The Sermon on the Mount, the Twelve Steps, and the Royal Road

By Daniel Hazelwood

In The Sermon on the Mount, the Twelve Steps, and the Royal Road, Dan Hazelwood presents a unique blend of early church Christianity and the twelve-step recovering program that explains how the Christian experience changed over the last four hundred years and how the twelve-step process reconnects a spiritually seeking person to a deeper Christ experience that many mainstream churches cannot duplicate. In preparation for this journey into studying the sermon, he takes the reader on a historical church odyssey and highlights significant philosophical, church, and secular events that not only affected Christian thought but also were significant in altering how current Christians view Christ. He also demonstrates why early Christians viewed Christ differently. By providing this background, he prepares the reader to study the sermon in a manner the early church did while simultaneously demonstrating why the twelve steps represent a reconnection to an almost lost and forgotten Christ experience. Complementing this journey is an exhaustive examination of biblical Greek so that the reader may gain a deeper understanding of the sermon in its original, majestic splendor. This challenging and thought-provoking book unlocks the deeper meanings of many biblical passages and greatly enhances a spiritual seekers walk.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Apr 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546236290

Daniel Hazelwood

With over twenty-five years of continuous recovery, twenty years intense Bible study, Greek word study, and a passion for church history, Mr. Hazelwood combines his experience and knowledge into a format that explains why many recovering people have difficulty in forging a marriage between church and recovery. Mr. Hazelwood who lives in Indianapolis is semi-retired, married, has three adult children, and two grandchildren. He was fortunate enough to seek recovery from his addiction so that he could raise his children in a clean and sober home, as well as raise them in a Christian environment. He has been actively involved in both church and recovery since his initial days of recovery. In addition to Bible study, he is also a Big Book student, but is not a recovering fundamentalist, believing that truth and recovery have many sources. So grateful and dedicated to his recovery program is he that he still attends three recovery meetings per week, and delights in sharing his experience, strength, and hope with newcomers.

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© 2018 Daniel Hazelwood. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 04/12/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-3630-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-3629-0 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

Unless otherwise indicated, all scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®). Copyright ©2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. [Biblica]

CONTENTS

Introduction

For The Recovering Person

For The Non-Recovering Reader

The Twelve Steps

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Conclusion

Appendix A

Appendix B

Bibliography

Footnotes

A special note of gratitude to my friend, Karen F., for her spirituality, honesty, and assistance.

INTRODUCTION

The last half of the twentieth century, and particularly the final twenty-five years, brought an explosion in the fields of counseling, therapy, psychology, psychiatry, and other social sciences. Moreover, America witnessed such a dramatic and frightening increase in drug and alcohol use that substance abuse hospital rehabilitation facilities became a growth industry. Concurrent with drug and alcohol abuse was the influx of eastern religions into mainstream American theology. Transcendental meditation, yoga, EST, occultism, and astrology entered everyday conversation. From the turned-on, tuned out alienated sixties generation to the telepathic, psychokinetic, out of body spiritualism of the eighties and nineties, people from all walks of life (including ministers, priests and rabbis) searched for a spiritual fulfillment that seemed to be lacking within historic Christian doctrine. By the early twenty-first century, alienation from the historic Christian mainstream American ideas and values so permeate the fabric of societal cohesiveness that random shootings, senseless bombings, road rage, and other mindless acts of destruction threaten the foundation of a free society.

There are as many theories about the causes of alcoholism, drug use, societal alienation, spiritualism, and the need for professional help as there are social scientists. For whatever explanations the social sciences can provide, the underlying need of alienated people seeking help and alternative answers is that they either face a life crisis or harbor a spiritual soul abyss. Life crises sometimes shatter long-standing beliefs as well as create equally troubling identity crises. In recovery meetings, searching people in spiritual or emotional crisis often develop a deeper identity. In the counselor’s office, the search for identity and life purpose becomes a self-discovery journey as the counselor takes the shattered and alienated person back into his or her childhood, and reviews their life experiences to explain the emotional turmoil that exists within. Professionally trained people, through assisting hurting people in the self-discovery process, often help create life-changing attitudes within their clients. Social sciences and recovery programs are successful because the search for identity and meaning forces us into ourselves, exploring our soul’s innermost being. In the inner search, we discover a deeper self and often re-emerge with a different, and more stable personality.

The fundamental psychological change that takes place in the self-discovery process is like being born again. The psychological transformation induced by social scientists and recovery programs that create a solid, healthy personality and life viewpoint is essentially identical to the experiences of the early church. The Christ experience of Christianity’s first three hundred years produced the same profound personality changes we now attribute to social scientists and recovery programs. Nevertheless, the early Christians attributed the change to their experiences with the Lord. The early church Christ experiences were so profoundly healing not only spiritually, but emotionally and psychologically, that they experienced Christ in an intimacy they termed union.

It was these experiences of Christ intimacy that formed Christianity’s initial foundation. However, over the centuries, early church Christ intimacy became a religion, and the religion became an institution. As John A. Sanford explains it in his book, Mystical Christianity:

"… when a religion becomes institutionalized it tends to lose its inner, psychological dimension. The usual pattern is that certain persons have dynamic, transforming psychological experiences with God, which then become generally accepted but transcribed into an institution with authority, doctrines, and fixed rituals. This has the advantage of offering a wide range of people the benefits of the religious experiences that originated with the few, but has the disadvantage of substituting an outer order for an inner experience." ¹ (Italics mine)

If the early church had an inner experience that created not only spiritual, but psychological and emotional change that roughly parallels the effect the current social sciences produce, then a piercing question arises. Since the self-discovery journey, the search for identity, and the questioning of life purpose are historically spiritual searches, the question is: Why doesn’t current mainstream Christianity provide real, meaningful solutions to psychological and emotional problems?

If our Lord truly is the great soul physician who can cleanse our soul and create such profound personality changes that people die hideous deaths for Him, then His Holy Being can certainly respond to twenty-first century crises and demands. Yet, hordes of Christians seek answers from sources outside their church.

