1,

Salvation= Light
Redemption= Fire

Saviour= Light-Bringer
Redeemer= Fire-Bearer

Light= God’s Face
Fire= God’s Heart

Salvation= friendship with God’s Face
Redemption= intimacy with God’s Heart

Salvation= the past dispensation
Redemption= the future dispensation

The saved of the past dispensation are like their Saviour= Light-Bringers
The redeemed of the future dispensation are like their Redeemer= Fire-Bearers

Light-Bringers= sanctity
Fire-Bearers= holiness

Children of the Light= raised up from down; cleaned, beautiful
Children of the Fire= plunged down to go through; dirtied, ugly

The Light knows your name, but only the Fire knows your heart.

The Salvational Way of Light in Christianity is similar, even though not identical, to other Eros religions. The old Metta Prayer of Buddhism=

“May all beings be peaceful. May all beings be happy. May all beings be safe. May all beings awaken in the light of their nature. May all beings be free.”

Free ‘from’ illusion and delusive craving– but free ‘for’ what?

The Way of Light cannot answer.

The Way of Fire answers– with its very life-blood.

It recognizes the necessity of crucifixion.

2,

In the Light of Love, Eros, we are ‘liberated’ from all unreal, deadening attachments, so as to be available for all real, life-giving attachments.

In the Fire of Love, the Daemonic, we are made ‘obedient’ to the burning in God’s Spirit which descends into the hell where our human fire has failed. At the very point where human passion hits the wall, the ‘wailing wall’ in Jerusalem, Christ’s deed in the abyss renders the wall into a door, the gateway for our passion becoming divine-human.

The resurrection of Christ inaugurates the New Age to Come, the Age of the Second Covenant.

But have Christians, East or West, made a start in this New Age?

Hardly a start..

Why not?

They have not followed in Christ’s footsteps because they have not consented to let the Spirit of God ignite and enflame their heart’s existence in this world. The same Fire that powered him through his deed is needed to power us through our deed= to ‘commune with’ his deed is thus to ‘participate in’ the Spirit of Passion, the Spirit of Fire, driving it.

The Spirit took him through hell, and so we need the Spirit to take us through hell.

3,

Modernity is looked at askance by many religious people, especially the fundamentalists whose reactionary reversion to a supposedly divinely sanctioned absolutist authority seeks to undo its ‘rebellious freedom.’ But from a Jewish perspective, there is no going back..

Modernity has seen the collapse of the Western Medieval Religious System; it has also inaugurated the beginnings of a Daemonically driven existential crisis for all humanity. The religious floor boards have fallen through. God must be refound in a different way, authentically, existentially, through the heart, or remain absent forever. This is make or break.

Modernity is a watershed in human history, which gives us a chance to begin the Second Covenant. We are, in the wake of this watershed, in a more Daemonic moment, a time more horrible yet more empowering for the embrace of the Messianic. No church tradition, however beautiful and rich, is sufficient at such a moment.

There is a huge change in the heart of humanity. We cannot go back to the simple duality of ‘purity versus sin.’ We moderns have plunged deeper into tragedy, where wheat and tares are mixed, but this makes possible a deeper turning, the turning only possible in hell.

This watershed — which Dostoyevsky portrays in his novels, and Berdyaev comments upon – is the real spiritual meaning of ‘modernity.’

Pre-watershed= the church and its tradition provides a structure which answers the distress and underlying disquiet of existence in a falsely premature, and non-existential way. So those who are religious feel they have an answer, and those not religious in the distress, in the tragedy, are tacitly sneered at= they too could be safe in the structure, so it is their fault if they do not grab the opportunity.. This attitude is why Christianity is dying.

Post-watershed= we are all in the tragedy together, and nothing churchy and traditional will advantage some as against others who are left out and disadvantaged.

4,

If — as many people currently sense — some great Catastrophe is coming to the entire world, then this is the world’s Kismet, and it will happen in order to Daemonically spark the world’s redemption. A terrible fate can resurrect from abysmal failure the truest destiny.. This is what Christ’s Cross, Descent into Hell, Resurrection, reveals.

It depends on us, our heart, our passion. Will we learn the Daemonic meaning of suffering? Will we, by giving our brokenness to God, join and participate in the mystery of Christ in hell, and thereafter reach the resurrected passion for existence? Will we let ourselves be raised by the Daemonic to join and participate in its paradoxical way of over-throwing the Evil One?

These questions bite into more and more people today, though not many are in any of the religions, which have for the most part not discerned the new summons in the all or none change brought by modernity. In the future, however, once the Daemonic Kismet hits the planet as a whole, these questions will bite into everyone.

Yeshua the Mashiach [John, 12, 24-28]=

“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it abides alone;
But if it dies, it brings forth a rich harvest.
Anyone who loves his [worldly] life will lose it;
Anyone who hates his [worldly] life will keep it for everlasting life.

If any man serves me, he must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also.
If any man serves me, Yahweh my Father will honour him.
Now is my soul troubled, and what shall I say?
Father, save me from this hour?
But for this cause I came to this hour.

Father, glorify thy name.
Then came a voice from heaven, saying, ‘I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.’
Yeshua answered [after people speculated on the voice], and said, this voice came not because of me but for your sakes.
Now sentence is being passed on this world: now shall the prince of this world be cast out.
And I, if I be lifted up from the earth [on the Cross], will draw all men unto me.”

The Jewish Bible says God has a ‘soul’ and a ‘heart.’ The world is built out of the soul. The world is upheld by the heart.

The heart of God is not above the world, in heaven, but below the world, in the abyss.

The question the Daemonic puts to our heart is, will we truly cleave to the heart of God in those depths, to forge an alliance at the only level which can make a difference to the world= which can redeem the world.