When Christ Was Enough: The Living Gospel Before Creeds and Councils Part 2

Here is Part 2 of a three part series. The link for Part 1 will be at the end of the text.

As the centuries rolled forward like waves upon the shore, the early fluidity of the Gospel narrowed into structure, and structure hardened into dogma. What had once been an awakening experience of Christ within slowly shifted into belief about Christ external to oneself. The canon, finalized through the deliberations of bishops and councils, became the definitive measure of truth. And yet beneath the triumph of orthodoxy, something tender and essential was forgotten—not destroyed entirely, but buried like treasure hidden in a field, awaiting a generation that would search again with eyes to see.

The great councils, earnest in their intentions, did not merely sift the genuine from the false; they also fenced the mystical from the historical, the experiential from the propositional. They privileged the narrative of sin, guilt, blood, and atonement as the primary framework through which to understand Jesus, burying the more luminous vision of divine memory and spiritual resurrection that had lived in the early currents. The cross became the emblem of a necessary sacrifice to satisfy divine wrath, rather than the transcendent portal through which fear, separation, and death itself were overcome. Penal substitutionary atonement rose not because it was the fullness of truth, but because it served the growing anxiety of the institutional church to explain suffering and to enforce conformity.

And so it happened that the Christ who had whispered in the lilies of the field and called each soul to awaken to its divine sonship was cloaked under layers of guilt and fear. The memory of humanity’s inherent divinity, the original blessing that Paul glimpsed when he proclaimed there is no condemnation for those in Christ Jesus, became overshadowed by the heavy weight of original sin. Where once the Gospel was the announcement that the forgotten light within had been rekindled, it became a courtroom drama where humanity stood condemned, saved only by the tortured death of its judge. Love was not erased, but it became tethered to conditions it had never known.

Yet even in this Great Forgetting, the seeds of awakening remained. They lived quietly in the scriptures, visible to those who could read not only with the mind but with the heart. They lived in the secret teachings passed down in hidden monasteries, in the solitary prayers of mystics who felt the fire of the Spirit burning deeper than doctrine. They lived in the forbidden gospels, the lost sayings, the half-remembered dreams of a people who sensed that God was closer than the officials proclaimed, more intimate than even the holiest of sacraments could contain.

The Gospel of Thomas, once declared heretical, carried in its verses the profound simplicity that the kingdom of the Father is spread out upon the earth and men do not see it. The Gospel of Mary dared to place spiritual authority not in the hands of Peter but in the wisdom of a woman who had seen the Lord not with the eyes of flesh but with the vision of the soul. The Gospel of Truth proclaimed not judgment but joyful awakening, as if humanity, long trapped in amnesia, were being called home by a voice it had forgotten it knew.

The early Gnostics, often caricatured and misunderstood, did not in their truest forms seek to destroy the body or despise creation; rather, they sought to transcend the illusion that the material alone was real. They dared to teach that within the heart of every human being was a seed of light, a fragment of the divine Pleroma, waiting to awaken. They spoke in parables and myths, not because they were lost in fantasy, but because they understood that truth was too vast, too luminous, to be captured in mere propositions.

In the Age of Pisces, dominated by hierarchy, structure, and the slow building of empire, these voices were silenced, marginalized, or buried. Yet even as the great cathedrals rose and the creeds were etched in stone, there were always undercurrents of remembrance. In the writings of John the Evangelist, who dared to call humanity not merely servants but friends of God. In Paul’s insistence that Christ is in us, the hope of glory. In Peter’s declaration that we are partakers of the divine nature. In the fruits of the Spirit, which even the most rigid dogma could not uproot, blooming in acts of kindness, patience, and unselfish joy across the centuries.

It is these seeds, these quiet notes of memory, that the Age of Aquarius now invites us to recover. An age that is less about tearing down what was, and more about unveiling what has always been. An age not of rebellion, but of revelation. An age in which the rigid exteriors crumble, and the living Gospel rises again, not merely as a set of doctrines to believe, but as a living reality to embody.

The canon, understood rightly, is not an idol to be worshiped, nor a prison to be escaped, but a portal through which light can flow — provided the heart remains open. The error was never the canon itself, but the forgetting that the Spirit who inspired the canon was never contained within it. That same Spirit continues to speak, continues to reveal, continues to call each soul beyond fear, beyond shame, into the endless embrace of Love.

The Age of Aquarius whispers what Jesus whispered so long ago: that the Father’s house has many rooms; that the kingdom is within; that to be born again is to awaken, not to a dogma, but to the living Christ within. The structures that were necessary for one era have become the husks from which a greater flowering must now emerge. The Gospel of the Age of Aquarius is not a new gospel but the oldest of all, the one that lived before canons and creeds, in the eternal song of Spirit calling Spirit back to itself.

To embrace this Gospel is not to reject the canon, but to fulfill it — to find within its pages the living Word, and to hear once again the words that have echoed across centuries, awaiting a generation willing to remember: "You are the light of the world." Not because of merit or blood, but because you have always been, and will always be, of the Light.

Link to Part 1