Why?

The problem of Christians seeking outside help is so severe that many churches have responded with Christian counselors. The existence of Christian counselors is ironic in that the counselors usually do not learn counseling from the Bible or Christian seminaries, but instead receive psychological training from secular universities. They then attempt a marriage of secular psychology with Biblical truth. Moreover, Christian counselors rarely undergo a personal self-discovery journey into their inner being. The result is that, rather than the intensely personal one-to-one soul cleansing sharing the early church practiced, counseling an emotionally or spiritually hemorrhaging Christian becomes a Biblically based clinical evaluation based upon academic principles.

The fact that many Christian counselors receive training from secular universities underscores mainstream Christianity’s impotence in providing answers for both emotional and psychological problems, as well as finding life purpose. Since, according to Jesus in Luke 17:21, it is within the inner being that we find the Kingdom of God, then a true spiritual search must include emotional and psychological searching. The need for Christian counselors seems to indicate failure in the church’s primary purpose, which is to guide the infant Christian into the necessary spiritual, emotional, and psychological condition necessary to experience true Christ intimacy.

Failure to guide the infant Christian to the kingdom of God within the soul through the self-discovery process is a relatively recent phenomenon. For sixteen centuries, the church provided an avenue for self-discovery that roughly mirrors current secular psychology’s approach. The early church (id. est., Christianity’s first sixteen centuries) taught not only a self-discovery process similar to the twenty-first century’s psychological approach, but advanced beyond secular psychology limitations, taking the searching soul into spiritual dimensions of which twenty-first century mainstream Christianity knows virtually nothing.

There is, as Dr. Jacob Needleman so aptly titled his book, a Lost Christianity. It is a Christianity that not only provides real, meaningful solutions to spiritual, psychological, and emotional problems and the riddle of life purpose, but lifts the soul to heights of ecstatic bliss in a rapturous Christ/soul union love. It is a Christ experience that begins in the soul’s innermost being through self-discovery, and which ignites the soul’s desire to shed all worldly bonds in order to fly to Him in rapture. The means by which we free our soul to join Him is through a process the early church termed the Royal Road. Tragically, the Royal Road is a virtually unknown path amid the impotent, screaming, shout-to-the-Lord-praise-gathering highways of twenty-first century surface Christianity. The Christian experience the early church termed the Royal Road began its demise in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for reasons this book studies.

Fortunately, in spite of a near death knell, the Royal Road still exists. Its rebirth began, amazingly enough, in 1935 with an alcoholic named Bill W. Following a powerful religious experience in a hospital, he remained sober until his death several decades later. Bill W.’s method of maintaining sobriety was a twelve-step process of self-discovery that strongly resembled the early church path. The twelve steps are so successful that many other groups incorporate them into their healing process.

However, the twelve steps, as successful as they are, stop short. The early church recognized that, although self-discovery is critical, self-discovery is but an initial part of a larger purpose. The twelve steps merely prepare the soul for entry into a second stage. The entry into the second stage (which is itself a preparation for the third, and most ecstatic, one) is a path taught by Jesus. Bible scholars term His path The Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount is not simply a significant Bible teaching, but a self-discovery journey that lifts the soul into Christ’s light in a manner that mainstream Christianity cannot imagine.

Beginning in the sixteenth century, mainstream Christianity slowly abdicated its primary purpose, which is to assist the infant, and grow the maturing, Christian to spiritual perfection. Understood in its majestic splendor, the Sermon on the Mount leads the disciple of Christ to a forgotten spiritual perfection (Matthew 5:48) so that he may discover the kingdom of God within, and experience Christ in the rapturous bliss of ecstasy and soul union the early church knew. It is the position of this book that current mainstream Christianity has precious few experiences this study of the Sermon on the Mount examines. It is due to mainstream Christianity’s failure to seek Christ in the manner of the early church that renders the twenty-first century Christian leadership impotent for psychological and spiritual healing. Hurting people do not want answers and directions for life; they are dying for them. Emotionally and psychologically hemorrhaging Christians must seek answers elsewhere because their church leadership cannot help.

This book incorporates recovering programs’ twelve-step experiences with the Sermon on the Mount in a manner familiar to, and consistent with, early Christianity. Moreover, our study extends beyond the twelve-step soul cleansing process. This study teaches the journey’s second spiritual stage, while introducing the Royal Road’s third stage, so the true spiritual seeker may come to spiritual perfection.

As all Christian ministers, pastors, or leaders say, Christ is the answer. Indeed, our Lord truly is the answer. Nevertheless, Christian counselors rarely provide substantive answers that blend Christology and the Christ experience with emotional and psychological healing. Moreover, we do not find substantive psychological solutions in Sunday morning Bible studies, hand-clappin’, foot stompin’ praise gatherings, ladies’ retreat weekends, or Wednesday night prayer meetings. This study of the Sermon on the Mount introduces us to Christ as the great soul physician He is, and shows us how the early church experienced a profound psychological and emotional healing through spiritual union. When we begin to taste even the smallest morsel of His Holy Being in the manner of the early church, we experience a similar psychological transformation, emotional healing, and soul peace that is nonexistent in mainstream Christianity. That complete personality change that takes years to accomplish is what the early church believed Christ meant when He said a man must be born again in order to enter the kingdom of God.

This study is challenging, thought provoking, and radical. When we compare early church Christ experiences with what the current mainstream church purports to be Christianity, we expose surface Christianity’s impotence, and understand why hurting people seek answers outside their church.

FOR THE RECOVERING PERSON

This book represents a ten-year effort that I did not begin until I had almost eighteen years of continuous recovery. By its completion, I had twenty-seven continuous years. I note this because this book, although written primarily to and for the recovering Christian, is not for everyone in recovery. Indeed, it has limited appeal, and I wish to strongly discourage certain recovering people from reading it. I base this recommendation on both my recovering and Christian experiences, and it is important that the reader understand my personal background that led to this appeal.

