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The Paganization of New Testament Studies
INTRODUCTION
Given the institutions where I have taught during my professional life, it is appropriate to begin my overview of the Paganization/Gnosticization [2] of New Testament Studies with a quote from J. Gresham Machen, speaking of the inroads of Liberalism into the American church at the beginning of the last century:
“The truth is that liberalism has lost sight of the very centre and core of the Christian teaching. In the Christian view of God as set forth in the Bible, there are many elements. But one attribute of God is absolutely fundamental in the Bible; one attribute is absolutely necessary in order to render intelligible all the rest. That attribute is the awful transcendence of God. From beginning to end the Bible is concerned to set forth the awful gulf that separates the creature from the Creator. It is true, indeed, that according to the Bible God is immanent in the world. Not a sparrow falls to the ground without Him. But He is immanent in the world not because He is identified with the world, but because He is the free Creator and upholder of it. Between the creature and the Creator a great gulf is fixed.” [3]
To be sure, Machen does mention Gnosticism, but he does define the essence it religious belief. Gnosticism, which builds on the common pagan notion of humanity as divine. Plato taught that the soul “was immortal by its very nature.” [4] This notion is integrated into Jewish thinking by Philo, [5] and developed by later Gnosticism as the alien “divine spark” within humanity. [6] Hans Jonas defines Gnosticism as radically dualistic-a dualism between man and the world,” [7] an anthropological a-cosmism.” [8] “The essence of man is knowledge, of the self and God.” As the famous Messina Colloquium on Gnosticism in 1966 clearly recognized, “the idea of divine consubstantiality” is a defining notion of Gnosticism. [9] Such a notion effectively eliminates the uniqueness and transcendence of God.
The Gospel of Thomas appears to reflect this notion in its view of redemption, proposing a “‘backwards’ creation” for Mary, moving from the “female rib into the male Adam, and back into the ‘living spirit.'” [10] This is nothing less than the undoing of creation, expressed most powerfully in sexual/gender transformation and liberation. There is here proposed the destruction of the opposites and a return to primordial unity. [11] The cosmos is an ordered universe, but “an order with a vengeance, alien to man’s aspirations.” [12] Such a world view eventually finds the biblical notion of a transcendent Creator, distinct from the creation, creating an ordered cosmos, as insufferable foolishness; indeed, the epitome of evil, [13] and Jahweh is unceremoniously thrown into Hell. [14]
The essence of liberalism throughout its history is the importation into the church via the use of Christian terminology, of the various historic expressions of pagan notions, in particular, the denial of God’s transcendence. In this sense, the first “liberals” were the Gnostics. Certainly a form of Gnosticism, sometimes called proto-Gnosticism is behind the denial of the incarnation in the Johannine epistles, and of the resurrection in the early and later Paulines. Interestingly, the Liberals of the modern period have had great admiration for the proto-Gnostics, in particular, Marcion. In A.D. 150, Marcion, a theologian from Pontus in Asia Minor, was excommunicated from the Church in Rome for heretical teaching. He dismissed God the Creator, the Old Testament, the Mosaic Law, and three of the gospels. From the few epistles of Paul that he accepted, he expunged Old Testament quotations and claimed to worship the “alien god” behind the God of Scripture. [15] Tertullian (AD 160‑225) called Marcion “the Pontic mouse who has nibbled away the Gospels . . . abolished marriage,” and . . . tore God almighty to bits with [his] blasphemies,” [16] and Polycarp (A.D. 69‑155), who knew the apostle John, called Marcion “the first‑born of Satan.” [17]
In spite of Marcion’s massive rejection of early Christian orthodoxy, and his denunciation and excommunication by the second century Church, the great nineteenth century Liberal historian and theologian, Adolf von Harnack, called Marcion “the first Protestant.” For Harnack, “Protestant” meant “liberal.” The similarly sympathetic judgment by Helmut Koester, a Bultmannian New Testament scholar, lately at Harvard, calls Marcion “a textual critic, philologian and reformer.” [18] When these church fathers are dismissed by contemporary liberal scholars as “myopic heresy hunters,” [19] and the terms “Protestant” and “reformer” are associated with the Gnostic Marcion, making him a virtual second-century Martin Luther, we must see that we are in the presence of a “palace revolution.” The popularity of Marcion can only be understood in the light of the present-day Gnosticization of Biblical Studies. Liberal Lutheran Koester is disarmingly clear. He urges scholars to abandon the New Testament canon in order to allow the other early Christian voices–“heretics, Marcionites, Gnosticism, Jewish Christians, perhaps also women—. . . to be heard again.” [20] The contemporary promotion of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts as a valid expression of early Christianity is a further example of liberalism’s predilection for Gnosticism. This is in no sense a “reformation”: it is rather a profound revisionism of Christian history leading to a major theological revolution, namely, the normalization of heretical Gnosticism in contemporary mainline Christianity.
As at the time of Gnosticism, today the great biblical doctrine under attack like no other is the doctrine of God the transcendent Creator. In this sense, Gnosticism has returned to the Church with a vengeance.
RUDOLF BULTMANN
The role of Gnosticism in the paganization of Biblical Studies was initially the result of the work of one man, Rudolf Bultmann. One cannot underestimate the importance and influence of Bultmann. Schmithals, An Introduction to the Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (1967), 1: “…no living theologian’s work is noted and discussed more than that of RB. B is for our time what Karl Barth was to the German speaking world between the two world wars. The main difference is that B’s theology has aroused lively interest transcending all boundaries of churches, languages and indeed religions…” “…one of the theological giants of the twentieth century.” David Ferguson, Bultmann (1992), viii. Of very few is it said: his work is “a towering achievement.” James Robinson says, “The new quest…the later Heidegger, hermeneutic and Gnosticism find in Bultmann their unity.” [21]
Bultmann believed a great deal of the NT, especially John and Paul, had profound relationships with Gnosticism. [22] TNT I, 165: “Whereas to ancient man the world had become home-in the OT as God’s creation, to classic Greece as the cosmos pervaded by the deity-the utter difference of human existence from all worldly existence was recognized for the first time in Gnosticism and Christianity, and thus the world became foreign soil to the human self.”
He claimed that “the cosmological dualism of Gnosticism has become in John a dualism of decision.”(TNT II, 21). Though he only had knowledge of pre-Nag Hammadi Gnosticism, and wrongly believed that the Gnostic redeemer myth is at the base of Christology, which has never been established, [23] he did understand the Gnostic impulse.
Bultmann’s fascination with Gnosticism doubtless arose from the connection he saw between it and 20th century existentialism which was Bultmann’s fundamental inspiration for understanding the NT. James Robinson makes the same connection, characterizing the ancient Gnostics as the “dropouts” of Roman imperial society, comparing them to the “counter‑culture movements coming from the 60’s.” [24] Rudolf calls their interpretations of Scripture as “protest exegesis,” [25] and Hans Jonas draws fascinating parallels between ancient Gnosticism and modern exxistentialism. Heidegger’s view of God, according to Jonas, approximates to that of the Gnostics, who is the “other, the unknown.” [26] This God, says Jonas, is “a nihilistic conception: no nomos emanates from him, no law for nature and thus none for human action…” [27] In Gnosticism, the true pneumatic is radically free from psychical essence; in existentialism no “determinative essence is permitted to prejudice the freely self-projecting existence.” [28] Jonas notes that Heidegger’s description of Dasein as “having being thrown”-Geworfenheit, is originally a Gnostic notion, because in the Mandean literature it is “a standing phrase: life has been thrown into the world…the soul into the body.” [29]
Bultmann made existentialism his heuristic principle for unlocking the code of the NT message. George Eldon Ladd, Bultmann (Chicago: Inter-Varsity Press, 1964), 30: “The heart of Bultmann’s positive message [is] the interpretation of the gospel in terms of authentic [eschatological]existence.” Indeed, Heidegger and Bultmann did joint seminars together at Marburg, and to Heidegger Bultmann dedicated Faith and Understanding, the first volume of his collected essays, in 1933. [Tillich was another colleague at Marburg during that period].
