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Apologia Report 12:2
January 12, 2007
Subject: UK's Economist magazine on Pentecostalism's growing impact
In this issue:
GNOSTICISM - recent book-length summary exhorts readers on the supposed virtues of Gnosticism
PENTECOSTALISM - UK business weekly profiles the movement and comes away with significant insights
TOLERANCE - religious correctness, simply "the latest version of political correctness" or has a secular academic sport been busted?
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GNOSTICISM
Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief, by John Lamb Lash [1] -- reviewer Jonathan Kirsch acknowledges that "Gnosticism is a label applied to a collection of religious ideas that has long exerted a certain appeal to public intellectuals and controversialists.... What attracts them, I suppose, is the conviction that the highest truths are available only to a small circle of initiates...."
Lash "describes the Gnostics of the ancient world as 'the elite of Pagan intellectuals' and declares that their writings are 'the explosive charge that can blow the institution of the Faith off its foundations, for good and all.' By 'the Faith,' he means the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition in its entirety, and he intends to do nothing less than convert his readers into latter-day Gnostics."
Lash "dismisses the work of Princeton historian Elaine Pagels, author of The Gnostic Gospels [2], because she places the texts discovered at the Egyptian archeological site of Nag Hammadi within the context of early Christianity. Such an approach, he insists, 'has hampered understanding of who the Gnostics were, and why they protest so vehemently against the rise of Christianity.'
"Lash seeks to rescue Gnosticism from the dustbin of Christian history and restore it to its rightful place amid the splendors of pagan antiquity." He "insists that Gnosticism represents the path toward 'spiritual deep ecology,' symbolized by today's adherents of the Greek earth goddess Gaia.
"Not in His Image is perhaps best compared to Robert Graves' The White Goddess [3], an earlier and only slightly less eccentric effort to find and explain the linkages among the fantastic variety of religious experiences in the ancient world."
Lash "confidently issues pronouncements about what he calls 'the wholesale genocide of Pagan culture' and prescriptions for the spiritual salvation of the world." His "goal is to melt down the religious and philosophical ideas of antiquity and recast them as a serviceable faith for our world. In place of the Judeo-Christian- Islamic tradition, which he links to 'the religious schizophrenia of the ancient Hebrews' and which he flatly condemns as 'annihilation theology,' he proposes that we embrace Gnosticism and what he dubs 'Gaian ethics,' which he describes as 'not a call to faith in God, but faith in the human species.'
"Lash is capable of explaining the mind-bending concepts of Gnosticism and pagan mystery cults with bracing clarity and startling insight. At moments, however, he slips into a kind of New Age rant as baffling as any mystical text. ...
"[W]hen he considers what he calls the 'sci-fi theology' of the ancient Gnostics, he comes uncomfortably close to affirming that the otherworldly 'Archons' of Gnostic myth were authentic extraterrestrials." Kirsch shares that, as a boy, Lash said, "I swore to finish what Nietzsche had begun ... I vowed to think through and live out his critique of Christianity to the end.' ...
"But when Lash invites us to embrace [his thinking] he passes wholly through the looking glass." Los Angeles Times Book Review, Dec 3 '06, pR9.
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PENTECOSTALISM
"Pentecostals: Christianity reborn" (no byline) -- the United Kingdom's largest business magazine comments on the enormous influence of the global movement. "The great secular ideologies of the 19th and early 20th centuries - from Marxism to Freudianism - have faded while ... Pentecostal denominations have prospered, and Pentecostalism has infused traditional denominations through the wildly popular charismatic movement." The story is based in part on findings by Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life (which were included in AR 11:38).
Referring to what began on a street called Azuza, the unnamed author reports that "LA's most successful export is not Hollywood but Pentecostalism." Specifically, "renewalists make up around 50% of the population in Brazil and Kenya. And in Latin America Pentecostalism has shattered the Roman Catholic Church's monopoly." Pentecostalism's influence on Guatemala, in particular, is profiled - where the population is "around 30% Protestant, and six in ten remaining Catholics are 'charismatics.' ...
"Harvey Cox, a professor at Harvard, points to two things that have put wind into the movement's sails. One is the fact that it reconnects people with primitive religion.... As the Pentecostals say, 'the man with an experience is never at the mercy of the man with a doctrine.'
"The other is that Pentecostalism offers a 'third way' between scientific rationalism and traditional religion. ...
"Pentecostalism clearly has a powerful internal dynamic. Still, it would be naive to try to understand the spread of a 500m-strong religion without reference to sociology. ...
"One result of this is that Pentecostalism draws on the full talents of the population. ... Pentecostal churches have a genius for elevating charismatic sheep from the flock. They are particularly good at using female talent. Women not only fill the pews. They get up and testify. And they are increasingly becoming preachers in their own right - a particularly striking development in patriarchal Latin America.
