A Preview of the Great Apostasy?


http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/sw.htm



Spirit Wars: Pagan Renewal in Christian America
by Peter Jones
WinePress Publishing, 1997
$18.95, 331 pages
ISBN: 1-883893-74-7




"Where was it ...said...that in the religious history of the West the
old gods are always turning into devils, cast from their thrones into
dark undergrounds, to be lords over the dead and the wicked? It had
happened to..the Northern gods...who became horned devils for
Christians to fear...And now look, the wheel turns, Jehovah becomes the
devil. Old Nobadaddy, liver-spotted greasy-bearded jealous God, spread
over his hoard of blessings like the Dragon, surrounded by his
sycophants singing praises, never enough though...

(John Crowley, "Love & Sleep," pages 499-500)



It's a rare American church-goer who has not noticed that at least some
of the leaders of his denomination have been talking funny in recent
years.

[...] To take the most colorful example: if the
God of Genesis said to be fruitful and multiply but otherwise to behave
yourself, then obviously the way to subvert his law is to engage in any
form of sex that does not result in children. There has always been a
real horror of reproduction in gnostics of all ages. This sentiment was
well expressed by Jack Kerouac in his declining years, when he
regretted that he had fathered a daughter and thereby had added to the
"meat-wheel" of the world system. Similarly, both in modern and in
ancient times, there has been a strong gnostic tendency to regard
homosexuality as metaphysically superior, since it moves beyond the
division of gender roles established by the Demiurge.

[...] When the whole of art and science and politics are
denounced as part of a system of patriarchal oppression, the point is
not to draw attention to unjust gender-relationships, the point is to
get rid of the art and the science and the politics. Again, the impulse
here is fundamentally gnostic, a studied loathing of ordinary life not
because it is evil, but because it exists.
[...] whose participants vote periodically on which elements of the
New Testament should be given what level of credence, and particularly
on which sayings attributed to Jesus were really his. The sayings they
endorse are those that suggest Jesus was mostly interested in finding
the inner self and subverting gender roles.

A Preview of the Great Apostasy?

http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/sw.htm

Spirit Wars: Pagan Renewal in Christian America
by Peter Jones
WinePress Publishing, 1997
$18.95, 331 pages
ISBN: 1-883893-74-7

"Where was it ...said...that in the religious history of the West the
old gods are always turning into devils, cast from their thrones into
dark undergrounds, to be lords over the dead and the wicked? It had
happened to..the Northern gods...who became horned devils for
Christians to fear...And now look, the wheel turns, Jehovah becomes the
devil. Old Nobadaddy, liver-spotted greasy-bearded jealous God, spread
over his hoard of blessings like the Dragon, surrounded by his
sycophants singing praises, never enough though...

(John Crowley, "Love & Sleep," pages 499-500)

It's a rare American church-goer who has not noticed that at least some
of the leaders of his denomination have been talking funny in recent
years. The use of gender-neutral language does not prove much, since
this is becoming a standard professional-class dialect (failure to use
which is in some cases actionable at law). Nevertheless, even the most
trusting parishioner has to wonder whether new formulas like "Creator,
Savior, Comforter" really mean the same as the old "Father, Son, Holy
Spirit." Perhaps more incomprehensible to the folks in the pews has
been the dogmatization of ecology, which might seem to some people to
be the paradigm case of a prudential issue.

Paradoxically, it is only in the most extreme situations, where pastors
speak openly of the Earth as the goddess Gaia and churches invite
practicing witches to lead Bible study groups on Halloween, that it
really becomes clear what is going on. The bald truth is that a large
slice of the American theological establishment has abandoned
Christianity as expressed in its traditional creedal formulations and
adopted a species of gnosticism. "Spirit Wars," a new book by Peter
Jones, currently Professor of New Testament at Westminster Seminary in
Escondido, California, is a guide to this new religion, showing how it
fits into the intellectual landscape of late twentieth century America
and describing in detail its many close links with the classical
gnostic heresies of the first few centuries A.D.

