25 March 2006 - 11:21pm
With my righteous eyes I gaze down at you, gnostic heretic
This is what I'm talking about: La Shawn posted on BlogHer over a week ago her thoughts on a Barna Group study that found 62% of Americans "consider themselves to be not merely 'religious,' but 'deeply spiritual.'" La Shawn offers some barbed questions:
Being “spiritual� is trendy, but there’s no clear definition of what that means. Is it a belief in God or a god? How is this spirituality practiced? What does it look like?
Yes, I'm spiritual because everyone's doing it. Spiritual is the new black. Right....
Barna found a disconnect between what people do and what they say. Nothing grounding-breaking there. It’s part of the human condition. A prime example is similar to one cited in the article: I always find it sadly amusing when a trash-mouthed rapper with scantily-clad, rump-shaker background dancers thanks “God� after he wins an award.
Good points there. There's nothing rare about religious hypocrisy, is there? But...
“It seems as if God is in, but living for God is not,� George Barna said. More precisely, god is in, but the living God is not. Christians have a term for living and growing in Christ as opposed to paying lip service to “spirituality�: discipleship. A disciple is a follower, one who helps spread the teachings of others. A Christian disciple is one who spreads the Gospel of Jesus Christ and is, by nature, an evangelical.
You gotta love it: Faith is to be measured by how much you want to impose it on others. I suppose by that measure Osama Bin Laden is pretty damned faithful, isn't he? No spiritual "lip service" from him, or any religious fundamentalists who consider your faith their business.
No wonder fundamentalists don't get along. When measure of one's faith is one's willingness -- yea, determination -- to impose one's will on others, well, I guess that's why prayers will not suffice and we have to have burning of churches, bombing of mosques and the flying of jetliners into skyscrapers.
Like me -- and this is the reason I'm dusting off this old-ish BlogHer thread to blog about tonight -- Mata H doesn't buy into the notion that faith without imperialist intentions is only "lip service." In a comment, she writes:
I think one of the reasons so many people who may have described themselves as "Christian" (or a variety of the same) 20 years ago now describe themselves as "spiritual' is that we may have let the radical right claim ownership of that word "Christian". I cannot speak for other faith traditions, but I know that if I tell someone that I am Christian I can sense that they are doing that silent scanning thing to see if I start hissing abdout Roe v. Wade or supporting the slaughter in Iraq. While I do find value in other faith traditions, and have incorporated much eastern thought into my Christian Cuisinart Faith, at the core I remain Christian, liberally Lutheran in fact, albeit somewhat embellished.
Speaking for myself, I cannot in good conscience call myself a Christian -- not when I see Christianity these days as being all about hate and intolerance. ("We crucify you because we love you!") That's not the Christianity I learned in Sunday school. In fact, the Biblical characters I associate with modern-day Christians are the ancient Romans. Pontius Pilate would have made a popular Republican Christian conservative these days.
Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, at the heart of this time-warped faith-warp is the anti-gnostic view of faith and religion as espoused by the Roman Empire's inheritor, the Roman Catholic Church. The gnostics were wiped out by the Church. Historians say this is because the Gnostics believed that faith was within, without any dependency upon some vetted authority (such as a Church). Elaine Pagels writes of the Gnostic Gospels:
Word of this codex soon reached Professor Gilles Quispel, distinguished historian of religion at Utrecht, in the Netherlands. Excited by the discovery, Quispel urged the Jung Foundation in Zurich to buy the codex. But discovering, when he succeeded, that some pages were missing, he flew to Egypt in the spring of 1955 to try to find them in the Coptic Museum. Arriving in Cairo, he went at once to the Coptic Museum, borrowed photographs of some of the texts, and hurried back to his hotel to decipher them. Tracing out the first line, Quispel was startled, then incredulous, to read: "These are the secret words which the living Jesus spoke, and which the twin, Judas Thomas, wrote down." Quispel knew that his colleague H.C. Puech, using notes from another French scholar, Jean Doresse, had identified the opening lines with fragments of a Greek Gospel of Thomas discovered in the 1890's. But the discovery of the whole text raised new questions: Did Jesus have a twin brother, as this text implies? Could the text be an authentic record of Jesus' sayings? According to its title, it contained the Gospel According to Thomas; yet, unlike the gospels of the New Testament, this text identified itself as a secret gospel. Quispel also discovered that it contained many sayings known from the New Testament; but these sayings, placed in unfamiliar contexts, suggested other dimensions of meaning. Other passages, Quispel found, differed entirely from any known Christian tradition: the "living Jesus," for example, speaks in sayings as cryptic and compelling as Zen koans:
Jesus said, "If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you."
I don't know, but that last part sounds a lot like it's about spirituality, and not evangelism.
Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these-the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure--emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century. Before that time, as Irenaeus and others attest, numerous gospels circulated among various Christian groups, ranging from those of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, to such writings as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Truth, as well as many other secret teachings, myths, and poems attributed to Jesus or his disciples. Some of these, apparently, were discovered at Nag Hammadi; many others are lost to us. Those who identified themselves as Christians entertained many--and radically differing-religious beliefs and practices. And the communities scattered throughout the known world organized themselves in ways that differed widely from one group to another.