"Another result is that Pentecostalism is wonderfully innovative. What other Christian movement can produce churches with names like the Mountain of Fire and Miracles (in Nigeria) and the Church of Christ's Spit (in Brazil)? And what other religious movement can produce 'hallelujah robotics' - a sort of frenzied dancing and chanting? ...
"Many churches are therefore superb businesses - honed by competition and obsessed with expansion." Examples that the author lists include The Universal Church of the Kingdom of God in Brazil, Jotabeche Methodist Pentecostal Church in Santiago, Chile, and Korea's Yoido Full Gospel Church ("the biggest church in the world," with 250,000 coming each Sunday).
"The final explanation is drawn from Max Weber - that Pentecostalism, like Puritanism before it, is an instrument of modernisation. ... Pentecostalism is making dramatic advances among the upwardly mobile. One of the movement's central messages is self-respect - Pentecostals are 'dynamite in the hands of God' rather than deferential servants. Relying on ordinary people to spread the word, the churches are particularly good at conveying the rudiments of management. ... The bookshops in the mega churches are full of tomes on management as well as spiritual uplift. ...
"Many of the new generation of Pentecostal preachers, particularly in the biggest churches, are notable for their entrepreneurial and intellectual sophistication" as well as a growing interest in politics. "Brazil's Universal Church has its own political party. Majorities of Pentecostals in nine of the ten countries studied by Pew said that religious groups should express their views on politics...."
The article's conclusion includes a brief idea of what it was that really caught the attention of business professionals the UK. Pentecostalism is "consuming the business and professional elites of the developing world." The Economist, Dec 23 '06, pp48-50. <http://economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=8401206>
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TOLERANCE
"The Devoted Student" by Mark C. Taylor -- begins: "More college students seem to be practicing traditional forms of religion today than at any time in my 30 years of teaching.
"At first glance, the flourishing of religion on campuses seems to reverse trends long criticized by conservatives under the rubric of political correctness. But, in truth, something else is occurring. Once again, right and left have become mirror images of each other; religious correctness is simply the latest version of political correctness. Indeed, it seems the more religious students become, the less willing they are to engage in critical reflection about faith. ...
"Distinguished scholars at several major universities in the United States have been condemned, even subjected to death threats, for proposing psychological, sociological or anthropological interpretations of religious texts in their classes and published writings. [Did this make you think Muslims might be the perpetrators? Notice how followers of other faiths could also fit in here. - ed.] In the most egregious cases, defenders of the faith insist that only true believers are qualified to teach their religious tradition. ...
"For years, I have begun my classes by telling students that if they are not more confused and uncertain at the end of the course than they were at the beginning, I will have failed. A growing number of religiously correct students consider this challenge a direct assault on their faith. Yet the task of thinking and teaching, especially in an age of emergent fundamentalisms, is to cultivate a faith in doubt [Name this religion. - ed.] that calls into question every certainty. ...
"If chauvinistic believers develop deeper analyses of religion, they might begin to see in themselves what they criticize in others. In an era that thrives on both religious and political polarization, this is an important lesson to learn one that extends well beyond the academy. ...
"The warning signs are clear: unless we establish a genuine dialogue within and among all kinds of belief, ranging from religious fundamentalism to secular dogmatism, the conflicts of the future will probably be even more deadly." New York Times, Dec 21 '06, <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/opinion/21taylor.html>
Contrast Taylor's thinking with that of The Wall Street Journal's Victor Davis Hanson ("Losing the Enlightenment," Nov 29 '06, n.p.) when, in reference to Islam, he describes the "cheap surrender to religious fanaticism" amidst "the moral paralysis in Europe." Hanson discusses the hypocrisy of Europe's "new self-censorship" in going to extremes not to offend Muslims while its newspapers "caricature Christians and Americans with impunity" and its politicians increasingly rail against alleged Jewish conspiracies.
Hanson finds that "almost every genre of artistic and intellectual expression has come under assault: music, satire, the novel, films, academic exegesis, and education. Somehow Europeans have ever so insidiously given up the promise of the Enlightenment that welcomed free thought of all kinds, the more provocative the better." He compares Europe's "endemic Western self-loathing" to America's "liberal criticism [which has recently gone] over the edge into pathological hysteria" and includes a sampling from various politicians.
<http://www.opinionjournal.com/federation/feature/?id=110009312>
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Sources, Monographs:
1 - Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief, by John Lamb Lash (Chelsea Green, 2006, paperback, 464 pages)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/193149892X/apologiareport>
2 - Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels (Vintage, 1989, paperback, 224 pages, ISBN 0-6797-2453-2)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0679724532/apologiareport>
3 - The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, by Robert Graves (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1966, paperback, 512 pages)
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0374504938/apologiareport>
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