…the work of existential philosophy, which I came to know through my discussion with Martin Heidegger, has become of decisive significance for me. I found in it the conceptuality in which it is possible to speak adequately of human existence and therefore also of the existence of the believer. [30]
Without this philosophy, “it is a mistake to think we can understand a word of the New Testament”; without it, the Scripture will have nothing to say to the present.” [31]
Bultmann believed that Heidegger’s existentialist analysis of the structure of being “is nothing more than a secularized, philosophical version of the New Testament’s view of human existence.” The difference is that Jesus makes authenticity happen, by faith. [32]: Bultmann said about Heidegger: “I learned from him not what theology has to say but how it has to say it.” Or again, “…we all not necessarily subscribe to Heidegger’s philosophical theories when we learn something from his existential analysis.” [33]
Taking Heidegger’s analysis as the grid of interpretation, “revelation” is not God’s self-disclosure. It must be understood in existential terms…[about me and my future, not revelation about God or cosmology or the future of the world]. Theology must arise out of anthropology.[34] As Bultmann says, “Paul’s theology is, at the same time, anthropology.” [35] According to Schmithals, Heidegger asks the question of being in a new way, not in terms of the cosmos, but in an analysis of human existence. Human existence, according to Heidegger means that man [in the words of Schmithals] “always has himself before himself as his own possibility; to exist in an authentic way means to keep oneself open at all times for…the future.” [36] If man is his own possibility, authentic existence means to keep oneself open for the future. According to Heidegger, “Dasein has Always fallen away from itself and into the world…It goes over to the world. It allows itself to be determined…by the world…which is nothingness. All this happens on the basis of an anxiety in which the insignificance of my Dasein and the nothingness of the world dawn upon me.” [37]
Bultmann boldly affirms that the observer has no objective place on which to stand from which to observe reality.[38] He thus anticipates the postmodern critique of modernity. Bultmann nevertheless observes existence-with the aid of existentialism, which gives “the ontological structure of being.” [39] In other words, he does claim to make statements about existence, but inevitably from within a world view and its presuppositions about existence. [40] Bultmann calls this “pre-understanding.” It is an appropriate or “right philosophy.” [41] He calls this “a scientific-religious understanding of the ontological and abstract features of the understanding of existence which lie behind the particular beliefs of the [New Testament] writers.” [42] “…real meaning yielded by existential analysis is for Bultmann the meaning of Scripture as the word of God.” [43] In other words, existential analysis is the word of God. This makes what is believed to be inherent within nature the determining truth about existence. This is surely a fundamentally pagan concept of knowledge and truth, which eliminates the transcended Lord and Creator and special revelation. G. Kuhlmann argues that Bultmann’s dependence on Heidegger means that he only ever describes the “natural” man. [44] Bultmann argues that Christian theology gives the “how”: philosophy only describes the “that.” Bultmann states that Heidegger’s philosophy was “atheistic” in the sense that God is not the subject of the philosophy of the early Heidegger, thus leaving room for theology. [45]
THE EARLY HEIDEGGER
Heidegger was certainly one of the great philosophers of the modern age, certainly, but two things catch my attention: 1. his moral failings, and, 2. his religious commitments, which perhaps get to the heart of the man and his thought.
Heidegger’s major moral failings included his commitment to Nazism, which he never ever repudiated, and the decades-long affair he had with his major apologist in the English-speaking world and former student, Hannah Arendt. Edward Oakes believes these were not blind spots but failures that flowed directly from his philosophy. [46]
Heidegger’s religious commitments trace the course of his life. He began “as an ultraconservative Catholic, destined for the priesthood, [47] after 1917 bec[a]me deeply involved in a dailogue with liberal Protestant historical theology. After 1928 Heidegger deeply antagonistic to, even an aggressive opponent of, Christianity.” [48] In 1928 he also became an enthusiastic reader of Nietzsche, where the myth of Being is purged of any Jewish or Christian notions, and his philosophy became Judenrein. [49]
His rejection of Catholicism included his denial of metaphysics, that is, in essence, the biblical account of existence, which includes the transcendent God of Creation. In the name of human existence, Heidegger denies the biblical doctrine of God and creation. For him there is no such thing as “human nature” nor purpose to human existence save the freedom of “self-actualization.” This notion fundamentally undermined any concept of objective morality. [50] These two notions, self-actualization and the lack of objective morality doubtless explain his interest in National Socialism. [51]
Grounding Dasein in freedom “as the inner source of its possibility,” against traditional metaphysics, certainly accords with a Gnostic view of existence. [52] In Gnosticism, freedom is likewise gained via the elimination of the transcendent God of Scripture. Heidegger does not ground the reality of Dasein in God but in its own structure, in nothing outside of itself. This is its the ultimate transcendence. [53] It cannot transcend to something outside itself. There is nothing out there.
Realizing the failure of traditional metaphysics thus brings one to the fact of nothing outside of being, so that the arrival at nothing unveils being. [54] In this account of existence there are shades of Buddhism, as a number of scholars have pointed out. [55] Heidegger seeks to root objective thought “in something more primal than a metaphysically understood subject.” [56] In other contemporary words of Harold Bloom, who, on becoming a modern Gnostic, declared: “I am as old as God.” According to Heidegger, metaphysics “is Dasein’s effort to ground itself…in some supreme being, itself an uncaused cause.” [57] This is an objectifying kind of thought in which the subject establishes itself as the basis of reality…reality becomes merely the subject’s picture.” [58] Metaphysics has no existence.
This understanding of being that is the result of overcoming metaphysics is called “non-conceptual thought….A return to the soil out of which metaphysics grew.” [59] In Heidegger’s What Is Metaphysics, he clarifies the metaphysics implicit in his earlier existentialist analysis. [60] It is not a simple, objective description of human existence in the world. It is human existence devoid of classic metaphysics. When asked if he had changed, Heidegger said truth was the way, not any particular moment on the way. [61]
Just how pagan is existentialism? What is the inner principle of that world view contained in existential philosophy? Is it Christian or pagan?
It is often claimed that it was only the early Heidegger who influenced Bultmann. [62] It is often argued that it was Heidegger’s Being and Time that influenced Bultmann, which came from the period prior to his anti-Christian, pro-Greek polemic-it was a demythologized, existentialist map of existence that Christian theologians believed they could use. [63]
However, Bultmann, himself, did not consider the later Heidegger’s thought as a conversion, “but sees the ‘late’ Heidegger in unbroken continuity with the ‘early’ Heidegger.” [64] Indeed, Heidegger claimed that his work on existentialist analysis was not “for its own sake, but rather in order to awaken new questions as to the meaning of being.” [65] [against Bultmann’s claim to merely using description]. How does this affect Bultmann’s “Christian” theology?
BULTMANN’S VIEW OF GOD
Bultmann’s approach to the NT is uniquely through human experience. That which does not fit the existentialist grid is demythologized. In other words, like Heidegger, he rejects classic Christian metaphysics. If we may call a spade a spade, Bultmann rejects the biblical worldview of God the transcendent Lord, Creator of heaven and earth, and thus stands in some real sense, within so-called “Christian” Gnosticism. Little wonder Bultmann can claim that the difference between the dualisms of Gnosticism and Christianity is that in Gnosticism it is the dualism between the evil created world and the divine soul; in Christianity, it has become “a dualism of decision,” “the decision against the world for God.” [66] Is this finally merely a difference of terminology, thus a distinction without a difference? Otherwise, how could Bultmann compare identification with Christ’s death as analogous to the death of the divinity in the mystery religions (TNT, I, 297), [67] and claim that “the Gnostic view of redemption offered the apostle an equally appropriate form of expression.” [68]
In Faith and Understanding (45), Bultmann denies that God is a being. He talks of God as “Creator” of man, but “not in the sense of a cosmological theory which professes to explain the origin of the world. Rather it is a proposition that concerns man’s existence.” [69] Though Bultmann, in Faith and Understanding (263), argued that liberalism had read the NT through the lens of a “pantheism of history,” where religious meaning is implicit in historical events. Bultmann, it seems, has opted for a “pantheism of existence.” Ridderbos says it well: “Bultmann’s conception is a grandiose attempt to effect a synthesis between the Christian faith and immanence philosophy (the view of life which seeks to find the absolute within the limits or boundaries of the human spirit), here conceived of in its existential form.” [70]
Ridderbos argues that insofar as this affirmation of man as spirit is within man’s own reach, God is entirely superfluous, but he claims that Bultmann is different from existentialism because man is brought to decision through the address of God’s word, thereby “join[ing] the Christian faith to existentialism.” [71] But if Roberts is right, only existentialism is God’s word.
After three hundred and twenty two pages of profound analysis, hailed by Paul Homer, professor of theology at Yale Divinity School as “the most penetrating study of Bultmann that I have read,” Robert Roberts, professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Western Kentucky University. summarizes the whole project of Bultmann as an attempt to reduce the content of Christian theology to a single idea: that of an act or decision in which man draws his self-understanding and thus his self into conformity with his authentic being as potentiality to be. [72] Though aesthetically pleasing, Roberts calls this tour de force “a disaster” for failing to do justice to the Christian faith and thus failing to aid people in their relationship with God. [73] I agree with the judgment of Ladd, who observes: “…Bultmann’s existential interpretation is the contemporary adaptation of the gospel to the prevailing philosophy [of the day],” [74] which, in this case, I would add, was a subtle form of paganism, delivered in the new, beguiling clothes of existentialism
BULTMANN’S DISCIPLES
Bultmann did his deconstructive work, ridding the Christian faith of genuine transcendence, but James Robinson suggested in an SBL “fireside chat,” that Bultmann did not go far enough. “I would have liked to get involved in the death-of-God controversy…,[I]n demythologizing, Bultmann did not carry through consistently with regard to God talk.” [75]
Robert Funk, in a public lecture at the SBL Meeting in New Orleans, November, 1996, entitled “The Incredible Creed,” argued that Bultmann had not gone far enough, but had hastened the demise of the kerygma because already he did not believe in heaven and hell, good and evil spirits, miracles, eschatology as an event produced by God, divine determination, death as the punishment for sin, the atonement and the resurrection. But Bultmann’s radical stance was attenuated by working within the neo-orthodox confines of the kerygma and the Christ event.