When I reached recovery, I was a married man with three small children. My wife, who came from a strong Christian background, did not suffer from any addictive behavior. Moreover, she was faithfully attending a church. At no time was she condemnational of my addiction or subsequent recovery, and neither did she ever discourage me from attending meetings. Nevertheless, our home and marriage had a large elephant in our midst because, although she never explicitly asked me to attend church, the elephant was the unspoken desire on her part that I attend with her.

Within my first two years of recovery and working the steps, I had certain indescribable experiences that infused me with a desire to search outside of recovery meetings for additional spiritual insight. Hence, to her surprise and pleasure, I not only began attending church with her, but underwent baptism, and acquired a passionate thirst for the Bible. That began my recovery/church journey, and I faced the same obstacle that all recovering people face when they attempt a marriage between church and recovery: It is a most difficult marriage. It is a common cliché among recovery people that church and recovery are like two railroad tracks that run parallel to each other. As you look down the tracks, they appear to merge somewhere in the distance, but the truth is they never do. It is recovery’s way of stating a difficult truth: The church is church and recovery is recovery, and although there are striking similarities, each has its place. True, they can, and do, complement each other so that a discerning recovering person can take the best of both and attempt a harmonious relationship.

Being obsessive (a natural condition for recovering people), I was able to forge a fragile bond between the two without sacrificing recovery meeting attendance. From my first meeting onward through my twenty-seven years (as of this writing), I faithfully attended two to three recovery meetings per week (and still do). Because I believed I had found the tie that binds the two tracks together, my intense Bible study soon lent itself to reinforcing certain parts of recovering literature. Because I believed I was able to do this, my recovering ego flattered itself by convincing me I had a truly unique church/recovery marriage. Indeed, I became so proficient in the Bible (during this time, I studied Biblical Greek), that I became a Bible Study teacher in a two thousand member church. Moreover, although I did not accept it, I was asked to be a church deacon. The church I faithfully attended for fifteen years, which had an essentially fundamentalist doctrine, had a powerful minister who had a special gift, and the congregation was a dynamic one. Needless to say, I was pleased with myself and my unique blend.

As recovering people know so well, God has a way of puncturing our egos when we least expect it, and the higher we think we have progressed, the more painful is our fall. I do not wish to detail the Jobian ² experience I suffered except to say that my emotional pain was so severe that I did not believe it was possible for a human to experience that threshold of pain. Like Job, I begged for the mercy of death. After fifteen years of what I believed was a successful church/recovery marriage, I lost everything, and found myself completely bewildered. I not only lost faith in God, but experienced extreme anger (as did Job) at Him. Moreover, I felt bitterly betrayed by the church members who had said they loved me, because they distanced themselves from me in my worst pain. Those who were sincere and devout people of Christian faith were nowhere to be found. I discovered the painful realization that Christian people really do shoot their wounded. (Recovering people, of course, not only did not abandon me, but lent their experiences and compassion when I most needed it.) Finally, the tragedy found a solution, and I entered a new phase of recovery.

My next life period proved to be the critical turning point that led to this work. Licking my wounds, and rediscovering my faith in God, I began re-attending church (a different one), and believing myself wiser and stronger as a result of my traumas, reassumed my exalted position as Bible and Christian recovering person extraordinaire.

And along came Karen F.

This impertinent woman, who had considerably less time in recovery, confronted me with the charge that I was a spiritual kindergartner. Because my massive ego had once again convinced me that I was just a little above the average church member or recovering person due to my exhaustive Biblical knowledge and twelve step involvement, I was furious.

The problem was: She was right.

Her challenge was the first of a series of coincidences that led me to a spiritual universe that I did not know existed. During the next ten years, I discovered an almost lost and forgotten Christianity. It was a Christianity to which I had never been exposed, and its magnificence vividly showed the link between the twelve step program and early Christianity. As I read more (and I became an insatiable reader), the clearer it became that early Christianity used a form of the twelve steps that rendered a Christ experience vastly superior to what I had known. The more I learned, the more I realized that what passes for current Christianity is, in comparison to the early church, silly.

Far more poignantly, however, was the realization of what the twelve step program really is. It is a powerful spiritual path to Christ that yields a spiritual experience so dynamic and profound, it creates a transformed state of spiritual being. It is an experience so deep, blissful, and rapturous that there is nothing – absolutely nothing – the world (or current Christianity) can offer to match it. The early church knew Christ in an encounter so profound that they no longer wanted to dwell in their bodies, and they knew the peace that passes understanding about which Saint Paul writes.

The purpose for this autobiographical odyssey is to state that this work requires a certain degree of spiritual maturity. For instance, non-recovering mainstream Christians will have extreme difficulty with it because it challenges much of what they hold dear. To any non-recovering Christian who may be reading this, remember that I was once one of you, and I know why you will be disturbed about what you read. I certainly would have been. To the recovering person who is not attending church, I plead with you not to read this until you have a solid Christian base and a minimum of five years’ of continuous recovery. If you do not have this combination, this work will not only not help you, but can do damage to your recovery and spiritual walk.

To the recovering Christian for whom this work is primarily aimed, I likewise urge you not to read this book unless you, too, have a solid Christian base, at least five years of continuous recovery, and have worked the steps – all twelve of them – at least twice.

Realizing that this request is placing a red flag in front of a bull and that I have only guaranteed that the people I have challenged not to read it will, of course, read it, I am nevertheless asking that you display a maturity that I did not have at five years and do not read this book until you are ready for it. If, as an immature recovering person (as I was at five years, although I didn’t think I was), you can rise above your immaturity and not read this book until you have reached the necessary spiritual maturity, your journey at the time you are prepared and ready will yield rich rewards that will immeasurably enhance your recovery.

FOR THE NON-RECOVERING READER

Because this book’s primary audience is the recovering person in general, and the recovering Christian in particular, it presents formidable challenges for the non-recovering person. The first challenge lays in the use of terms and experiences the recovering person knows well, but which may be alien to a non-recovering person. For instance, there are many references to a fourth-step inventory. A recovering person instantly relates to what that means, while the non-recovering person may experience confusion. This is not to say that the non-recovering person can neither understand nor appreciate this book, but that you will not understand it in the depth a recovering person will.