Professor Jones writes from an evangelical perspective, though not
without reference to the state of Judaism and the Roman Catholic
Church. (Regarding the latter, he quotes frequently from Donna
Steichen's "Ungodly Rage.") With a masters degree from the Harvard
Divinity School and a doctorate from the Princeton Theological
Seminary, he is certainly in a position to describe the progressive
paganization of the leadership of the mainline churches in America.
Though British-born, he seems to have made his way through the great
educational institutions of the United States just before the Long
March of `60s ideology began. Unlike many of his younger colleagues
today, he is therefore still able to be shocked.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the book is the connections it
makes between the resurgence of gnosticism and other trends in the
academy and politics. The literary technique known as deconstruction,
for instance, helped to create the intellectual universe in which the
transcendental monotheism of orthodox Christianity became quite
literally unthinkable to many people with expensive educations. I might
add that, most recently, deconstruction (which turned out to have been
founded by Nazis) has been superseded in some institutions by some form
of "historicism." As practiced by many prominent theologians, this
approach essentially consists of recasting biblical history to fit an
ideological perspective. The metaphysical anti-monotheism inculcated by
deconstruction still remains, of course, but there has been added to it
a profound dishonesty in the use of historical sources.

Even more interesting, perhaps, is Jones's assertion that American
gnosticism has begun to serve as the theological underpinning of
cultural and even political liberalism. For two centuries, the chief
alternative to orthodox Christianity was atheist humanism, or agnostic
scientism, or at any rate some way of looking at the world that
categorically excluded the supernatural. This is no longer the case.
Increasingly, people who oppose traditional ethics and who seek to
collapse the human race into the natural world are claiming some sort
of supernatural sanction. This trend has entered the mainstream to an
appalling degree, as even a cursory familiarity with Vice President Al
Gore's preachy eco-feminist tract, "Earth in the Balance," will
confirm. In some ways, the people who control the key institutions of
American society are more pious than their predecessors were a century
ago. The problem is that this piety is directed toward objects that
have less and less in common with the religion of the people these
institutions are supposed to serve and represent.

The origins of gnosticism are disputed, as is the precise time of its
appearance, but it is clear that in the first few centuries after Jesus
there was a variety of sects, other than the orthodox church, that
claimed to be Christian, indeed to be the true and esoteric
Christianity. They changed and multiplied, as their adherents followed
after one charismatic adept after another, but a few themes and names
stand out. Marcion, for instance, who lived in the second century,
essentially threw out the whole Old Testament as the work of the devil
and kept only fragments of the New. Others, such Valentinus, tended to
keep the scriptures but modified their meaning. As a rule, though, in
gnostic speculation the God of the Jews was denounced as a tyrant who
had created the inferior world in which we live. His law is folly and
his promises are lies. The universe over which he rules is a
multi-layered prison in which human beings are confined in ignorance of
their origin and destiny. The serpent in the Garden of Eden was seeking
to liberate mankind, and Eve was its prophet.

In most gnostic systems, there is indeed a god worthy of worship, but
one wholly alien to this world. This god is neither male nor female,
neither good nor evil, but beyond all categories even by analogy. The
Christ is his agent, but understood primarily as a psychological
function. The Jesus of history, to the extent the gnostics were
interested in him at all, was an exemplar rather than a redeemer. Human
beings contain the "sparks" of the alien god. After many incarnations,
these captive souls may hope to attain the "knowledge," the "gnosis"
(the words are cognate, by the way) that will allow them to return to
their origin.

How did the sparks get there? They are trapped, through "love and
sleep," in the mass of the world, into which a fragment of the complex
divine reality called the "pleroma" has fallen. This final emanation of
the divine is called Sophia, "wisdom." She is conceived of as a goddess
whose fear and terror and grief at her separation from the pleroma gave
birth to the Demiurge, the false god of our creation. There is a
"higher" or unfallen aspect of Sophia who works to undo the enslavement
of the divine to matter and to rescue the human race from the world of
birth, death and division.