Yet by A. D. 200, the situation had changed. Christianity had become an institution headed by a three-rank hierarchy of bishops, priests, and deacons, who understood themselves to be the guardians of the only "true faith." The majority of churches, among which the church of Rome took a leading role, rejected all other viewpoints as heresy. Deploring the diversity of the earlier movement, Bishop Irenaeus and his followers insisted that there could be only one church, and outside of that church, he declared, "there is no salvation." Members of this church alone are orthodox (literally, "straight-thinking") Christians. And, he claimed, this church must be catholic-- that is, universal. Whoever challenged that consensus, arguing instead for other forms of Christian teaching, was declared to be a heretic, and expelled. When the orthodox gained military support, sometime after the Emperor Constantine became Christian in the fourth century, the penalty for heresy escalated.
Maybe today people aren't paying "lip service" to faith, but in fact are practicing a religious tradition that has been all but oppressed to nothingness for 2000 years. Maybe what we call spirituality is the true faith, because it begins in the heart and soul. Maybe that's not good enough for some people. But since when is it their place to decide? What penalty shall we pay today for the heresy of knowing our own hearts?
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Bible history is a mythological history. I am not saying the man we call Jesus Christ did not exist. He may well have, but apart from the Biblical accounts, we have little to go on.
I do not mean to be disrespectful to people who have deep faith and whose lives have been changed and made better. But let me give an example of what I mean by a myth being self-contained and offered as fact.
Take Superman as an example. If we collect all the Superman comics and look at them together, we have a very coherent story. A man with special powers who came to Earth and walked among men and did good deeds and lived a life of moderation, despite his vast powers.
We might even find "pulp" evidence and fragments of episodes of things that happened in his life. His life in Smallville. His love of Lana Lang. Then moving to Metropolis and a very different career in crime fighting - Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, not the mention Lois Lane who suspects Clark's secret identity.
Yet for all the consistency of Superman and his deeds, there is no evidence that Superman or Clark or the Daily Planet actually ever existed apart from the saga.
To then spread the Gospel of Superman to other nations and tell of his great deeds, takes on a life of its own.
The chief ingredient required is faith. If challenged that there is no proof of any Superman, the faithful say: that's just the point.
They believe in Superman as an act of faith and their faith that he exists makes them strong and righteous.
If 60% of people agree that they believe in "truth, justice, and the American way," the retort is, "yes, but do you believe in Superman." That is, truth, justice, and the American way has no intrinsic meaning without a belief in and reverence for Superman. In fact, the American way is mere humanism without Superman to stand behind it!
As a kid I always had a bit of a problem with the slogan, "the American Way," but I let that slide because I gave the benefit of the doubt to Superman who I thought would behave within the boundaries of the law and that (silly me) Superman believed in the Constitution of the United States.
The religious right and fundamentalists will say that lawful behavior and truth and justice flow from Superman and not from something within ourselves.
Surely the Enlightenment was a point when people realized that understanding did not come through blind faith, but through reason. For example, we do not steal because Superman doesn't like it. Our code says that ultimately a society based on thievery is corrupt. I don't need Superman to tell me that.
If I refrain from adultery, it is because I am faithful to my mate, not because Superman might suddenly shown up in the motel room and haul my partner and me off to prison because of the tryst.
The Fundamentalists who are seeking greater power and going outside the Constitution (where's Superman, now that we need him!) have a belief that people cannot come to moral laws through logical debate. That we must go to the ancient writings about Superman to decide if I am wrong in coveting my neighbor's manservant.
The Fundamentalist are in revolt against the Enlightenment and it bothers them that 60% of the people can come to moral conclusions without requiring a belief in Jesus in order to have a moral code.
It may well be for the Fundamentalists that they would not behave morally if Superman, up there in the Fortress of Solitude, were not using his x-ray vision in order to see what people are going and writing it all down.
But you don't need x-ray vision to understand something about the Fundamentalist view of themselves - that unless they have Superman to watch them and record their misdeeds, then they would NOT subscribe to a moral code.
And looking at our leaders and their usurpation of power, maybe we understand better what we are up against.
As a Gnostic priest, I'd like to thank you for your fair comments concerning Gnosticism. Such accuracy and insight is refreshing.
Many blessings,
J+
http://egina.blogspot.com/
You bring up a lot of complex issues. One way to look at religion is to realize that within any religion there is authoritian leadership and spiritual leadership. Too often, there is too much of the authoritarian and not enough of the spiritual, though the founding movements of religion are often spiritual. What really complicate things is when authoritarian leadership and spiritual leadership are combined in the same person; many religious leaders assume they have both but fail to see they are dominated by the authoritarian side.
Some might argue that someone like Saint Augustine had both and therefore represents the complexity, difficulty and humanness of trying to sort religious, spiritual, philosophical and even legal issues.
In the end, it all comes down to the need so many people have for meaningfulness in their lives and the feeling that there is meaningfulness whether defined by a particular organized religion or by a less certain set of criteria, even if it isn't easy to define. When people feel the meaningfulness in their lives is being threatened, it's never something to be taken lightly. But the history of religion is a history not of stagnation, though stagnation too often happens for long periods, but primarily of development. Christianity may be 2,000 years old, but its thought has been developing for at least 2500 years. And it's likely that Christian thought and the the thought of other religions will continue to develop whether right wing Christians wish it or not.
How we get wisdom and salvation has forever been a battle between those who seek a direct connection with their god and those who would control some version of official access. That people themselves might find their own way has ever been a threat to those who would hold power. Oy.