Are You My Friend?

By Dr. H. Lawrence Zillmer

Christians of the Lie is a detective story. The corpus delicti is our current religious conditions: The disillusionment over religious institutions, the willingness to accept uncritically just about any religious doctrine, and the angst of modern man. Who did it? Thanks to current research we now know what Jesus taught. It is labeled Shepherd Theology. Thanks to research we know how the philosophy of Stoicism penetrated the early church and then distorted that churchs message down to our own time. Christians of the Lie ends in a vision of what could happen if Shepherd Theology were put into practice today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 18, 2003
• ISBN: 9781462823253

Dr. H. Lawrence Zillmer

Dr. Zillmer has spent more than eight decades studying God’s blessed revelations in the Bible. Part of his PhD research introduced him to the great truths of cultural myths, none more powerful than the ten which begin the Bible. Modern mankind has lost the ability to understand the purpose and relevance of myths. As we recover our understandings of this art form, the great truths that begin the Bible will open up. We will understand more fully why God chose this art form to begin to answer the ten great human questions, which are ultimately the message of the messenger from heaven—Jesus.

Book preview

ARE YOU

MY

FRIEND?

Dr. H. Lawrence Zillmer

Copyright © 2009 by Dr. H. Lawrence Zillmer.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

[e-mail]

18887

Contents

FOREWORD

CHAPTER ONE

It All Begins With . . .

CHAPTER TWO

The Jesus Message Engages Stoicism

CHAPTER THREE

St. Paul—Apostle to the Gentiles

CHAPTER FOUR

Other Greek and Roman Influences

CHAPTER FIVE

St. Augustine of Hippo

CHAPTER SIX

St. Thomas Aquinas

CHAPTER SEVEN

Reactions and Reformations

CHAPTER EIGHT

In Summary

APPENDICES

FOREWORD

Do not look for anything new in this work. There is no new twist, no new insight, nothing that hasn’t been said before. And that is the significance of this work. Jesus came into our world with a very special message for we human beings. That message was but an elaboration of the truth of this Creation, which has been a part of human experience since the advent of Homo Sapiens. This truth has been available for us down through the ages. Countless men and women have ministered this truth by their lives and living in all places and times. So why this work?

Too many of us, living in this day and age, have lost something which has been essential for human well-being from time out of mind—our relationship with our Spiritual Father. Too many focus upon such question as, Is there a Deity? Or, If there is a Deity, what is His or Her plan for me? What is the Deity all about? How can any loving Deity allow what is happening in this Creation, if He or She made it? When is whatever Deity there is going to stop all this injustice?"

We have lost too much of our spiritual connectedness. Let us remember that we are a soul/spirit temporarily existing in a physical body. The last four centuries, following Descartes dictum, I think, therefore I am, have centered on the humanist view that man is the measure of all things. And we do tend to measure all things by our minds.

While there is no doubt about the contribution of science and technology for the general betterment of our physical living, we have too often allowed our souls, our executive egos, to be guided solely by our minds, our emotions, or the demands of our physical bodies. Too often we have believed that what we cannot quantify, measure by rational human standards, cannot be qualified, that is, determined as to its truth value.

We tend to treat the Deity like some specimen, hold it up for examination, measure and weigh it, and then decide what or who it is! The finite is rationally determining what, if anything, the Infinite is or ought to be!

Dare it be suggested that the choices of our executive egos need to be guided by spiritual realities? Do we know what those realities are? Certainly. Our Heavenly Father has gone to great lengths to reveal those realities to us.

We have the order of this Creation, the message and life of Jesus, the guidance and empowerment for living by our indwelling Holy Spirit, and the work of the Holy Angels. The Deity has come to us in so many ways to help us grasp the relationships we need to have in order to live well within this Creation in which we find ourselves. But relationships require a certain degree of intimacy. So the spiritual relationships, once assumed essential for living in earlier times, those spiritual relationships which form the backbone of Biblical revelations, have simply vaporized in the stale air of humanism. Our rational minds have become the judge and jury of what we are to believe and how we are to live. Solipsism, believing what is true, is true because we believe it, has too often taken the place of our executive ego’s humble listening and responding to divine guidance on a spiritual plane.