Now, all of this sounds like pretty esoteric stuff, something that only
scholars or would-be magicians might be expected to run across. Until a
few years ago, that was largely true. Today, in contrast, expressions
of gnosticism turn up in the most unexpected places. Consider, for
instance, the following autobiographical description of a vision
experienced by the author of a recent book that dealt largely with the
state of current progress toward a unified field theory in physics:

"...I became convinced...that I was the only conscious being in the
universe. There was no future, no past, no present other than what I
imagined them to be. I was filled, initially, with a sense of limitless
joy and power. Then, abruptly, I became convinced that if I abandoned
myself further to ecstasy, it might consume me...With this realization,
my bliss turned into horror...As I fell I dissolved into what seemed to
be an infinity of selves."

(John Horgan, "The End of Science," page 261)

The interesting point here is that the writer of this passage had
apparently never heard of the gnostic doctrine that the world had been
created through God's own fear. He mulled over this experience for many
years and eventually wrote "The End of Science" to work through the
possibility of a downside to omniscience. However, most people do get
their ideas about gnosticism from books rather than personal
experience. With certain adaptations, all of the themes described above
as elements of ancient gnosticism now have modern analogues, expounded
in prestigious schools of divinity and, in many cases, preached to
actual congregations.

Some things have needed translation, of course. Classical gnostics
loathed matter and the structures of this world because they thought
there was an immeasurably better world elsewhere. However, though this
better reality was absolutely transcendent, they believed the way to
find it was by looking within. In modern gnosticism, in contrast, the
transcendent is a more muted theme; any appeal to the "beyond" is
likely to be denounced as an ideology. The search within continues,
however. Instead of seeking union with the alien god, modern gnostics
seek their authentic selves. The techniques for this search are
therefore more likely to be considered therapy than magic, though in
fact rather a lot of traditional hocus-pocus has become fashionable in
progressive religious circles.

In any event, today the opposition to the "structures of this world" is
at least as fierce as it was in the religious underground of
second-century Alexandria. To take the most colorful example: if the
God of Genesis said to be fruitful and multiply but otherwise to behave
yourself, then obviously the way to subvert his law is to engage in any
form of sex that does not result in children. There has always been a
real horror of reproduction in gnostics of all ages. This sentiment was
well expressed by Jack Kerouac in his declining years, when he
regretted that he had fathered a daughter and thereby had added to the
"meat-wheel" of the world system. Similarly, both in modern and in
ancient times, there has been a strong gnostic tendency to regard
homosexuality as metaphysically superior, since it moves beyond the
division of gender roles established by the Demiurge.

Modern gnosticism is predominantly feminist, and indeed to the extent
that feminism seeks an ontological justification, gnosticism is
probably it. However, we should keep in mind that consciously gnostic
feminism has as little to do with the actual needs and concerns of most
women as Leninism does with those of industrial workers. I, at least,
am increasingly convinced that the role of feminism in the critique of
the Western tradition is in any case largely instrumental. Notions like
"patriarchy" are essentially a form of class analysis, with the genders
substituted for economic classes. It is an unfalsifiable hypothesis.
Like the term "bourgeois," it is a cuss-word rather than a description
of anything. When the whole of art and science and politics are
denounced as part of a system of patriarchal oppression, the point is
not to draw attention to unjust gender-relationships, the point is to
get rid of the art and the science and the politics. Again, the impulse
here is fundamentally gnostic, a studied loathing of ordinary life not
because it is evil, but because it exists.

