Was the Council of Nicaea About Power? Michael Horton Responds to Elaine Pagels and Alex O’Connor

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   ALEX O'CONNOR: Making heretical the Gnostic tradition may be having something to do with the consolidation of power in human earthly bishops. What's— well, what's that all about?

2. 00:13

   ELAINE PAGELS: Well, I think that is what happens.

3. 00:15

   MICHAEL HORTON: That is not what happens. In fact, when the Gnostics arose, there were no bishops.

4. 00:20

   ELAINE PAGELS: They don't want mystical teachings because mystical teachings are always open.

5. 00:27

   MICHAEL HORTON: Mystical teachings are not always open. Mystical teachings are usually pantheistic, and there is always an orthodox tradition that is not. To simply put them in terms of one being open, one being closed, is a frankly kind of polemical and unscholarly way to write history. Hi, my name is Mike Horton, and I teach theology and apologetics, and I've been looking at some really interesting comments made by Alex O'Connor and Elaine Pagels. I become really intrigued by Alex O'Connor as an atheist who nevertheless really understands Christianity better than a lot of Christians. Elaine Pagels is a professor of religion, scholar of Gnosticism. So I'd like to hear what they have to say about early Christianity, Gnosticism, and Orthodoxy.

6. 01:25

   ELAINE PAGELS: The word Gnostic is so overused. There are 2 massive books you know, about what is Gnosticism. The word is made up and the word is polemical. That's why I don't like it.

7. 01:36

   MICHAEL HORTON: Now, there is a lot of truth to that. Gnosticism as a noun really is an invention of historians, not necessarily against Gnosticism, but in many cases, yeah, critical. As I've argued in my book, Shaman and Sage, took a couple of chapters to deep-sea dive on the various Gnostic scriptures, as they're called. They're so similar in their basic tenets. They differ only in particular details of window dressing. The doctrines are pretty much the same across these various groups or communities of so-called Gnostics. And they themselves said that we have a secret gnosis or knowledge that the rest of the church doesn't have. We're the enlightened ones.

8. So I think it's perfectly reasonable for us to group these communities that said pretty much the same thing under one umbrella called Gnosticism.

9. 02:41

   ELAINE PAGELS: It means all the bad stuff you shouldn't believe. Hmm. But Paul—

10. 02:46

    MICHAEL HORTON: Well, it does mean not Christian, not orthodox Christian. It's pretty hard. I know that Elaine Pagels and others have tried to make the case that early Christianity was a free-for-all, kind of a cafeteria with a lot of options for people. But that wasn't the case because the Gnostics themselves referred to the great church, quote unquote, as unenlightened, as preaching nothing but Christ and him crucified. But they know better. They're enlightened. They have the the gnosis, and they have a higher understanding of spirituality than all these Christians over here within the great church. And that's what they called it, the great church, the majority.

11. So already distinctions were being made between orthodoxy and heresy, even in the 2nd and 3rd centuries.

12. 03:45

    ELAINE PAGELS: But Paul was a visionary. And Paul, what do you want to say, was a mystic. He says he went up into the 3rd heaven and heard things that he wasn't allowed to speak. He had revelations he couldn't possibly tell you. That's the kind of secret teaching that mystics claim.

13. 04:04

    MICHAEL HORTON: You can't confuse that admittedly intriguing but not very typical comment that Paul makes about having that mystical experience. Many people have had very mystical experiences. That's not what we're talking about. Gnosticism isn't just about having a mystical experience and being interested in having them. Gnosticism is an alternative religion that maintains that an evil God created the world and matter, that we are saved not by God becoming flesh, but by our losing our flesh, our emancipation from our bodies to finally become reunited with the spiritual beings of the universe. 180 degrees opposite to Christianity. And including the Christianity that Paul taught.

14. 04:55

    ELAINE PAGELS: To receive to this day. And mystics in the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches have always been reined in by orthodoxy, blocking them at every point from saying anything that doesn't agree with what becomes 4th century theology.

15. 05:15

    MICHAEL HORTON: This 4th century theology, I'm reminded of my Mormon friends who talk about how we got the Nicene Creed from Constantine, and that the Trinity wasn't taught in the church until the Nicene Council met in 325. It's the same kind of message that we get with proponents of Gnosticism, which Elaine Pagels is. She is a proponent of Gnostic religion. So the idea is that there really was no orthodoxy in the earliest centuries, something that happens— Nicene Council. Well, Nicene Council didn't even deal with Gnosticism. It didn't deal with about 14 heresies that were already out of the bag by then. And so, you know, the Nicene Council dealt with the Trinitarian heresies. The church had already faced Gnosticism.

16. The church had already said no to it. And continued to say no to it over all of its centuries. Here we are again in a situation where the Gnostics want to be recognized as part of a broader Christian tent.

17. 06:32

    ELAINE PAGELS: Of which, as you can see, I'm not a great fan, because it did what it was meant to do, which is suggests a control, a kind of monopoly on spiritual truth within the Catholic Church, which still claims that monopoly.

18. 06:52

    MICHAEL HORTON: Many of the scholars of Gnosticism today have a Roman Catholic, conservative Roman Catholic, or conservative Protestant background that they have rebelled against. And so a lot of their scholarship about this supposedly vast empire of a hierarchical church somehow existing in the first centuries of the church, which is impossible because there were no popes or hierarchies. The church was scattered in various communities around the Mediterranean. Somehow the picture of a medieval church with an oppressive hierarchy enters the picture here, I think, because of their own experience with the church, Roman Catholic or Protestant.

