Who or what is God, according to Rudolf Steiner? Waldorf school students are expected to recite prayers, written by Steiner, that address “God,” “God’s spirit,” and/or the “Creator Spirit.” [1] To whom are they praying?

Steiner spoke of the Godhead, which may be taken as a reference to the creative force behind the universe, often seen as the Christian triune God — Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. On the other hand, Steiner also said that polytheism is correct; monotheism is only a distant ideal:  “Monotheism or monism can only represent an ultimate ideal; it could never lead to a real understanding of the world....” [2]

In Steiner's view, there is no One and Only God, at least not yet. That God, or at least the reality encompassed by that God, is still being evolved: It is “an ultimate ideal”.

To repeat, then: To whom are Waldorf students praying?

The Godhead

Here is some of what Steiner said about the Godhead. He identified the Godhead as divine will. He depicted a nebulous force that activates the good gods, and good humans, and everything else aside, perhaps, from the evil gods and all the beings that lack real spirit. The Godhead is the “creator spirit” or the “kingdom” into which the good may enter. In this sense, it is blessedness.

“[A] Christian sees a mirror image of the Godhead, of divine will, in every single thing in the world. The universe contains the sacrificed Godhead, and this reflected image of the Godhead was called in esoteric Christianity ‘the kingdom’. What the kingdom meant to them was the divine will raying back to them multiplied a million times. The kingdom was the creative power of Atma, the living force of Buddhi in us, the creative force working in the outside world.” [3]

If this explanation leaves you still in the dark, that’s how things work in Steinerworld. But maybe we can find a little additional illumination.

“True existence is the incarnation of the Godhead; the world process is the Passion of the incarnated Godhead and at the same time the way of redemption for Him who was crucified in the flesh....” [5]

The Godhead is a spirit that incarnates in true existence (false existence incarnates evil or it has no spiritual component at all). The Godhead, incarnated in Christ and enduring Christ's Passion (the Crucifixion), sacrificed itself for our sake. We ourselves can follow the world process that, if properly unfolded, will lead to our Christ-informed spiritual evolution — toward our own divinity, which may be considered the ultimate fulfillment of the Godhead.

Atma, Buddhi, evolution. This is not your father’s Christianity.

Let’s turn to God the Father.  The Godhead and God the Father stand outside humanity, as it were, although they also reside within us. Ultimately, we will be one with the Father — not as companions, but literally as Himself. “[W]e shall have gradually achieved the transformation of our own being into what is called in Christianity ‘the Father.’” [6]

The Father is the creative spirit,  in which sense it is the Godhead or a portion of it. It is somewhat like the Creator in the Bible, except that it did not literally create the world — it is the spirit that enables all creation, but creation is an evolutionary process, the handiwork of the many good gods in Steiner’s polytheistic vision. 

Note the quotation marks around “the Father” in the quotation, above. Steiner clearly separated his vision form orthodox or Biblical faith. Steiner felt free to contradict the Bible, even writing or adopting alternatives texts. For example, one version of the “Lord’s Prayer” he used is addressed not to “Our Father which art in heaven” but to “All-Father of Humanity”: "We sense You above in the heavenly heights,/All-Father of Humanity./Consecrated be Your Name.” [7] This unBiblical version of the Lord's Prayer goes on to say “Yours is the claim of Lordship/Yours is the right of Might.” [8] God the Father has a “claim” to Lordship; He has the “right of Might” — but the divine cosmic plan of the Godhead has not yet been fulfilled, the claims of the Lord are not yet realized.

Our own spirituality requires us to see spirit — not God the Father, but "spirit" — as the creator: “We are spiritual beings only when we recognize spirit as creator — the agent that works on and shapes the material world. It is not the worship of some abstract spirit in the clouds....” [9]  Steiner’s God the Father is both more concrete and more vague than a traditional conception of the Biblical God. “The Father” is apart, in Heaven; but He is also all around and inside us, not precisely as He but as It, “an agent,” an impulse.

According to Steiner, "the Father" is certainly not, as shown in the Old Testament, Jehovah. Steiner taught that Jehovah (or Javhe) is only one of several collegial gods, the Elohim: “[The] further evolution of man has only been possible because one of the Elohim, Jahve, accompanied the separation of the Moon — while the other six spirits remained in the Sun — and because Jahve cooperated with His six colleagues....” [10]

As for the bits about the Moon and Sun — don’t worry about them; they are not illuminating at this stage of our discussion. But one thing we can say: This is not your father’s Judaism.

III.