A novel aspect of modern gnosticism is its millenarian streak. Ancient
gnostics anticipated that the corrupt world system created by the
incompetent Demiurge would come crashing down one day, but they did not
normally anticipate it happening anytime soon. They were wholly
uninterested in transforming the world or in becoming a universal
faith. In today's gnosticism, in contrast, there is a strong
dispensationalist sentiment. The Age of Christianity (or of Jehovah) is
over, they say, and the New Age is about to begin. Among feminist
gnostics, the motto "women will destroy god" is frequently met with.
There is a high end and a low end to this sentiment. The low end is
represented by "witches" who conduct gothic ceremonies in honor of the
return of the Goddess Sophia. The high end is represented by people
like Joseph Campbell, who held that the global society of the third
millennium requires a new global myth, one consonant with modern
science and social practice. There is no lack of perfectly respectable
people, again notably including Al Gore, who have suggested that the
myth of the Goddess Gaia, of the Earth as organism, might serve this
function. Thus, modern gnosticism has plans not only for destruction,
but for the reconstruction to follow.

On a less global level, vandalism is a good enough description for what
has been happening in the Protestant mainline churches and elements of
the Catholic Church for the past quarter century. (Actually, in the
case of Catholic parish churches, "vandalism" is not a mere metaphor,
considering the ghastly effect that modernizing liturgists have had on
the ornamentation and design of church buildings.) Church-goers who
have been paying any attention at all have had little trouble following
the irresponsible mutations that have occurred in the treatment of
scripture and liturgy.

Peter Jones is particularly exercised by the proliferation of
tendentious Bible translations in recent years. Perhaps the most
dishonest exercise so far has been "The Five Gospels," a
heavily-marketed translation of the four canonical gospels, plus the
"Gospel of Thomas," a work that came to light among the gnostic texts
found at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. The "Gospel of Thomas" is simply
not a "gospel," both because it is of later composition and quite
different in form, a mere collection of sayings attributed to Jesus.
Nevertheless, this is precisely the kind of distinction that many
modern theologians have been systematically subverting.

The progressive line now is that the gnostics had as much right to be
considered Christians as did the orthodox Church. The victory of one
faction over the other was a matter of pure chance, the outcome of a
power struggle. How Christian orthodoxy, an outlawed religion for three
centuries, could have won a power struggle against anybody is hard to
see. Syncretistic religions that included elements of Christianity were
not illegal; a statue of Jesus stood in the pantheon of the third
century emperor Alexander Severus. Nevertheless, in the interests of
inclusiveness, "Gnostic Bibles" containing apocryphal literature from
Nag Hammadi and other sources have already begun to appear. They find
increasing acceptance in seminaries where the whole idea of a biblical
canon is under question..

The situation is only exacerbated by enterprises like the "Jesus
Seminar," whose participants vote periodically on which elements of the
New Testament should be given what level of credence, and particularly
on which sayings attributed to Jesus were really his. The sayings they
endorse are those that suggest Jesus was mostly interested in finding
the inner self and subverting gender roles. The Seminar is, as Jones
notes, essentially a hoax perpetrated by people with impeccable
credentials. However, it has the backing of Time Magazine, which gives
choice bits of its "discoveries" wide publicity every Christmas and
Easter.

Just thinking about this subject is enough to invite cosmic paranoia
(which is a good definition for gnosticism in the first place). And
then, of course, sometimes merely odd stuff happens. As I mentioned,
Peter Jones is English, and he hails from Liverpool. In fact, he was a
good friend of John Lennon in high school. They parted company when
Lennon went to vocational school for the arts while Jones took a
college track. Jones pronounces himself mystified as to how, despite
this divergence in education, Lennon was incorporating gnostic themes
into his later work that Jones knew about only because he had studied
patristics. I mention this because, a few hours before starting to read
this book, I was poking about on the Web and I came across a site whose
author purported to be no less a person than Antichrist himself. Of
course, sites purportedly maintained by Abraham Lincoln are probably no
less numerous than those maintained by Antichrist. This particular
Antichrist, however, had an eschatology that incorporated John Lennon
as the final incarnation of Christ, so that Lennon's death marked the
beginning of the end of the Christian era. I hate it when this kind of
thing happens.

