Speaking Like Luther

By Lemm Sadler

Within three centuries of his resurrection, Jesus of Nazareth
was presented to the world as incarnation of the Second
Person of a triune Godhead. The great debate at Nicaea
sought to resolve the issue of how the death of Christ could be effective
for the sins of the whole world. The Alexandrians and Romans infused
Christ with the qualities of a Greek deity, and argued that Christ had
literally come down from his heavenly throne and appeared among
mortals as a man, yet died as a deity for mankind. The pragmatic
Asians, however, believed Christs existence began only with his birth,
and believed that Jesus Christ was a man sent by God to reflect the
nature of God perfectly to others.
The debate-winning Alexandrians explained salvation using Greek
metaphysical notions about the relationship between physical and
spiritual worlds. Speaking Like Luther enters the fray by tackling the
same questions while rejecting metaphysical arguments. In a way, it
gives a voice back to the early Asian bishops. It asks the 21st century
Christian to challenge what Nicaea and the Church Fathers first
believed to be the truth, and to reconsider how it was that Jesus could
save his own nation and offer a universal salvation to all mankind, if
he was something less than a deity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Nov 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781514441527

Lemm Sadler

The author, who writes under a pseudonym, holds science and divinity degrees. He makes his living in Australia as a teacher, and lives with his wife and three children. He strongly believes the days are late in the prophetic calendar, and that the return of Christ draws near. The message in this book, therefore, can wait no longer.

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Copyright © 2015 by Lemm Sadler.

Cover background image by Graeme N. Bayley (B.Pharm.)(Photographer)

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.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Rev. date: 10/28/2015

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CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1: Original Sin

Chapter 2: Marred Image of God

Chapter 3: Messiah and Trinity

Chapter 4: What is Salvation?

Chapter 5: Speaking Like Luther

Chapter 6: Neurosis

Chapter 7: Salvation is of the Jews

INTRODUCTION

W hile Martin Luther is credited with starting the Reformation, this was not because he was an outstanding theologian in his age. The key to Luther’s success lay rather in the fact that he was able to voice what so many others also wanted to voice, if only they dared. The conspiracy of fate against Luther, and his civil disobedience to the authority of the day, turned out to be the first step away from what later came to be seen as a great deception that had until then posed as the true religion of Christ. His refusal to obey those who claimed to speak directly for Christ started a process which would also see Scripture completely re-examined for the first time in a millennium.

Yet his break with existing religious authority was only half of the total Reformation that was required, because a complete movement away from the traditions of the Roman Catholic Church needs a revision that is more fundamental still. That revision is the subject of this book. The present author will use modern license to speak to the Church in a way that compares with how Luther spoke to the Church in 1517, or with how Origen spoke to Christians in the first century. Christians of all descriptions are now encouraged to become brave and free enough to re-evaluate the philosophies and interpretations of the fourth century theologians of North Africa (especially from Alexandria) and Rome. Did these early theologians – steeped in Greek culture and philosophy – really give a true presentation of the personal doctrines of the Jewish Christ?

What is proposed in this book is therefore nothing less than a second doctrinal reformation – one in which it is hoped that all erroneous doctrines of the Catholic and Reformation Churches should be identified and deleted from Christian theology. The hope and expectation is that the true doctrines of Christ will finally be rediscovered by the Church. Such revisions should finally put aside as pagan the metaphysical concepts of Greek classicism. These are notions that poured Jewish understanding of divinity and deity into Greek philosophical moulds, converting the biblical Christ into a god who had descended into the world of men.¹

A truly biblical theology should never be in competition with Roman polytheistic systems, but should build upon pragmatic Jewish realism and a strong sense of the Covenant of God with Israel. It should also speak of the blessings of that covenant - as per Romans 11 – being extended to all nations through Israel. Nor, perhaps, has the Church considered that it is just as serious to enlarge the biblical Christ as it is to diminish him – indeed, perhaps even more so, as a downward correction is in many ways more difficult to make than an upward one.

However, to get to where I want to go by Chapter 4, there is a little trudging over old theological ground, and for the reader who is well acquainted with Christian doctrine, it may seem like a dry walk through chapters 1 to 3. Yet this territory has to be covered, as these taken-for-granted doctrines are exactly where the problem lies. But to help the reader hang on for what follows, a fairly direct path is taken through the issues of Original Sin and the Image of God in Man. The question of the Trinity will also be touched on, as this is directly related to the question of Christ’s rank within the society of Israel, and to the priesthood and ministry of the Church that follows him. Once a clearer understanding of these issues has been gained, Christology and the doctrine of salvation can be revisited, and the significance of the New Covenant can be seen in this new light.

So buckle up. If you are easily offended, or believe that just because the Church taught you something it must be true, you could be in for a bumpy ride!

