Christians believe that Jesus is the only son of God, the only one. And that is where the difficulty lies. But Jesus is not the only son in the sense that I have one son, and he is my only son. When I repeat the Christian creed: "I believe in his only Son, Jesus Christ, our Lord" I mean something else then when I speak of my only son. We have to try to understand this. It is of no use merely to repeat words, whether they are the words of Jesus or of Baba, or the words of the creeds: we have to use our understanding, which is what I invite you to do. In Christian theology, that is to say in systematic thinking about Christian belief, Christ is thought of as the second person of the Trinity. Note that nobody says 'Jesus'; the word used is 'Christ.’ Christians sometimes picture God as 3 persons, sitting on 3 thrones: that of course is an absurdity, and no sensible person thinks so. The Trinity is an abstraction. It is a way of describing Godhead that is one; for the essence of Trinity is oneness. There is one son in the Godhead, one principle of sonship, the only one. And when we say that Jesus is the only son, we mean that he reveals that principle of sonship. We do not think of sonship in the biological sense.

The principle of One-Sonship exists wherever God is, that is to say everywhere in the entire creation. Not only in man but in the stone and the galaxies. Divinity becomes conscious in man, and, when fully conscious, sonship is realized: that is the meaning of creation, that the eternal sonship should be infinitely realized. Because God is everywhere, everything is an incarnation of God in the sense of God expressing himself. But Incarnation as applied to Jesus means something different. God is incarnate in all things as spirit. In an Incarnation God appears as man, he, as it were, descends as man. Jesus is believed to be such an Incarnation, and it is worth while to look at that word further. It is essentially an initiative of God, that is to say not an activity due to the processes within the empirical world-soul but an act of divinity from, as it were, outside. So that an Incarnation is the birth of a being who descends as God to appear as man. Thus an incarnated being in this sense is not a man who realizes his divinity, one who becomes perfect by the cultivation of his soul and the grace of God, but a perfect being who voluntarily becomes imperfect man. That is why the real meaning of Jesus is said to be not in his teaching or even his miracles but in himself, in his act of obedience to God, his emptying himself, and in his actual presence on earth. Jesus is known as God-Man because he said so, and for saying it he was killed. "When you see me, you see God." he said. "Before Abraham was, I am," and for that he was put to death.