'From the Feast of Agape to the Nicene Creed' - Part 1

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

i have decided not to continue with the kabbalah book as it is more complex than

it first seemed. Rather, here is Part 1 of 'From the Feast of Agape to the

Nicene Creed'. It comes from Elaine Pagels' book of 'Beyond Belief, The Secret

Gospel of Thomas'.

 

Enjoy!

 

violet

 

 

 

From the Feast of Agape to the Nicene Creed - Part 1

 

(p.3) On a bright Sunday morning in February, shivering in a T-shirt and running

shorts, I stepped into the vaulted stone vestibule of the Church of the Heavenly

Rest in New York to catch my breath and warm up. Since I had not been in church

for a long time, I was startled by my response to the worship in progress--the

soaring harmonies of the choir singing with the congregation; and the priest, a

woman in bright gold and white vestments, proclaiming the prayers in a clear,

resonant voice. As I stood watching, a thought came to me: Here is a family that

knows how to face death.

 

That morning I had gone for an early morning run while my husband and

two-and-a-half-year-old son were still sleeping. The previous night I had been

sleepless with fear and worry. (p.4) Two days before, a team of doctors at

Babies Hospital, Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, had performed a routine

checkup on our son, Mark, a year and six months after his successful open-heart

surgery. The physicians were shocked to find evidence of a rare lung disease.

Disbelieving the results, they tested further for six hours before they finally

called us in to say that Mark had pulmonary hypertension, an invariably fatal

disease, they told us. How much time? I asked. " We don't know; a few months, a

few years. "

 

The following day, a team of doctors urged us to authorize a lung biopsy, a

painful and invasive procedure. How could this help? It couldn't, they

explained; but the procedure would let them see how far the disease had

progressed. Mark was already exhausted by the previous day's ordeal. Holding

him, I felt that if more masked strangers poked needles into him in an operating

room, he might lose heart--literally--and die. We refused the biopsy, gathered

Mark's blanket, clothes, and Peter Rabbit, and carried him home.

 

Standing in the back of that church, I recognized, uncomfortably, that I needed

to be there. Here was a place to weep without imposing tears upon a child; and

here was a heterogeneous community that had gathered to sing, to celebrate, to

acknowledge common needs, and to deal with what we cannot control or imagine.

Yet the celebration in progress spoke of hope; perhaps that is what made the

presence of death bearable. Before that time, I could only ward off what I had

heard and felt the day before.

 

I returned often to that church, not looking for faith but because, in the

presence of that worship and the people gathered there--and in a smaller group

that met on weekdays in the (p.5) church basement for mutual encouragement--my

defenses fell away, exposing storms of grief and hope. In that church I gathered

new energy, and resolved, over and over, to face whatever awaited us as

constructively as possible for Mark, and for the rest of us.

 

When people would say to me, " Your faith must be of great help to you, " I would

wonder, What do they mean? What is faith? Certainly not simple assent to the set

of beliefs that worshipers in that church recited every week ( " We believe in one

God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth... " )--traditional

statements that sounded strange to me, like barely intelligible signals from the

surface, heard at the bottom of the sea. Such statements seemed to me then to

have little to do with whatever transactions we were making with one another,

with ourselves, and--so it was said--with invisible beings. I was acutely aware

that we met there driven by need and desire; yet sometimes I dared hope that

such communion has the potential to transform us.

 

I am a historian of religion, and so, as I visited that church, I wondered when

and how being a Christian became virtually synonynous with accepting a certain

set of beliefs. From historical reading, I knew that Christianity had survived

brutal persecution and flourished for generations--even centuries--'before'

Christians formulated what they believed into creeds. The origins of this

transition from scattered groups to a unified community have left few traces.

Although the apostle Paul, about twenty years after Jesus' death, stated " the

gospel, " which, he says, " I too received " ( " that Christ died for our sins

according to the Scriptures; that he was buried, and that he was raised on the

third day " ), [1] it may have been more than a hundred years (p.6) later that

some Christians, perhaps in Rome, attempted to consolidate their group against

the demands of a fellow Christian named Marcion, whom they regarded as a false

teacher, by introducing formal statements of belief into worship. [2] But only

in the 'fourth' century, after the Roman emperor Constantine himself converted

to the new faith--or at least decriminalized it--did Christian bishops, at the

emperor's command, convene in the city of Nicaea, on the Turkish coast, to agree

upon a common statement of beliefs--the so-called Nicene Creed, which defines

the faith for many Christians to this day.

 

Beyond Belief

(The Secret Gospel of Thomas)

Chapter 1, pg. 3-6

Elaine Pagels

Vintage Books, New York, U.S.A

ISBN: 0-375-70316-0

 

Notes:

 

[1] 1 Corinthians 15:3-4.

 

[2] So Adolf von Harnack reconstructed the origin of such statements; see

'History of Dogma', volume I, 5-6, and II, 1-2, in Neil Buchanan's translation

from the 1900 edition of 'Dogmengeschichte' (New York, 1961), volume I, 267-313,

and II, 1-29.