Steiner and Christianity
Steiner appreciated the ritual of the mass he experienced while serving as an altar boy from school age until he was ten years old, and this experience remained memorable for him as a genuinely spiritual one, contrasting with his irreligious family life. As a young adult, Steiner had no formal connection to organized religion. In 1899, he experienced what he described as a life-transforming inner encounter with the being of Christ. Steiner was then 38, and the experience of meeting Christ occurred after a tremendous inner struggle. To use Steiner's own words, the "experience culminated in my standing in the spiritual presence of the Mystery of Golgotha in a most profound and solemn festival of knowledge." His relationship to Christianity thereafter remained entirely founded upon personal experience, and thus both non-denominational and strikingly different from conventional religious forms.
Steiner's Anthroposophy influenced the Russian theologians Pavel Florensky and Sergei Bulgakov. Carl Raschke called Steiner "the occult theologian, par excellence", and stated that Steiner was a pantheist. An evangelical author agrees that Steiner was close to pantheism.
Steiner describes Christ as the unique pivot and meaning of earth's evolutionary processes and human history, redeeming the Fall from Paradise. He understood the Christ as a being that unifies and inspires all religions, not belonging to a particular religious faith. To be "Christian" is, for Steiner, a search for balance between polarizing extremes and the ability to manifest love in freedom.
Central principles of his understanding include:
The being of Christ is central to all religions, though called by different names by each.
Every religion is valid and true for the time and cultural context in which it was born.
Historical forms of Christianity need to be transformed in our times in order to meet the ongoing evolution of humanity.
In Steiner's esoteric cosmology, the spiritual development of humanity is interwoven in and inseparable from the cosmological development of the universe. Continuing the evolution that led to humanity being born out of the natural world, the Christ being brings an impulse enabling human consciousness of the forces that act creatively, but unconsciously, in nature.
James A. Santucci says Anthroposophy is based upon esoteric Christianity. Steiner's views of Christianity diverge from conventional Christian thought in key places, and include gnostic elements. However, unlike many gnostics, Steiner affirms the unique and actual physical Incarnation of Christ in Jesus at the beginning of the Christian era. One of the central points of divergence with conventional Christian thought is found in Steiner's views on reincarnation and karma.
Steiner also posited two different Jesus children involved in the Incarnation of the Christ: one child descended from Solomon, as described in the Gospel of Matthew; the other child from Nathan, as described in the Gospel of Luke. He references in this regard the fact that the genealogies in these two gospels list twenty-six (Luke) to forty-one (Matthew) completely different ancestors for the generations from David to Jesus. Monty Waldin notes that the two Jesus children sound heretical to mainstream Christians. According to Steiner, Christ will never again have a physical body. Steiner's view of the second coming of Christ is also unusual. He suggested that this would not be a physical reappearance, but rather, meant that the Christ being would become manifest in non-physical form, in the "etheric realm" – i.e. visible to spiritual vision and apparent in community life – for increasing numbers of people, beginning around the year 1933. He emphasized that the future would require humanity to recognize this Spirit of Love in all its genuine forms, regardless of how this is named. He also warned that the traditional name, "Christ", might be used, yet the true essence of this Being of Love be ignored.
The teachings of Anthroposophy got called Christian Gnosticism. Indeed, according to the official stance of the Catholic Church, Anthroposophy is "a neognostic heresy". Other heresiologists agree. The Lutheran (Missouri Sinod) apologist and heresiologist Eldon K. Winker quoted Ron Rhodes that Steiner had the same Christology as Cerinthus. Indeed, Steiner thought that Jesus and Christ were two separated beings, who got fused at a certain point in time, which can be construed as Gnostic but not as Docetic, since "they do not believe the Christ departed from Jesus prior to the crucfixion". "Steiner's Christology is discussed as a central element of his thought in Johannes Hemleben, Rudolf Steiner: A Documentary Biography, trans. Leo Twyman (East Grinstead, Sussex: Henry Goulden, 1975), pp. 96-100. From the perspective of orthodox Christianity, it may be said that Steiner combined a docetic understanding of Christ's nature with the Adoptionist heresy." Older scholarship says Steiner's Christology is Nestorian. According to Egil Asprem, "Steiner's Christology was, however, quite heterodox, and hardly compatible with official church doctrine."
Anthony Mellors states that Steiner's interpretation of the Bible is heretical. Two German scholars have called Anthroposophy "the most successful form of 'alternative' religion in the [twentieth] century." Other scholars stated that Anthroposophy is "aspiring to the status of religious dogma". According to Maria Carlson, anthroposophy is a "positivistic religion" "offering a seemingly logical theology based on pseudoscience." According to Swartz, Brandt, Hammer, Hansson, and others Anthroposophy is a religion. They also call it "settled new religious movement", while Martin Gardner and others called it a cult. Another scholar also calls it a new religious movement or a new spiritual movement. Already in 1924 Anthroposophy got labeled "new religious movement" and "occultist movement". Other scholars agree it is a new religious movement. According to Helmut Zander, both the theory and practice of Anthroposophy display characteristics of religion, and, according to Zander, Rudolf Steiner would plead no contest. According to Zander, Steiner's book Geheimwissenschaft [Occult Science] contains Steiner's mythology about cosmogenesis. Hammer notices that Anthroposophy is a synthesis which does include occultism. Hammer also notices that Steiner's occult doctrines bear a strong resemblance to post-Blavatskyan Theosophy (e.g. Annie Besant and Charles Webster Leadbeater).
