The Gnostic Gospels
Perkins, Pheme
respond by knocking out a missile based inside the Soviet Union.' 'Well, then what do they, do? 'Well,' he said, 'that's when we hope cooler heads will prevail and they'll stop and talk." As it...
...He explicitly differentiates between the psychologicai need of ancient gnostics to emerge into consciousness of a spiritual realm and th# psychological need of moderns to find reconciling and balancing symbols of male/female...
...What that confidence comes down to is the observation that deterrence has worked so far, which might have been said equally well of the balance of power which maintained the peace of Europe for so long after the FrancoPrussian War--43 years-- until 1914...
...He may even be right that this is the best of all possible nuclear worlds...
...This book exaggerates the weaknesses of several of her scholarly articles, which it popularizes...
...Fearing that this frustration was simply the result of too close an acquainitance with the matter, I tried chapters out on educated, non-theologian, nonhistorian friends and students...
...Over the years, Prof...
...Another faction says U.S...
...The lesson, of course, is that what might have happened then, might be happening now...
...Malcolm H. Miner...
...Finally, Pagels's discussion of the detailed connections between images of God, of salvation, and of community and its structures of authority, remind us that images of the divine are to be used with care...
...First of all, it brings home the great diversity in second century Christianity, something many people are still not conscious of...
...The policy of both Truman and Eisenhower was to build enough of them so the Russians would never dare to launch any sort of attack which might trigger a nuclear response...
...g .tgh she po!nts to Jung as appreciathe psych'ological profundity of ,gnosis, she apparently has paid little attention to what he says on the subject...
...The point, in Mandelbaum's view, is that the m'gument is still about deterrence: not how to win nuclear wars, but how to avoid them...
...He also points to many instances in which the orthodox Christian symbols are a more adequate expression of psychological wholeness than those of the gnostics...
...A provisional English translation of the whole was published almost two years ago (J.M...
...They claimed that other Christians, who still worshipped the god of the Old Testament, had not attained to the spiritual truth of their religion...
...Most came away with the feeling of "being had" even though they could not distinguish true from false or from mere conjecture...
...Christian gnostics interpreted Christian traditions and sacraCommonweal: 634ments along the lines of this perception of: reality...
...The Nag Hammadi Library in Engl~ h. Harper & Row, 1977), but never caught the media in the way that the Dead Sea Scrolls did, and those of us working on these now materials have been spared the plague of hasty and inaccurate generalization...
...He has studied these things for so long, is so familiar with the technical arcana, and has discussed them with so many men who'lived with the details for years, that the prevailing wisdom of the defense community now appears to him as if engraved on granite...
...Dr.~ Laurence H. Blackburn (author of God Wants You To Be Wall...
...Healing and the abundant life which Christ came to give can come to you through reading and applying the workable, practical principles in this Interesting book...
...HEALING AND THE ABUNDANT LIFE The Roy...
...Kennedy went one step beyond the bomb's deterrent value after recognizing that the Russians were eventually bound to reach the stage where they could do to us, what we could do to them...
...She is frequently taken in by the stock rhetmicai polemics of both sides, mistaking rhetoric for fact...
...Like many esoteric movements they feel that they have contacted the deeper truth of the' "JudeoChristian tradition...
...its powers and gods...
...Mandelbaum has a great deal that is interesting to say, especially about the success of diplomatic efforts to control weaponry once the United States abandoned visionary attempts to negotiate multinational agreements which would do away with arms and war altogether...
...Mandelbaum describes this situation as "the best of all possible nuclear worlds," while conceding it is not "the best of all imaginable nuclear worlds...
...material/ spiritual...
...9 November 1979:635 The new book by the author of Healing Is For Real...
...Unfortunately, Prof...
...The god of the Old Testament--as well as pagan deities and "the divine" of philosophers--is not the transcendent source of divine being which constitutes the source, essence, and goal of humanity...
...The Christianity, both orthodox and otherwise, of the fhst three centuries was quite different from the institutionalized churches we take for granted...