Spirit Wars is in fact fairly free of paranoia and quite devoid of
conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, towards the end of the book, Jones
does permit himself this observation:

"As she covers her anemic body with a fake robe of Christ, Sophia
begins to look more and more like the harlot of the Apocalypse, that
startling image of an apostate Church, fornicating with the kings of
the earth, drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs of Jesus.
On the threshold of the third millennium, the `Spirit Wars' have begun
in dead earnest, though at present we have only seen the initial
skirmishes. Sophia is only at the beginning of her reign."

(Spirit Wars, page 257)

Well, maybe. On the other hand, there are some other points to
consider. The big one is the size of gnosticism's actual audience.
Peter Jones cites dozens of conferences, books and papers that propound
a gnostic point of view (the book has 60 pages of notes; I just wish it
had a better index). I am quite ready to believe, as Jones suggests,
that gnosticism is now the orthodoxy of many of America's major
seminaries. Still, he does overlook one key point about the power of
gnosticism: it empties churches faster than stink bombs. The mainline
Protestant churches with which Jones is primarily concerned have been
bleeding membership for thirty years. They adopted fad after fad in
theology and liturgy, so that when gnosticism and feminism came along
they had no living tradition of resistance. The result was that soon
many such churches also had no members.

On the Catholic side, of course, the saddest case has been what
happened to American nuns. In the wake of the Second Vatican Council in
the 1960s, some few orders made only the modest reforms suggested by
the Council, and at this writing they look like they will survive.
Most, however, followed essentially the same gnosticizing trend as,
say, the Episcopal Church in America. The result is that the scariest
academic conferences Jones discusses, in which the God of the Bible is
denounced as an idol and goddesses are openly worshipped, are largely
populated by Catholic nuns. They are, however, for the most part aging
nuns. Their orders do not attract new members. They can solicit
contributions from ordinary Catholics successfully only by appealing to
old memories of parochial school graduates. Their fate is as clear an
indication as one could wish that liberal Christianity has no future.

The churches that are growing in the United States are for the most
part those that make some effort to remain theologically conservative,
though one might wish that they could combine this endeavor with a
higher level of theological sophistication. Some of the mainline
churches, notably the Presbyterians, have recoiled from the abyss at
the insistence of their local memberships and started firing liberal
staff in their central organizations. The Catholic Church in this
decade has produced a thoroughly orthodox Catechism that has reached a
wide popular audience despite the efforts of liberal ecclesiastical
bureaucrats to suppress it. While these developments hardly constitute
rollback (a fine old Cold War expression), they do suggest that Sophia
is not having things all her own way.

Finally, there is one other point to consider in assessing the
prospects of modern gnosticism. The religious future of the West cannot
be discussed without reference to the future of the West as a whole.
Peter Jones notes the analogies between the religious climate of the
early Christian centuries and that of today. Cyclical historians have
given this matter a great deal of thought. Jones cites Toynbee on the
subject, who says that the twentieth century will be remembered as the
time when the "Higher Religion" of the third millennium appeared. You
may pick your own favorite historical tea-leaf reader, but mine is
Oswald Spengler. Writing seventy years ago, he used the term "Second
Religiousness" to describe the cultural state of old civilizations,
after their "modern" eras have ended. According to him, it is precisely
in this final phase that "fancy-religions" like Theosophy and the cult
of Isis lose their appeal. Civilizations return to the forms of their
springtimes, which in the case of the West means a form of conservative
Christianity. It is not wholly clear that time is on the gnostics'
side.

A Preview of the Great Apostasy?


http://pages.prodigy.net/aesir/sw.htm



Spirit Wars: Pagan Renewal in Christian America
by Peter Jones
WinePress Publishing, 1997
$18.95, 331 pages
ISBN: 1-883893-74-7

A Preview of the Great Apostasy?