Word: gnostics
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...structure of 20th century religious thought, the works of Ingmar Bergman perch like gargoyles. Their gnostic faith belongs to no known dogma; their acrid doubt is too large to sit in the cool shade of existentialism. The Shame, latest of his grotesqueries, once again prays to a dead God, once again mixes actuality and surrealism, calamity and humor, a fertile mind and an arid soul...
...some theologians, the emergence of this underground church is a sign of spiritual health, a harbinger of renewal. To be sure, there is the possibility that these unstructured groups might coalesce into a new kind of gnostic sect-an elect that considers itself set apart from the erring mass of nominal believers. On the other hand, there is the far greater danger that institutional Christianity, without an extraordinary amount of reform, will end up as a monumental irrelevancy. Faced with a choice between the church in its present form and the underground cell, it is likely that a majority...
...dead theologians are the reductio ad absurdum of American Protestant theology. When they have not fallen into the perennial heresy of gnostic mysticism, like Altizer, they are conscious or unconscious followers of Durkheim, in that the real object of their worship is 20th century culture, particularly 20th century intellectual culture. They put themselves in the ridiculous position of saying to God, "Either come up to us 20th century intellectuals or get out." It would be a mistake to take them too seriously...
...best Hesse writes with diamantine clarity-not about the psychological self in current fashion, but about the metaphysical self of traditional contemplation. Hesse is not a conventional Christian; he does not believe he can be saved by belief in a god outside himself. He is a Gnostic; he believes he can be saved by experience of a god within himself. To Hesse the self is the end and all of living and man is the measure of all things-or would be, as he suggests ironically, if man could only devise some way to measure...
...church's attack on contraception, Noonan says, must be seen in its historic context, as a response to a particular challenge. In the first two centuries of Christian history, church leaders were forced to defend the value of procreation against Manichaeans and Gnostic heretics who saw in the Biblical counsels about virginity a commandment to abstain from sex entirely. Christians also had to defend the sanctity of life against a pagan Rome that accepted both abortion and contraception as a way of life...