- So Much to Choose From: A Tour of Vanished Christianities
Gnostics, Sethians, Encratites...what if Christianity had remained as diverse as it was when it first began?
By Richard Valantasis
Excerpted from "The Beliefnet Guide to Gnosticism and Other Vanished Christianities."
Alternative Christianities are only "alternative" because other, competing forms of Christianity rose to dominance. As a historian I often wonder what the world would have looked like if one of these now-vanished forms of Christianity had assumed the mantle of orthodoxy—or if Christianity had remained as pluralistic as it was when it began. Imagine for a moment that Gnostic Christianity had survived this early process of natural selection and that what we now call orthodox Christianity had become extinct.
You are a devout Gnostic Christian who has just moved to a new city. In the parish you moved away from, you had participated in a Gnostic spiritual group that eagerly devoted itself to Bible study, prayer and meditation, both solitary and communal; you also engaged in intense theological and spiritual debate. You and the members of your spiritual group expected far more out of church than what could be garnered from a Sunday morning worship service and coffee hour.
You believe in the superiority of the spiritual world; you distrust the material, created world. You believe that the Bible provides instructions for an ascent out of the material world and into God’s realm—and the Bible you study includes books that don’t appear in Catholic or Protestant Bibles today, such as The Gospel of Thomas, The Gospel of Mary, and the Apocryphon of John. You log onto the Internet to find a similar church in this new city...
Gosh! Just imagine if there were actually real live Gnostics! With, like, Gnostic Churches and Bishops and everything! Too bad they all died of "natural selection" (failing to become fireproof) in the face of superior orthodoxy.
The author's overwhelming ignorance saddens me. Our people were slaughtered, our scriptures burned; the murderers of Hypatia, The Albigensian Crusade, the Inquisition do not constitute "natural selection". I do wonder if he realizes how tremendously offensive this is, and the degree to which he paints himself as a dilettante. Give me five minutes alone in a locked room with this man; with access to Google. Would Valantasis be surprised, I wonder, at our curious resurgence, hooked like a Coelocanth from the depths of history?
1 comments:
Oh, I think he understands:
"The early varieties of Christianity that will be discussed in this book were condemned as heresies; those who considered themselves orthodox sought to stamp them out. Eventually they succeeded—if their ideas couldn’t be extirpated altogether (Gnosticism returned with a vengeance at the beginning of the second millennium with the Cathar heresy, for example; the Reformation revived some of the earliest challenges to orthodox Christianity) all of these groups were exiled from the church and eventually disappeared."
"Disappeared" is a euphemism for 'wiped out'. And I think he's trivializing these heresies because the so-called scholars out there know that Gnosticism is having a rebirth, and want to use ridicule to squash it, rather than force.
The author is a professor of Theology at some methodist Seminary in Colorado. His email is listed on the site, if you want to contact him directly, Reverend. However, it may be jousting at windmills. They won't take any notice of us until it's time to light the fires again.
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