21.2 On Christian Doctrine
© 2016 Christ Revealed Bible Institute
Although Augustine wrote extensively, his three primary works influencing Christian thinking are The Confessions, On Christian Doctrine, and The City of God. In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine spelled out the definitions by which all Christians must read the Bible, and in The City of God, Augustine defined the church in this world, a definition still held even by those who are not Catholics.
I made one foray into On Christian Doctrine a few years ago when I wrote on Augustine the first time; I will not look at it again. Thus I will use that earlier article to fill in the content of this lesson, focusing that content by our present investigation.
“The Bible Says”
I possess two mental characteristics. First, I love learning and am open to be taught. I have spent more time learning from others than most have done. And second, I am fiercely independent in my thinking, and I have spent more time in self-study than most.
But from the age of nineteen, when the Lord won my heart back to Himself, I have held the highest regard for the Bible. And so, for years, when I heard someone say something about God or “what the Bible says,” that I did not actually know for myself, I could not rest. I have my own Bible; I will know what God says. And I learned what God says by writing out by hand every verse on the topic.
What God Says
Here is what I discovered, writing out the verses of the Bible over and over every time I NEEDED to know what God says. Over and over, God does not say what they claim. Sometimes God says something different and sometimes God says the very opposite.
Let me give you a minor example. “We know that the Bible says to give with no thought of reward.” No it does not! God says nothing of the sort; in fact God speaks more about reward than He does about giving. This tendency of Christians, however, to say “the Bible says,” when it, in fact, does not, has deeply puzzled me over the years.
What Blocks?
I have shown dear believers in Jesus this or that verse. They see the words, but they cannot hear them. The words on the pages of the Bible mean nothing to them BECAUSE, in their minds, God does not say that.
And so I have always wondered what blocks them from seeing what God actually says or desiring to know what He means. I discovered that block that day in November, 2011, when I pulled Augustine off my shelf, opened to On Christian Doctrine, and began to read. Augustine began his argument by stating that when we read the Bible, we must know how to understand it. I was in full agreement, anticipating John 6:63.
Augustine’s Answer
You see, the gist of The Confessions is that we love Jesus, but the flesh in which we presently dwell is evil and we must war constantly against it. Augustine never became aware, as most do not, that his every effort to “wage war” against the flesh exalted the flesh.
It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing. The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.
Augustine’s answer to how we are to approach the Bible was to present to the reader precise Christian “doctrine” on all the critical issues of reality based on his strengthened version of the Nicene Creed. The words of Jesus entering us by Spirit as life he did not know.
“Profiting” by the Flesh
Entering the Bible with a complete set of “Christian” definitions to impose on every word one reads is an attempt to profit by the flesh.
As I continued to read in On Christian Doctrine, I was first disappointed not to see any mention of John 6:63. But my disappointment became consternation and then horror as I realized that I was reading words as familiar to me as my own breath, words that I had heard all through my Christian experience in EVERY stream of Christian thinking. But they were words absent the life of Jesus inside of me.
Instantly my knowledge of God ceased, and “Christian” doctrine took its place in all power.
A Demonic Spell
I grabbed my Bible, hoping to find comfort in words of life and Spirit as Jesus spoken into me. I turned to passages I teach from all the time and found no life in them. All I could see in those words was the claims of Christian doctrine.
I was under a demonic spell and I knew it; I knew that God was allowing me to experience the full measure of the veil cast upon His entire church. I simply waited on the Lord, and after a day or so, the veil lifted from my heart and I could see Jesus in the Bible and in me once again. Only then could I know what God intended for me to grasp.
Life and Death
Anyone (except those whom God is bringing into a similar understanding of Christ) who teaches “the Bible,” is not really teaching the Bible, but Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine. The reason that is so is because they have never read the Bible apart from Augustine’s required definitions. They can deny that all they want, but it remains the truth. Thus, when you hear a preacher say, “The Bible says,” you know that much of the time, he or she really means, “Augustine says.”
