Profile of a postmodern heretic

[Jordan_Francis]

I agree that the Gnostic texts do not reflect upon historical realities, but rather private or communal spiritual experiences.

Unfortunately, the experiences of the Gnostic Christians are based on a theology that it is not compatible with Christian theology. The gospels that you mentioned were not included in the canon for this exact reason- they do not jive with the Christian experience of Jesus.

The Gnostic gospels do not have an atonement theory. God is seen in monistic terms and Jesus is portrayed as a deliverer of divine knowledge, a kind of Buddha. If you want to look to the authentic Christian experiences, both mystical and otherwise, you should look at the writings of the early Church and the mystics of the Middle Ages.

The Gospels that you listed might have elements of truth in them. No one is sayign the Gnostics were off on everything. However, their mysticism is mis-guided and crosses over into gross heresy.

Just because other writings existed when the Canon was compiled and just because they claimed to Christian does not mean they should have accepted as Christian. The word “Christian” means something and the Gnostic texts quite obviously do not meet that criteria, even if they use (rather abuse) similar Christological language.

 

[Abraxsis]

Most Gnostics call themselves Christians. There is a non-Christian school of Gnostics called Hermetics.

The central figure of Christianity can be made out to be almost anything anyone wants him to be. Ever since the introduction of rationalistic approach to the Bible in the form of higher Biblical criticisms and similar approaches, the search for a “historical Jesus” has been on.

The one neglected though, is perhaps the most influential of them all, the Gnostic Jesus. Early Christians saw Jesus more as an inspiration than a savior or historical figure.

(Eph. 1.21) Paul describing Jesus…“far above all rule and authority, and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age [aeon] but in that which is to come.”

That quote from a Catholic Biblical source is so Gnostic you could almost say that Paul was Gnostic. A view that perhaps Paul and the Apostles viewed Jesus as being superior to the authorities (the creator or demiurge of this world) and their kin of this lower world.

Also a closer look at the Gospel of John has many Gnostic over tones. It’s a book that really only makes sense on Gnostic terms. Even the other 3 Gospels have elements of Gnosticism. The early Christians struggled with what form of Christianity they would take. It was obvious there was a schism in the faith even in these early times.

(Mark 13.24-30) “A man sows good wheat seed in his field, but later finds that an enemy has sown weeds among the wheat. When the workers ask if they should pull the weeds out, the farmer tells them to allow both wheat and weeds to grow until the time of harvest, when the two can more easily be separated.”

Gnostics believe the world is a mixture of light and darkness. It is hard to see them differently today because so many things fall into gray categories, but as time goes on they will become more and more distinct naturally.

Monotheistic religions like Roman Catholics, Jews, and Muslims place mainstream manifestations on faith. The conventional religious mind, the one in a juvenile state of understanding says I believe. The Gnostics mind attains a certain intrinsic knowledge that is liberating beyond the bounds of the manifested world. This has advantages that faith doesn’t have; in being that most people have faith because they have faith in someone else’s faith. Thus it devolves into a belief that is received second hand from others. Those people are not likely to have any real experience in faith.

 

[Jordan_Francis]

Abraxis,

I was in the same place you are in now once my friend.

There is nothing overtly Gnostic about Christianity. The Gnostics prefered the Gospel of John because it could be most easily manipulated. To look at Paul or Christian scripture as Gnostic is to do violence to the text by forcing upon it that interpretation. A Gnostic can only quote a few obscure portions of Christian texts because the texts are obviously not Gnostic.

There is no understanding of a demiurge in the New Testament, no fallen Sophia. The standard understanding of Christ is Savior and Lord as explicated most clearly by St. Paul. Your quote from Ephesians makes perfect sense in normative Christology, there’s no need to consider it Gnostic. Christians do believe that Christ has been entrusted with all authority and has been the name “lifted above all names”.

Gnostic theology is so much more complex than the Christian gospel- its quite clear Christian Gnosticism is a later development and does not reflect the original Christian understanding.

 

[Abraxsis]

I can agree with the fact that most of the New Testamnet as it is today is in fact not Gnostic. I was only pointing to the fact that there are some overtones of Gnosticism in them. Kind of like showing that yes Gnostics existed, its not some new trendy fashion thing. It is in fact a belief system that is much older than Protestism. Original Christian understanding however was very much conflicted.

If I may ask. What made you return to the Catholc Church? What is it that you found in your experiences that told you what you had tried to find and live by wrong?