Following Bultmann and Heidegger, Funk states: “The God of the metaphysical age is dead. There is not a personal god out there external to human beings…” Funk, Weststar website. Here you have the model for a consistent carrying through of the demythologization of biblical God talk, which owes much to the Later Heidegger.
NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES AND THE LATER HEIDEGGER
James Robinson wrote in and edited a book in 1963 entitled The Later Heidegger and Theology, [76] in which Robinson can hardly curb his wild enthusiasm for future theologizing. He speaks of the “explosive potentialities of the ‘later Heidegger’ for theology.” [77] Certainly a new wave of Protestant theologians saw in the later Heidegger new possibilities for theology. [78]
These post-Bultmannians went beyond Bultmann, just as Heidegger did. Where Bultmann tried to eliminate the mythic overlay of heavenly messengers and angelic powers, in a sort of closed-system rationalism, the later Heidegger sought to re-instate them. [79] Heidegger demythologizies the Bible and remythologizes the world in the accents of a Greek neomythology. [80] So Heidegger and the later Bultmannians went beyond Bultmann into religious pagan mysticism.
THE LATER HEIDEGGER
Generally, for Heidegger, one can speak of “a shift away from a biblical religion to a certain Greek religion….Heidegger now invokes not no god but new gods…” [81] Heidegger never gave up his commitment to Greek mythology. Heidegger was fascinated by Greece and spoke as much about “the gods” as about “God.” He speaks of “‘the gods [who] are the beckoning messengers of the Godhead,’ in himself incomparable and ineffable.” [82]
“Indeed, the later writings invoke a certain pagan mythic world of mundane gods and divinized cosmic powers.” [83]
After the war, the so-called later Heidegger becomes more mystical and meditative, and returns to Meister Eckhart, who had fascinated him earlier in his life. [84]
In this “religious” phase, he spoke of the possibility of a “coming destiny of Being, of a New Age, a coming Dawn, an Other Beginning, a new dispensation of Being and the Holy in which the last god will…make a new manifestation of the Holy possible.” [85] In 1959 Heidegger said that in his thinking “the door remains open for a non-metaphysical God…” [86]
Barth argued that theology gives priority to God over man, and that Heidegger gave priority to Dasein over being, but, according to Robinson, the later Heidegger gave priority to being. [87] But this is the typical confusion where faith of all kind is ok., where the very nature of being determines everything. It is reflected in John Macquarrie’s judgment: “a holy or sacred reality at the heart of all being [is that which] is central to [Eastern and Western] religion,” not a specific definition of God. [88] In this deep sense, argues Macquarrie, Heidegger is religious.” [This is also the position of Tillich, the third of the triumvirate at Marburg].
John D. Caputo, has a chapter, “Heidegger’s Gods.” Here is his fascinating thesis:
“In the 20s Heidegger took the jewgreek world of biblical Christianity seriously and moved in a demythologizing, ontologizing direction. From the 30s on, Jews and Greeks were shown the door and replaced by a pantheon of “pagan” “gods,” pure Greeks, and celebrated in an openly mythologizing thinking, which culminated in the hope that one day one of them would come along and save us.” [89] “The myth of Being, of Hellas and Germania, was made possible by the exclusion of Semitic myth-not only the myths of creation, fall and redemption, but above all by the myth of justice…and compassion.” [90]
At the same time, Heidegger was deeply religious. He is reputed to have said quite often, noch nur ein Gott kann uns retten-“Only a God can save us.” [91] What kind of God would that be? He agreed with Nietzsche that the God of classical biblical orthodoxy was dead. [92] He said he was neither “an atheist or a theist.” [93] Thus it can be argued, as Casuto does, that “Heidegger’s later writings are more suggestive of a certain Buddhism…than of Judaism and Christianity and the emancipatory power of biblical justice.” [94]
THE DECONSTRUCTION OF NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES
A powerful wing of Biblical Studies has been committed to the promotion of this Later Heideggerian pagan spirituality, particularly via the rehabilitation of ancient Gnosticism as a valid form of early Christianity. Robinson states that Bultmann’s pupils agree that theology must work with the later Heidegger. [95] Robinson and Koester apply the deconstructive program of their mentor, Rudolf Bultmann, the “demythologization of the New Testament.” Thereby dismantling the theistic understanding of the New Testament. Constructively they propose to fill the void the spirituality of monistic Gnosticism. Despite the vast cultural differences between North American Protestantism and ancient Gnosticism,” says Philip Lee, noted author on this subject, “the parallels between the two . . . can no longer be ignored.” [96] Lee could see that the interest in Gnosticism was not purely historical. As Robinson says about the Nag Hammadi texts: “The focus of this library has much in common with primitive Christianity, with eastern religions, and with holy men of all times, as well as with the more secular equivalents of today, such as the counter-culture movements coming from the 1960’s.” [97]
Why would Bultman’s disciples be so interested in Gnosticism? In 1985, as president of the prestigious Society of Biblical Literature, James M. Robinson issued a programmatic statement for the twenty‑first century. He called upon his fellow Bible scholars to deconstruct their discipline in order to “lay bare [its] . . . biblicistic presuppositions.” The Bible would no longer serve as the ultimate source of authority and as the definition of true Christianity. [98] We were warned. Ever since, Robinson’s agenda has picked up momentum not only because the time was right and his message fitted the mood of the modern world, but also because James M. Robinson and his colleague Helmut Koester of Harvard Divinity School have done seminal work to bring it about. [99] As a measure of Robinson’s importance, Robert Funk of the Jesus Seminar calls him “the Secretary of State of the biblical guild . . . (an) academic counterpart . . . (to) Henry Kissenger.” [100] Both Koester and Robinson are past presidents of the Society of Biblical Literature. Both have been committed to a clearly defined program: “The Dismantling and Reassembling of the Categories of New Testament Scholarship,” as one of Robinson’s articles is entitled. [101] One category they have successfully dismantled is heresy and orthodoxy. [102]
Both separately and together, Koester and Robinson sought to uncover the radical pluralism in the earliest church, causing Christian theology to develop along various trajectories. Orthodoxy was one trajectory, but not the only deposit of the true gospel, making the others heretical. [103] Koester contests that there is not “one gospel” as Paul said, but at least “four.” [104]
James Robinson put content to his manifesto. He founded and is director of the Institute For Antiquity and Christianity at Claremont, California. It is devoted to the rehabilitation of texts and a theology that the early Church denounced as heresy. Within this organization Robinson launched the Coptic Gnostic Library Project, which translates, publishes, and promotes the Gnostic texts. A great service to the scholarly world, it is also a powerful tool for the neo‑Gnostic theological revival. “Secretary of state” is not an exaggeration. Robinson has been the leading force behind the “Q Seminar” (whose importance for the new understanding of Jesus we shall discuss below); an active member of the Jesus Seminar (founded by a colleague, Robert Funk); and director of the Coptic Magical Texts Project, which promotes heretical Gnostic and magic Christianity.
Robinson describes the Church fathers who opposed Gnosticism as “myopic heresy hunters.” The future lies with inclusion. Gnosticism (heresy) and orthodoxy are two trajectories of early Christianity. What was a marginal position just a generation ago is now touted as majority conviction. Robinson encourages modern theology to extract values from both trajectories in order to produce a new formulation of Christianity for today. [105]Robinson’s 1985 manifesto explodes the constraining limits of the orthodox biblical canon. Koester readily admits that this is not value‑free, objective science. The old liberal historical‑critical method was, he grants, “designed as a hermeneutical tool for the liberation from conservative prejudice and from the power of ecclesiastical and political institutions.” [106] In the same way, future New Testament studies should have as their goal “political and religious renewal… inspired by the search for equality, freedom and justice” in the “comprehensive political perspective” of our modern world. [107]
In November, 1995 at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, victory was declared. Leading New Testament scholars rejoiced that the heretical Gnostic Gospel of Thomas had finally made it into the club, and that now we could disband the club. By club they meant the New Testament canon of Holy Scripture. They were referring to the elevation of Thomas alongside the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These backsliders from Christianity seem to be succeeding where their ancient spiritual cousins failed. In a second century list of New Testament books to be received as canonical, it is stated that the books of the heretical Gnostics have no place in the Bible because one cannot mix “gall with honey.” [108] James Robinson declared the elevation of the noxious Thomas into the life-giving Gospels as “the coming of age of American New Testament scholarship.”
Christianity has been Americanized by infusing Gnosticism into the message of the Bible. In a parallel universe, scholars now speak of the Americanization of Buddhism. “It is something of an article of faith in US Buddhist circles that Americans are improving the traditions-by making [Buddhism] more democratic, more practical, more socially engaged, more [feminized].” [109] The same goals mark this new Bible study. But there is also an aspect of triangulation here, since Marcus Borg’s new vision of Jesus compares him to the Buddha. [110]
Helmut Koester, in the epilogue of a collection of essays in his honor,21 gives his own prospective for future directions of the New Testament field. Early Christianity, he says, is just one of several Hellenistic propaganda religions, competing with others who seriously believed in their god and who also imposed moral standards on their followers. [111]
Only contradictory understandings of the Christian faith can explain the divergent evaluations of Gnosticism we noted above. Orthodox Christianity has always maintained the antithesis separating all expressions of paganism, including “Christian” paganism, from biblical truth. Liberalism has always tried to muddy the waters. Today liberals are claiming that ancient Gnosticism is an alternate, authentic expression of early Christianity. Is this estimation plausible? The early Church fathers said no. Modern liberalism says yes.