You see, here is the problem. God Himself devised the Bible as the clearing in the middle of the garden, with both life and death freely available in it.
God’s Intention
People say of the Bible, “You can find a verse to ‘prove’ any idea you want.” Absolutely, that is what God intends. God intends that everyone receive exactly what they ask and find exactly what they are looking for, especially in the Bible.
However, God’s intention is NOT acceptable to reasoning man. Indeed, that was the whole point of the Nicene Council. You see, everybody and his brother was running around, finding every imaginable “truth” in the Bible. (By the AD 300’s, the New Testament was pretty much put together.) Men of high IQ can’t stand the thought of other people reading the Bible “wrong.” The Nicene Council was intended to put a stop to all this independent “reading of the Bible.”
Nicene-Ordered Thinking
On Christian Doctrine is the greatest rendition of Nicene theology, and thus it stands as the definitive guide to all “Christian” reading of the Bible. Basically, what Augustine was saying was this. Get the doctrines of Christianity firmly fixed in your head first. Then, when you read the Bible you won’t be deceived by words on the page. Instead, you will be able to impose ‘truth’ (order) on those words. Thus you will remain in the truth.
Almost all Christians in the world, then, read the Bible using Augustine’s definitions first before understanding anything they might be reading. And the single most powerful layer in that dark veil is Augustine’s definition of “the Trinity.”
Augustine’s Trinity
The Nicene Council: …One Lord Jesus Christ… God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father…
Augustine: . . . The Trinity, one God, of Whom are all things, through Whom are all things, in Whom are all things. Thus the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and each of these by Himself is a complete substance, and yet they are all one substance. The Father is not the Son, nor the Holy Spirit; the Son is not the Father nor the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is not the Father nor the Son; but the Father is only Father, the Son is only Son, and the Holy Spirit is only Holy Spirit. To all three belong the same eternity, the same unchangeableness, the same majesty, the same power . . .
The Flesh in Control
Here is the problem. Christians are convinced that they read these things when they read the Bible. They do NOT. Rather, they impose these concepts of human intellectual argument on what they read, making it impossible for them even to hear what God says. Instead of the Word entering into us by the Spirit as the very life of Jesus inside of us, now human intellect, that is the flesh, is in full control of every idea in the Bible. And thus God can say, “Jesus is Man, Man, Man, Man, Man,” as many times as He wants and it means precisely nothing.
You know what. Having written this series on Essence, I am finally able to look at these definitions of the Trinity and say with all conviction: “Bunk! That is NOT the One I know.”
The Spirit of Anti-Christ
You see, this “other Jesus” that Paul foresaw and warned against in the late 50’s was already pressing full in the church by the 90’s when John wrote. Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of anti-Christ (1 John 4:1-3).
“Has come,” is present perfect, NOT past tense. The spirit that opposes Christ is determined to separate Christ Jesus from our flesh in the present moment.
The Man, Christ Jesus
The central question of Christianity is who and what is Christ, or, as Jesus asked, “Who do you say that I am?” Because Paul’s gospel was never really known except by a few people in the churches of Asia, and then by John before he wrote, everyone sees this as a question regarding a solitary figure, back then, up there, and someday. The argument of “the Trinity” has nothing to do with God, but rather with the power of defining Jesus.
There is one God and one Mediator between God and man, the MAN, Christ Jesus. – For this MAN, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins forever, sat down at the right hand of God. – The second MAN is a life-giving Spirit.
Not Actually Human
Augustine on Jesus: “In what way did He come but this, "The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us"? Just as when we speak, in order that (the idea) we have in our minds may enter through the heart into the mind of the hearer, the word which we have in our hearts becomes an outward sound and is called speech; and yet our thought does not lose itself in the sound, but remains complete in itself, and takes the form of speech without being modified in its own nature by the change: so the Divine Word, though suffering no change of nature, yet became flesh, that he might dwell among us.”
In other words, Jesus is “God.” So what if He showed up momentarily in human flesh, that did not change His nature. Jesus remained “God”; He is not actually HUMAN.
