Gnostic Christianity

Gnostic Christianity describes a cluster of early Christian communities and writings, most active between roughly the late first and the third centuries, that read the Christian story very differently from what would later become the orthodox tradition. They were not a single movement. They were not always called gnostic by themselves. The label is partly retrospective, applied later by their critics and by modern scholars who needed shorthand for a body of texts that shared certain recognizable features.

What they had in common was a particular intuition about the human situation: that the world we inhabit is not the highest reality; that the human soul carries within itself a fragment of a higher source it has forgotten; and that the work of salvation is therefore not primarily about belief or moral performance but about remembering. Christ, for these communities, was a messenger of that remembering, not a sacrifice to appease a wrathful God, but a teacher who showed the way back. The vocabulary they developed for this, gnosis as recovered knowledge, the soul's descent and return, the recognition that the seeker is the sought, has continued to circulate, sometimes openly, more often beneath other vocabularies, across the contemplative traditions of the centuries since.

Most of what the modern world knows directly about gnostic Christianity comes from a single archaeological discovery. In December 1945, near the Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi, a farmer uncovered a sealed jar containing thirteen codices, Coptic translations of Greek originals, that had been buried sometime in the late fourth century. The texts had survived because they had been hidden. The orthodox church had by then been suppressing gnostic literature for two centuries; the survival of these particular manuscripts was the result of a deliberate act of preservation by someone who knew the texts were under threat.

The Nag Hammadi library let modern readers encounter gnostic Christianity in its own voice for the first time, rather than through the writings of its opponents.1 The picture that emerged differs considerably from the orthodox caricature. The gnostic teachers, in their own words, are recognizable as serious theologians arguing in good faith for positions they believed they had received from earlier teachers. The dispute between gnostic and orthodox Christianity, read through the recovered texts, becomes intelligible as a genuine theological argument within the early Christian movement rather than as a contest between an authentic apostolic tradition and a foreign import.

The human situation is one of forgetting; salvation involves remembering; the role of teaching is to make remembering possible.From the essay

The Ministries does not adopt the gnostic theological system as its own. The orthodox case against the system, the severance from Judaism, the dualism of matter and spirit, the displacement of the crucifixion, has theological weight that the institution recognizes. What the institution preserves from the gnostic inheritance is the intuition: that the human situation is one of forgetting; that salvation involves remembering; that the role of teaching is to make remembering possible. This intuition is recoverable as a contemplative resource without adopting the gnostic theology that produced it. It is, in fact, what the orthodox mystical tradition has implicitly done with the same intuition for most of two thousand years.

For readers approaching the gnostic literature for the first time, three texts repay slow attention: the Gospel of Thomas (sayings, no narrative), the Gospel of Philip (sacramental theology), and the Gospel of Mary (private teaching contested by the male apostles). None of these are easy reading. None reduce to summary. What they ask of the reader is the same thing the gnostic tradition asked of its original students: that the encounter with the text become an act of remembering rather than an acquisition of information.

The institution offers this reflection in the conviction that contemporary spiritual practice has more to recover from the gnostic literature than the orthodox suppression managed to obscure, and less to fear from it than orthodox apologetics has sometimes suggested. The recovered texts are not a heretical alternative awaiting adoption. They are a corrective intuition, a permanent reminder that salvation by recognition is as old as the Christian tradition itself, and that the work of remembering is part of what the Christian story has always asked of those who take it seriously.