What would a modern Gnostic, with no pretensions to Christianity either orthodox or liberal, say? Duncan Greenlees is just such a Gnostic, an adept of the theosophical/occult tradition. His evaluation of Gnosticism is therefore most interesting:
Gnosticism is a system of direct experiential knowledge of God . . . the Soul and the universe; therefore it has no fixed dogmas or creed. . . . In the early centuries of this era, amid a growing Christianity, it took on the form of the Christian faith, while rejecting most of its specific beliefs. Its wording is therefore largely Christian, while its spirit is that of the latest paganism of the West . . . [emphasis mine] [112]
Here is no claim that Gnosticism is a valid though alternate form of Christianity. On this issue modern Gnostics and ancient church fathers agree. Both affirm that Christianity and Gnosticism are different religions, even if they sometimes use common terminology. One religion is pagan humanism, the other divinely revealed truth.
The program of the insertion of pagan religion into Christianity nevertheless is carried through in recent academic publications in order to deliver the real Jesus, the original Christian community and a radical redefinition of the Christian faith.
This has produced what Tom Wright calls:
THE GNOSTIC JESUS
The Gnostic Jesus [113] comes in a number of forms, many directly from the Jesus Seminar: peasant cynic, Jewish teacher, social revolution, apocalyptic prophet, the first feminist, mystical guru. Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar gives us his take on Jesus. His goal is to liberate Jesus “from the scriptural and creedal and experiential prisons in which we have incarcerated him.” This new Jesus is a teacher rather than a divine being, emphasizing forgiveness and freedom over punishment and piety, endorsing “protected recreational sex among consenting adults.” [114]
The approach of Marcus Borg, another fellow of the Seminar is an interesting case study in the nature of this new Gnosticizing quest. In his writings, Borg begins by noting a “major shift,” what he calls “the lessening interest in eschatology and apocalyptic.” This, you remember, was what Schweitzer noted about the liberal 19th century Jesuses. Borg is a man with a mission. He believes his “charismatic” Jesus “radically challenges the flattened sense of reality pervading the modern world view, and much of the mainline church,” in other words, a purely this worldly, social reformer, the result of previous NT critical work!
Borg hails the emergence of new questions-the questions are less specifically Christian, and more global, comparing Jesus to other religious figures; as well as new methods-since past methods were narrowly historical-the new are based on insights from the history of religions, cultural anthropology and the social sciences. [115]
Here is scholarship preparing the bed it intends to lie in, perhaps without even realizing that this is what is going on. For Borg then goes on to underline a new consensus. It is a consensus merely reflecting the limited number of groups that employ them.
A NEW CANON/NO CANON
“The distinctions between canonical and non-canonical, orthodox and heretical are obsolete…One can only speak of a ‘History of Early Christian Literature.'” [116] This again is an example, not of objective history but of theological prejudice that rejects the very notion of canon from the outset. Thus the pluralism and syncretism of today is read into the history of the Early Church.
The essential strategy is to incorporate ancient Gnosticism as a valid expression of early Christianity, and since Nag Hammadi Gnosticism is ascetic, for the general Christian public it is much more palatable form to rehabilitate. This is especially the case of the Gospel of Thomas, considered by left-wing scholarship as close to Q and earlier and more authentic than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Hence the massive attempt to elevate Thomas to Christian canonical status, for once Thomas is “in” the very notion of a theologically coherent canon is forever undermined. [117]
This scholarship grants the gift of existence to a purely hypothetical document Q, as a number of recent titles indicate–The First Gospel, [118] The Lost Gospel [119], and Q Thomas Reader, (hailed on the back cover as “The Earliest Sayings Gospels,”) [120] – as well as to the “Christian” community in which Q was born. On these hypothetical creations hangs a radical interpretation of Jesus as a pagan guru. So much hangs on speculation.
Wenham’s judgment in 1992 is that the Q hypothesis, since “no one knows for certain whether a Q-document ever existed,” is still held as a working hypothesis “but with decreasing confidence.” [121] James Robinson, in the same lecture in which he claims that Q is the most important Christian text we have, admits to the ongoing debate about the Synoptic Problem. [122] William Farmer takes him to task:
“…contra Robinson, would it not be more reasonable to conclude that if the ongoing debate about the Synoptic Problem raises questions about whether “Q” ever existed, which it certainly is doing, should not theologians like Robinson acknowledge the hypothetical character of their reconstruction, and admit that their projects depend upon a premise that may be false, a premise which an increasing number of competent scholars are prepared to say probably is false.” [123]
Already in 1955 A. M. Farrer argued there was no need for Q if Luke used Matthew. Everything that was common was the result of Luke incorporating Matthew into his gospel. [124] The simplicity of this argument has convinced more than one contemporary scholar, [125] one of whom described Farrer’s article as a “firecracker.” [126] Farrer’s argument still sparkles, awaiting a satisfactory refutation. [127]Without Q, the whole reconstruction falls to the ground like a house of cards.
NEW SCRIPTURES/NO SCRIPTURES
Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar, recently set up The Weststar Institute, producing a bi‑monthly journal, The Fourth R, and housing Polebridge Press. Polebridge Press has published The Complete Gospels (1992), edited by Robert J. Miller.43 This volume began as a new translation of the Bible, known as the Scholars Version. But since the translators attempted to avoid any overlay of orthodox theology, they refused the limitations of the orthodox canon as well. The implicit message of the title is that the canonical gospels are incomplete, and those who do not think so are biblically illiterate. The canonical gospels are “completed” by apocryphal gospels such as the Infancy Gospel of James and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, (a text long dismissed by critical scholars as popular folk literature of little theological interest). Also included in this complete canon are number of Gnostic gospels: The Gospel of Thomas, The Apocryphon of James, The Dialogue of the Savior, and The Gospel of Mary, all of which, Miller admits, witness to the blending of Christianity and Gnosticism.
All this is proposed in the name of objective science. Says one of the spokesmen for the Jesus Seminar: “[our work] is not answerable to any church….Our purpose is simply to let the gospels speak, as much as possible, on their own terms…” [128] The only problem with the image is that it is false. There is as much theological commitment here as in any openly religious group. [129] Moreover, the “science” on which the image is based leaves a lot to be desired.
If the science is not convincing, what ideology propels the movement? Notably, it is the “Christian” pagan syncretists who exult at the publication of The Five Gospels. The radical Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong, who denies the virgin birth and accepts ordained homosexuals, hails the book as “a probing, penetrating, and deeply spiritual journey into the hearts of the gospels . . . and might well become the means whereby the secularized post‑Christian world discovers its own deepest roots.”79
Feminist rhetoric also avails itself of this new scholarship. Notably absent in the “Jesus seminar” at the RE‑Imagining Conference in 1993, attended by some five hundred participants, was the orthodox, New Testament image of Jesus. The proceedings began with songs to the goddess Sophia, and presenter Dolores S. Williams, a “womanist” theology professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York City stated bluntly: “I do not think we need a theory of the atonement at all.” A leader of the seminar, Kwok Pui‑Lan, asked: “Who is this funny God that would sacrifice a lamb?” She went on to explain, in terms that recalled the Gospel of Thomas, that the Chinese do not believe in a God outside the creation, and that the Confucianist tradition emphasized the propensity for good in mankind.84
As we await the new Bible, various mainstream publishers have already entered the market. Harper San Francisco announces the arrival of The World’s Wisdom: Sacred Texts of the World’s Religion, by Philip Novak [1994]. “Virtually a World Bible for an age of intercultural understanding,” says the publisher, the book “presents the world’s most enlightening wisdom.” [130] 92 Penguin Books brings us The Portable World Bible [ed. Robert O. Batlou, 1994] which includes selections from the bibles of the major world religions: the Upanishads and the Bhagavad‑Gita of Hinduism, the Lotus of the True Law and The Tibetan Doctrine from Buddhism, The Gatas from Zoroastrianism, the Koran from Islam, the Li Ki and the Book of Filial Piety from Confucianism, the Tao‑Te King from Taoism, and “substantial selections from the Old and New Testaments” from Judaism and Christianity.
The World Scriptures, a gender and religion inclusive interfaith planetary Bible is part of the brave new world of the Age of Aquarius awaiting us in the third millennium.
APOSTATE SCHOLARS WITH A RELIGIOUS AGENDA
Above we mentioned the claim to objectivity. It is true that the Jesus Seminar prides itself on its objectivity. In the introduction to The Five Gospels Funk argues that, in the aftermath of the Scopes Trial (1925), American biblical scholarship retreated into the closet while the “fundamentalist mentality generated a climate of inquisition that made scholarly judgments dangerous.” [131] “The Christ of the creeds and dogma…can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope.” [132] But thanks to the Enlightenment and the dawn of the Age of Reason, biblical scholarship has nevertheless pioneered in its research to discover the real Jesus behind the “Christian facade of the Christ.” In taking the findings of the Seminar to the public, Funk states: “The public is poorly informed of the assured results of critical scholarship.” [133] He gives a definition of “critical”: “The Fellows of the Seminar are critical scholars. To be a critical scholar means to make empirical, factual evidence…the controlling factor in historical judgments. Non-critical scholars are those who put dogmatic considerations first and insist that factual evidence confirm theological premises.”