 

[Jordan_Francis]

Why am I no longer a Gnostic?

I practiced Gnosticism with much fervor for about two years. What ultimately lead to its demise in my spiritual life was the need for my faith to not only be spiritually vital, but also intellectually honest. I think it is quite evident that there are a great many people who do not need intellectual honesty when it comes to their faith, both Gnostic and otherwise. The problem especially pertains to so called Christian Gnosticism because a great deal of the central tenets of Gnostic belief regarding its own credibility and tradition lies on a number of shaky and, from the outside, quite transparent claims.

The problem, I suppose, begins with figures like John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg and other prominent members of the Jesus Seminar. Their theories regarding their so-called “historical Jesus” have made significant headway into popular culture, having been widely promoted throughout the universities and by publications such as TIME magazine. I take serious issue with these scholars, not because they do not open the Gospels and see the Christ of faith (which I think one can only do under the light of faith) but because their conclusions rely so heavily upon “invisible gospels”. They are so quick to speculate on the sources that the Evangelists must have used, and not only this, but they quickly hypothesize a series of “missing” manuscripts that support their conclusions. The result has been that, in the popular mind, the person of Jesus of Nazareth has largely become an empty category of history. The Jesus Seminar wouldn’t say so, but scholars, I feel, have so confused the public with their conflicting and wildly speculating and unsubstantiated theories that the average person feels that they can declare Jesus to be just about anything and find an academic to prove it.

This ties in closely to the problem of Gnosticism. As I said before, Gnosticism, when it looks to the New Testament, has to consciously force its interpretation on the text. It has to bend and distort scripture and ignore clear inconsistencies. Not that orthodox Christians are never guilty of this. But, on the whole, Catholic theology takes the whole of scripture in mind and takes pains to say only what can be infered by the text. It expands the Christian understanding, but it does not fundamentally contradict it as the Gnostic does. Catholic theology works because it is always working in light of the lineage out of which the New Testament originally emerged.

I call Gnosticism intellectually dishonest because it is guilty of mis-appropriating Christian symbols and then calling it “original”. With Jesus being largely considered an “empty category” Gnosticism finds its success in filling it in with a theory that half follows Christian doctrine and half innovates a Christian Buddha. This is very satisfying to modern culture which pines for the alternative theories of the East, but finds the cultural barrier too large. The credibility of so called Christian Gnosticism rests on the theory that the Gnostic Gospels are legitimate Christian texts and that they were removed because the authoritarian Church wanted to keep power. This is dishonest. The closer I studied Christianity, the more I realized that my Gnostic gospels could not and should not have been accepted by Christians. While the New Testament has small and sometimes jarring contradictions in theory, the Gnostic texts are literally incompatible with the Christian New Testament.

Gnostics complain that the Church rejected their gospels and created its own canon that would verify its own ideas. The historical truth of the matter is that Christians chose a canon that represented the Christianity passed down to them. The New Testament was built on a tradition, a tradition that is incompatible with Gnosticism. How could the Gnostics be Christian when they rejected everything fundamental about Christianity? (atonement, incarnation, redemption of the flesh, goodness of creation, significance of the Hebrew scripture)

Gnosticism, I learned, was not its own religion but lived off Christianity. Today it continues to feed off of its parents. Why is it, that after 1900 years or so, Gnosticism still parrots the Catholic Mass? Why do they manipulate the Rosary and Hail Mary? Why do they imitate the Eucharist? Why do they adapt themselves to orthodox frameworks and infuse it with heresy then turn and pretend this was the “original way”? Its becasue Gnosticism is not a religion of its own. All Gnostics are Catholic at heart, longing for the Church but rejecting its authority. They constantly imitate everything it does, but in a way that secures their own spiritual individualism. They need to imitate the Church’s crediblity and tradition in order to have its own crediblity and tradition.

 

[Jordan_Francis]

In short I realized that I was playing a game of make-believe. I wanted to invent my own religion, but at the same time I wanted that invention to be something like Catholicism. Gnositcism, in order to sustain its own definition, has to erode definitions everywhere. It dissolves the meaning of the Christian identity in its own intense subjectivism in order to fit itself into that identification. It has to elimate criteria, it has to elimate “canons” and all ways of measuring. After doing this, it loudly proclaims its own legitimacy and crediblity because there is nothing objective left to evaluate those claims against. In short, it is the religion that the post-modern, individualistic and anti-authoritarian culture requires.