I wonder if I'm becoming like the hammer who sees everything as a nail. I am seeing everything as a teaching tool regarding gnosticism. Indeed, I have made steps toward entering graduate studies and if I do I am very inclined to study this particular -ism.
Gnosticism means at root an emphasis on knowledge. As such it has full play in the zeitgeist. My late beloved Bible college Dean, Dr. Edward Palm, once asked us, "What is the dominant, controlling idea today?" Befuddled 20-somethings that we were, I am not sure how or if we answered. His reply was simple.
"The dominant idea of today is that science, or knowledge, is the most important thing."
I have pondered this in the intervening years and am sure he was right. What else accounts for the countless colleges and universities, to say nothing of the assumed certainty that the world wide web would make us better because more information is available to all? We never question such assumptions.
Gnosticism values knowledge over meaning or substance (the philosophical expression would say "epistemology versus ontology'") In fact, its primary expression is illustrated in the life of the famous Augustine of Hippo. He was taken with the Manichees, a gnostic sect who made much of the body being evil. If the body is evil what matters what I do with it? Spirit is the only reality, flesh and blood will pass and as such are of no real account. "This is great," Augustine concluded, along with, to some extent, everyone who has ever lived. "I can do what I want." Such a notion gave rationale to the libertine sexual morality for which he was known before his conversion.
In the Scripture and in the early church this gnostic view of the body was countered with the very life of Christ. It became crucial to see the incarnation as a real taking on of flesh. For if the Creator can take on flesh then flesh is made holy and good, even if one thought it was not so before. (I admit to being dull on this logical connection but I know it is the classical formula so accept it as valid.)
I am fully aware that theologians far-better schooled than me may find this faulty. I hope I will learn the errors in time. For now I am trying to work it out. And here is where I believe gnosticism connects with medium and message.
The incarnation means the body -- and by extension, material substance -- is good, valid, imbued with the image of God by virtue of Creation. When God wished to reveal Himself did He use knowledge? Of course, implicitly so, for there is no awareness without knowledge. They are one and the same.
But he used more, or perhaps we should say, something more basic. God used the very human body wed with the Creator to, in some right sense, reveal the ordering principle of all things: logos. This is His medium. Christ -- fully God, fully man: all of Creation embodied and thus able to redeem all of Creation through bodily sacrifice. This particular body born of a woman was the very Son of God. He ate, slept, wept, walked, talked, felt, suffered, jumped, ran, laughed, labored. He was a fully embodied human. This the church fathers worked out in creedal language.
If the body is the medium, what is the message? Doesn't the message matter most, medium of no real account? Why didn't God save from heaven, use power as medium? Why not learning? He could require us to pass some kind of cognitive test.
No, the medium was vital and central to the nature of God and thus subsumes the message within it. If Christ were not human, humanity could not be saved. He assumed all it means to be human. And the ancient formula has it: "Whatever is assumed is thereby redeemed." If Christ were not human, humans could not be saved. The medium rather matters.
Better minds may fault my use of medium in this way. Perhaps they are right. I only mean to say that the question of medium and message goes to the heart of reality and it is a folly to dismiss it as trivial.
And because it deals in reality there are countless applications in everyday life.
The Incarnation subsumes message into medium and lets us know there is something primary to knowledge.
No comments:
Post a Comment