It is impossible, within the span of a few introductory pages, to explain what recovering terms and experiences mean, and why the recovering person will find this book more meaningful than the non-recovering person will. As mature recovering people understand, true recovery requires years to take full effect to the extent that a person undergoes a dramatic psychological, emotional, and spiritual transformation. Therefore, it is difficult to explain recovering terms and experiences to a non-recovering person, even if we had the time to do so.

Moreover, although current mainstream Christianity’s pews host thousands of recovering people on Sunday mornings, many other recovering people sense that their church is indefinably inadequate. Recovery meetings offer something indefinable – perhaps it is a spiritual substance - their church does not. In many instances, if a recovering person were forced to choose between church and recovery, they would choose recovery meetings over church services. This is not to state they reject Christ because many recovering people choose Christ as their higher power, but that they cannot find the type of spiritual dimension in churches that they find in recovery. Additionally, if forced to explain what it is they are seeking, but cannot find, most recovering people are unable to provide a meaningful response. All they can state is that they seem to receive more in recovery than they do in church.

However, the cyclopean obstacle that a non-recovering person - especially a Christian non-recovering person – faces in reading this book is essentially the book’s theme and premise: Current mainstream Christianity is an impotent, surface religion that is woefully and shamefully inferior to early Christianity. The book’s sub-theme is that recovery’s twelve steps represent a reconnection to early church Christianity’s depth. As such, this book’s contents contain formidable challenges to generally accepted mainstream Christian doctrine and belief. Essentially, the only similarity between early and current Christianity is that both believe that Christ is God incarnate, and that He rose from the dead. Other than that core belief, we have two very different Christian religions. The early church would not only reject what passes for twenty-first century Christianity, but would fully embrace recovery programs.

They would embrace recovery programs because they understood the Christ experience in a different, and deeper, way than current Christianity does. Specifically, the early church recognized the profound importance of psychological and emotional healing for a true Christ experience. Similarly, they would recognize – and applaud – the twelve-step program as the path it is: a journey of self-discovery into the kingdom of God within the soul. Christianity’s first sixteen centuries contain a myriad of books, discourses, and writings that emphatically underscore the belief that no one can know and experience Christ intimately unless they first know themselves. For instance, Richard of St. Victor, a twelfth century Christian spiritual master, beautifully expresses self-examination’s importance for the seeker’s Christ journey in his masterpiece, The Twelve Patriarchs - The Mystical Ark - Book Three of the Trinity. In this passage, he is writing of the person who presumes to know God, but has never explored his inner emotional and psychological needs:

"In vain he raises the eye of the heart to see God when he is not yet prepared to see himself. Let a person first learn to know his own invisible things before he presumes that he is able to grasp at invisible divine things. You must know the invisible things of your own spirit before you can be capable of knowing the invisible things of God. If you are not able to know yourself, how do you have the boldness to grasp at those things which are above you?" ³ (Italics mine)

In addition to the assumption that most non-recovering Christians rarely explore their own psychological and emotional needs, and thus do not embark upon the self-discovery path to which Richard of St. Victor refers, the major challenge for the non-recovering person is that this book excoriates generally accepted twenty-first century mainstream Christian doctrine. Accepting a direct confrontation to cherished belief is a terribly threatening trial for anyone who hasn’t the spiritual curiosity or courage to examine that which they hold dear. This book is not for the mentally or spiritually lethargic people who find solace in that old-time religion, or who accept the cliché, God said it. I believe it. That settles it. The non-recovering Christian who reads this book in its entirety is the true spiritual seeker because they dare risk re-examining many beliefs that constitutes their foundation. Doing so requires spiritual hunger and courage. You may not agree with what you read, but rest assured that I am not trying to steer anyone from Christ. Instead, I am attempting to deepen a person’s Christian walk who is, for reasons the non-recovering Christian may not initially understand, unaware there is a deeper, more meaningful, and rapturous Christ experience that they early church knew and experienced, but which we slowly lost in the last four hundred years.

THE TWELVE STEPS

1. We admitted we were powerless over (your addiction) ⁴ — that our lives had become unmanageable.

2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.

5. Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.

6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character.

7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.

8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.

9. Made a direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.

10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it.

11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to others, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. ⁵

CHAPTER ONE

"Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Go forth from your country, and from your relatives and from your father’s house, to the land which I will show you; And I will make you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great; and so you shall be a blessing;

"And I will bless those who bless you, and the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.’

"So Abram went forth as the LORD had spoken to him; and Lot went with him. Now Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran.

And Abram took Sarai his wife and Lot his nephew, and all their possessions which they had accumulated, and the persons which they had acquired in Haran, and they set out for the land of Canaan; thus they came to the land of Canaan.

- Genesis 2:21-22

The delusion that we are like other people, or presently may be, has to be smashed.

- Alcoholics Anonymous ¹

Contained within the Bible’s sixty-six books (eighty four if we count the Apocryphal andDeuterocanonical ones) are three short chapters (five, six, and seven) in Saint Matthew’s Gospel we call the Sermon on the Mount. These three chapters laid the groundwork for a spiritual and societal revolution that, over the following three centuries, transformed the Roman Empire from pagan worship to an empire in which Christianity became the official state religion. Not only did Christianity and the Sermon change Rome, but ultimately converted the entire western world to the Christian religion. Christianity and the Sermon’s success in transfiguring society was in their ability to first transfigure people so dramatically that the infant church attracted spiritually searching people by the thousands. Nevertheless, lest we misunderstand, we can only rightly call it a sermon in that Christ taught it. It was not a sermon like we normally associate with a minister’s oration during a Sunday church service. The Sermon on the Mount is more powerful than a gifted spiritual orator is precisely because it is not, in the meaning we normally associate, a sermon at all. It is a spiritual path for a relationship with God that is so intimate, powerful, and transforming that people to whom it first had meaning, and who followed its path, experienced a spiritual ecstasy that is virtually unknown in the twenty-first century’s western world. That is to say, it introduced what Professor Jacob Needleman so accurately termed a lost Christianity.⁶ The Sermon’s heart, id est., the lost Christianity’s message and spiritual path, defined the faith for the next twelve hundred years until certain world events in the Middle Ages created a theological and philosophical environment that led to a religious metamorphosis, birthing a new, and strikingly different, Christian religion. Although the new faith, twenty-first century Christianity’s religious embryo, was powerful, advancing civilization to new heights, it did so at the expense of early Christianity’s heart.

