Who does not know these momentous words which Jesus of Nazareth uttered when He hung on the cross.
They are one of the greatest prayers of intercession ever spoken. Clear and explicit. And yet in spite of
this, for the past two thousand years these words have been met with a complete lack of comprehension.
They were interpreted one-sidedly. Only in that way which appeared to be agreeable to men. There was
not one person to raise his voice and call out their proper meaning in all its explicitness to mankind,
especially to Christians!
But not only that. Every soul-stirring event in the earth-life of the Son of God was put into a false
light by the one-sidedness of the transmission. These faults, however, are not only present in Christianity;
they are to be found in every religion.
If disciples place the purely personal things about their teacher and master into the foreground, then
this is understandable, especially when this master was so abruptly and brutally torn from their midst,
and, although utterly innocent, was exposed to the most terrible suffering and coarsest mockery, and
finally put to a most agonizing death.
Such events would be deeply engraved on the souls of those who had come to know their teacher in
the most ideal way while they lived together, and would quite naturally cause them to place the personal
element foremost in everything they remembered. But the sacred Mission of the Son of God lay in His
Word, in bringing the Truth from Luminous Heights, in order to show mankind their way to the Light.
This way had been closed to them up till then, because the state of their spiritual development had
previously made it impossible for them to walk on that road!
The suffering thereby wrought by mankind upon this great Bringer of Truth stands entirely alone!
However, what was quite understandable and natural to the disciples resulted in many great errors in
the later religion. The essence of the Divine Message receded far into the background before the personal
cult of the Bringer of Truth, a cult which Christ never intended.
For this reason mistakes are now evident in Christianity which will lead to the danger of a breakdown
unless the errors are recognized in time, and are openly and courageously confessed and corrected.
It can only be expected that the smallest amount of serious progress must make all of these gaps
visible. So it is decidedly better not to avoid them, but to tackle them boldly! Why should the purification
not be initiated by the leadership itself, cheerfully and frankly, with a free upward gaze towards the
Supreme Godhead! As if freed from a pressure, which although perceived was never really recognized as
such, great numbers of men would gratefully follow the call that would lead them into the light of joyful
conviction! —
In following the habit of those who blindly subject themselves to the unlimited rule of their intellect,
and who thereby severely diminish their ability to comprehend, they placed the same value on Christ’s
earth life as on His Mission. His family relationships and all the earthly events received even greater
attention than the main purpose of His Coming, which consisted of bringing enlightenment to the matured
human spirits about all the real happenings in Creation, wherein alone they will find the Will of God,
which is woven into it and thus guaranteed for them.
The bringing of this yet unknown Truth alone made it necessary for Christ to come to the earth.
Nothing else. For without truly recognizing the Will of God in Creation no man can find the road of
ascent to the Luminous Realm, much less walk upon it.
Instead of simply accepting these facts as such, immersing themselves in the Message and living
accordingly, as the Bringer of Truth repeatedly and emphatically demanded, the founders of the Christian
religions and churches created a personal cult as the principal foundation, which forced them to make the
suffering of Christ into something entirely different from what it really was.
They needed it for this cult! Finally, in the course of further development, this quite naturally
produced one great error after another, preventing them from even recognizing the right way at all.
This false structure alone, which was founded in a lack of objectivity, brought about the distortion in
all of the happenings. Unbiased naturalness was bound to be lost as soon as the main cult became purely personal! With this arose the desire to anchor the Mission of the Son of God mainly in His life on earth.
Indeed this became a necessity.
However, Christ Himself proved by His whole attitude that it was the wrong course to take. More
than once He clearly and sharply rejected the attention given to his person. With every word and every
action He always pointed to God the Father, Whose Will He fulfilled and in Whose Power He stood and
acted. He explained how mankind should henceforth learn to look up to God the Father, but He never
spoke of Himself in this connection.
But since His words in this regard were not heeded, it became inevitable in the end that Christ's
suffering on earth was presented as necessary, and as ordained by God, even branded as the main task of
His coming to earth! According to the resulting view, He came from the Luminous Heights only in order
to suffer here on earth!
As He had not burdened Himself with any guilt, there remained only one explanation: He must have
taken the sins of others upon Himself in order to redeem these sins for them!
What was left but to continue to build in that manner on the foundation thus established.
And the well-known overestimation of self-worth, from which all mankind suffer, provided the
nourishing power and fertile soil for this. It is the result of the great Fall of Man, which was directed
against the spirit, and which I have often explained in detail. In valuating his intellect too highly man is
concerned only with himself and not with his God, all of the bridges to Whom he has thus destroyed.
Only a few here and there still have a very weak pathway to the Spiritual Sphere which, however, allows
them to gain but a small sense, never real knowledge.
For this reason, the proper and natural thought, completely to disassociate the earthly suffering of
Christ from the Divine Message as being a separate happening, occurred to no one. Nor did anyone
recognize all the hostility, persecution and torture as the serious and most brutal crimes that they really
were. It is a new and great wrong to euphemize them by depicting them as a necessity!
His sufferings and agonizing death on the cross certainly deserve the radiant light of highest glory
since the Son of God did not shrink from such evil reception among the arrogant and vengeful people, a
reception which was to be expected after the Fall of Man, but in spite of all this, He brought His so
urgently needed Message of Truth to the earth for the sake of the few who were good.
