Behold the Lamb of God, Which Takes Away the Sins of the World

"The guilt we accrue, the sin we accrue, is not just a fact related to us--we have to make a distinction here--but it is an objective fact in the world, it is something that affects the world. We make up in our karma for deeds we have committed; but that we stabbed somebody's eyes out, for example, is a real event and if we, let us say, stab somebody's eyes out in this incarnation and then do something in the next to make up for that, it nevertheless remains in existence in terms of objective world events that we stabbed somebody's eyes out so and so many hundred years ago. That is an objective fact in the totality of the world.... We must distinguish between the consequences of a sin for ourselves and the consequences of a sin for the objective progress of the world.... We would have to bear unspeakable suffering if a being had not united with the Earth which undoes those things for the Earth which we ourselves can no longer change. This being is Christ. He has taken the burden off us not of subjective karma, but of the spiritually objective effects of deeds, of guilt."--Rudolf Steiner, lecture of July 15, 1914