Augustine: The Rock Is Christ

The following is from Tractate CXXIV of Augustine's Homilies on the Gospel of John:

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For, as regards his proper personality, he was by nature one man, by grace one Christian, by still more abounding grace one, and yet also, the first apostle; but when it was said to him, "I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven; and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven," he represented the universal Church, which in this world is shaken by divers temptations, that come upon it like torrents of rain, floods and tempests, and falleth not, because it is founded upon a rock (petra), from which Peter received his name. For petra (rock) is not derived from Peter, but Peter from petra; just as Christ is not called so from the Christian, but the Christian from Christ. For on this very account the Lord said, "On this rock will I build my Church," because Peter had said, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God." On this rock, therefore, He said, which thou hast confessed. I will build my Church. For the Rock (Petra) was Christ; and on this foundation was Peter himself also built.

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Related:

• Is Peter the Rock On Which the Church Is Built?
• Augustine On Peter

Now where such matters are concerned the question has to be asked: Whence comes the present materialistic spirit? Who is responsible for it? The answer is that the religious faiths have fostered it. And its living presence in the social world-outlook is due solely to the social world-outlook being a true disciple of what, strictly speaking, has arisen during the centuries from the religious faiths, It was really more important than people think In 869 the Catholic Church denied the spirit at the World Council at Constantinople. Since then no catholic man of learning dare talk of the spirit being present in man. They may only say that man consists of body and soul. Ant. so it was all through the Middle Ages. Nothing scared the learned ones of medieval Catholicism more than any mention the trichotomy, in other words the threefold division of man's being into body, soul and spirit. For at the Council of Constantinople it was established that man consists of body and soul, the soul having certain spiritual forces and attributes. Something of the spirit is in the soul, but no mention may be made of a separate spirit. Since then the scientists and philosophers have believed that on a basis of science “free of hypotheses” they differentiate only between body and soul, whereas they are acting merely under the influence of Catholic dogma.
Why is it that when knowledge of the world is in question one should not be allowed even to speak of the spirit? In part it is due to this dogma. But neither may one speak of the soul. Of the real soul it is not permitted to talk because the religious faiths claim it as their prerogative to speak of the soul and — so far as their dogma allows — also of the spirit. It is their monopoly. It does not the long to the ordinary man's province to speak of soul and spirit; belongs to those who speak to people from the standpoint of some religious denomination. What then remains for science — the unfortunate zoology, physiology, chemistry, physics — but to speak of material processes? If in any place something flares up and spirit is mentioned they are interfering in the affairs of religion. Nothing remains for this poor science of the world but to become material, materialistic, since the religious denominations deprive it of the possibility to touch on anything spiritual.
There is something very important in this, my dear friends. It is most important to realise that the very powers responsible for materialism are the powers of the Western Churches. It is the Churches we have to thank for materialism. And materialism will go on increasing in strength if the Churches do not lose their administrative powers in the various religions and confessions. If we take our civilisation seriously it will be impossible for us to entertain any illusions in these matters. Today it concerns us all to take these matters seriously. Today we may not out of human weakness venture on any compromise. If in our ordinary activities we are forced into making a compromise, this must be done consciously and not lightly dismissed with a few words. It must be quietly admitted that it is necessary to yield to superior power. We must not make a compromise with what we know; we must not believe a thing to be right that we do at the dictates of coercion.
Thus it is necessary to create for our knowledge a foundation that is once and for all a sure foundation. Today things have to be given pointed, very pointed emphasis. Here in this sphere are the things that have to be given such emphasis. For we are now at a point of time where knowledge concerning the spiritual world must be treated with seriousness. The scientific knowledge that has arisen knowledge that began with Galileo, Giordano Bruno, Kepler, Copernicus, the period of natural science having in the nineteenth century Julius Robert Mayer as one of its most outstanding exponents, all this knowledge followed methods and proceeded from views of natural science which were quite new in comparison with the methods and views among the various religions handed down from olden times. Between the methods of natural science belonging to the scientific outlook, and the methods of the religious faiths, there is no possible agreement. Spiritual science, that spiritual science that has grown out of actual modern culture, must, however, take stand on the same ground as natural science. It must deal in all seriousness with what I wrote in my book “Mysticism and Modern Thought”. Such things have to be taken with the utmost seriousness. But they will not be taken seriously if it is not made clear that spirit is working in all we now observe in the world. Matter never exists purely as matter, Wherever there is concrete matter there is at the same time concrete spirit. And when man today says that he stands in the world as man with the three kingdoms — animal, vegetable and mineral — below him, he is stating merely a half-truth if, at the same time, he does not recognise that just as below his body there are animal kingdom, plant kingdom and mineral kingdom, so above there are the three spiritual kingdoms of the hierarchies of the Angels, Archangels and Archai. No one has the right to speak of animal kingdom, plant kingdom and mineral kingdom as being below physical man if he does not realise that three other kingdoms, spiritual kingdoms, are above him. For man as a being of the physical world stands in bodily connection with the three kingdoms of animal, plant, mineral; through his soul-spiritual being he stands in connection with the three kingdoms above, which, for the developed human perception are just as real spiritually as the three kingdoms below are real physically for the physical senses. And before it is admitted that we come to recognition of the spirit through developed observation, not allowing ourselves to be held back by any traditional religious faith — just as little as maintaining there are walruses would hinder us from asserting something about the spiritual world — before we come to this, we can never grasp what has to work as impulse into the present time. These things today must have our earnest consideration.
This is how matters stand. We have entered an age of human evolution in which man is a different being from what he was in earlier periods of the evolution of the Earth. Man has always been in a state of evolving. When the Great Flood had subsided and out of a much older culture the first blossoming of our culture , human beings where their physical bodies were concerned made a great step forward. Persian Egypto-Chaldean; to a certain degree on into the Greco-Latin period up to the middle of the fifteenth century of our era. Since then the evolution of man as a physical being has slowly been losing ground. His bodily evolution has come to stop. The human body has gone beyond its zenith in upward evolution, and as body, filled with physical forces, is approaching not an upward but a downward development. If out of the spiritual knowledge gleaned from our literature we ask why this is so, the answer must be: As we as men have entered into a different relation with the animal world — for example, during the Egypto-Chaldean period man had a great deal more of the animal in him than he has today, life being more in accord with animal-instinct — so now he is developing another relation to the three higher kingdoms. Up to our own time these three higher kingdoms had indeed a particular interest in concerning themselves with man. People of the present day will have to begin to understand that in speaking of these things we are speaking of realities. The spirits of the hierarchies of the Angels, Archangels and Archai had a living interest in occupying themselves with human beings, but now this interest is ceasing. It began to do so in the middle of the fifteenth century, These beings of the higher hierarchies looked upon it as their ideal to arrive at a picture of man as a complete human being. This they could not do up to the present time, for the human being had not reached the peak of his completion. They had to wait. Today when there is so confused a representation of God that it easily becomes atheism, this necessary waiting of the spiritual beings above man cannot be understood.
Evolving human being? In former times it was justifiable to speak of certain people as being gifted, as having a touch of genius. And quite rightly the predisposition to this tendency was looked for in the bodily constitution. Teachers could turn their attention to the bodily constitution and by developing it correctly could bring out the genius. All the dispositions of the human being were thus brought out. From now onwards there is no longer any bodily development. If in any science of education there is a desire merely to develop the physical body nothing comes of it. Today attention must be focused on the soul. Today account must be taken not merely of what comes from physical evolution through heredity, for nothing more can come from that; we have to turn to what in this life on earth man bears within him as fruits of past earthly lives. are then being gifted through his soul.
It is certainly very fine today to speak as a historian to people of how right it was to perceive the Christ in the way He was perceived by Luther. But modern man cannot have this perception, for it no longer has any reality and if upheld only leads to what is untrue. Present-day man wanting to find the Christ must do so by direct perception. As we find Nature by perceiving her directly, so we find the Christ through inner perception.