The act is to be valued all the more highly, because it is really only a small proportion of mankind
who wish to save themselves thereby.
But it is a new sacrilege against God when the crimes mankind committed at that time are supposed
to be so mitigated through false assumptions as to make it appear that men had only been the tools of a
necessary fulfillment.
It is because of these errors that many thinking men are so uncertain about the consequences of the
action of Judas Iscariot! With full justification. For if the death on the cross was necessary for mankind,
then Judas and his betrayal provided the necessary tool, and in the spiritual sense he should not really
have been punishable. The truth about the actual happening, however, removes all such conflicts, the
justified emergence of which only confirms the fact that the assumption accepted in the past must really
be false. Where the right view prevails there is no room for such unresolved questions, and the quite
natural happening can be considered from every point of view without running into an obstacle.
Man should at last have the courage to recognize the diminishment of the true nature of this crime,
i.e. the euphemizing of it, as cowardice, which is only kept concealed by the cleverness of his earthbound
intellect, the greatest enemy of everything that is able to rise above it, just as this fact always shows itself
with every base fellow. Or it may show as veiled self-aggrandizement which springs from the same
source! Isn’t it nice to be able to imagine being valued so highly as to have a deity take on suffering and
fight only to be able to offer a place of honor in the Divine Realm of Bliss to this small human being!
In reality such is man’s basic view, plainly and bluntly expressed! This is the way it looks as soon as
a firm hand tears away the glitter from its forms!
I need hardly point out that such a view can only be the result of a most seriously restricted capacity
to comprehend all non-earthly happenings. Ever and again it is one of the grave consequences of the
glorification of the earthly intellect which prevents any free, broad outlook. Worship of this idol, the intellect has naturally grown steadily since the Fall of Man, until it has now developed into the earthly
powerful Antichrist or, more explicitly, into all that is anti-spiritual! This is clearly evident today
wherever one looks. This no longer requires a keen eye.
And since the spiritual alone can provide the bridge to approach and to understand all that is Divine,
the granting of supreme power to the earthly intellect, to which all the sciences proudly confess today, is
nothing but an open declaration of war against God!
Not only the sciences, but all mankind today moves under this banner! Even anyone calling himself a
serious seeker carries this poison about with him.
It is therefore not unnatural for the Church also to contain much of it. In the rendering and
interpreting of all the words of the Savior, therefore, much has crept in which has its origin only in the
earthly intellectual cleverness!
This also is the serpent which seduces man ever again and of which the Bible story warns! This
serpent of intellectual cleverness alone, confronts every man with the misleading decision: “Yea, that
God said..?”
As long as every decision is left to the serpent, i.e., to the intellect alone, it will always, as has been
rightly indicated in the Bible, choose what is hostile to or what leads away from God, that which is purely
earthly and much lower, to which the intellect belongs as its highest manifestation. Thus it cannot grasp
what is higher.
Man has been endowed with intellect so that in every life on earth he has a counterbalance pulling
downwards to balance the upward-striving pure spirituality. It was given to him for the purpose of
preventing him from floating in spiritual heights only, and thereby forgetting his task on earth. The
intellect is also meant to facilitate and make his whole life on earth easier and more comfortable. But,
above all, it is intended to transmit the strong upward drive toward what is sublime, pure and perfect,
which is an absolutely inherent quality of the spirit, to that which is small and earthly, and to make its
effect visible in the material world. It should act as the handyman of the living spirit, as its servant, not as
the one to make decisions and take the lead! It is to help create the earthly or material opportunities for
the carrying out of spiritual urges. The intellect is to be the tool and the servant of the spirit.
If, however, all decisions are left to the intellect alone, as is done now, then it ceases to be only a
counterbalance and helper, but puts only its own weight into the scales of every decision with the only
possible result being a sinking lower, on account of its downward pull. No other course is possible
because the intellect belongs to the World of Matter and is firmly bound to it, whereas that which is
spiritual comes from above. Instead of extending a helping hand to the spiritual, and becoming strong and
great in doing so, the intellect, as soon as everything is left up to it, rejects and repudiates the stronger
hand proffered by the spiritual. It cannot do otherwise and acts only in accordance with the laws of its
own nature.
It must be remembered, however, that the earthly intellect becomes the enemy of the spirit only when
it is elevated above the latter! Not before. For if it stands under the dominion of the spirit, as it is set up
by nature in accordance with the Creative Will, it remains a faithful servant which can be appreciated as
such. But if, contrary to the Laws of Nature, the intellect is given a position of authority, where it does not
belong, the consequence is that it will suppress anything that might interfere with its remaining on the
usurped throne. It automatically closes the doors which, if kept open, would throw light upon its
deficiencies and narrow limitations.
This is strictly analogous to the actions of those people, who in well-ordered circumstances and under
good leadership feel their abilities grow, and who then over-estimate these abilities and overthrow the old
order, and who then, because of their inability to achieve what is higher, plunge a nation into poverty and
distress. Just as such people can never realize their error and, both to themselves and before others,
always seek only to blame past circumstances for their own incapacity, so will it be equally hard for the
human intellect to recognize that it can never work in the place of the superior spirit without causing
gravest harm and finally bringing about destruction. It is always the same picture, the same happening,
repeated endlessly.
Men should for once think themselves calmly and deeply into this process. Everything would then
quickly become understandable to them, and it would also appear most useful.

AND HE IS THE PROPITIATION FOR OUR SINS.