The Christology of Rudolf Steiner: Exploring the Spiritual Reality at the Heart of Christianity

At the heart of Rudolf Steiner’s anthroposophy is his teaching on the incarnation, death and resurrection of Christ, which he saw as the turning point in humanity’s evolution. Steiner’s Christology, however, differs from that taught in many mainstream churches, and can present a challenge to someone getting to grips with his complex and wide-ranging ideas.

In this extract from The Christology of Rudolf Steiner, Willem Veltman outlines the development of the relationship between faith and knowledge and where Steiner fits into this.

Faith, Knowledge and the Need for a New Revelation

In the first centuries of Christianity the bearers of spiritual culture were not intellectuals but ‘knowers’ in a different sense. People at the time spoke about gnosis, a knowledge of spiritual realities obtained by individuals with clairvoyant abilities. The knowledge of these initiates, drawn from the ancient mystery cults, was gradually lost, however, and by the fourth century it had practically disappeared. In some cases, it has been deliberately eradicated. In the absence of this old wisdom, a need soon arose for these ideas to be explained, especially those concerning the nature of Jesus and the divine Trinity. There were diverging views and heated disagreements. Councils and dogmas were needed to instruct the faithful, but that led to a belief based on authority. In the Middle Ages, faith became a church-sanctioned state of mind, supported and maintained by ritual pomp and beautiful liturgical music.

Gradually, however, all of this had to give way to what would eventually become our modern culture, with its scientific knowledge that depends on empirical evidence and rational thinking. Faith was slowly banished from the field where material science was developing as the new knowledge. Medieval Christian philosophers began to speak of the ‘double truth’: the truth of faith and the truth of science, and because they might contradict each other, human beings should keep them separate.

This irrational mindset still predominates in Western culture. A child learns the creation story of Genesis in Sunday school and then during the week is taught the theory of evolution as formulated by Charles Darwin. On Sunday you have to ‘believe’; during the week you are allowed to ‘know’. For the child as they get older, the contradiction between these two worldviews quickly becomes a problem. When you add to this Protestant Biblical criticism, which has served to undermine the faith, Christianity appears to be a religion that is unable to justify its own existence.

“For Christianity to have any future, a new approach is needed based on spiritual insight and inner experience.”

It was necessary that faith, for a time, took the place of the old knowing, but that time is now also coming to an end. For Christianity to have any future, a new approach is needed based on spiritual insight and inner experience, one that provides insight into both the earthly and divine worlds, the human being, and perhaps most significantly of all, the incarnation of Christ.

The importance of this cannot be overstated … If the path could be cleared, if a new light could be thrown on what took place in the Holy Land two thousand years ago, then it might turn out that Christianity is not so much a religion like other great religions, but a central affair that concerns all of humanity. Not because of the content of a particular doctrine, but because of the actual reality of Christ’s life.

“If a new light could be thrown on what took place in the Holy Land two thousand years ago, then it might turn out that Christianity is not so much a religion like other great religions, but a central affair that concerns all of humanity.”

One person who sought to develop such an approach was the Austrian philosopher and founder of anthroposophy, Rudolf Steiner. Steiner was born in 1861 in the small town of Kraljevec in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire but today is in Croatia. From an early age, Steiner was naturally able to see into the spiritual world, but he saw it as his life’s task to develop a systematic way that would allow other people to bridge the gap between the world of the senses and the world of the spirit. As a student he found the seeds of such a spiritually oriented research method in the work of several Central European thinkers, foremost among them the German poet and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Steiner went much further than his predecessors, however, creating a modern spiritual science that can be seen as building on and going beyond the natural science of our time.

About the author

Willem Frederik Veltman (1923–2018) taught at the Waldorf school in The Hague, in the Netherlands for over forty years. He authored many books on culture, art history and literature, including studies on Dante and William Shakespeare.