Another author states that the question whether Anthroposophy is a religion cannot be answered by "Yes" or "No". Somebody else called it "a form of 'Christian occultism'". The Anthroposophist N.C. Thomas denies that Anthroposophy is a religion. Joel Beversluis recognizes that is what Anthroposophists claim. Two Marxist–Leninist German scholars say Anthroposophy is semi-religious. Robert A. McDermott says Anthroposophy belongs to Christian Rosicrucianism. According to Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Rudolf Steiner "blended modern Theosophy with a Gnostic form of Christianity, Rosicrucianism, and German Naturphilosophie". He also described Anthroposophy as a [modern] offshoot of Ancient Gnosticism, especially of "the aeons of the Valentinian pleroma". Gary Lachman stated that Steiner stood for a "heavily Christianized version of Theosophy" and "Christianized occult science". According to McDermott, "Rudolf Steiner was an esoteric teacher in the Rosicrucian-Christian tradition [...]". Geoffrey Ahern states that Anthroposophy belongs to neo-gnosticism broadly conceived, which he identifies with Western esotericism and occultism.
Was Steiner a Gnostic? Yes and no. Yes, from the point of view that he offered insights and methods for a personal experience of Christ. I have formulated this aspect of his work as his hermeneutical key: 'not I, but Christ in me'. No, from the point of view that he was not trying to reestablish Gnosticism's practices into a neo-gnostic tradition. Steiner was, in his times, well aware of concerns articulated more recently by Pope Francis about the two subtle enemies of holiness, contemporary Gnosticism and contemporary Pelagianism.
Granted that Steiner included Gnostic elements in his cosmological reinterpretation of Christianity, many of them from the Pistis Sophia, Steiner was not a Gnostic in the sense of someone who held that the world was ruled by a demiurge, that matter was evil, or that it was possible to escape from this fallen universe by acquiring secret spiritual knowledge. To characterize the structure of his thought as derived from Syrio-Egyptian gnosis (Ahern 2010) may be too strong and plays down the fact that he was critical of early Gnostic Christianity as having no adequate idea of Jesus as a man of flesh and blood.
According to Steiner, "Christ's role is to ease the transition to the Age of Aquarius, while for Gnostics, his task was to save humanity from God". Between 1903 and 1910 Steiner published multiple Gnostic texts, while that publishing house was having intention of subverting orthodox Christianity. Elizabeth Dipple stated that Rudolf Steiner's system was a "neo-Platonic, semi-Gnostic, occult anthroposophical system [...] with its allegiance to mystical Christianity, Rosicrucianism and certain versions of spiritualism [...]". According to Heiner Ullrich, Steiner's point of view was that of a "neo-Platonic gnostic". Gareth Knight agrees that Steiner was neo-Platonic. Brandt and Hammer describe Steiner's anthropology (spirit, soul, and body) as neo-Platonic. Carl Abrahamsson stated that Steiner posited a gnostic Christ. Steiner's theology is "redemption through sin", he accuses good Christians of killing the spirit of Christianity.
According to Catholic scholars Anthroposophy belongs to the New Age. George D. Chryssides also considers Steiner to be New Age, or at least a forerunner of the New Age. John Paull considers him a New Age philosopher. Nicholas Campion says Steiner was a New Age Christian. Campion stated that "Anthroposophy is perhaps the most vibrant of New Age movements". Even allowing that Steiner himself was not New Age, an author wrote "anthroposophy—a spiritual movement that is the basis for much of the New Age thinking in Europe and North America today." Roger E. Olson and Dominic Corrywright agree. The New Age Encyclopedia lists Steiner among the luminaries of the New Age. Wouter Hanegraaff discusses two meanings of "New Age": Steiner fits one meaning, but not the other; the difference lies in the absence of the psychologization initiated by the New Thought. That is, Steiner lies at the root of New Age sensu stricto.
In the 1920s, Steiner was approached by Friedrich Rittelmeyer, a Lutheran pastor with a congregation in Berlin, who asked if it was possible to create a more modern form of Christianity. Soon others joined Rittelmeyer – mostly Protestant pastors and theology students, but including several Roman Catholic priests. Steiner offered counsel on renewing the spiritual potency of the sacraments while emphasizing freedom of thought and a personal relationship to religious life. He envisioned a new synthesis of Catholic and Protestant approaches to religious life, terming this "modern, Johannine Christianity". The resulting movement for religious renewal became known as "The Christian Community". Its work is based on a free relationship to Christ without dogma or policies. Its priesthood, which is open to both men and women, is free to preach out of their own spiritual insights and creativity. Steiner emphasized that the resulting movement for the renewal of Christianity was a personal gesture of help to a movement founded by Rittelmeyer and others independently of his anthroposophical work. The distinction was important to Steiner because he sought with Anthroposophy to create a scientific, not faith-based, spirituality. He recognized that for those who wished to find more traditional forms, however, a renewal of the traditional religions was also a vital need of the times.
