Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

In our reading from Colossians today, Paul begins by writing, “See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ.” That phrase “elemental spirits of the universe” is fascinating and evocative.

The Greek that Paul uses is something a little closer to “the principles of the kosmos” and what it looks like Paul is literally referring to here are something like angelic beings or intermediary spiritual entities believed to have some rule or influence over some aspect of the universe—angels of planets or stars or constellations of stars or natural processes. In other words, what he’s really getting after is gnosticism.

When I was younger, around the time I starting getting into the writings of the Christian mystics, someone at the church I attended with my family in Southern California asked me, “So you’re into the mystics…do you know the gnostics?”

I had only just discovered that mysticism was actually a very real Christian thing. To discover that there was another thing maybe like mysticism (maybe deeper than mysticism?) was really exciting. So I said, “No. What are the gnostics?” To which this person replied, “Check out the Nag Hammadi Library [a collection of gnostic texts re-discovered in Nah Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945].”

So I did. And man oh man, did I LOVE gnosticism! Here were secret writings, here were amazingly complex mythological and literary-poetic explorations of the Godhead, here were supposedly ancient wisdom-sayings of Jesus that were completely bizarre and strangely compelling. Here was a whole mythological system filled with Sacred Syzygies and Holy Ogdoads, with fallen sparks of divine joy imprisoned in evil matter by a wicked Demiurge and his celestial Archon elemental-spirits-of-the-universe henchmen who ruled the planets and constellations and existed to frustrate humanity’s attempts at becoming wise. Here was a rationale for a pursuit of things intellectual to the denigration and repudiation of things bodily. Here was a belief system that didn’t seem to require any belief, that seemed to understand itself as a vehicle for knowledge, not as anything in which to actually believe. Here was a God who desired I know things rather than have faith in anything. And I wanted to know things. I loved gnosticism.

It took a while for me to fall out of love with gnosticism, but I’m glad I did! In part, it took understanding that what God was calling me to was relationship, not a collection of secret information, not a specialized knowledge—that in fact, there could be no enlightenment worth the name without relationship, without love. It took understanding that the doctrines and dogmas of the church were not poetic mythologies I could take or leave if I chose, were not mere vehicles for some information or teaching or other, but a series of invitations to believe in a particular direction, in a particular way, in a particular person who is the Way, Jesus Christ, and to discover my life transformed by and into Christ’s own life by grace. It took that the distinction between theology and mysticism/spirituality that’s so prevalent today is actually very new: that for centuries, doing theology and being a mystic were considered one and the same thing; that a mystical spirituality divorced from a theological undergirding is either self-deceiving and impossible or, as the author of Jude writes, leads to a condition of being a cloud without water, carried about by any wind, a wandering star. It took understanding that Jesus wasn’t merely an influential wisdom-teacher who taught salvation, but a real person (not an idea or a concept or an archetype), someone truly human (body and all!) and truly God (fully divine!) in whose life, death and resurrection is salvation--who, by his life, death and resurrection, has destroyed sin and death, giving us all access to eternal life through his very being, sanctifying all of human experience (including the body!) and drawing it all into the Divinity. It took understanding that I couldn’t accumulate salvation, I needed, by faith, by trusting, to relax into the arms of the Savior. It took understanding that Jesus wanted to be in relationship with all of me, not just my mind, but my body and soul, each of my successes and all of my failures. He wanted all of me. It took understanding that the highest form of knowing is Love, and that, miraculously, graciously, Love desired to understand in me and cause me to understand with Love’s own understanding.

Friend, Jesus wants all of you, too! Gnosticism can be very attractive and (often minus its mythological but not its philosophical content) remains popular in many parts of the church. But no secret wisdom and no solipsistic spiritual / intellectual elitism can compare to relationship with the One who is the Power of God and the Wisdom of God. And no knowledge in heaven or on earth or under the earth compares to knowing that you, yes you, dear Friend, are beloved by God and called into ever deeper relationship with God by God who is Love!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+