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News and Ideas from around the Anglican World |
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David A. Harris and C. Peter Molloy
With summer on the horizon, many of our readers will undoubtedly be looking for a few good books to take to the beach/cottage/ backyard. Perhaps some of you will still reach for The DaVinci Code, or -- for the more academically inclined -- perhaps you will read some recent scholarship on the Gospel of Judas.
Not surprisingly,
you will have noticed that TAP doesn’t give a lot of credence to
these two texts. Last month, Stephen Andrews analyzed
It is, of course, easy for us to stand back and criticize these texts and label them as crude forms of Gnosticism. If we distill Gnosticism to its first principles we might be alarmed at how this ancient heresy has crept back even into the mainstream of the Church’s life -- and even into our own thinking about God and the world. Gnosticism, for the contemporary Church, isn’t just something “out there,” it’s something “in here” as well.
Fundamental to Gnosticism is the question of how we know God. For Gnostics, there is a great divide between the earthy and the spiritual. Gnostics cannot envision a God who takes upon himself the crude materiality of human form. Thus the physical world (the world in which are grounded God’s Incarnation and our Atonement) cannot be the forum in which God revealed himself to the world. The only source of truth available for Gnostics is the secret spiritual truth that is planted within our “enlightened” minds by some special pattern of teaching. Gnostics are therefore reticent to affirm the authority of Scripture. Scripture can only be regarded as an interesting collection of religious metaphors which may be helpful, but are ultimately simply the creation of human authors.
Similarly the
great spiritual journey of Gnosticism focuses on simply “activating”
the spiritual spark that is within each one of us. There is no need
for redemption or regeneration - there is only “enlightenment.”
It doesn’t matter what sort of spiritual practice you take on, or
what doctrines you profess, so long as you are true to what you
discover inside of yourself. You probably already recognize in these
two points both the common philosophy of pop culture, and the
operative theology of much of mainstream Christianity. Indeed,
Gnosticism is alive and
The fact is,
Gnosticism -- ancient or modern -- is simply out of sync with the
Gospel. Whereas Christian experience is most definitely personal,
and even inward, it is an inwardness that is rooted in the firm
(even earthy) realities of the Incarnation and Atonement. The Gospel
says that the path to inner enlightenment comes by having our minds
and souls ignited with the luminous fire of the Truth which Jesus
Christ himself is. Without this grounding in the Truth the volatile
fires of personal experience diminish in time towards a spiritual
complacency, or worse - burn uncontrollably in bizarre and
soul-destroying ways. It’s not a coincidence that the majority of
Gnostic sects in the ancient world
Bishop N.T. Wright puts it like this: “The authentic Christian gospel, which is good news about something that has happened as a result of which the world is a different place — this gospel demands that we submit to Jesus as Lord and allow all other allegiances, loves and self-discoveries to be realigned in that light. God’s project and God’s gospel are rooted in solid history as opposed to Gnostic fantasy and its modern equivalents. Genuine Christianity is to be expressed in self-giving love and radical holiness, not self-cosseting self-discovery.” It is all of the difference in the world.
Oh yeah, we almost forgot: Have a great summer!
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June 2006|
Copyright The Anglican Planet © 2006 |