Early Christianity’s fount, heart, and spirit, was the deeply held conviction that the human soul might actually unite with Christ in an esoteric love encounter. At variance with twenty-first century Christianity, early Christians saw the Christ experience not as instantaneous salvation (the early church definition of salvation was not the same as the twenty-first century one), but as a joyous climax of indescribable bliss that resulted from an arduous spiritual struggle. Among other rigors, the struggle consisted of a highly demanding discipline of self-examination by which the spiritual seeker sought to know himself thoroughly. During the struggle, the neophyte Christian experienced a complete emotional, psychological, and spiritual healing. While twenty-first century Christians who suffer emotional and psychological problems seek help through counselors and therapy, the early church confronted and healed the emotional wounds we pay secular counselors to accomplish. When, during the Middle Ages, western Christianity began its evolvement into the twenty-first century form with which we are familiar, it abandoned that focus, thus depriving the faith of its strength in the crucial area of psychological healing.

By gradually abandoning the faith’s psychological and emotional healing power, the new Christianity begat a religion that suffers from an equally sinister malaise: surface, literal fundamentalism. Because we derive the insight gained into our true identity from a self-searching process (whether through the steps, counselors, or a combination thereof), it produces an emotionally and psychologically stable personality. Its loss fashioned a perfunctory faith that lacks the substantive depth that early Christianity enjoyed. That is to say, because twenty-first century western Christianity fails to explore our emotional and psychological depth, we therefore lack the training and mental prowess necessary to explore spiritual depth. It is easier to sing How Great Thou Art, which yields a temporary, emotional high we mistake for a spiritual experience, than to face our innermost being, or seek answers to life’s complex spiritual questions. Lacking the mental fortitude to seek meaningful answers renders the Sermon a superficial teaching. As we shall see, if we are to partake of early Christianity’s supreme ecstasy, we must rise to the necessary mental challenge. Doing so requires preparation and training.

One of the keys to understanding the Sermon in its majestic depth lies in knowing what the lost Christianity is, and when, why, and how the Christian religion abdicated early Christianity’s soul. In this and the next two chapters, we are going to undergo extensive preparation so that our twenty-first century western minds can re-examine how we view the Christ experience in relation to recovery’s twelve steps and early Christianity so that we can study the Sermon on the Mount in a deeper way than contemporary books present. Coupled with addressing some necessary philosophical questions pertinent to our quest, we will do so through a thumbnail sketch of church history so that we may rediscover an almost forgotten Christ experience.

The lost Christianity is not a religion, but a spiritual experience by which the soul unites with God in a rapturous euphoria, briefly experiencing what the early church termed the Beatific Vision. Although the transformed state of being when the soul briefly enjoins itself into God’s essence is common in eastern religions like Taoism, Hinduism, and Buddhism, it has virtually disappeared from our current Christian experience. Much of western Christianity lost this God/soul rapture first in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Renaissance, and later in the Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when prevailing Christian theology shifted from a heretofore transcendental and mystical experience, to a worldly one.⁷ It was during this transition (and in the centuries to follow) that Reformation Christianity lost the early church Christ experience’s heart. Although significant changes were transpiring since the eleventh century, they became an unstoppable torrent in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries’ era of world exploration. As worldly pursuits due to the wealth brought by discoveries of new lands seduced and absorbed men’s souls, Reformation Christian theology conveniently adapted itself to accommodate the marriage of God and mammon, a significant departure from historic Christian doctrine. ⁸

From its inception, historic Christianity regarded the attraction for economic gain as avarice, one of the seven deadly sins. Discarding fifteen hundred years of accepted church doctrine, Reformation theology, led by the brilliant sixteenth century French theologian, John Calvin, baptized thrift, hard work, and business success as virtues, easing the consciences of Christian men who uncomfortably found themselves drowning in sinful affluence. Calvin’s annexation of these virtues into Christian doctrine was revolutionary because an early church ideal was not, as John Calvin taught, thrift, hard work, or business success, but poverty. For instance, Clement, a pupil of Saint Peter and a successor as pope (bishop of the church at Rome) came from a noble and wealthy Roman family. Renouncing his family’s wealth, power, and influence, he embraced poverty for the sake of gaining Christ. Clement loved Peter and tried to imitate him because he saw Peter imitating Christ. In Recognitions of Clement, Saint Peter tells the newly converted Clement about his manner of living:

But perhaps, although you live with me, you do not know my manner of life. I live on bread alone, with olives, and seldom even with potherbs; and my dress is what you see, a tunic with a pallium: and having these, I require nothing more. This is sufficient for me, because my mind does not regard things present, but things eternal, and therefore no present and visible thing delights me. Whence I embrace and admire indeed your good mind towards me; and I commend you the more, because, though you have been accustomed to so great an abundance, you have been able so soon to abandon it, and to accommodate yourself to this life of ours, which makes use of necessary things alone. ²