Faith in reason is nevertheless qualified. Funk claims that the JESUS Seminar had constantly before it the reminder: “beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you.” [134]
Are not all these scholars coldly objective scientists giving us a Jesus liberated from church dogma and irrational faith? Not every member of The Jesus Seminar is an evangelical believer. Indeed, for “objectivity” there are even non-Christian fellows. But a number of the leaders are apostates from Christian orthodoxy.
JAMES M. ROBINSON
Robinson, a fellow of The Jesus Seminar was raised on the Westminster Confession of Faith by his father, the highly respected southern Presbyterian theologian William C. Robinson. “We were soaked in family prayers, bible reading and the recitation of the psalms…I have moved steadily left ever since.” [135] He was an evangelical minister in the old PCUS. Retired Presbyterian Church, US missionary to Brazil, Frederic R. Dinkins tells of his providential meeting with James Robinson in 1946 at a youth camp which turned Dinkins’ life around:
Jim Robinson had just finished Columbia Seminary and was working at the First Church in Hattiesburg…with a very conservative and evangelical pastor, Dr. McIntosh. Late one afternoon, at the Youth Camp, Jim Robinson spent about four hours with me – taking me through the Bible to show me some basic positive Reformed doctrine based on the Scriptures as God’s Word. He taught me and challenged me that I needed to study God’s Word if I was to be a minister….He taught me to rely on God’s Word. [136]
Soon after this encounter Dinkins went to Brazil where he worked for thirty five years. Robinson went to Germany to study under Bultmann. During his successful academic career Robinson has been committed to application and extension of Bultmann’s teaching. [137] From that deeply orthodox beginning, Robinson states, “I have moved steadily to the left ever since.” [138] James Robinson, general editor of The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), and director of the Institute For Antiquity and Christianity and the Coptic Gnostic Library Project excoriates the Church Fathers on whom we have depended for our knowledge of gnosticism until this point. Eight times in the scholarly introduction to this quasi-official English translation, Robinson uses the term “heretic” as in the phrase: “[The Gnostic view of existence] has until now been known almost exclusively through the myopic view of heresy hunters.” [139] This is unusually emotive language in such a scholarly work. Is it science or a desirable, new view of Christianity that drives this scholarship?
MARCUS BORG
Marcus Borg, another fellow of The Jesus Seminar and author of the recent book on Jesus, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time [140] is a deeply religious man. Raised an evangelical Lutheran, he now has discovered a new view of the Spirit and of Jesus. The Jesus he met again for the first time is not the Jesus of scriptural orthodoxy. Says New Testament scholar Borg, “Like Socrates, Jesus was a teacher of a subversive wisdom. Like the Buddha, he had an Enlightenment experience. Like a shaman, he was a healer. Like Gandhi, he protested against a purity system.” [141] Borg is not merely comparing Jesus with elements in the lives of other holy men. Borg is recognizing the validity of other religious traditions. For Borg’s new view of the Spirit, according to a recent study of Borg’s development, is actually “rooted in the pantheism of Huston Smith.” [142] So we need to ask not merely who is Jesus. We need to ask who is Huston Smith.
Huston Smith, born of missionary parents in China, is a well-known expert in comparative religions, deeply committed to monistic spirituality. Significantly associated with New Age and occult Theosophical thinkers, Smith is a sponsor of the Temple of Understanding, a organism of the Theosophical Society devoted to global syncretism which now has the privileged status of a Non-Governmental Organization in the United Nations. Smith was a faculty member with well-known New Ager and Assistant Secretary-General of the U.N., Robert Mueller, the Dalai Lama and Marilyn Ferguson, author of the book, The Aquarian Conspiracy, at an interfaith gathering in Malta in 1985, and in the same year gave a lecture at the Theosophical Society’s “Blavatsky Lodge” in Sydney, Australia on the subject, “Is a New World Religion Coming? [143] Huston Smith believes that there is, by the work of the “spirit” “an invisible geometry…working to shape (the great religious traditions of the world) into a single truth.”
Needless to say, this syncretistic view of the Spirit when employed by Marcus Borg will only consider believable a Jesus-guru who can blend into other religious systems. It will reject as unacceptable and thus unauthentic the exclusive claims of the Jesus of orthodox confession. In his personal testimony Borg states quite honestly: “I do not believe that Christianity is the only way of salvation, or that the Bible is the revealed will of God, or that Jesus was the unique Son of God.” Christianity is only one of many “mediators of the sacred.” [144] One certainly has to respect Borg’s belief system, but it is just that – belief. When one comes “out from fundamentalism,” as Borg has also done, if one is aware of the spiritual domain, and evangelicals are, one goes somewhere else, and it appears one often goes into some form of spiritual pagan monism. Is this why a Seminar member states with touching naivete that it is becoming more and more difficult to imagine a Jesus who reflected on his own death? The reason is because the belief-system of many modern Bible scholars, not the facts of the matter, has changed. So, at the end of the day, when all the science has been paraded, and all the claims of cold dispassionate scholarship touted aloud, one still cannot help but think that The Jesus Seminar is one more ideologically-loaded attempt to serve the revival of pantheistic spirituality in our time. Behind the science lies spiritual apostasy.
The marketing people know where Borg’s work belongs. The Many Paths…Infinite Possibilities…One Spirit Book Club, giving you “resources for your total well-being: spirit, mind and body,” offers selections in “self discovery, yoga, prayer, homeopathy, psychology, Ayurveda, Buddhism, astrology and Christianity.” One of the featured book, along with various titles like Celtic Magic, or The Druid, or An Encyclopaedia of Gods, or The Tarot Handbook or Awakening the Buddha Within is Borg’s Jesus and Buddha.
ROBERT FUNK
Robert Funk is the founder of The Jesus Seminar who is committed to bringing the fruits of his radical critical scholarship to the average Christian in the pew. According to Funk Christians need to mature in their knowledge and realize that most of what Jesus says in the Gospels was placed on his lips by later believers and that most authentic sayings of Jesus come from a hypothetical document, Q, which some scholars believe is embedded in Matthew and Luke, and from the heretical Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. In 1993 Funk published a best-selling book, The Five Gospels, setting this heretical text alongside the four canonical Gospels as an equally valid source for access to Jesus. [145] This is like asking Christ and Belial to share the Sunday morning service. This can only confuse the average Christian and promote the coming of pagan religious syncretism.
According to another Seminar fellow, Marcus Borg, in a taped public debate at the University of Oregon, his colleague Funk has a past as an evangelical fundamentalist that he still is attempting to live down. According to Borg, as a youth, Funk, dressed in a white suit and white shoes was pushed forward as a boy preacher. If anyone knows the hot-house atmosphere of certain milieu where children are used as cute “Christian” performers, one sympathizes with Funk. But escaping “out from fundamentalism,” is anything but a cold objective affair.
Funk has come a long way. He dedicates his book to Galileo “who altered our view of the heavens forever”; to Thomas Jefferson “who took scissors and paste to the gospels”; and to David Friedrich Strauss who “pioneered the quest for the historical Jesus.” [146]
Certainly the great scientist Galileo got an undeserving shaft from the church of his day, but should the work of Jefferson and Strauss on the Bible to be seen as “science” in anywhere near the same sense? Would anyone today accept the subjective Bible-study methods of Jefferson? With regard to Strauss, as a so-called biblical scientist, he is a most complex figure.
Strauss’s biographer documents that though held up as the great example of critical, dispassionate scholarship and the father of scientific research on the historical Jesus, Strauss was in deep fellowship with the occult. [147] Though his father Johann Friedrich Strauss was an orthodox Christian pietist, [148] early in his theological training David immersed himself in the mysticism of Jacob Böhme, in “spiritism, clairvoyance and sopiritual healing,” [149] and came to believe deeply in the supernatural, but “not…in any theistic sense, but rather as a belief in the pantheistic unity of the world.” [150] Strauss himself later recounts a meeting with a medium, the Seeress of Prevorst:
I cannot in my whole life remember such a comparable moment. I was absolutely convinced that as soon as I laid my hand in hers [the medium’s] my whole thinking and being would lie open before her….it was as if someone pulled the ground away from under my feet and I were sinking into a bottomless abyss….she [the medium] praised my faith, and…[said] that I would never fall into unbelief. [151]
According to this seeress, the father of modern New Testament scholarship would always be a believer – in occult pantheism, something Strauss never repudiated. How can someone with such deep religious convictions of a non-Christian nature, antipathetic to orthodoxy, make a believable claim to objectivity when dealing with a theistic document like the New Testament! Monists will always find theism unacceptable. With admirable consistency they will always eliminate any expressions of theism as a possible explanation of phenomena in the life of Jesus. Miracles, unique divine nature, atoning death for sin, God distinct from the creation He made, and inspired Scripture, to name just a few, are all elements intrinsic to a theistic world view which are “objectively” and “scientifically” screened out by monists as later additions to a Jesus they want to make much more amenable to their theology. At the end of the day, such a theological agenda determines from the start what Jesus can and cannot say. Monists can only produce a monistic Jesus. This might be good [monistic] theology but it is not science.