We tend to forget that life is about relationships. How can one have any real relationship with a laboratory specimen, or a legal document of proscribed realities? In our fascination with computers and communication machines, have we overlooked the fact that life does not consist of machines—it consists of people? If we have difficulty relating to people, how are we going to relate to a Deity? Where are our flesh and blood relationships in our rational legal-brief concept of life and living?

So this work is about relationships. It will focus on our spiritual relationships. What kind of a relationship do we have with the Deity? What kind of relationship does the Deity desire to have with us? What guides our personal choice-making: our minds, emotions, and physical drives, or the Deity’s spiritual directives into special relationships?

We are in a moral Creation. That is, if we live in harmony with its laws and harmonies, we can live well, if we don’t, we are in trouble. Any real relationship with the Deity presupposes a vital relationship with the harmonies of this physical world in which we find ourselves. From God’s Ten Commandments through to the messages of Jesus, to the discoveries of science, we find that same reality—live in harmony and live well; to live contrary to this reality is to destroy the beautiful and the orderly, sometimes our very selves, even our world.

Every generation needs to experience anew the great life-changing awareness that Jesus brought into our world: that it is our spiritual connectedness which leads to spiritual realities, and it is in those realities in which lie our life and well-being. Of the hundreds of thousands of witnesses to the workability of this truth, I would add another voice for our time and our life situations.

So please bear with me as I return to the ancient proven reality that we are an immortal spirit/soul temporarily dwelling in a physical body. Our spiritual entities must be guided by spiritual realities if we are to find spiritual health in the time of our living within our physical bodies. Without that spiritual health, no other real health is possible, either for ourselves, or for our human societies.

Whatever can be used for your pilgrimage of living, take it and may God bless you with it as He has blessed me. Whatever shortfalls there may be, count them as but a human failure to express so great a truth.

CHAPTER ONE

It All Begins With . . .

We humans are a creation with a soul/spirit living temporarily in a physical body. A basic tragedy of our time is our unwillingness to admit and live with this amazing reality. Yes, we have a mind, and yes, we have emotions, but the one aspect of our existence that is to be the basis of our living and which will transcend the death of our physical body, is our spiritual essence, which we call a soul.

When the western world focused upon the mind; when Descartes said, I think, therefore I am, and when western humanists made our minds the measure of all things, they simply ignored the key element of our human identity—our spiritual component. Even when the gestalt psychologists suggested that if the spiritual was not included in a clinical diagnosis, then the results were bound to be flawed, we continued to focus on the mind. If we think right we will be all right!

Let us not put down our minds, for they have given us great technology. We have discovered the antidote to many diseases, we have made human life easier, we have gone to the moon and returned, and the list goes on and on. But let us never forget, whatever the technology, whatever the advances in science, it is still a human being with all of our capabilities and our foibles, a being who comes into this world as all humans must, as an infant knowing little more than how to nurse, that is in charge of all this technology! It is still a human who peers through a microscope, a telescope, gives marriage vows, sets political agendas, and builds relationships.

So what is this human? Undoubtedly he or she consists of a mind, a physical body, and emotions. But there is more. It is in that „more that our beings were designed to be centered, and that „more will one day leave our bodies for a spiritual existence. This is witnessed at death beds. Something does leave the body. And when the spirit departs, the body is dead; it returns to the elements from which it was made, brain, emotions, and bodily functions.

This work is not designed to prove the existence of a spirit. Experientially one finds that those who will not accept this fact will continue to not accept this fact no matter what is said. They will by choice live their lives guided by tunnel vision, excluding anything that they do not perceive as „rational." This work is directed to the spiritually sensitive; those who may have had spiritual experiences; those who are aware to some degree of the spiritual dimensions of living, those who want something more than what is coldly rational.

How does one have these „spiritual" experiences? What do they mean? How can they be made a positive part of our daily living?

Children have these experiences all the time. Children two, three, four, or even older, meet angels, have spiritual encounters, and have no trouble talking or praying to spiritual beings. That may seem childish to some, but let us remember that we go through five stages of human development before we reach adulthood, and we are to