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God's Word or Human Words - Part 1

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Dear All,

 

We concluded 'Gospels In Conflict: John and Thomas' with the following words:

 

(p.73) " But the discovery of Thomas's gospel shows us that other early

Christians held quite different understandings of " the gospel. " For what John

rejects as religiously inadequate--the conviction that the divine dwells as

" light " within all beings--is much like the hidden " good news " that Thomas's

gospel proclaims. [152] Many Christians today who read the Gospel of Thomas

assume at first that it is simply wrong, and deservedly called heretical. Yet

what Christians have disparagingly called gnostic and heretical sometimes turn

out to be forms of Christian teaching that are merely unfamiliar to

us--unfamiliar precisely because of the active and successful opposition of

Christians such as John.

 

How, then, did John prevail? To answer this question, let us look at the

challenges that confronted the first generations of his readers. "

 

Beyond Belief (The Secret Gospel of Thomas), Chapter 2, p. 73.

 

Note:

 

[152] C.H. Dodd, in his commentary on the Johannine gospel, notes that this is

what separates John's message from " gnostics " ; for Dodd, this secures John's

place as an authentically Christian teacher, see 'Interpretation of the Fourth

Gospel', 97-114, 250-285.

 

Here now is Part 1 of 'God's Word or Human Words'.

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

 

God's Word or Human Words - Part 1

 

(p.74) About a year after I had written 'The Gnostic Gospels', I was sitting at

tea one brilliant October afternoon at the Zen Center in San Francisco, a guest

of the Roshi, along with Brother David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk. The

Roshi, an American whose name is Richard Baker, told us how he, as a young man,

had gone from Boston to Kyoto, where he entered a Buddhist monastery and became

a disciple of the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. " But " --he laughed-- " had I

known the Gospel of Thomas, I wouldn't have had to become a Buddhist! " Brother

David, who that morning had offered to the Zen students a succinct and incisive

exposition of the Apostles' Creed, shook his head. Thomas and some other

unorthodox gospels, he acknowledged, may be Christian mystical writings, but, he

insisted, they are essentially no different from what the church offers:

" There's nothing in those texts that you can't find in the writings of the great

mystics of the church, like Saint Teresa, or Saint John of the Cross. "

 

(p.75) I said that I did not agree. In the first place, Teresa of Avila and John

of the Cross--to say nothing of Jacob Boehme, the German mystic of the

seventeenth century, and others like him, who were condemned and excommunicated

as heretics--were intensely aware that whatever " revelations " they confided to

their monastic superiors would have to conform--or seem to conform--to orthodox

teaching. Christian mystics, like their Jewish and Muslim counterparts, have

always been careful not to identify themselves with God. But the Gospel of

Thomas teaches that recognizing one's affinity with God is the key to the

kingdom of God. The remarkable modern scholar Theodor Gaster, the thirteenth son

of the chief rabbi of London, observed that Jewish mystics are careful to speak

of 'relationship' with God but not of 'identification': " The Jewish mystic can

say, with Martin Buber, 'I 'and' Thou,' but can never say 'I 'am' Thou,' which

is permissible in Hindu religious teaching, for example, as in the phrase, 'tat

thvam asi' [literally, " Thou art 'that' " ]. " [1]

 

Orthodox Jews and Christians, of course, have never wholly denied affinity

between God and ourselves. But their leaders have tended to discourage or, at

least, to circumscribe the process through which people may seek God on their

own. This may be why some people raised as Christians and Jews today are looking

elsewhere to supplement what they have not found in Western tradition. Even

Father Thomas Keating, the former abbot of St. Joseph's Abbey in Spencer,

Massachusetts, who has been a Cistercian monk for over fifty years, has sought

through dialogue with the Buddhist and other wisdom traditions, as well as

contemporary science, to deepen the ancient practice he calls Centering Prayer.

(p.76) Fr. Keating finds that certain elements of Buddhist meditative practice

complement Christian tradition by offering other experiential ways to discover

divine truth. Thomas Merton, the famous monk who wrote the best-seller of the

1940s 'The Seven Storey Mountain', a Trappist like Keating, had similarly

investigated Buddhist tradition. Thus even some devoted Christians have found

that the impulse to seek God overflows the banks of a single tradition.

 

Beyond Belief (The Secret Gospel of Thomas), Chapter 3, p. 75-76

Elaine Pagels

Vintage Books, New York, U.S.A

ISBN: 0-375-70316-0

 

Notes:

 

For the technical discussion of the research summarized in this chapter, see

Elaine Pagels, " Irenaeus, the 'Canon of Truth' and the Gospel of John: 'Making a

Difference' Through Hermeneutics and Ritual, " 'Vigiliae Christianae' 56.4

(2002), 339-371.

 

[1] Theodor Gaster's comment occurred in a conversation; Buber's phrase serves

as the title of his book 'I and Thou' (translated by W. Kaufmann from 'Ich und

du' and published in New York, 1970).

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