In the above mentioned lecture concerning the critique of Bultmann, Funk stated that we do not need a heavenly redeemer, because Joseph Campbell, amongst others, gives us an “internal redeemer.” Joseph Campbell, guru to George Lucas, one of the spiritual creators of Anakim, the “Balancer,” and Star Wars, [152] was an apostate Roman Catholic and Jungian, who sought wisdom in the pagan myths, and delivered much of it on public television. [153] He describes the calling of every human being, though born in one sex or the other, to transcend duality. This is to be done, as in the ancient mystery religions, by undergoing a series of initiations [or mystical experiences], whereby the individual “realizes that he is both mortal and immortal, male and female.” [154] Campbell was enamored of the goddess story because in it “the world is the body of the Goddess, divine in itself, and divinity is not something ruling over and above a fallen nature.” [155] With his predilection for Strauss, Funk has also found the equivalent of Strauss’s seeress in the person of Campbell. Recently Funk and the Jesus Seminar created the Order of D. F. Strauss to honor scholars who excel in this tradition.
If there is a Jesus in the new, liberated world of tomorrow, he will fit all the parameters of this world’s new paganism. The Jesus Seminar will see to that. So much for their objective, neutral position. Stephen Neil and N. T. Wright identify the subjectivity:
Within the study of the history of religions there always tends to be a bias. However much most scholars declare their neutrality, there is always a sense that proving some element of Christianity to be derived from, say, Gnosticism, or Qumran, might have a hidden value-judgment attached to it. Students who fail to see this tend to get tired of the endless arguments about ‘background’: but once the agenda is revealed, the battle can be smelt, and its implications for wider issues all too easily imagined. In scholarship, as in international affairs, fighting often takes place on secondary battlefields, with the superpowers taking an active interest in apparently small-scale local skirmishes. [156]
Wright in Jesus and the Victory of God [157] argues that their view of Jesus “… is a particular view of Jesus, working its way through into a detailed list of sayings that fit with this view.”
A NEW VERSION OF CHRISTIANITY/THE END OF CHRISTIANITY
Here is the real goal. The New Jesus of the Jesus Seminar gives us a new Christianity for the global era. With their new Jesus, the Jesus Seminar feels authorized to address the question of God, with the stated starting point: “It is no longer credible to think that there is a God ‘out there.'” [158]
John Shelby Spong, promoted by the Jesus Seminar‘s Westar Institute, gives us A New Christianity for a New World. Spong’s mentor was J. A. T. Robinson, who popularised Tillich in the English-speaking world, and defended the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. [159] Spong claims that stand helped him take a new view of sexuality, which presently includes him being the religion editor on a pornographic website. [160]
Spong credits Lloyd Geering for creating “an audience for me in New Zealand and Australia.” [161] Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies at Victoria University, considered one of New Zealand’s foremost thinkers, described by Bishop Spong as a “Presbyterian heretic,” [162] Geering takes this moment of human history very seriously, setting tomorrow’s global culture in the context of Western intellectual history. Embraced by the Jesus Seminar, Geering’s books [163] are promoted as programmatic essays for the future earth community-from the point of view of Christian apostasy and pagan orthodoxy.
In other words, this pagan New Testament scholarship finds its “theological” expression in Geering’s radical agenda According to Geering, tomorrow’s culture will be post-Christian, global, and religiously pagan. This agenda is remarkably similar to that found in the ex-Roman Catholic Thomas Berry, The Great Work, which is working its way not simply through biblical texts but through the texts of the UN’s global programs.
TOMORROW’S CULTURE WILL BE POST-CHRISTIAN
This is because evolution proves that human beings, as they evolved, created language, then symbols, then religious explanations. The most recent human religious inventions are the monotheistic divine Creator of all things, and the dualism between the spiritual realm of a God who is believed to really exist, and the realm of created life. Classic Christian theology has called this the Creator/creature distinction. However, according to Geering, “The other-world of the dualistic picture…has been slowly dissolving from Western consciousness…,” not least “through the most serious condemnation of traditional monotheism,…by feminist thought.” [164]
Geering, following Spong, is thus categorical in his rejection of the God of the Bible: “The time for glorifying the Almighty (male) God who supposedly rules is now over.” [165] The end of Christianity is so evident “that some future generation may well be moved to discard the Christian calendar entirely, and rename the year 2000 AD as 1 GE, the first year of the global era. [166] Soon the Lord’s Supper will only signify human fellowship, and Christmas will be a holiday for the celebration of family.
TOMORROW’S CULTURE WILL BE GLOBAL
This is because we live at a moment in time where “the process by which all scientific, cultural, religious and economic human activity is being integrated into one worldwide network.” [167] Thus Geering believes “the UN’s time has finally come. It is only within the framework of that global organization that the common problems of mankind can be collectively addressed.” [168] Global consciousness is causing us “to discover and acknowledge both cultural diversity and cultural relativity,” [169] as well as to create “one unified species [through] a global consciousness/super-consciousness.” [170] This possibility leads the analytical intellectual, Geering, to deep expressions of optimistic spirituality, “…possibly the human species,” opines Geering, “…could become so united in love and goodwill that there would be some kind of spiritual center…” [171] Indeed, this possibility becomes a requirement. “If the global society emerges, it will require humanity to develop a new consciousness and a new form of spirituality.” [172] So, what kind of new spirituality will this be?
TOMORROW’S CULTURE WILL BE RELIGIOUSLY PAGAN
This is so because “the new story,” which has become basic to the global world, begins with a new word or idea:…evolution. Geering takes this word “in its broadest sense of change and development from within.” [173] Following the logic of his thoughts, he states unambiguously: “Unlike the dualistic character of the Christian world, the new global world is monistic [italics mine]. That means that the universe is conceived as essentially one…” Of course, this is not new. It is classic spiritual paganism, and Geering, in spite of his all-pervading explanatory principle of evolutionary progress, has to admit with “surprise” that ” the new story has… . “link[s] with the pre-[monotheistic]…nature religions in which the ancients thought of themselves as the children of the earth mother.” In an odd turn of events, contemporary “spiritual” evolution goes backwards! Biblical theism disturbed our evolutionary progress. The clocks have to be put back. As C. S. Lewis said some fifty years ago, noting religious paganism’s perennial character, [he called it ‘pantheism’], and its appearance in Nazi ideology, even as he wrote: “…by a strange irony, each new relapse into this immemorial ‘religion’ is hailed as the last work in novelty and emancipation…so far from being the final refinement, pantheism is, in fact, the permanent natural bent of the human mind.” [174]
Not surprisingly, the same old symbol, Geering believes, will serve for the spanking new future planetary religion. In the religion of the coming global society “Mother Earth would be the a consciously chosen symbol referring to everything about the earth’s eco-system.” He notes that “The loving care of Mother Earth is in many quarters replacing the former sense of obedience to the Heavenly Father.” [175] …In the religion of the coming global society, the forces of nature, the process of evolution and the existence of life itself will be the objects of…veneration.” [176] Again, this is pure paganism, as the New Testament affirms-“worship of the creation rather than the Creator.” [177] These expressions, without surprise, fit naturally “the Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese notions of non-theistic spirituality,” so a coming together of all the pagan religions is on the cards. [178] Sounding like a paragon of tolerance, Geering states: “There will not be ‘only one way’…groups must learn to be inclusive…” [179] In other words, there will only be the “one, inclusive, pagan, way,” and this “must” be the case. This is not tolerance, but a veiled and hence dangerous form of intolerance-but, for the survival of the planet, this is the way it must be!
We are in the presence of a powerful pagan/Gnostic theological agenda, claiming to be spanking new, objective and scientific, but as old as the hills. It is my belief that this trend in biblical studies is part of the setting in place of a pagan reconstruction of human culture for the planetary era.
I close this lecture with a warning that comes from a scholar whose work is independent of my own. Johannes van Oort, Professor of church history and the history of dogma at the University of Utrecht, the Netherlands, and world expert on Manichean Gnosticism, states a fact and gives a challenge: “…Gnosis in one form or another is expected to become the main expression of secular religion in the new millennium. In order to equip the Church for this new age, the scientific study of Gnosticism is vital.” [180]
Notes
[1] Peter Jones, after teaching the New Testament in Europe and the USA, is now Scholar-in-residence at Westminster Seminary in California and Director of truthXchange (website: truthxchange.com).
[2] I use the terms “Gnosticism” and “paganism” virtually interchangeably, for the following reasons. Paganism is the general religious belief in the divinity of Nature; Gnosticism is a specific and somewhat rarified application of that general belief that becomes associated with the early Christian movement. I thus agree with the early church fathers, who, according to modern scholarship, falsely described Gnosticism as a “relapse in heathenism.” Kurt Rudolf, Gnosis: The Nature and History of An Ancient Religion (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1977), 9. Here, Rudolf is implicitly critical of this association. It is, though, the position of very gifted theologians/Church Fathers, such as Hippolytus, who stated that the Gnostics took their doctrine from “the wisdom of the heathen.” [ibid., 14]. Much later in his book [225], Rudolf documents that many Gnostics “fostered a cult of images, owning statues of gods such as those found among the archeological remains of the mystery cults.” See also p. 226 for further evidence. Somewhere, I recall, but I have not been able to trace it, Kurt Rudolf describes Gnosticism as dualism on a monistic background.