Things must be considered in their right connection. Outer conditions sufficiently point to how necessary it is today to remind men that they should take the most primitive impulses of their religious faith seriously. Even for Christians the commandment holds good not to take the Name of God in vain. But if anyone comes along and speaks about social affairs people immediately say: He is not speaking of Christ at all, what he says is not Christian! — Certainly nothing becomes Christian because in every third line Christ's name is mentioned. It needs to be given out so that people may be convinced of its being spoken out of the mood in which Christ wills it to be spoken at the present time. But when it is said out of the very spirit of the present and one is at pains to speak in this way, people come and say: Oh, but he is not talking of the Christ. He should be speaking with more depth. Then the so-called depth is put forward in the most external way possible. We should just say: These people were brought up to this, it is true, they cannot change their calling later in life, so let them talk. But we should not think it necessary to agree with all they say except in a conventional way and without discussion.
As I said, it would be easier not to talk about these things. But we are approaching such difficult and serious times that it is quite impossible not to refer to them. There is far too much of the human weakness of not taking things seriously. Certainly anyone may say: I cannot change myself nor my profession, and so on, but he cannot justify himself, he just owns up to compromising. What is important today is the upholding of truth even if this truth is considered necessary only from the point of view of external conditions. When we take note of how present-day human beings have been rushed into the fearful material catastrophe the only reason we can see for this is that they have so entirely given up always looking from things to words and from words to things. So often today people value the words and then believe they know something of the things. This tendency to develop the meaningless beyond reason is the prevailing tendency of our age and, then, not to see that even if the words are there the matter is not.
Today people are not taught pedagogics nor didactics so that they may understand them but pedagogics are decreed by law. As laws are enacted that people should not steal, they are commanded by law through official gazettes, through official decrees, I agree with this or that, agree as far as the words, the sentences go. That men today are clever enough to be able easily to come to terms with the content of a sentence is certainly not denied by one who ventures from inner knowledge of the spirit to assert that the spiritual beings, who till now have been working in evolution, have brought man so far that he has attained their ideal of completion. It is not denied that men today are clever, that they can criticise that they have advanced a long way intellectually, that in a certain way they are indeed complete creations from the earthly point of view. Just because they are all this, however, they have to tap a new source in themselves, an entirely new source.
It is true that those who know spiritual life hold modern men to be a finished product. But just because the are so, because they have reached completion through other beings, they have to start now on making something of themselves.
Let truth prevail! One would so like to proclaim this craving over and over again to men out of the solicitude of one's deepest heart. As with Augustine,s “[Even] If I am mistaken, I am.”This explains the idea that grace works like a law of nature, drawing the human will to God with a divine omnipotence. Of course this Neoplatonic coloring must not be exaggerated; it is more consistent with itself in his earlier writings than in the later, and he would never have arrived at his predestinarian teaching without the New Testament. With this knowledge, we are in a position to estimate the force of a difficulty which now confronted Augustine for the first time, but never afterward left him, and which has been present in the Roman Catholic teaching even down to the Councils of Trent and the Vatican. If faith depends upon an action of our own, solicited but not caused by vocation, it can only save a man when, per fidem gratiam accipiens, he becomes one who not merely believes in God but loves him also.
What has been said has not yet been found. Whoever sees into how things work today knows only too well that it has not been found by mankind through what has been said. If you help towards right understanding of what is said you will not again fail to help the truth to be spread in a true way among men and not simply in an external logical form. truth can be spread abroad in a way that is not true, which often does more harm than the spreading of actual lies. Or what is meant to bring about harm by making truth prevail in a way that is untrue.

