Christ as mediator ends up with Christ being a false center or Idol when Christ is the bridge between me and God. Why can’t I know the Father first hand? And knowing Father first hand means not being second to the Father as a thing separate from another thing. But discovering identity with the Source —Jesus said I and the Father are One—became heresy in the church because the church wants to be the mediator in the negotiation. The middle man can be the Church as in Catholicism or Jesus as in Protestantism. Either way I need a lawyer.
The problem rises in understanding when we only look at the Bible and its teachings through the objective view of reality, through the Third Person, where Jesus and the teachings are about IT. But this is just so much information and is not personally transforming. You can change the information in the mind, beliefs, etc, but the mind is never changed in its view of realtiy or being in reality by information.
When the Teaching is viewed from First Person, everything shifts. First Person is really Gnosticism, or knowledge of God as idenity. This is a metaphorical way of engaging the teaching. Je Suis Christ.
The teaching suddenly is My voice, my teaching, and I am seeing myself and world through the eyes of Christ as Christ, yet I an not Christ. The metaphor is This is That; This is not That.
The subjective view or First Person is I AM…as center. And when I and Christ are one center, then the teaching becomes alive because the teaching and I are one. I speak the world of Jesus as he is speaking therm. Time collapses in First Person. Time only exists in Third Person when everything is a IT in time.
The Transcendent Way—and this way is not just in Christianity—is when the First Person and the Third Person are contained by a new way of being in the world that is a living metaphor. I am That (First Person): I am not That (Third Person.) One has to suspend logic in order to contain this ambiguity. This is Zen.