A Man in the Form of God
I now understand exactly what Jesus is and can state it with all confidence based entirely on what God says. Jesus is, in His essence, a human, but existing in the form of God, that is, all here now and personal in us.
Now, the Nicene definition attempts to say that Jesus is, in His essence, God, and that He, as His own God-being NOT the Father, put on Himself momentarily the form of a human. And thus, the argument that Jesus is eternally human is rejected by Nicene thinking. HOWEVER – that is not how they envision Jesus. Here is the real Nicene definition of Jesus. Jesus is, in His essence, God, but existing in the form of a man, that is solitary and far away.
A God in the Form of Man
They say, “Jesus is God,” but they reject any thought that Jesus is all here now. In fact, the idea that Jesus is all here now (and that we are His body) is supreme heresy by Nicene definitions.
Now, the perversion of Jesus into a tiny and isolated form back then, up there, and someday, can be clearly understood. What we must know, however, in order to set creation free, is what, exactly, is the central point of that perversion.
The central purpose of the spirit of anti-Christ is to break the Covenant. God above and man below, fine and dandy, just make sure they cannot ever come together as one.
The Covenant
The Covenant has three parts.
Part 1 – the Source: This is the covenant – that all shall know Me. This is eternal life, to know You, the only true God, and to know Jesus Christ whom You have sent.
Part 2 – the Fulcrum: God is determined to symmorphose us together with the image of Christ – We are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory – We shall be LIKE HIM for we shall see Him as He IS.
Part 3 – the Expression: That they all may be one, as You, Father, are in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us… And the glory which You gave Me I have given them, that they may be one just as We are one: I in them, and You in Me; that they may be made perfect in one.
The Fulcrum
Fulcrum means turning point, or the point of leverage by which the Covenant is turned from Source to Expression. The turning point of the Covenant is that we, you and me, humans walking this earth in this present age, will BE exactly like the Lord Jesus Christ without any limitation and in all ways except in place of honor. And the action that will cause us to be exactly like the Lord Jesus Christ is SEEING Him as He IS.
The expression of the Covenant, of course, is even more purely blasphemous, for Jesus placed you and me entirely into the fellowship of Father and Son, walking as one Pperson together with the Father by every Word that is Jesus.
Nicene Confrontation
It is that fulcrum that the spirit of anti-Christ must destroy in order to have any hope of victory over the church.
I am seldom confronted by angry Nicene Christians, but one such email was perfect in its expression of anti-Christ. I had placed on Facebook this injunction, that we speak Christ our only life, that we call ourselves by all that Christ Jesus is. I will paraphrase the challenge I received in an email. Jesus is God. You are not God; you are human. You cannot be like Jesus. – Exactly.
If the Nicene definition of Jesus is “the truth,” then the Covenant is broken; God lied. And if God “lied,” then there is no god. We are absolutely wasting our time.
The Point of Contention
KNOWING this point of the contention, this absolute upon which everything turns, I have sought, over many years, but especially from the time I began writing in a steady stream from November of 2008 on, to KNOW what Jesus is. And to know what Jesus is ONLY out from what God actually says in the New Testament. I want to KNOW what Jesus is that I might SEE what Jesus is that I might be just like Jesus, that I might be what I am.
And Augustine screams against me: Daniel, you live IN evil. My reply is, “No, I live in Christ.” Augustine cries: Daniel, Jesus is far away from you. My reply is, “No, Jesus lives in my heart.”
It’s as Simple as That
Wow. You know what? It really is that profoundly simple. I live in Jesus; Jesus lives in me – John 14:20.
Bible “interpretation” has NOTHING to do either with “the Bible,” or with Christian theology. Bible “interpretation” is one thing only: where I live.
Those who live “in evil,” and who see Jesus back then, up there, and someday, can proclaim orthodox Christian “truth” all they want, it means absolutely NOTHING. But you and I, living only in Jesus and seeing Christ alone inside of all that we are, read every word in the Bible as the Lord Jesus Christ entering into us as His very Self.