19. 07:46

    ELAINE PAGELS: And deny it anywhere else.

20. 07:49

    ALEX O'CONNOR: I was quite stunned in reading your book again to find that Ignatius of Antioch writes in the early church that the laity should revere and honor and obey the bishop as if he were God.

21. 08:09

    ELAINE PAGELS: Yes.

22. 08:10

    ALEX O'CONNOR: This extraordinary letter where the sort of absolute authority of the bishop is established and the—

23. 08:19

    MICHAEL HORTON: Well, first of all, you have to understand what bishop, episkopos, meant in the early church and how different it became in the Middle Ages. That's the first thing. That's a a whole nother story. But when you're talking about controversy and you're talking about people who are disrespecting church leadership, that's not the same as having a kind of general rule that you're to treat your pastor or your bishop as God. Ignatius never built a whole doctrine on that comment. The point was that God has set aside teachers and The Gnostics believed as much as the Christians that they were teachers who should be heeded. In Gnostic circles, as well as Orthodox circles, you could be excommunicated if you rejected the teachings of that group. What's wrong with that? What's wrong with not being allowed to remain a member of a community that you no longer agree with? It seems like that's a pretty natural thing for the community, if you want to have community at all, for a community to do.

24. 09:30

    ALEX O'CONNOR: Again, that phrase, as if he were God, seems to run so contrary to what you might expect a Christian to think about earthly dominion. But this comes in your book as part of a chapter on this making heretical the Gnostic tradition, maybe having something to do with the consolidation of power in human earthly bishops. What's— well, what's that all about?

25. 09:56

    ELAINE PAGELS: Well, I think that is what happens.

26. 09:58

    MICHAEL HORTON: That is not what happens. In fact, when the Gnostics arose, there were no bishops. The first bishop in Rome was Victor, and he wasn't a pope. He was just a pastor in Rome. And the way it happened, initially, leaders in the church were pastors and elders, and then there was a moderator of that presbytery, that group of pastors and elders. And as Jerome, ancient church father, explains this view, instead of episkopos, bishop, and presbuteros, presbyter, being interchangeable terms for the same office, they separated them, and the moderator of the presbytery became the first among equals, became a bishop, a separate office of bishop. Well, all of that happened in the time of Irenaeus, but late into his ministry. You really don't have bishops as a separate office in the church in the first place until you get to the 3rd and 4th centuries.

27. So the idea that this is Jesus set up a Roman Catholic magisterium, hatched, fully formed in the way that you see it in the Middle Ages. It's an anachronism. It's taking something that comes in the Middle Ages and imposing it on centuries where there was no hierarchy. There was no ability for the church to have any worldly power when the church itself was under persecution by the Roman Empire.

28. 11:39

    ELAINE PAGELS: When Constantine becomes a Christian and puts the power of the state, the military, behind a group of bishops, they claim that they have all knowledge.

29. 11:50

    MICHAEL HORTON: Well, then that happened in the 4th century. So how does everything else Professor Pagels has talked about happening, how does that flourish before Constantine? Yes, exactly. That's the point. When you get to Constantine, only when you get to Constantine, is the boot taken off the neck of the church. And only then would it be possible for leaders in the church, bishops in the church, to sometimes abuse their power because they could have people in the government looking the other way. With power comes corruption, and there was certainly plenty of that in the 4th century. But Professor Pagels herself is recognizing here that that kind of position to abuse one's ecclesiastical power wasn't even in place at the time when the Gnostic sects actually flourished.

30. 12:54

    ELAINE PAGELS: Of all truth, and all of it is in the canon of books that they prescribe and they limit. They don't want mystical teachings because mystical teachings are always open.

31. 13:07

    MICHAEL HORTON: Mystical teachings are not always open. Mystical teachings are usually pantheistic, and that means that they are just— they're a different theological, philosophical outlook. Not that they aren't a theological position, but they're a different one. It's pantheism instead of theism. And to suggest that mystics are open and orthodoxy is closed is to misunderstand that there is a mystical tradition that is always pantheistic, and there is always an orthodox tradition that is not. And so to simply put them in terms of one being open, one being closed is a frankly kind of polemical and unscholarly way to write history.

32. 13:56

    ELAINE PAGELS: Always can be claimed to be transcendent. And the Catholic Church to this day doesn't allow that. And most Christians don't, except Pentecostalists, except Quakers who believe that the Spirit in fact leads people into truth. That's what the Gospel of John says.

33. 14:16

    MICHAEL HORTON: You see, it's, I mean, when pro-Gnostic, pro-mystic scholars quote John to support their interpretation and defense, it's not unscholarly, apparently. But when Orthodox people do, it comes off as a Bible lesson. You know, I have learned a lot from reading Elaine Pagels. She is a brilliant scholar and has has done a lot of research on Gnosticism over many years. But one of the things that it has reminded me of is that everybody comes to the study of something like Gnosticism, which for centuries has been considered a heresy, comes to a heresy like Gnosticism with lots of loaded guns, taking up sides on whether they are sympathetic to Gnosticism or unsympathetic to Gnosticism. And even the Even the most rigorously disciplined scholars, you will find dividing into one side, one camp or the other on whether they're for it or against it. It's really an amazing thing to watch. And I have really appreciated her honesty in basically saying that she sides with the Gnostics.

34. What I have a harder time with is the scholarly narrative. That sometimes is driven, I think, more by personal subjective views than it is by a concern with the historical facts.