God the Son

Let’s turn our attention to God the Son. In the New Testament, Christ Jesus is one of the three persons of God. Steiner’s conception overlaps this, but it is also extremely different. Christ is not so much the Son as the Sun. “The Sun oracle [a being/place having the power of prophecy] of ancient Atlantis [yes, Atlantis] had already prophesied the coming of Christ, of the Sun-God.” [11]

The spirit of the Sun God entered Jesus, the man, for three years, after which it merged with the Earth. Jesus was merely the man into whom the spirit of the Sun God entered. Early Christians understood these things, more or less, but later Christians forgot: “With greater of less understanding, Christ was thus pictured by the Christians of the first centuries as the mighty ‘Sun God’. [paragraph break] But throughout Christendom at this time the faculty of instinctive clairvoyance once possessed by men was fading away. Then they could no longer see in the sun the great spiritual kingdom at whose centre the Christ once had his abode.” [12] Note that Steiner and/or his editor put the phrase “Sun God” in quote marks. Steiner was not disowning his own description of Christ; Steiner was, rather, trying to be elusive, deep, suggesting that words are hardly adequate to convey his meaning.

Christ came to Earth and quit the Sun. “Christ died to the Sun. He died cosmically, from the Sun to the earth. He came down to the earth. From the moment of Golgotha onwards his Life-Spirit was to be seen around the earth.” [13] The life-spirit is the Buddhi, which I mentioned before. Christ "died to the Sun", meaning that he left the Sun. He, or his body, Jesus, later died on Earth, and Christ the spirit then merged with the Earth.

Dying to the Sun, and later merging with the Earth, is not quite the same thing as dying to redeem our sins. Christ is not so many mankind's savior as the role model humans should follow. "Christ shows himself to him as the great human Prototype and Example, united with the Earth's true evolution." [14] Christ is our opposite but also our fulfillment, the all-encompassing mega-man: “The ‘being’ of Christ should be thought of as the inverse macrocosmic man, but identical with the second aspect of the Divinity, the Logos.”  [15] We are microcosmic men, small reflections of the entire universe, and we become macrocosmic men when we properly follow Christ, who is the living Word of God, Logos.

Digging through all this, you need to remember that Steiner felt free to rewrite the Bible. In lectures presented as THE FIFTH GOSPEL, Steiner “corrects” the Bible by adding a new book to it. In his new gospel, Steiner says that Christ was accompanied on Earth by the demon Ahriman: “[I]t was also possible for Ahriman to be active side by side with the Christ during the three years in which Christ was active in the body of Jesus of Nazareth ... The Christ spirit only united with the three bodies [Jesus's physical, etheric, and astral bodies] gradually in a process that took three years.” [16]

This is not your father’s Bible.

Finally, at long last, let’s consider the third person of the Christian triune God. It is the most nebulous of the three persons. It is, in a sense, what Christ left behind when he departed Earth. “[T]he living spirit speaks to us again. [paragraph break] It is no formula devised by human cleverness, the Trinity of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. It is a reality deeply bound up with the whole evolution of the cosmos; and it becomes for us a living, not dead, knowledge when we bring to life within ourselves the Christ Who, as the Risen One, is the bringer of the Holy Spirit.” [17]

Note that the triune God is a formula devised by “human cleverness.” It is not the real dope.

Three of Steiner’s devotees may help us, here. In one sense, the Holy Spirit is a light beckoning us onward in our evolution: A “light appears from the future ... It is this, so to speak, beckoning light that Steiner speaks of as the Holy Spirit....” [18] And, the “individual comprehension of the Christ Impulse is described by Steiner as the gift of the Holy Spirit, the direct reception of which is celebrated at Whitsun.” [19] The Christ-Impulse is the spiritual impetus and ability activated in us by Christ. The Holy Spirit gives us this impulse as a gift. Whitsun or Whitsuntide (or Pentecost) is a celebration of this gift. At Waldorf schools, Whitsun is "the festival of awakening, or free individuality, of baptism ... Whitsun/Pentecost is both moveable and fixed [in the calendar], in that it follows fifty days after Easter; that is to say, the experience of death and resurrection leads in due course to the experience of understanding oneself as a spiritual beings." [20]

But, as always, let's turn to Steiner himself for the real deal. Steiner taught that the Holy Spirit is the divine female principle, the feminine side of God, as it were. Just as "Eve", the mythical mother of mankind, led us to the knowledge of good and evil, so can Sophia — Wisdom — lead us to knowledge of the great beyond. And, indeed, this spirit — bringing the Word into the human soul — is  the human soul, in a manner of speaking. “Here we have one of the central conceptions of Mystery-teaching, which acknowledges the human soul as the mother of god.”  [21]

As we saw, above, God is not yet complete — or, anyway, the purpose of the Godhead has not yet been perfected. In a sense, as we attain divinity and become "what is called in Christianity ‘the Father'”, we will have created God. And we will have done it thanks in large measure to the "mother" of God: Sophia/Artemis/Eve/Mary, the Holy Spirit. [22]

Well there, more or less, you have it. God, by Steiner.

This is not your father’s God.

"The animals, the sun, the soil, the rain, all of these are important and necessary on the farm. 

But only God's grace will help the animals to be born and the plants to grow."

God is honored in Waldorf schools — and so are "the gods"

(Steiner said that polytheism is truth).

Whenever you see a Waldorf practice that seems consistent with mainstream monotheistic religion,

you may want to dig deeper.

[Waldorf student work.]

According to Steiner, God is

our evolutionary goal — the being

atop the universal hierarchies.