[3] J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism (Eerdmans, 1923), pp.62-63.
[5] Philo, Leg. All. 3:161, where he speaks of the soul as a “divine fragment.”
[6] See Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 42-43, who sees radical dualism as the “cardinal feature” of Gnosticism. For the similarity between later Gnosticism and Philo, see the Nag Hammadi text, On The Origin of The World 117:29-35, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), 173: “Now the first Adam of light is spiritual. He appeared on the first day. The second Adam is soul endowed. He appeared on the sixth day, and is called <Herm>aphrodite<s>.” Bentely Layton, in NAG Hammjadi Codex II, 2-7, vol 2 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1989), 71, proposes “pneumatikos” and “psykhikos,” which the Coptic clearly indicates. Since these terms are not found in Philo, later Gnosticism must have taken Paul’s terms and read them into a Philonic reading of Genesis. I am indebted to my student, Joshua Smith, for pointing out this reference to Layton.
[7] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 326.
[9] Le Origini dello Gnosticismo, ed. U. Bianchi, Numen vol 12 (Leiden, 1967), 100f. Irenaeus gives proof of this notion, in his ingenious argument against the Gnostic theory of consubstantiality, that is, the confusing of God and the creation. If, he argues, the emitted eon shares the same substance with the emitter, then the limited characteristics of the emitted eon (passability, ignorance) are shared by the emitter (Adv. Haereses II:17, 4-5).
[10] Jorunn Jacobsen Buckley, “An Interpretation of Logion 114 in the Gospel of Thomas, Novum Testamentum XXVII(1985), 246. See also H. Rengsdorf, “Urchristliches Kerygma und ‘gnostische’ Interpretation in einigen Sprűchen des Thomasevangelium,” Ugo Bianchi, ed., Le Origini dello Gnosticismo, Numen vol 12 (Leiden, 1967), 567, who sees a reference in the phrase “living spirit” in logion 114 to Paul’s “spirit that gives life,” and wonders if Isis mythology, where Isis becomes a male has influences Egyptian Gnosticism.
[11] This is doubtless a reference to original androgyny, the spiritual state beyond male and female-as a number of scholars propose-see Buckley, 246, and not an expression of Thomas’ male chauvinism, as Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979), 49, believed, though later in her book retracted (p. 67).
[13] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 43. The Gnostics turned the biblical names for God into proper names for inferior, demonic beings.
[14] For Jahweh as a “fool”, see Sophia of Jesus Christ 112:19; 114:14-25; On the Origin of the World 100:5-10, 26-27; Apocalypse of Adam 64:14-16; Apocryphon of John 15-19 cp 21:30; Letter of Peter to Philip 135:16. Texts describing Jahweh cast into hell are Hypostasis of the Archons 95:8ff; On the Origin of the World 103:25; 126:20-30. See also Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism, translated by Anthony Alcock (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990),132. Many of the Nag Hammadi texts seek in some way to undermine the teaching of Genesis 1-3, indicating a fundamental antipathy to the biblical notion of creation. According to Elaine Pagels, “‘The Mystery of the Resurrection’: A Gnostic Reading of 1 Corinthians 15,” JBL 93 (1974), 276-288, the Gnostics believed in the resurrection but not the way the church understood it. According to Origen the Gnostics do not believe in the resurrection of this flesh and they consider belief in bodily resurrection the “faith of fools.” (Pagels, 278). This is not simply another approach to the same subject, as Pagels suggests. Since Paul also dismisses Christians who refuse to believe in bodily resurrection as “fools” (15:36), we are clearly confronted again with mutually exclusive world views.
[15] The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1956), 489.
[16] Cited in R. J. Hoffmann, Marcion (Chico, CA.: Scholars Press, 1984), 110-111.
[17] Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3:3:4.
[18] Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament: Volume 2: History and Literature of Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1982), 330.
[19] James M. Robinson, “Introduction,” The Nag Hammadi Library in English (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1977), pp. 3, 6, 7, 16 and 24. Eight times in this introduction to the critical edition of the Gnostic texts, Robinson describes the anti-Gnostic church fathers this way.
[20] In the volume, published in Koester’s honor, The future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester, ed. Birger A. Pearson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 472.
[21] James M. Robinson, “How My Mind Has changed,” SBL Papers (1984), 481.
[22] David Ferguson, O.P., Bultmann: Outstanding Christian Thinkers Series (Collegeville, MN.: The Liturgical Press, 1992), 95.
[23] John K. Riches, A Century of New Testament Study (Valley forge, PA.: Trinity Press International, 1993), 84, 176.
[24] James M. Robinson, ed., The Nag Hammadi Library in English , 1.
[30] R. Bultmann, Existence and Faith: Shorter Writings of Rudolf Bultmann, ed. and tr. By Schubert Ogden (New York: The World Publishing Company, 1961), 258ff.
[33] Thiselton, The Two Horizons, 28
[37] Schmithals, 72-3. According to Stanislav Grof Future of Psychology: Lessons from Modern Consciousness Research (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 44, citing Riedlinger, 1982), Jean-Paul Satre’s work on existentialism was “deeply influenced by a badly managed and unresolved mescaline session…”
[38] KM, 18ff, see Roberts, 42
[40] Roberts, 43, fn. 48: “Bult does, of course, have a stake in preserving the possibility of an objective description of “existence” along the lines of Heidegger’s Being and Time.”
[44] Thiselton, Two Horizons, 227:
[46] Edward T. Oakes, S.J., “Being and Nazism: The Problem of Martin Heidegger,” The Weekly Standard, (August 3, 1998), 33-35. Oakes is professor of religion at Regis University in Denver, Colorado.
[47] Caputo, 170. Cp. Thomas Berry.
[50] See William E. Hughes, “The People versus Martin Heidegger,” First Things (December, 1993)35-36.
[51] Oakes, art. cit., 33, refers to the biography of Heidegger by Rudiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, transl. By Ewald Osers (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1998). See especially John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1993), 118ff, and 168ff, who argues that the source of his ethical insensitivity and political blindness arose as Heidegger explained Being from Greek philosophy and its expression in National Socialism, while excluding everything Jewish and Christian, especially the biblical ethics of justice and mercy. See also the statement of Otto Poegoller, Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking, transl. Dan Margushak and Sigmund Barber (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1987), 272: “Was it not through a definite orientation of this thought that Heidegger fell-and not merely accidentally-into the proximity of National Socialism without ever truly emerging from this proximity.” Cited by Caputo, ibid., 5.
[55] Caputo, 184, though he is referring particularly, here, to the later Heidegger. “Heidegger’s later writings are more suggestive of a certain Buddhism…than of Judaism and Christianity and the emancipatory power of biblical justice.” More generally, John Macquarrie, Heidegger and Christianity: The Hensley Lectures 1993-1994 (New York: Continuum, 1994), 100, states: “I am inclined to agree…that ‘pantheism accords well with Heidegger’s religious statements.'”
[61] James M. Robinson, “The German Discussion,” The Later Heidegger and Theology, ed. James Robinson and John B. Cobb. Jr., (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 4.
[64] Schmithals, 15. See also John D. Caputo, 7, who sees the later Heidegger already in the early.
[65] Robinson, The Later Heidegger, 7.
[66] Walter Schmithals, An Introduction to The Theology of Rudolf Bultmann (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1968), 115, citing Kerygma and Myth, 20.
[68] Schmithals, 134. A. H. B. Logan, “At-Onement: The Nature of the Challenge of Gnostic Soteriology,” Scottish Journal of Theology 5 (4. 97), 481-497, Compares Valentinian soteriology with that of Bultmann.
[69] The words of Schmithals, 76.
[70] H. Ridderbos, Bultmann, tr. by David Freeman (Phillipsberg, NJ.: Presbyterian and Reformed, 1979), 45
[72] See Robert C. Roberts, Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology: A Critical Interpretation (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1976), 323.
[75] James Robinson, “How My Mind Has changed,” SBL Papers (1984), 486.
[76] James M. Robinson, ed., The Later Heidegger and Theology (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).
[77] Robinson, The Later Heidegger, 5.
[82] Vortrage und Aufsatze, (Neske, 1954), 177.
[83] Capuato, 180-181. See also Macquarrie, ibid., 105.
[84] Caputo, 179. See also John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986). In his later work, Demythologizing Heidegger (1993) Casuto becomes much more critical of this mysticism.
[85] Capuato, 183. MacQuarrie, 98, wonders if the mystics like Plotinus, Meister Eckhart, even Heidegger perceived Being in some “ecstatic flight.” Macquarrie calls him a neo-Platonist.
[89] John D. Caputo, Demythologizing Heidegger (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN.: Indiana University Press, 1993), 168ff.
[91] John Macquarrie, Heidegger and Christianity: The Hensley Henson Lectures 1993-1994 (New York: Continuum, 1994), 94.
[92] Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion, 332.
[96] Philip Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics, (New York : Oxford University Press, 1987), 84.
[97] Robinson, The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 1.
