← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · weisbrot
Thread ID: 17531 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2005-03-26
2005-03-26 17:39 | User Profile
[url]http://www.tennessean.com/local/archives/05/03/67441957.shtml?Element_ID=67441957[/url]
[B]Gnostic way a backlash against lackluster sermons, worship [/B]
A friend called with a question. She was whispering.
''Have you read the gnostic gospels?'' she asked. She spoke as if her phone were tapped.
''They're the gospels the church kept out of the Bible,'' she added.
The Christian gnostic texts have that kind of effect. They're handled like forbidden fruit. They are ancient collections of teachings or stories of Jesus that promise a ''secret'' path to redemption, a spiritual alternative to traditional Christianity. Gnosticism was rejected by the early church as heresy. One reason: Gnostics apparently refused to believe the divine Jesus had taken a human body, suffered and died. Gnostic writings ignore the resurrection, miracles and Easter.
But interest in gnosticism revived after World War II, when manuscripts were unearthed in Egypt in 1945-46. Ever since, they have found a ready audience in an era increasingly skeptical of religious authority.
Their sympathizers are like a free-floating congregation, united by fascination with archaeological intrigue and also by suspicions that organized religion suppressed these ''hidden'' words of Christ long ago.
Gnostic writings are often strange and fragmentary, but they sketch a counter-Christ. In The Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says, ''Lift up the stone, and you will find me there. Split the piece of wood, and I am there.''
And, ''I am not your teacher. Because you have drunk, you have become intoxicated from the bubbling spring that I have tended.''
And, ''Where there are three deities, they are divine. Where there are two or one, I am with that one.''
Is this the Jesus of Baptists, Methodists and Churches of Christ? It's hard to reconcile this Jesus with the messiah of the New Testament. No one is sure how the gnostic texts came to be written. Titles include The Secret Book of John, The Second Discourse of Great Seth, The Round Dance of the Cross ââ¬â all probably produced decades (or centuries) after the four Gospels of the Bible. That's another reason they were left out of Scripture: Most were written too late. They were too far from the days of the eyewitnesses.
Some experts refuse to use the words ''gnostic'' and ''gnosticism'' at all anymore. The terms are too squishy and vague, impossible to recover their ancient meaning. But ''gnostic'' is Greek for knowledge. The texts imply salvation is a matter of attaining special mystical knowledge, or self-knowledge. Ignorance, not sin, is the obstacle to redemption.
''Jesus is not a teacher in the conventional sense, according to the Gospel of Thomas, because people must come to knowledge themselves,'' writes Marvin Meyer in The Gnostic Gospels of Jesus, the latest book to collect these hidden gospels and secret sayings of Jesus.
''Jesus was more like a bartender, in that he serves the intoxicating drink of knowledge, but people must drink for themselves.''
The gnostic way looks fresh and liberating to certain kinds of spiritual seekers. It doesn't focus on the question of miracles and details of doctrine but on how to feed wisdom to the innermost self. It's a backlash against a lifetime of predictable sermons and lackluster worship. It meets an emotional need that mainstream religion ignores.
Interest in gnosticism might be a sign of an underground movement, a third way to be a believer ââ¬â a movement of restless questers. They reject the church code of evangelicalism and multimedia worship ââ¬â and reject a liturgical style of ancient prayers and ceremonial silence. They're convinced that the early orthodox doctrines about Jesus emerged from an excitingly fluid, complicated struggle. They want to catch that excitement in their own spirituality. Gnosticism is traditional Christianity's worst nightmare. Always was.
On Easter Sunday tomorrow, millions of Christians will pack into church, remember childhood Easters, relish the stirrings of spring and make sense of Jesus' resurrection in their own way. But there will be no ''secret'' way to salvation that only the initiated will understand. Unlike gnosticism, the mainstream churches insist the resurrection happened in actual history. The world, and the world's suffering, are taken seriously.
Maybe gnosticism will get its own prominent church life going one day. It's already part of the scene now, riding a blockbuster archaeological jackpot, stimulating big what-ifs about Christian history. It has arrived as one answer to the hunger of the times. My friend on the phone doesn't need to whisper anymore.
[I]Ray Waddle, former Tennessean religion editor, is author of A Turbulent Peace: The Psalms for Our Time. [/I]
2005-03-26 18:27 | User Profile
The early Church did not recognize the gnostic "gospels" for a reason. They were written some generations after the Apostles and present a counterfeit Jesus. Gnosticism was similar to today's new age movement. It appeals to the naive, but ego-oriented individual who wants to be his own savior, his own god. Gnosticism was and is satanic. If one follows that path, he will only find death and destruction.