<< back to Online Library Table of Contents
“What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
Ecclesiastes 1:9
The early Church spent much of
its time debunking heresies. Wrestling with the chaos of contending beliefs the
Church was compelled to differentiate itself between Marcionism, Arianism,
Nestorianism and other ancient lies by legitimately formulating its theological
views through the gathering of both clergy and laity in Ecumenical Councils.
While most scholars agree that these doctrinal battles culminated in the
development of the non-negotiable tenets of the Nicene Creed (4th Century), the
recent emergence of heretically based novels, films and magazine articles attest
that the X-Files of ancient defeated voices are as much a temptation today as
they were in the second, third and fourth centuries.
The rage of the early Christian
world, X-Files might be described as exotic religious texts that claimed to
express truths about Jesus, his mother, the content and interpretation of the
scriptures, and the nature of the church. An amalgamation of Greek Philosophy,
magic and eastern ideas, these manuscripts coalesced into a sectarian heresy
that came to be known as Gnosticism. Based on the Greek word for knowledge
(gnosis) Gnostics held the central belief that salvation was not accomplished
through the Church that was founded on the mystery of the cross and resurrection
of Jesus Christ but rather on an individual’s ability to discover true knowledge
and wisdom on his or her own! Whereas Orthodox Christianity preaches salvation
to all that will accept it, Gnosticism espouses the belief that only an elite
will be able to comprehend the breadth of hidden truth.
Fortunately, the false teachings
of Gnosticism and those that pertained to the other heresies of early
Christianity were debunked by theologians such as Irenaeus, Clement of
Alexandria, Basil the Great, and Athanasius, who emphasized the apostolic
exposition of revealed truth. For these great defenders of the Faith, the truth
of the gospel was not a matter of a secret but of a sacred tradition that
centered on the Incarnation, Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Transmitted by a legitimate apostolic succession of bishops that verified the
authentic and continuous voice of the apostles, this sacred truth X-posed the
illogical doctrines of the Gnostics as ridiculous . . . as worthless X-Files!
For nearly two millennia the
X-ed Files of Gnosticism remained buried in the arid sands of ancient history.
In 1945, however, a number of early Christian Gnostic papyri manuscripts,
translated from Greek into Coptic, were discovered by local peasants near the
Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi. Since the discovery of these documents, there has
been a resurgence of interest in Gnostic doctrines throughout the world. In
fact, numerous social scholars (Armstrong, H; Bloom, H; Pagels, E.; Hitchcock,
J) have all noted a strong Gnostic trend in contemporary media. The vogue of
mystical and exotically charged books such as the Da Vinci Code and the
Jesus Papers are the direct result of the re-emergence of these ancient
worn-out debates. The appearance of Gnostic creedal tenants such as: (a) the
suspicion of authority, (b) private spirituality, (c) the rejection of external
forms of worship, (d) the distortion of sexuality, (e) the rejection of bodily
Incarnation of God, and (f) the refutation of absolute truths, attest to the Old
Testament exhortation quoted above . . . indeed, “what
has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing
new under the sun” (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
According to Dan
Brown, the Jesus Seminar and Good Morning America, the traditional gospels
written by Matthew, Mark. Luke and John can no longer be trusted. Instead, we
are asked to
discard 2,000 years of reliable witness and scholarship and replace it with the
message conveyed in “new gospels.” We are encouraged to look to architectural
symbols, secret rituals and previously discarded apocryphal texts such as the
Gospels of Thomas and Judas for the reliable and authentic understanding of the
nature of the Church and the Person of Jesus Christ. Confronted with such an
irrational invitation from a frenzied media to discard what is valid for what is
spurious one cannot but recall Saint Paul’s admonition to the Galatians
concerning the Gnostic pretense of new knowledge:
“I am astonished that you are so quickly deserting
the one who called you by the grace of Christ and are turning to a different
gospel which is really no gospel at all. Evidently some people are throwing you
into confusion and are trying to pervert the gospel of Christ. But even if we or
an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to
you, let him be eternally condemned! 9As we have already said, so now I say
again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted, let
him be eternally condemned!” (Galatians 1:6-9)
What can be done to guard the authentic Christian
message from those that would once again attempt to de-construct it? What can
we do to help our children differentiate fact from the fantasy articulated in
novel like The Da Vinci Code that has sold over 46 million copies in 35
languages? I would suggest that we turn our collective attention to the
prayerful study of the theological writings of the early Church Fathers . . .
the ramparts that sustained the orthodoxy of the Gospel in the past! In so
doing, we will begin to develop our understanding of an Orthodox Christian
World-View that will provide the intellectual scaffolding and filter for
successfully distinguishing truth from perversion of sugar-coded falsehood.
Although there are many variants, at its core
Gnosticism asserts the belief that that the world in which we now live is our
prison. Having rejected the notion that God is the Creator of the cosmos with
all its potential sacramental elements, the life-goal of the Gnostic is to
escape the created order through the knowledge (gnosis) of deep
self-illumination. By abandoning the search for God, however, humanity is
destined to rummage blindly through life, running from one “clue” to another,
like Langdon, the pathetic character in Dan Brown’s novel, trying in vain to
discover the cipher to the code . . . the grail of our existence!
G. K. Chesterton one said that
when people cease believing in Christianity, it is not that they will believe in
nothing, but rather, they will believe in anything. The apocryphal myths
contained in the X-Files of early heretical texts have once again emerged as the
protagonists against the Sacred Tradition of Orthodox Christianity seeking to
lead the catechetically uninformed and spiritually fickle into a hollow pursuit
whose ultimate destination is death and destruction. Let future generations
find us, as we found our forebears, worthy of defending the apostolic creedal
truths of Orthodox Christianity against historical revisionists who base their
conspiratorial accounts on the X-Files of ancient lies.
