If this is true, then the fruit of the Spirit is not moral effort, nor proof of allegiance to a religious system, but the natural outflow of awakening to the Divine consciousness within. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, and self-control are not badges earned through discipline but the inevitable expression of union with the indwelling Spirit. Jesus stands in human history precisely as one who understood this with full clarity. What made Him unique was not that He alone carried divinity while the rest of us remained damaged, distant, and damned. His uniqueness lay in His consciousness—His knowing. He knew the Logos dwelled in Him, and, by extension, in all. His invitation was not to worship a solitary Son but to awaken to the shared Sonship of humanity. To be “born from above” is not to meet the membership requirements of a sect; it is to remember who we are at the deepest level of being: offspring of the Divine, participants in the same Spirit, expressions of the same cosmic Love.
This is why the Gnostics, despite the smear campaigns of later orthodox authorities, remain legitimate followers of Christ. They did not distort Christianity; they preserved its mystical core. Their writings, alongside the canonical texts, reveal a view of salvation as awakening rather than appeasement, illumination rather than doctrine, liberation from ignorance rather than ransom from wrath. They understood sin not as legal debt but as forgetfulness—a falling asleep to our divine origin. Their Jesus frees not by blood payment but by revelation: He comes to restore sight, not settle accounts. If we dare to approach the New Testament and the Gnostic texts as parallel witnesses rather than competitors, a coherent picture emerges: Scripture was never meant to be reduced to literal forensic logic. It is symbolic, psychological, mythic, cosmic. Mythic is not synonymous with untrue. Mythic means truth conveyed through symbol, story, and spiritual experience.
This reading is not foreign to the earliest voices of the faith. Paul was not a systematizer of penal transactions but a mystic of union. His language is not courtroom but interiority: “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” John, too, is no legal narrator of guilt and payment; he is the poet of abiding, of oneness, of divine indwelling. “I am in the Father, and you in me, and I in you.” Both apostles speak the language of consciousness, union, and transformation, not empire, law, and punishment.
The tragic shift came not through Christ, not through the apostles, but through Rome. When Christianity became the religion of power, it had to become a religion of control. Orthodoxy, in its imperial stage, was not born to guard truth but to regulate it. Creeds and councils did not arise from mystical contemplation but from political necessity. The empire needed a unified theological system, not a diverse mystical movement. Thus the living, breathing, experiential faith of Jesus and the earliest followers hardened into rules, boundaries, penalties, and eternal threats. Love became fear dressed in ecclesial robes.
In that climate, penal substitution grew—not from Jesus' lips nor Paul’s pen, but from Augustine’s anxiety and Anselm’s feudal logic. For the first three centuries, no Christian theologian preached divine wrath satisfied by blood payment. The cross was victory, healing, illumination, liberation from the forces of ignorance and death. Christ conquered the fear of separation, not the Father’s temper. Only later did salvation become courtrooms and cosmic accounting.
It is in this same shift that hell transformed. Jesus spoke of Gehenna—a known garbage valley outside Jerusalem where fires smoldered and decay was visible. He used it as symbol, as prophetic image of wasted life, ego ruin, and inner breakdown—not eternal torture. The early Christians understood this. It was the imperial church that needed eternal punishment to fuel conformity and obedience. Fear is the easiest tool by which to direct populations.
So when I speak of reimagining Christianity, I am not inventing a new faith. I am remembering an old one. I am recovering the mystical Jesus who reveals our divine origin, the Pauline Christ who lives within rather than above, the Johannine Logos who binds all consciousness in love, and the Gnostic insight that salvation is awakening from forgetfulness, not rescue from divine violence. This Christianity is coherent, reasonable, historical, and spiritually alive. It returns to the vision of a God who is not a monarch in the sky but the living consciousness in whom all things share their existence. It sees humanity not as depraved wretches awaiting rescue but as luminous beings capable of remembering their origin in Love.
To reimagine Christianity is simply to remove the imperial armor that has covered its heart. It is to remember that Jesus did not come to found a system but to reveal a state of being: the Kingdom within. It is to reclaim a faith defined not by threat but by transformation, not by fear but by awakening, not by debt but by love. In this sense, reimagining Christianity is not an invention. It is a return.
