I.

            Perhaps the death of the church is inevitable. Living dogma is an oxymoron. Therefore, in terms of its initial purpose, the church dies by dogmatic assertion. A church that sees its role as exclusionary based on dogma is already a dead letter against the spirit. And a church that preempts spirit into dogma murders the spirit.

            That the church, and the western churches in particular, failed to distinguish between spirit and religion, finally, shows that from the first the church had lost its roots in the prophetic. What sets the possibility of a messianic drama apart from other traditions is the recognition of this difference. Prophecy begins and ends in the otherness of God : a God ineffably remote reveals itself through a peculiar human gift. It is this necessary otherness of God which separates the prophetic from the oracular.

            Oracles are a function of spirit. Spirit inverts evolution, showing that the web of life and awareness pervades and extends back through ‘the material’. Everything is included in the moment, since there is only the now, and therefore a spiritual awareness that fully embraces the moment or any key to a spiritual power that emanates from the wholeness of the moment has oracular power.

            But the ‘everything’ which is included in the moment and in spirit, while it includes the sense of an otherness, cannot ‘reveal’ this otherness which undergirds it. This is the task of prophecy : to show that what is inevitably and ineluctably other is also essentially benevolent and intimate.

            If I remember correctly, it is in the Koran itself that the Angel tells Muhammad, ‘God is nearer to you than your jugular vein.’ But Islam, like Judaism, retains the essential otherness of God. While both traditions have verbal signs for the intimate Presence of God, neither admits of any possible human embodiment.

            This, of course, is what separates these two from ‘Christianity’, the ecclesiastical or corporate spirit of the Jesus tradition.

            At the same time, all three traditions speak of ‘the kingdom’. Judaism holds the promise of Zion, a messianic transformation beyond the mere physicality of Israel. And read as a strictly spiritual and religious (rather than legalist) pronouncement, the Koran is not other than the exposition of Paradise.

            But legalism is the corporate or institutional state of the mind.

            Perhaps Islam is the anomaly, since Muhammad was a political as well as religious leader; and, at times, the voice of the Angel seemed to respond more or less directly to juridical questions. But even here, if we begin from the Koran itself, we have an insistent individualism that holds the personal responsibility toward God above all institutional forces.

            But all of the Judaic prophets, up to and including Jesus, made an increasingly clear distinction between prophecy and the law. Prophecy is not other than the inward voice of God. The prophetic gift is not other than the moral center revealed in each of us, not in terms of an external ritual of behavior, or even through adherence to a code, but in an organic understanding of how our present behavior and situation holds the potential for the direct expression of the moral in the light of the living spirit as well as the Presence of the unseen.

            Neither external form nor any conscious idea of righteousness can lead us to this moral center. It involves a necessary transformation of consciousness – a recognition of how consciousness itself works – in order to be effected as a living sense of the organic value at the center of our lives.

            But priestcraft requires law.

            Priestcraft institutionalizes prophecy – an oxymoron. Prophetic religion has nothing to do with institutional power. The shift to politics is inevitable. That is, the very nature of priestcraft turns from religious to political force.

            Prophecy itself is the nature of vocation. Therefore, undoubtedly, some have a more nearly religious vocation. And, undoubtedly, within the frame of the vocational gift, each mediates spirit. But such mediation can only embody initiation within the frame of the given ‘form’ for vocation, or ‘craft’. Individual liberation is a function of the individual, because, finally, it depends on an intimate moment of ‘the other’, something one can only encounter for one’s self.

            This is precisely where prophecy differentiates between religion and spirit.

 
            II.

            With the assertion of the Incarnation, the church essentially violates the prophetic gift. Jesus cannot be both the prophesied Messiah and a human incarnation of God.

            At first, only the Prophets themselves experienced the radical transformation of consciousness that revealed the inevitable historical change in which the force of prophecy itself would become a universally available possibility. But we see, as the prophetic tradition develops, a gradual turn within the prophetic, by which the psychology of the prophetic consciousness begins to be revealed.

            If Jesus is the pivot, this prophetic understanding has somehow become generally accessible, at least in terms of the subsequent historical evolution. But, as such, the prophetic development continues. That is, the change in consciousness is complete at Jesus, but not complete in terms of the world. And since the history of the change is evolutionary from the time of Jesus, the presumption is necessary that evolutionary change will persist, even if we arrive at profound moments of qualitative shifts in history and culture as a consequence, as now seems to be the case.

            But the church misinterpretation of the original message seems inevitable.

            The church defines itself as ‘the body of Christ’. And this definition is exact.

            The body is inherently devotional.

            That is, wisdom is not of the body.

            Because they lack self-awareness, corporate entities cannot ‘think’. And since the institutionalizing force of communal corporations is inherently inertial and stultifying, their intellectual creativity, as corporate entities, is generally limited to the first generations of participants. And, even here, the creative insight is usually borrowed or stolen. The orientation is bureaucratic and not creative.

            I say, ‘wisdom is not of the body’. But wisdom is also of the whole body,

            When we touch the whole body or the whole moment of experience as the embracing ground of our immediate act, we express wisdom.

            But we cannot engage this expression consciously unless we have passed through the sequential frames of reflective awareness. Unless we fall and rise again, descend into the narrowing frame of self-awareness and re-emerge through the understanding of how to use the sense of cogency – the feeling value which expresses value – as the instrument of wisdom, our expression of whole body, of ‘intuition’, remains relatively random.

            If our commitment or the institutional forms in which we make our commitment is limited to ‘body’, in this sense, then only devotional practice – the assumption of an essential center ‘beyond’ or ‘outside’ us to which we surrender – can approach this intuitive moment.

            And, of course, this is the necessary condition of ‘church’ and submission to the church.

            While, at the epitome of the devotional, there is an access to the realm of otherness that is the necessary condition of the prophetic understanding, vocationally there are so few destined to this instance that God necessarily becomes the raging judge, the nearly universal anathema of the church, for which the church has mistaken the vector.

            The wisdom of Jesus is non-exclusive.

            But, of course, this non-exclusivity would have necessarily destroyed the church at its inception.

            Since the messianic pivot is freedom, we cannot necessarily assume that this preemption of the first individualist message of Jesus in favor of an institution was ‘destined’. But history makes it a fact. But history also makes it a fact that we now have the documents which originally pointed to the individualist message.

            And the fact that the churches are now becoming wholly the playthings of politics, under the hypocritical aegis of moral ‘ideologies’, makes it clear that any survival of church necessarily reverts to the strictly communal level and equally necessarily involves the readmission of the gnostic understanding, an awareness that there is no such finality as ‘dogma’ in the legitimate teachings of Jesus.