"All the great religious systems posit a point in the normal evolution of man when the process of individuation would require the natural and instinctual propensities to be curbed, and, in the end, give way to more spiritualizing energies. Understood properly, this result might be considered at the end of one evolutionary cycle and the beginning of a new one--a transcendence, as it were, that yet occurs within the framework of natural order and in full harmony therewith. Through the operation of the law of polarity between the positive spiritual principle and the negative physical forces in the economy of man's nature, there was to come a time of crisis in evolution at which the further progress of the soul was to be facilitated by the resolution of the tension between the two. Out of the agon, the struggle of which St. Paul speaks so eloquently, was to be born a new and higher order of conscious being for the soul. But Christian theologians mistook the beneficence of the polar opposition between the natural and the spiritual law for the evil of nature's battle of the flesh with the spirit. This confusion impaled Christianity on a false concept of the true significance of human life on earth. As a result, Christians were persuaded into an attitude of hostility to the world, which was regarded as inherently sinful. They were at enmity with their environment, when the relationship should have been wholesome, delightful and natural, as it was with the Greeks. Psychologically, a posture of distaste and rejection of the world can blight nature's power to sustain, nourish, and heal the soul. Christianity failed to grasp the beneficent role of physis--"nature"--in life's polarity. And, as John Dewey perceived, the false view split the soul of man and produced the tragic hostility of the spirit to the world, which has so great a need of that spiritual flowering.
"The seventh chapter of St. Paul's epistle to the Romans has disturbed and baffled theologians to this day because it lauds the law of the flesh which brings the soul into polar relation to physis, entailing for it the battle against "sin" and "death" and explaining that man could not know spiritual glory if his soul had not had to wrestle with and know the nature of "sin." This makes St. Paul's discourse a tribute to "sin." Yet this chapter, which reveals the salutary nature and the office of the negative pole in the duality of life, is one of the most luminous expositions in all the scriptures. The polar tension in the heart of man can be fierce and take tragic forms, and the soul's battle in this arena can have its grim moments. The struggle is only complicated and, indeed, debased by the persuasion that the battle itself is a miscarriage of divine intent.
"It has been a failure of Christian insight not to realize that all of the potential needed for the implementation of man's self-evolution is already there, within the arsenal of his constitution. He has all the militant power of God that he can possibly appropriate and utilize within his own organism, available to him at every moment. God could do no more than plant the seed of his own nature in the tiny garden of man's physical life and let man have the thrilling adventure of nourishing it to growth and glory. As many a Christian thinker has said, "God could do nothing for man without man's own effort." The Zohar again and again declared that the "above" could or would not bestir itself on behalf of the "below" until it was awakened by the effort of the latter. Modern philosophers like Buber are saying God needs man as much as man needs God. The natural extension of this view is the recognition that the Messiah God, the Christ Savior, comes to mankind, not as a gift from the benevolent Father in heaven, but in inevitable response to the compelling call from within the depths of man's own being. In that moment when the spiritual fire enters man's earthly tenement, the Christ child is born within his heart, progeny to the union of the two polar energies."
P.171-173, A Rebirth for Christianity, "Are the Gospels Fictitious," by Alvin Boyd Kuhn (2005)