Concurrent with Calvin’s sin-to-virtue conversion was an idea the Catholic Church considered a particularly dangerous conviction: the doctrine of solo scriptura, which is the belief that the only authority Christian men need accept is the Bible. Until the Reformation, Christian authority lay in the Catholic Church. The danger, according to the Catholic Church, was not only accepting the Bible as the sole authority, but also its corollary, which was that each man held the right to personal Biblical interpretation. Reformation leaders like Martin Luther, Zwingli, Bucer, Melanchthon, Calvin, and Knox, et. al., in their sincere and successful efforts to bring Biblical teachings to the average layman, inadvertently created a scriptural and theological holocaust. Although introducing the Bible to the average person was a noble ideal, they failed to recognize two crucial snares: 1) that untrained laymen might misinterpret the Bible and embrace misleading or false teaching; and 2) that the Bible’s deeper, mystic mysteries were beyond the scope of most people. Consequently, Biblical interpretation underwent a slow degradation from its original mystic splendor that required training and guidance to understand, into our current morass: untrained ministers and pastors who cannot, or will not, rise above basic Biblical fundamentalism, espousing an impotent literal superficiality.⁹ Thus, as we shall see, many current Christian sects are mere hollow shells of what was once the most powerful spiritual experience a person can have this side of heaven.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not birth the new Christianity. They were a volcanic climax of powerful forces, which included theological, philosophical, economic, societal, artistic, governmental, agricultural, and educational, that had been bubbling below the surface since the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. When the eruption occurred via Martin Luther in 1517, a tsunami-like transfiguration engulfed Europe, and birthed revolutions (both religiously and militarily) in not only every geographical area, but in virtually all areas of the human experience. Contributing to this change, which was, as we have seen, monetary affluence from the inflow of gold and other precious commodities from the new world and the orient, combined with joint stock corporations, Dutch, Genoese, and Venetian banking, and budding capitalism. The upheaval that shook western Christian civilization to its foundations was that these new forces, greatly aided by increasing wealth and Renaissance learning, served to transform Europe from a feudal system to a mercantile and infant capitalist economy. Moreover, the structure that was civilization’s bedrock, the Catholic Church, saw its power and influence slowly usurped by congealing geographies progressing from a feudal, manorial system into an embryonic nationalism ruled by powerful noble families. (The feudal system was analogous to America’s southern plantations in the nineteenth century; they were fully self-supporting economic units ruled by lords who owned virtually all the land. Serfs tilled the land for the benefit of the lord landowner.) Due to the self-interest and influence of powerful families like the Italian Medici’s, Austrian Hapsburg’s, French Guise (and Valois), Swiss Savoy’s, et. al., the feudal system thwarted economic expansionism, keeping western Europe ninety percent agricultural. Moreover, artificial boundaries that contain imaginary lines to delineate one country from the next did not exist. That is to say, if we examine a twelfth-century map, we will not see clear national delineations. The geographically defined nation-states with which we are familiar, like France, Spain, Austria, Germany, and so forth, did not exist.¹⁰ Historically speaking, distinct nation-states are barely out of infancy. The metamorphosis from the feudal system to neo-nationalism was the result of many factors, not the least of which was a growing monetary system that could finance the machinery necessary to transform an agricultural economy first to a mercantile, and later to an industrial one.

The influx of wealth was so widespread that, beginning in the fifteenth century, a new societal class composed primarily of bankers, merchants, and tradesmen arose to first challenge existing church power and influence, and later to challenge, and change, Christian theology. Although the Catholic Church had combated, and defeated, hundreds of deviant beliefs over the centuries, remaining the sole church and primary civil and religious authority, its autonomy and rule over civil and religious matters fractured during the Reformation. Where the Catholic Church formerly possessed the power to suppress beliefs it considered heretical, it suddenly found itself unable to exert power and authority in the manner it enjoyed for centuries.

When Martin Luther wrote his ninety-five theses in 1517, his ideas inflamed northern Europe with an unquenchable theological conflagration that allowed differing beliefs freedom. Because the Catholic Church was embroiled in other distracting serious matters, like militant Islamic expansionism that threatened western Europe’s existence, it was slow to react to Luther’s theology, enabling his ideas to take root. Because the Catholic Church was slow to react, it found itself, for the first time in Christian history, defenseless, unable to exert its authority and halt what they considered were deviant beliefs. The anti-Catholic Church movement, known as Protestantism, found fertile soil for the establishment of a church divorced from Catholicism. John Calvin’s new theology, based upon Martin Luther’s teachings, and coupled with Calvin’s personality and indomitable will, were the first seeds for a new church. Calvin was perhaps the first layman who successfully established a religion apart from the Catholic Church (his religion, originally called the Huguenots in France, is what we today call the Puritans). ¹¹ Closely following Calvin was John Knox, who began a religion in Scotland called Presbyterian. So influential were these early reformers that we can trace much of what we in twenty-first century America accept as being Christian and societal axioms to Luther, Knox, and Calvin’s theologies.

Before continuing our history lesson, we will briefly interrupt our chain of thought and address the reader who may not only be a new Christian, but also may not understand terms like Catholic, Protestant, and other expressions we will meet. From Christ’s resurrection in approximately 33 AD, the Christian church has a checkered history, and has been splintered several times. The historic timeline and the names associated with Christian churches are as follows:

Circa 50 AD to the early fourth century, only one church existed: the Catholic church.

From the early fourth century to the early sixteenth, there were two churches: Catholicism and Orthodox (Byzantium era). The orthodox churches began when Constantine moved the Roman Empire’s capital to Constantinople. This form of Christianity includes current twenty-first century churches with names such as Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, Serbian Orthodox, Romanian Orthodox, etc. that dominated eastern Europe. However, Catholicism dominated western Europe.

In the early sixteenth century (the era we are currently studying), western Catholicism split between Catholic and Protestant. Nevertheless, there has never been a church solely with the name Protestant. The term, Protestant, is a general classification of many churches with names that are familiar to us. These include churches like Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, Disiciples of Christ, Lutheran, Church of Christ, Church of the Nazarene, Pentecostal, Assemblies of God, and many others who are independent congregations that have no national or local affiliation. The names of these independent congregations are impossible to list because they may have any name the pastor or the congregation selects. For instance, there may be a church named the Sixth Street Church of the Living Savior.

There are also several churches that have tangential ties to historic Christianity, but who the Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant churches all correctly classify as cults. These groups profess abberant, and false, beliefs. These include groups like Jehovah’s Witnesses, Worldwide Church of God, Mormons, Seventh-Day Adventists, Unity, Unitarian, Church of Scientology, etc.

