth freely. I want you particularly to note that the Accused is daring to use virtually the same diagram for Jesus Christ on the Cross as he has used for himself throughout this Trial. Thus, without needing to spell out his terrible message in so many words, he surreptitiously accords himself divine status. Which only goes to show how justified are the distress and the anger he’s causing among earnest Christians such as the Witness.

MYSELF: Surreptitious my foot! Don’t you ever listen to me? I
insist
that virtually the same picture does for Jesus Christ as First Person on the Cross as for myself as First Person all the time. And (I hasten to add) for all humans. None - not the wickedest or stupidest or the most unchristian - is, in his own experience of himself, any different. Why, of course! How else could it be? All, each and every one, are caught up bodily (repeat,
bodily)
in the drama of Calvary. Only with all and as all could Jesus Christ suffer and die for all. To suffer and die for alien beings was just not on. St Paul has every reason for claiming that we are all bearing about
in the body
the living and dying of the Lord Jesus.

COUNSEL: You can’t dilute or excuse your blasphemy by spreading it around - nearly all of it in places and among persons that won’t accept it. As I understand it, the Christian faith is based on the absolute uniqueness of the Son of God incarnate as Jesus Christ, a uniqueness which you are denying and which St Paul (except when quoted out of context) never questions.

MYSELF: Again, believe it or not, I insist on the very thing you say I deny. In the deepest sense there is only one First Person - the First Person
Singular;
only
one
Son of God, His
Only
Son - eternal, uncreated, incomprehensible, begotten before the world. ‘All mankind is in Christ one man,’ said St Augustine. But this isn’t to deny that, at another level and in another sense, there are as many First Persons as there are third persons - every third person coming equipped with his or her First-Person aspect, and vice versa - so that God has countless Sons and Daughters. Take that matchless passage from the Fourth Gospel: