Issue
Gnosticism
Vol. 4, No. 4 • Jul/Aug 1995
Answering the question: What do Madonna, Pat Robertson, Lewis Sperry Chafer, Mary Baker Eddy, and The Beatles have in common? Learn to despise this world of outward things, and devote yourself to what lies within…Christ is ready to come to you, with what kindess in his glance! But you must make room, deep in your […]
All Articles (6)
Gnostic Tendencies
Answering the question: What do Madonna, Pat Robertson, Lewis Sperry Chafer, Mary Baker Eddy, and The Beatles have in common? Learn to despise this world of outward things, and devote yourself to what lies within…Christ is ready to come to you, with what kindess in his glance! But you must make room, deep in your […]
Gnostic Worship
Americans are often accused by foreigners of expressing a “greasy familiarity,” even with people they have met for the first time. Similarly, there is a greasy familiarity inherent to Gnosticism, based on the belief that we have direct and immediate access to God whenever and however we want. Whenever the children in the public school […]
The Pride of Simplicity
Egalitarian movements almost always spawn new breeds of elitism. George Orwell showed this bitter irony in Animal Farm. And Christians should find nothing surprising in such an assertion since all rebellions against any alleged elitism are tantamount to saying, “If I were Adam, I wouldn’t have sinned in the first place.” The Church falls prey […]
Trichotomy
One of the most difficult problems any theological tradition faces is that there are often fundamental differences at critical points between the “official doctrine” affirmed by the divines and academics of that tradition, and those doctrines actually believed and practiced on a popular level by the rank and file. There is, perhaps, no greater illustration […]
The New Gnosticism
Entertainment Weekly is not exactly an evangelical house-organ, and yet, like many secular periodicals these days, it seems to observe more truth than a number of evangelical magazines and journals. In its October 7, 1994, issue, Jeff Gordinier wrote, In a year when TV airwaves are aflutter with winged spirits, the bestseller lists are clogged […]
Are Your Hymns Too Spiritual?
The average Christian will learn more from hymns than from any systematic theology. Hymns chart progression from classic hymns of the 17th and 18th centuries (especially those of Charles Wesley, Augustus Toplady, John Newton and William Cowper) to the Romantic “songs and choruses” of the 19th and 20th centuries. They reflect the shift from Reformation […]