[98] “How My Mind Has Changed,” 495.
[99] See William Farmer, “The Church’s Stake in the Question of ‘Q’,” Perkins Journal, 39/3 (1986), 10.
[100] Robert Funk, “Three Tributes to James M. Robinson,” Foundations and Facets 5/2 (Sonoma, CA.: Polebridge Press, 1989), 6.
[101] James M. Robinson, Interpretation 25 (January, 1971), 63-77.
[102] A recent attempt to do the same, by one of Koester’s students, is Elaine Pagel’s Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Random House, 2003), which seeks to rehabilitate Gnosticism by the same ideological commitment to religious relativism.
[103]James McConkey Robinson, and Helmut H. Koester, Trajectories Through Early Christianity, (Philadelphia, Fortress Press 1971).
[104] Helmut H. Koester, “One Jeus and Four Primitive Gospels,” Harvard Theological Review 61 (1968), 203-247.
[105] Robinson, How My Mind Has changed,” 486.
[106] Helmut Koester, The Future of Early Christianity: Essays in Honor of Helmut Koester, ed. Birger A. Pearson (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,1991), 474.
[108] The Muratorian Canon, line 67.
[109] Stephen Prothero, “Addition or Subtraction: a review of Westward Dharma: Buddhism Beyond Asia, ed. Charles S. Prebish and Martin Bauman (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 2002),” Buddhadharma (Spring, 2003), 65.
[110] Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time
[112] Duncan Greenlees, The Gospel of the Gnostics (Madras, India: The Theosophical Publishing House, 1958), vii.
[113] N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis : Fortress Press, 1996), 73.
[114] Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar has a new book, Honest to Jesus: Jesus For a New Millennium (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). See also, US News and World Report (August 4, 1997), 55.
[115] Marcus Borg, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teaching of Jesus (New York/Toronto: Edwin Mellen, 1984); Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987).
[116] So declared Koester, in Trajectories, 270.
[117] See Robert Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993), 1.
[118] Arland D. Jacobson, The First Gospel: An Introduction to Q (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1992).
[119]. Burton L. Mack (also a member of the Jesus Seminar), The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (San Francisco: Harper, 1993).
[120] This is another offering by Polebridge Press – John S. Kloppenborg, Marvin W. Meyer, Stephen J. Patterson and Michael G. Steinhauser, Q Thomas Reader (Sonoma, CA: Polebridge Press, 1990).
[121] Ibid. See also the judgment of Hobbs in 1980: “There is no serenity in the field of the sources of the Gospels, there are no longer `assured results of scholarship…'”
[122] A lecture given at Drew University in 1983, published as “The Sayings of Jesus:Q,” Drew Gateway (Fall, 1983), 26-38, cited in Farmer, “The Church’s Stake,” 15.
[123] Farmer, “The Church’s Stake,” 15. See also S. Petrie, “Q Is Only What You Make It,” Novum Testamentum 3 (1959), cited by Wenham, Redating, 42. See Jones, Gnostic Empire, 105, n.34, where a portion of this article is cited. In 1989 a similar judgment about Q was made by Hobbs, “A Quarter-Century Without Q,” 13: “No reconstruction of Q has gained anything like overwhelming acceptance.”
[124]. A. M. Farrer, “On Dispensing With Q,” Studies In The Gospels, ed. D. E. Nineham (Oxford: University Press, 1955).
[125] M. D. Goulder, a radical critic, nevertheless finds Farrer’s arguments still convincing in 1980. See his “Farrer on Q,” Theology 83 (1980), 190-195, and also his “On Putting Q To the Test,” New Testament Studies 24 (1978), 218-234.
[126] See the article by Edward C. Hobbs, professor of theology at the Graduate Theological Union, and the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, Berkeley, California, “A Quarter-Century Without `Q’,” Perkins Journal 33 (Summer, 1980), 10.
[127] Art.cit., 19. In the judgment of Hobbs (in somewhat purple prose): “very few are owed so much by so many as Austin Farrer is owed. He is dead these ten years; the posterity of his work lives after him, to declare his wisdom and to summon his successors to honor him, as in fact we do this day.” William Farmer, “The Church’s Stake,” 16, still cites Farrer’s argument as unanswered in 1986.
[128] Miller, “The Gospels that Did Not Make the Cut,” 15. See also his introduction to The Complete Gospels, xi, where he boasts that the work is “free of ecclesiastical and religious control.” Is Miller naive enough to think that Funk did not bring together a group of scholars with a religious pre-commitment?
[129] The studied attempt at objectivity is undermined by the ideological homogeneity of the Seminar members assembled by Robert Funk, most of whom would doubtless call themselves theological liberals. Beyond that one may well wonder how much these scholars are representative of world-wide New Testament scholarship.
[134] James M. Robinson, “How My Mind Has changed,” SBL Papers (1984), 482.
[135] .From a letter to the present author, dated Friday, 25 November, 1994.
[136] Ibid., 481. In recounting his thoughts as a young scholar, choosing between the conservative Oscar Cullmann and the radical Rudolf Bultmann, he states: “…with Cullmann one had nowhere to go, whereas with Bultmann one had the agenda for a meaningful lifetime of research.”
[137] James M. Robinson, “How My Mind Has Changed,” 482.
[138] James Robinson, Nag Hammadi in English, 3.
[139]. Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1993).
[140] Marcus J. Borg, “Me and Jesus: The Journey Home,” The Fourth R (July/August 1993), 9.
[141]. Scott McKnight, “Who is Jesus: An Introduction to Jesus Studies,” Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Re-invents the Historical Jesus, ed. Michael J. Wilkin and J. P. Moreland (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 70, n.22. Professor McKnight here mentions a master’s thesis written under his direction at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School by Dana K. Ostby, “The Historical Jesus and the Supernatural World: A Shift in the Modern Critical Worldview with Special Emphasis on the Writings of Marcus Borg,” 1991, which traces Borg’s theological development.
[142] . Alan Morrison, The Serpent and the Cross: Religious Corruption in an Evil Age (Birmingham, UK: K&M Books, 1994), 568. Huston Smith has published with the Theosophical Publishing House of Wheaton, Illinois [Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (Wheaton, Ill: Theosophical Publishing House, 1989)] . Readers will recall that the Theosophical Society was founded towards the end of the nineteenth century by the spiritualist Helena Blavatsky, and later propagated by Annie Besant, and that both women are now considered foremothers of the New Age. An authority on the history of the occult calls the Theosophical Society “the very pillar of the late nineteenth century revival of the occult,” according to James Webb, The Occult Establishment (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1976), 25 and 553.
[143] Borg, “Me and Jesus,” 9.
[144] Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993).
[146] The following information is drawn from Horton Harris, David Friedrich Strauss and His Theology (Cambridge: The University Press, 1973).
[150] Strauss’ Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Zeller, 1876-78, cited in Harris, ibid., 16.
[151] George Lucas recognized Campbell as one of his spiritual mentors, and Campbell was a constant guest a the Skywalker Ranch.
[152] In a PBS series, shown in the late 80s. One must not miss the irony of tax-payer money being used to promote a deeply religious, anti-Christian, prosyletizing apology for pagan spirituality.
[153] Joseph Campbell, The Power Of Myth (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 58.
[154] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, 121. Interestingly, Jung, whom Campbell followed, was fascinated by the Mother-Goddess cults which he believed expressed the truth about reality-see Richard Noll, The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 161-176.
[155] Stephen Neil and Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament 1961-1986. Second edition (Oxford: OUP, 1988), 369.
[156] Jesus and the Victory of God, 33.
[157] The Fourth R (August, 2000), 17.
[158] John A. T. Robinson, “The Mentor Who Shaped My Ministry,” The Fourth R 15/5 (September/October, 2002), 17.
[161] John Shelby Spong, Why Christianity Must Change Or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile (San Francisco: Harper, 1999), xviii.
[162] Lloyd Geering, The World to Come: From Christian Past to Global Future (Polebridge Press, 1999), and Tomorrow’s God: How We Create Our Worlds (Polebridge, 2000).
[163] Geering, Tomorrow’s God, 130.
[164] Geering, Tomorrow’s God, 131.
[167] 152. Already the UN seems ready to make reality what is still a theoretical utopia. Kofi Annan urges “a global society for all,” abcnews.go.com (07/02/2001). He believes that “humanity is indivisible” (Insight Mag.com, October 4, 2000), and promises a world without want and without fear.
[170] 105. The warning of Roman Catholic philosopher, Thomas Molnar (Utopia, 217), needs to be heard: “…the very idea of planetary unity assumes the existence of a new and mature mankind which is capable of transcending all evils which used to mark the old mankind…[a] ‘new man.'” This, of course, is why utopians like Geering must propose a religious solution, for only from religion can one hope for a transformed humaniaty, which raises the following question: can religious paganism transform fallen mankind?
[173] C. S. Lewis, Miracles (New York: The MacMillan Publishing Company/Collier Books, 1947), 82-3.
[178] See p. 154: “All religious traditions will contribute…and those that can respond most flexibly…to the current challenges are likely to offer the most.”
[180] Johannes van Oort, “New Light on Christian Gnosis,” Louvain Studies 24 (1999), 26,
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Feb 2, 2003
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