The Creed as Inspiration for Walking with Christ

The Creed as Inspiration for Walking with Christ conference with Rev. Richard Goodall

Report by John-Peter Gernaat

A conference looking at aspects of the Creed as an inspiration for Walking with Christ was held from Friday evening, 9 May, through Saturday,10 May, and a final session on Sunday morning, 11 May. Richard had worked with this material during his visit to the congregation in Hillcrest and has written a report that is available on this website.

The Creed that is read in the Act of Consecration of Man and is made available to everyone who chooses to become a member, is read by the Celebrant after the Celebrant removes the priestly vestment, the stole. It is not ritual text. It is a set of twelve statements regarding our relationship, as human beings, with the Spiritual World. This Creed is born out of Spiritual Science. It is relevant to humanity at this stage of our evolution where we are encouraged to develop the relatively new faculty of the Consciousness Soul. The Creed covers the whole of human experience and therefore this conference only considered very small aspects of it.

The first concept that we considered was the difference between ‘knowledge’ and ‘belief’. We discussed this in pairs and then shared the fruits of the discussion with everyone. It became clear that taking a thought as a hypothesis and coming to an experience of its validity by testing it in one’s life leads to real inner knowing. We are then more likely to be prepared to take another step in faith and test that in our life of experience. As one gains more confidence on this route one can feel a sense of certainty in something one believes that does not yet arise from knowledge alone. One should wrestle inwardly with concepts such as these to gain ever deeper and more meaningful insights.

The evening concluded with a look at the architecture of the Creed. The Creed begins with an introduction to the Trinity, the Father God, the incarnation of Christ and the role of the Spirit in the Incarnation. Nothing is said about the ministry of Christ; the Creed immediately jumps from birth to the Death of Christ. Then follow five statements regarding Christ’s role and work after his Death on the Cross and the creed concludes with two statements concerning our role as human beings.

There is an initial creative process and then, through the Mystery of Golgotha, there begins a second creative process that relies on the co-operation of human souls to be the place and the portal through which this creative process can be brought about by the Christ, thus redeeming the fallen first creation.

Saturday morning began with the Act of Consecration of Man. Then followed thoughts that particularly stood out for me. We go from a perception in the world, the percept, into a realm of concepts. These concepts are moving and in flux. Rudolf Steiner described truth as a spiritual ocean. Truth is not fixed. The ocean is reliable; all water flows towards it. It has currents and tides that are reliable. However, every time we meet the ocean the experience is different, the colours are different, the waves are different, the interaction is unique. We must learn to be receptive to truth in the moment. Concepts are living, spiritual beings and must be understood in the moment.

We delved into the first sentence of the creed and considered two concepts, what we can understand by ‘Spiritual-Physical’ and ‘Ground of the heavens and of the earth’. The considerations brought to light two aspects. The spirit becomes physical when it is contained. The natural world has come into being as a result of our becoming and is the ‘fall-out’ of our becoming. We shed what is not us so that we can remain malleable in our becoming. The ‘fall-out’, the world of nature, is ‘stuck’ at the point at which we cast it off. Physical creation is the ’ash’ of the creative process. When we, as human beings, create, our creative process causes an elemental world to come into being. It is our task to enter into a cooperative relationship with this elemental world in order to redeem it by streaming towards it Christ forces from our heart. How this happens was discussed further.

The next session considered the fourth sentence of the Creed: The Sickness of Sin. The process of Christ’s Incarnation is driven by Christ himself through the Holy Spirit. Christ’s incarnation was made possible by the Holy Spirit who worked to bring about that being into which the Christ could incarnate in space and time into the people of Israel.

Consciousness arises in the human being as a result of the resistance of our physical body – we wake up to ourselves in the body. We experience peripheral consciousness while in the spiritual world and have point consciousness in the physical body. Our body is permeated by blood. Warmth lives in our blood. The blood is the physical organ of the self; it is the organ of will. The spiritual and physical meet in a vortex. This is the experience of the blood in the heart, which itself is a physical vortex of muscle. Our blood allows us to exert who we are and to exert our will into the world.

Neither our body nor our blood can fully do what they need to do as a result of The Fall and the resulting Sickness of Sin (un-wholeness) that exists in the body and the blood. What our task is, is to work transformatively into the world. We cannot fulfil the divine plan though our current physical body. Christ came to undo the effect of The Fall in the human body. In doing so, he did it for all of humanity, for all of creation (past, present and future). Christ replaces the death forces in the human body with the original divine intention. I can come to the realisation that I come from God and cannot be excluded from God. Christ transformed every aspect of the human body until he could say on the cross, “It is complete”. Before his death, Christ pours his healing, formative forces into the bread and his resurrected life forces into the wine. Christ bleeds out between the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. When a dead body is pierced, nothing flows out of it. When the centurion pierced the side of Christ blood and water flowed out of the body into the earth. This was new blood that Christ has brought into being which has as its densest component the etheric - no earthly mineral content. This flows into the earth to begin the transformation of the earth. The earth protests this intrusion because the earth is the realm of the adversarial forces. The people’s experience of this was the earthquakes and a darkening of the sun.

On Maundy Thursday Christ initiated the Mass in which he transubstantiated earthly substances by pouring his transformed and healed formative and life forces into them. Every Mass is a continuation - a re-enactment of this deed as a new creative deed. The Festivals were already there on the Sun incarnation of earth and have been transformed ever since. They are cosmic events that affect the entire creation. Therefore it is no surprise to find the Festivals in pre-Christian times. We give the Festivals expression and they transform as our consciousness evolves. The Mass is a new creative impulse of the healing of the Sickness of Sin in the bodily nature of humankind.

Rudolf Steiner said that the earth is the seed of the dying cosmos. A regenerative process takes place here. The human soul is the germ of this seed. The Christ Sun is the force of this regenerative seed, that in us is reborn. Everything in the interest of the Good for the future can only come from offering. This offering is the opening of our soul to the Christ forces, so that they may enter anew. Through our offering we may receive the consecrated body and blood.

After lunch we experienced the Overcoming of Death as an artistic exercise. Using colours, we experienced the transformation from light into darkness and then the removal of darkness to reveal that the light was still there behind the darkness. The overcoming of the darkness through engaging with Christ forces is able to ray out into all of existence.

​On Sunday we considered faith. Faith in the western world declined from the spiritual to the seeking of political and economic harmony. However, people have awakened to the realisation that investing in a political system is futile and are looking for a new way of life. Social life must improve human life. This opens the soul to experience something that has been negated. The western world is slowly approaching this individually. Spiritual Science provides an entry point from which we can slowly connect to a renewed faith. When we take questions into sleep they are fructified, providing new insight into the questions. We can offer our soul by removing content from our thinking, feeling and willing, in this way we permit spirit to flow into us. Our freedom is untouchable and therefore if we stop inviting the spiritual world to work in us it is obliged to withdraw. We may aim to be in a breathing relationship with what sustains us. When I breath into nothingness in my heart and listen into this nothingness, and direct my efforts towards the Christ then He can work into us as a matter of Grace.