Then, of course, are the television evangelists who fall into no classification at all. Most are simply ego-driven charlatans who have discovered that they can gain power, fame, and money through exploiting Christ and the naievte of emotional Christians. (We will study these people in Chapter Seventeen.)

Now, with this background sketch, we can return to our history preparation.

The Reformation’s nucleus, like the Renaissance that preceded it, was the rediscovery and adaptation of the ancient Greek (sixth through fourth centuries BC) and Roman ideals we term humanism, which is the foundation of current western society and most Christian sects. Humanist ideas form the core of the changes that took place in philosophy, theology, government, art, education, the sciences, and medicine. Originally theological in nature and thereby acclimated into church doctrine (most notably by Saint Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century), humanism trickled into the non-theological arena, begetting secular humanism. Although difficult to define precisely, humanism’s basis is its belief that, as the ancient Greeks taught, we create an ideal, perfected society via creating the ideal, perfected man. Humanism’s ideal of human perfection was hardly new; indeed, it was the goal that Christianity sought since Christ’s resurrection and the establishment of His church. For instance, Christ tells His disciples in the Sermon on the Mount that they are to be perfect, as their father in heaven is perfect (Matthew 5:48). Although we in the twenty-first century flippantly express the attitude that no one is, or can be, perfect, the early church, as well as Renaissance Christian humanism, believed perfection was an obtainable goal. However, the means by which the early church and Renaissance humanism achieved perfection are opposites. Ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, based primarily upon the teachings of the Greek philosopher, Aristotle, and the Roman orator/philosopher, Cicero, were Renaissance Christian humanism’s foundation, teaching that a man, aided by the Holy Spirit, may seek God and reach perfection through virtuous living and right thinking.

Particularly apropos to our focus (id. est., recovery) is the fourteenth century Italian humanist, Francesco Petrarch. Basing his philosophy on the fourth century Christian theologian, Saint Augustine, Petrarch, like Saint Augustine before him, concluded that the only meaningful life pursuit was the thorough knowing of oneself. Through a rigorous and thorough self-examination (a fourth step?), one discovered the soul’s divinity. Hence, one of early humanism’s trademarks was humanity’s dignity. According to humanism, God so elevated the soul above the rest of creation, she contained a glory akin to God Himself. Therefore, to early Christian humanism, which was much in accordance with the early church, we obtain salvation through a soul cleansing process whereby we conquer the soul’s self-centered desire for sensory pleasure, defeating the seven deadly sins, and acquire a purity, gaining the seven virtues.¹² To both the early church and early Christian humanism, this state of spiritual being was the perfection to which Christ referred. Humanism’s roots, both Christian and secular, are grounded in the Aristotlelian belief in man’s rationality. That is to say, our ability to think and reason gives us the power of not only self-discovery, but of raising civilization to an utopian state.

By contrast, the early church married much (but rejected just as much) of Plato’s thought with Christ’s teachings (and specifically with His teaching in the Sermon on the Mount), and believed that human perfection consisted of human rationality abandonment that culminates in a mystic splendor of Christ/soul rapture in which the soul participates in an ecstasy of indescribable love. Understanding this difference is integral, crucial, and fundamental to understanding the Sermon on the Mount. Synthesizing Plato’s ultimate, perfected man, who he calls a philosopher-king with the Christ experience, many early Christian thinkers, like Saint Augustine, saw Christ as the embodiment of Platonic philosophy. For instance, in Saint Augustine’s The City of God, he writes the following:

"9. The philosophy that approximates most nearly to Christianity

Thus there are philosophers who have conceived of God, the supreme and true God, as the author of all created things, the light of knowledge, the Final Good of all activity, and have recognized him as being for us the origin of existence, the truth of doctrine, and the blessedness of life. They may be called, most suitably, Platonists; or they may give some other title to their school. ³

"11. How Plato may have acquired the insight which brought him so close to Christianity

Some of those who are united in fellowship with us in the grace of Christ are amazed when they hear or read that Plato had a conception of God which they recognize as agreeing in many respects with the truth of our religion. ³

To the early church, Christ was nearly Plato’s philosopher-king. The difference is that, to early Christian theologians, Christ was supreme over Plato’s philosopher-king in that Christ was God incarnate, while a philosopher-king was a man whose soul had sojourned above humanity into the ultimate, but was not God Himself. Also at variance with the Aristotelian/humanist goal of a perfected society based upon man’s rational ability to raise himself to his ultimate potential, is the Platonic design for a structured, hierarchical society.

This design, which the early church adopted as a theological basis for a hierarchical church, classified people into certain strata based upon their natural abilities. Some were tradesmen, some weavers, some potters, some warriors, and some rulers etc. According to Plato, the only ones truly fit to rule were those who (in theory at least) corresponded to his philosopher-king who had reached the state of perfection. The belief was that only those who knew the God-like essence of truth and justice could rightly administer it. Therefore, the early church embraced a ruler, so to speak, as the Vicar of Christ on earth who would pattern an earthly structure similar to a heavenly-like one. Hence, the bishop of the church at Rome evolved into the office of pope. By the second century, the early church was so hierarchically structured that it became a society within a society; a state within a state, complete with its own laws and courts. As Christianity grew, the church codified church law in the same manner that the Romans codified their civil law. Subjection to both civil and church law (canon law) remained in force until the Reformation and beyond. For instance, while the Catholic Church retained its centuries old canon law, many early Protestant churches adopted their own canon law to which their members must answer. For centuries, this pattern, a society based upon hierarchical structure, was the only accepted governmental form (whether secular or theological). The idea of a democracy or representative republic was not only alien, but incompatible with God’s divine plan because a king or pope held his position by virtue of God’s will, and a man who challenged the design was virtually challenging God Himself. ¹³

The point is that the Platonic design resulted from the few who reached the state of perfection in a manner opposite the Aristotelian approach. In the early church, Christ/soul rapture belonged to the few who reached that perfection. As stated, however, they achieved this transformed state of being not through Aristotelian rationality, but through rationality abandonment and reliance upon faith. Therefore, before we begin studying the Sermon, we must recognize and understand the Reformation’s profound influence upon Christianity’s view of the God/soul relationship, and likewise understand the difference between Christian humanism (which is twenty-first century Christianity) and Christian transcendentalism or mysticism (which drove the church for fifteen hundred years).

