The Sage of Aquarius: A Centennial Study of the Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ. Robert M. Price

by the time Levi Dowling wrote The Aquarian Gospel. Outside of the Seventh Day Adventist sect, no Protestants took the notion of Christians keeping Torah rules seriously enough to debate it. Most Protestant interpreters simply assumed that Jesus rejected and flouted the Torah, anticipating the Pauline polemic against it. For Jesus Aquarius, the Law of Moses, or any other, is a museum relic. “If one is full of love he does not need commands of any kind” (17:7). This saying is perhaps suggested by St. Augustine’s dictum, “Love God and do as you will.” But it goes farther than the pinched-faced saint could imagine, all the way to Rudolf Bultmann’s pneumatic antinomianism.⁸ Any fan of The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ would, a few decades later, have felt right at home in the pages of Joseph Fletcher’s Situation Ethics with its dictum, “Love only is always good.”⁹

      Such an ethic sits loose to legal formulations and is thus very far removed from Immanuel Kant’s deontological ethics, an ethics of duty and the keeping of moral absolutes. But there is a major element of Kant’s approach that finds a ringing echo in the pages of our Gospel according to Levi: acting for the sake of duty and not merely in accordance with it. “And when you sow, sow seeds of right, because it is the right, and not in the way of trade, expecting rich rewards” (100:12). In this Kant would rejoice. It mirrors his distinction between mere hypothetical imperatives (prudent considerations if one wants to achieve some goal) and truly moral categorical imperatives, obeyed despite any costs, simply for the sake of one’s duty, because a thing is right.