CHAPTER 1

ORIGINAL SIN

B ishop Origen came to the conclusion that Christ was eternally begotten of the Father, and yet he also believed in a corpus of metaphysical ideas that would generally be rejected in the modern day. His ideas included the notion that Adam and Eve, before the Fall, were not physical beings at all, but more or less angelic, and argued that it was only after the Fall that human mortality, now linked to a fallen nature, propagated as a curse over humanity. Through the eyes of post-classical Greek thinkers, this fall was thought to have precipitated within Man’s ethereal nature just as the first ethereal cosmos also devolved into a similarly cursed physical cosmos. This was the original understanding behind Original Sin. ² Human flesh and its mortality was not so much, then, the cause as the consequence of the great Curse, according to the early theologians. Yet it is also the flesh that continues to transmit this fallen nature to everyone subsequently born of woman.

It was this strange idea of inherited sinfulness that got the Church into trouble over Mary. Mary, necessarily born in Original Sin – thus in a state of innate sinfulness – was the natural mother of Jesus. That Jesus was born through virgin birth is here an uncontested teaching. Jesus referred to it when answering Jewish questions about how the Pharisees could have proof that he was the Son of God. Yet the result is that part of Jesus genetically comes from the very human Mary, and the other part from God, even if the spirit of Jesus is not, in standard theological understanding, a hybrid of the human and divine spirits. When it began, Jesus was understood as comprising a human body marked with Original Sin, indwelt not just by divinity, but by the very deity God-the-Son. Strictly speaking, in the thinking of Origen, Jesus did not have his own spirit as a man, but was God-the-Son living in an otherwise empty human body. God had become flesh (incarnated) by clothing his spirit in a human body, and that body had been generated physically from Mary’s body.

In pinning themselves to the idea that Jesus was at once fully man and fully God, early theologians struggled to explain how the physically motivated part of Christ’s nature did not influence or defile the divine part, or how the presence of the divine spirit did not destroy his physicality.³ The human and divine, in Jesus, were evidently integrated as an un-conflicted unity. The theologians could not argue that the purity of God had simply negated the tendencies of Original Sin inherited from Mary’s flesh, which must certainly have been transmitted to Jesus through physical conception. They knew little of genetics, yet the Curse of sin, for them, was nevertheless transmitted biologically, so Jesus had a problem in being born from Mary. In Jesus, pure and impure worlds had somehow been brought together in harmonious and sinless coexistence.

The Church attempted a variety of explanations – but each required the invention of ideas not presented in Scripture itself. These included the idea that while Mary’s body housed the growing foetus of Jesus, the foetus was actually fed and grown miraculously by the Holy Spirit, not receiving the blood of Mary at any time. One would, with this view, think that Christ was not even attached to Mary by an umbilical cord.⁴ Yet while this separation of the bodies and blood of Mary and Jesus may satisfy a Jehovah’s Witness, it does not change the fact that Jesus shared the genetics of Mary and of humanity in general, and therefore participated as a flesh and blood human being, trapped through flesh in the condition of Original Sin, even if he did not subsequently sin.

Perhaps the best modern incorporation of this doctrine, but one in which no change in status is made to Mary, attempts to argue that Original Sin passes from generation to generation only through the seed of the father, with no transmission from the mother. This allows the divine conception of Jesus by the Holy Spirit to circumvent the transmission of Original Sin from one’s father and leave him uniquely sinless among men. Yet this argument changes Original Sin from describing the metaphysically fallen state of man and his nature, and assumes that physicality is Man’s natural created state. Original Sin then describes instead how human sinfulness and mortality are unavoidably transmitted through successive generations, and this becomes the great Curse from God. Indeed, this is what most people today believe the doctrine entails.

While this explanation seems attractive, the Apostle Paul’s theology seems to argue that human mortality is more than a curse. Paul puts forward the more concrete notion that eternal life is simply not possible in the human body, and that a new incorruptible (that is, undying) body is necessary to accommodate this higher state of being. Men must, in Jesus’ own words, become like the angels in order to conquer mortality, and presumably also to overcome their subjection to the power of Original Sin forever. So Original Sin could only be linked to Paul’s theology as the condition of being in a corruptible body, and not so much in terms of it being a pan-generational curse. That is, the argument that Original Sin is transmitted only through the father’s seed may solve the problem with Mary but it entirely forgets the original argument behind the doctrine, which is that fallen mankind lost a primal state of spiritual perfection and precipitated – effectively incarnated as flesh and blood - into a physical world. Human flesh and blood then became a kind of veil, separating Man and God.

In time, the official Church resolution of this conundrum about the un-fallen nature of Jesus resident in a fallen body, was that God must have extended a kind of divine dispensation to Mary, so that she – like Jesus who would be born to her – was herself the product of immaculate conception – and had escaped the corrupt fallen state marking the rest of humanity. While such a dispensation could as easily have been applied directly to Jesus, the theologians decided that it was indeed the blood of Mary that nurtured Jesus in the womb, so that Mary herself needed to be born without the taint of Original Sin. Mary, in any case, needed a perfect nature, as she had to bring up the young Jesus without spiritual taint. After all, she was bringing up the Son of God, who was already,