Today’s post includes a number of thoughts from the Sermon on the Mount book by Emmet Fox that was such an important part of A.A. in its early days – still a very appropriate resource for today.

My object is to present the reader with a practical manual of spiritual development (6).

Jesus Christ is easily the most important figure that has ever appeared in the history of [humanity]. It makes no difference how you may regard him, you will have to concede that. This is true whether you choose to call him God or man; and, if man, whether you choose to consider him as the world’s greatest Prophet and Teacher, or merely as a well-intentioned fanatic who came to grief and failure, and ruin, after a short and stormy public career (11-12).

What did Jesus really stand for? What did Jesus teach? What did he really wish us to believe and to do? What were the objects that he really had at heart? And how far did he actually succeed in accomplishing these objects in his life and in his death? How far has the religion or movement called Christianity, as it has existed for the last nineteen centuries, really expressed or represented his ideas? (14-15)

I propose to show that the message which Jesus brought has a unique value because it is the Truth, and the only perfect statement of the Truth of the nature of God and of [humanity], and of life, and of the world; and of the relationships which exist between them. And far more than this, we shall find that his teaching is not a mere abstract account of the universe, which would be of very little more than academic interest; but that it constitutes a practical method for he development of the soul and for the shaping of our lives and destinies into the things that we really wish them to be (16-17).

The plain fact is that Jesus taught no theology whatever. His teaching is entirely spiritual or metaphysical. Historical Christianity, unfortunately, has largely concerned itself with theological and doctrinal questions which, strange to say, have no part whatever in the Gospel teaching. It will startle many good people to learn that all of the doctrines and theologies of the churches are human inventions built up by their authors out of their own mentalities, an foisted upon the Bible from the outside; but such is the case. There is absolutely no system of theology of doctrine to be found in the Bible; it simply is not there (19-20).

The actual explanation of [human] life lies in just the fact that [the human] is essentially spiritual and eternal, and that this world, and the life that we know intellectually, is so to speak, but a cross section of the full truth concerning [the human] and a cross section of anything – from a machine to a horse – never can furnish even a partial explanation of the whole.

Glimpsing one tiny corner of the universe, and that with only half-opened eyes, and working from an exclusively anthropocentric and geocentric point of view, [humanity] built up absurd and very horrible fables about a limited and [human]-like God who conducted [the] universe very much as a rather ignorant and barbarous prince might conduct the affairs of a small Oriental kingdom. All sorts of human weaknesses, such as vanity, fickleness, and spite, were attributed to this being. Then a farfetched and very inconsistent legend was built up concerning original sin, vicarious blood atonement, infinite punishment for finite transgressions; and, in certain cases, an unutterably horrible doctrine of predestination to eternal torment, or eternal bliss, was added. Now, no such theory as this is taught in the Bible, to teach it, it would be clearly stated in a straightforward manner in some chapter; but it is not.

The “Plan of Salvation” which figured so prominently in the evangelical sermons and divinity books of a past generation is as completely unknown to the Bible as it is to the Koran. There never was any such arrangement in the universe, and the Bible does not teach it at all. What has happened is that certain obscure texts from Genesis, a few phrases taken here and there from Paul’s letters, and one or two isolated verses from other parts of the Scriptures, have been taken out and pieced together by divines, to produce the kind of teaching which it seemed to them ought to have been found in the Bible. Jesus knows nothing of all this. He is indeed anything but a Pollyanna, as they say, or cheap optimist. He warns us, not once but often, that obstinacy in sin can bring very, very severe punishment in its train, and that [person] who parts with the integrity of [the person’s own] soul – even though [that person] gain the whole world – is a tragic fool (21-24).

Jesus has been sadly misunderstood and misrepresented in other directions too. For instance, there is no warrant whatever in his teaching for the setting up of any form of Ecclesiasticism, of any hierarchy of officials or system or ritual. He did not authorize any such thing, and, in fact, the whole tone of his mentality is definitely antiecclesiastical (26-27).

It seems that human nature is very prone to believe what it wants to believe, rather than to incur the labor of really searching the Scriptures with an open mind (28).

Jesus . . . was careful to teach principles only, knowing that when the spirit is right, details will take care of themselves . . . yet, in spite of this, the history of orthodox Christianity is largely made up of attempts to enforce all sorts of external observances upon the people (30-31).

Tolstoy endeavored to put forward the Sermon on the Mount as a practical guide to life, taking its precepts literally, at their face value, and ignoring the spiritual interpretation of which he was unaware, and excluding the Plane of Spirit in which he did not believe (47).

The page references in this post are from the eBook version of Fox’s work – published in 1998 by HarperCollins e-books.

In the coming posts I will begin to look at some of the primary issues that haunt the organized church today and continue to cause much division and strife. And always, I encourage your comments and responses.

Grace and peace