With this initial historical sketch, we will briefly interrupt our history lesson and jump to the present so we may examine the difference. We will accomplish this by using an example with which most recovering people are familiar.

In your personal experience, how many times has it happened that you read a sentence or passage in AA’s Big Book, or other recovering literature, that suddenly had a new, different, and deeper meaning? It is as if a light bulb flashed in your head, and you suddenly grasped a meaning that seemed to engulf your soul. Moreover, the deeper understanding was mystifyingly unexplainable. For example, you tried to describe your experience and newer understanding to your sponsor, but discovered you couldn’t because you could not find the words. As you spoke, you realized your words were hollow; you couldn’t properly tell someone else, yet you just knew.

From where does that newer, deeper understanding emanate? That is to say, what is its source? And why can’t we satisfactorily explain it?

We might say that the newer meaning has two possible sources: 1) it is a climax of the mind’s natural learning process whereby the mind’s chemistry takes that which it previously assimilated, and somehow expounds it so that we see the deeper meaning; or 2) it is a revelation external to our mind. If we accept the second explanation, we might say the revelation is from God. Nevertheless, what at first glance seems a plausible and most likely explanation may not be accurate. We can understand why it may not be from God by making a quick study of Plato. A part of Plato’s philosophy (and one the church rejected) is his idea of a universal soul.¹⁴ His universal soul is strikingly similar to Hindu thought in that Plato believed in a universal cause that began with a universal oneness. Plato believed that the human soul is but a small piece of the universal one, and that the soul’s quest was its reunification into the whole so that it loses is distinct and separate identity. The analogy is of many rivers that flow into an ocean. Although each river is unique, once they reach the ocean, they blend with, and become the whole; all is one. From this idea, Plato further taught that, since a man’s soul is but a small piece of the whole, so to speak, then each soul, like the oneness, naturally contains truth, and the man who seeks to lose his identity in pursuit of the whole has within his capacity the ability to see and know truth. Consequently, a man’s soul will recognize and acknowledge truth when he sees or hears it. That is a possible explanation for our sudden epiphany when we perceive deeper meanings in something we read before. Our newfound wisdom is God and soul experiencing a rekindled relationship.

There is a problem with this belief. If this explanation is true, and we assign the explanation that a deeper understanding is a sort of revelation from God, then how do we account for a thought, discovery, philosophy, or belief that later proves to be wrong? The history of science is replete with instances of newer and greater discoveries that later scientists prove to be folly. What we thought was truth because it was a divine revelation was not a truth at all and, if God is truth, a mistaken idea or error cannot therefore be from God.

We can, as many philosophers do, take these philosophic questions into the abyss of mental confusion so that we conclude with no knowledge or certainty. We will not do so. Nevertheless, we must not dismiss philosophic inquiry as being a superfluous pursuit because we will address several philosophical questions as we proceed. Indeed, Christianity owes a huge debt to the philosophers who, through the centuries, have pondered deeper questions than this because, by confronting ideas and philosophies that may be dangerous and/or wrong forced the church to examine its beliefs, empowering it to combat false teachings. In doing so, historic church doctrine (id. est., prior to the Reformation) does not consist of fundamental, simple explanations, but of firm philosophic bedrock that can, and has, withstood the test of time. Had the church not first examined, and then incorporated certain philosophies into doctrine, it would have collapsed in the face of powerfully persuasive philosophic ideas that were inconsistent with the Christ experience. Essentially, historic Christian doctrine invites all philosophical and theological challengers.

For the sake of our purpose here, though, we will take the position that a revelation has its source either in the mind’s natural learning process, or from God. The reason we will take this position is that this difference is what separates the deeper, transcendental, and mystic Christian experience from our current, shallow, and literal version.

Before proceeding, we must confront another question that is key to grasping the difference between mystic and literal Christianity, and thusly, between a literal, superficial Sermon and a mystic one. Regardless of whether a revelation is the result of the natural learning process or a divine revelation, we must ask ourselves this question: by what means do we know what we know? That is to say, how do we learn? Whether we choose the natural learning process, or divine revelation explanation, both are dependent upon our previous experiences and knowledge. If we give it thought, we arrive at the conclusion that we learn by means of our five senses. Words that ultimately compose ideas, and the dreams by which we visualize ideas, enter our experience because we first saw, heard, tasted, touched, or smelled something. At birth, id. est., during the transition from fetus to newborn, there is a momentary vacuum by which the fetus/infant is bereft of all knowledge. The first learning experience derives from the light entering the eyes, the sounds of birth entering the ears, the feeling of being held, the aroma of the surrounding environment, and lastly the taste of mother’s milk. From this initial experience, the human infant builds a base of knowledge. From birth until death, our learning derives from a continuing influx of billions of sights, sounds, tastes, aromas, and sensory feelings by which the mind processes into a coherent pattern of understanding the world into which we are born. Unlike animals, however, the human soul possesses a crucial factor that animals do not: rationality and the ability to apply logic.

The early church Cappadocian fathers ¹⁵ contemplated the role our senses play not only in understanding the world about us, but also in perceiving God. For instance, Saint Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth century monk, grieving over the death of his brother, Saint Basil, questioned his sister, Saint Macrina the Younger, concering the soul and resurrection. In his conversation, she proclaims the role our senses play in learning about the seen and unseen worlds:

"We get our exact knowledge of this outer world from the apprehension of our senses, and these sensational operations themselves lead us on to the understanding of the super-sensual world of fact and thought, and our eye thus becomes the interpreter of that almighty wisdom which is visible in the universe, and points in itself to the