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Christ’s Church is based on “the Father” initiating a personal relationship with a man or woman. It is NOT based on Christ as the cornerstone thereof, nor on the apostles who are the pillars thereof.

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Continued...

Or....the Word (truth and wisdom) of God being the rock or foundation of the Christ's lawful assembly or the Church (and purposed not merely for initiating a relationship but for maintaining such a relationship)?

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Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. If ye had known me, ye should have known my Father also: and from henceforth ye know him, and have seen him. Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us. Jesus saith unto him, Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father? John 14:6-9 KJV

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So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. Genesis 1:27 KJV

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Which was the son of Enos, which was the son of Seth, which was the son of Adam, which was the son of God. Luke 3:38

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Between the Mysteries of the SPIRIT and those of the FATHER, stand the MYSTERIES OF THE SON.
Christ Himself appeared as a teacher in the most solemn celebrations and was therefore also a teacher who was not a man, but God. But in the MYSTERIES OF THE FATHER, those who will become teachers will be men, These men, who develop more quickly than the others, will be the true Masters of Wisdom and of Harmony; they are called “The Fathers”, in the Mysteries of the Father,"The mystery of God, namely Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge" (Colossians 2:2 and 3).The coming of Christ-Jesus was prepared for by the sequence of the founders of religions, by Zarathustra, Hermes, Moses, Orpheus, Pythagoras. All their teachings pursue the same aim: To let wisdom flow into humanity, but in every case, in the form most suited to each people respectively. The essentially new element is not found in what Christ said; the new element in the appearance and teaching of Christ-Jesus is the force that lay in Him to awaken into LIFE all that, formerly was only teaching. ACCESS to Christ is accepting oneself not as founders of dogma the rock has to be the same father . Are church fathered religions necessary Christ-Jesus is the force or foundation that lay in Him to awaken into LIFE all that, formerly was only teaching.God is Papa Or....the Word (truth and wisdom) of God being the rock or foundation of the Christ's lawful assembly or the Church (and purposed not merely for initiating a relationship but for maintaining such a relationship)? Maintaining Christ not a church is evident why is it the church became the great mystery. When all teaching is religious then what was Christ messaging certainly not religion I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me. with this authority one knows the eternal father. The church integrity is just a book and its teachings. Its far from being eternal.

I found some videos to explain why the Trading with the Enemy Act has been removed from sources of CODE:

I have seen this face, three times.

Listen to these lessons on "rivalry".

There is an immutable law of free will. The Master is limited, believe it or not, to the obedience of the student to actually attack. If the student is feigning the attack then the Master is limited. The first student is so determined to regain control of his body, that he strains a tendon in his thigh. Note the ponytail student too, hurts himself in determination to attack, but the Master heals him quickly, with the same loving energy.


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I take biochemical shortcuts and in short, by controlling my fears I delay the reaction to the potential deception that there can be deficit and loss. When it is out of timing, it is not brought by the time-dependent ego into existence.

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In other words, as a defense mechanism Cornell Law and the Senate have removed the Trading with the Enemy Act from the Bankers' Code in order to avoid murder charges. I have control over the matter, so long as they attack. When they do not attack, their free will is restored to them because there is peace. And you might continue to endorse private credit from the Fed if you so wish...

I hope you choose redemption.