Hi Diablo,
Originally posted by DiabloTX
Seagoon? Reply?
Sorry I didn't see the thread, I've been sick for the past two days (sat under a massive A/C duct in a tennis shirt for three days straight last week, who'da thunk you'd end up freezing your way through a conference in MISSISSIPPI!) and I'm currently working on half-power, if that. The Iran Nuke thread just about took all of my energy to reply to...
Anyway, look none of this is new, it may be new to a lot of Westerners because Church history has largely been forgotten in the modern world. The reason it's getting a lot of play at the moment is that everyone associated with "Gnostic Gospels" research is riding on the coat-tails of the current
Davinci Code bonanza. In the 1980s a similar phenomenon surrounded the "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" series and in some respects, Scorsese's
Last Temptation of Christ cashed in on that movement.
Unfortunately, it's big at the moment, big enough that I agreed to write a review and critique of Dan Brown's book for a Christian magazine to coincide with the release of the movie, just because I know that I'll have to address it with my own congregation anyway.
Anyway, as I said, this is nothing new, its yet another attempt to use ancient Gnosticism, to advance modern agendas. Gnosticism was a pseudo-Christian heresy that sought largely to create a synthesis between Greek Philosophy and Spirituality and the Christian faith. The Greeks in particular objected to the materialism of Christianity. In the Greek worldview that which was material was bad, and that which was spiritual or immaterial was good. In keeping with their philosophy, they preferred a religion in which one advanced beyond the material via enlightenment. The felt that the path to this enlightenment was via the assimilation of the "secret teachings" of various enlightened "masters" - hence their name
gnostics from the Greek word for "knowledge." They also tended to reject highly material and to their mind "barbaric" and material religion of the ancient Jews. Therefore gnostics like Marcion dramatically revised the canon of scripture to remove the entire Old Testament and to leave only part of one gospel and some of the Pauline epistles. Additionally many of the various gnostic cults began writing pseudopigrahal "sacred writings" such as the Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Judas to advance their particular theology. The heyday of Gnostic Gospel writing was in the 2nd through 4th centuries.
Even before the end of the first century though, the Apostles were already having to deal with the Greek distaste for the idea that Jesus was bodily resurrected. Keeping the body, "the prisonhouse of the soul" was not
good news to the Greeks it was "foolishness" to use Paul's phrase. So we see even in the letters of the Apostles which may be reliably dated to the period between 50-90 AD many attempts to deal with proto-gnosticism and the various heretical beliefs it was advancing. For instance:
2 John 1:7 For many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh. This is the deceiver and the antichrist.The specific, and for the Greeks jarring, word John uses is
sarx - flesh. For the Greeks the sarx was the fallen or evil component of man, so the idea that a sinless savior, who was the Second Person of the Godhead, took up a real human body like yours or mine was for some totally inconceivable. If flesh was evil, how could an all-good savior become flesh? Therefore they began to develop theories that Jesus only "appeared" to have a body (Doceticism).
Anyway, the Greek problem is still the same for all mankind. Many ancient Greeks simply could not accept a gospel that went counter to so many of their core-beliefs. So rather than "unlearning" what they believed, they altered the gospel to fit their philosophical and spiritual worldview. People today do the same all the time. So many of the central concepts of the gospel irritate modern people to no end: That man is naturally sinful and fallen and hell-bound, that God sent his only Begotten Son into the world to Atone for those Sins, that Jesus really was the God-man and that he did real miracles, that He died on the Cross and then rose again in the flesh, that we can only be saved through faith in Him, and so on. The end result is that many people would much rather accept ancient gnosticism rather than the much more difficult to swallow teachings of Christ and his Apostles. There I can speak from my own personal experience. The only thing that will really overcome that natural disinclination is to be
anaganeo as Christ and the apostles put it - spiritual rebirth, i.e. being "born again" through the power of the Spirit.
Hope this helps someone, somewhere...
Anyway, I've gotta get to bed, before I collapse entirely.
- SEAGOON
