History Channel Christianity

Over a morning break recently, I was watching a show on the History Channel about the Shroud of Turin. At one point, ominous images of people next to the Greek word for 'heretic' were shown in conjunction with the dramatic music playing, the gnostics portrayed as a group of people kicked out of the fold by the Church for arbitrary reasons; a narrator accentuated the made-mood by noting, 'The gnostics were considered heretics for beleiving there was more to the universe than meets the eye. Now, with modern science, we are able to see that they were closer to the truth than previously imagined.'

Whether because of a desire for Marxist sensationalism or otherwise legitimate ignorance, we have now just squashed layers of theological debate and historical fact. Certainly orthodox Christians have always believed there's 'more to the universe than meets the eye', just as the gnostics do. The gnostics were deemed heretics for numerous reasons, and our present first-world West could use a revisiting of those denunciations, as we have fallen into many facets of a neo-gnosticism - with our ideas of 'escaping the physical' for the 'pure spiritual', Christianity (an abstract term, replacing 'the Church' or 'the Faith') being an abstract construction or a 'special' or 'secret knowledge' instead of (or at least before being) an embodied, fleshed-out reality, etc.

There is a delicious historical poetry to the History Channel's defence of the gnostics: modern science can attribute many of its assumptions about the world to a gnostic lineage.* I love the History Channel, but I've often noticed the prideful scientism (and accompanying sensationalism) of our age - to say nothing of its antipathy toward fundamentalist protestants and the Catholic Church; and that makes me sad. Scientism, one of the lingering fragments of modernism, stands before tribal-garbed religion/theology (incense swinging and nose-ring clinking) and puzzles over it, unable to translate; eventually Scientism begins to speak, 'These primitive and ignorant people put flowers on the deceased person's grave because they believed the dead had an acute sense of smell.' Woe to you (i.e. I'm so sorry for you), because you've lost touch with humanity. Yes, you have even lost touch with the feared term: you have lost touch with primal humanity; you are afraid, because underneath the technology and coffee-shoppes we are still creatures of symbol and ritual. Your 'objective' and 'universal' framework for viewing the universe has blinded you to the universe itself.


*cf. Science, Politics, and Gnosticism by Eric Voegelin


-r