...Rufus J. Wombla, Warden, North America, The International Order of St...
...Mandelbaum's history is brief because the strategists have never managed to get very far from the great fact of the Bomb' s destructiveness...
...Beyond that, in Mandelbaum's view, we cannot go...
...Those who belonged to somewhat esoteric religious groups were able to bold out the longest but were offended for a different reason...
...We would know nothing of that other reality had a revealer from that world--usually, the revealer is Christ--not come to call us to our true destiny beyond this cosmos...
...Mandelbaum's book is distinguished by its brevity, its clarity of analysis, and its focus on the history of how we got from there to here...
...As early as 1946 the military analyst Bernard Brodie grasped what Mandelbaum still takes to be the basic truth concerning the Bomb: "Everything about it is overshadowed by the twin facts that it exists and that its power is fantastically great...
...The unreflective use of images in one sphere of religious life and discourse may well subvert the insights of another...
...Most of the cosmos that we know is a carefully constructed plot to keep humanity from awakening to its true divine home...
...This little experiment forced me to explain to' my victims what might be of value in the book...
...he quotes the sentence at least half a dozen times, and his history of the many futile attempts to find a way to use the bomb demonstrates what was implicit at Hiroshima--that it's safe to drop only on people who haven't got one...
...But I can't help wondering if Mandelbaum's confidence in the system's stability is misplaced...
...That put the strategic emphasis on the bomb's survivability...
...Certainly religious symbols are tied to social and political realities, but so what...
...submarines and planes would still threaten sufficient destruction of the Soviet Union to override any minor advantage to be gained by taking out Minuteman...
...Robinson ed...
...they say...
...Min,~ HEALING IS FOR REAL The Rav...
...Pagels' aRempt to bring these materials into the Polmlar consciousness, while not the plague, will certainly produce a bad case of flu...
...This book will help you discover the hidden possibilIties now dwelling within you...
...If it were vulnerable to surprise attack it would cease to deter;, hence the importance of launch systems so "hard," like the concrete Minuteman silos, or so elusive, like nuclear submarines, there would always be bombs and missiles enough in reserve to devastate an attacker...
...Popularizing the past THE GNOSTIC GOSPELS Elaine H. Pagels Randum...
...But the whole is so flawed by hasty generalization, over-interpretation of texts to fit a pre-determined scheme, and lack of sympathetic balance that this reviewer found herself constantly wishing that the whole could have been redone with more care...
...When they emerge into view in the second century, the gnostics are a religiously varied lot...
...One faction says this fact will invite attack, unless we build a new, less vulnerable system...
...War doesn't make sense, only a madman would run serious risk of one, neither side could gain, both sides know what would happen...
...Extravagant claims from both sides often stick in the popular imagination long after both sides have settled down to the sober task of understanding a religious phenomenon neither so orthodox nor so revolutionary as its original enthusiasts would have us believe...
...The Ray...
...an excellent, theologically sound book on Christian healing for both clergymen and laymen.., highly recommended for those who want an honest, believing presentation of the healing ministry"-- The Living Church (paperbound) $2.95 Please send check with order, adding 75r postage, to MOREHOUSE-BARLOW 78 Danbury Road Wilton, Connecticut 06897...
...As it happened, cooler heads prevailed before the first shot was fired, but it might have gone the other way...
...The professional literature on this subject is vast...
...He is a false, arrogant offspring of a heavenly figure, usually the female Wisdom, who fell away from the perfection and praise Of the transcendent God...
...Pagels, they felt, pushes the obvious correlation between certain Christian monarchic images of the one God and the development of monarchic forms of church authority to the point of obscuring genuine, gnostic concern with "deeper truth...
...Malcolm H. Miner With HEALING AND THE ABUNDANT LIFE, a follow-up to Healing Is For Real, "Malcolm Miner has done it agalnl In his new book he shares his personal experiences leading to a higher and broader conception of healing as related to the abundant life proclaimed by Jesus"--The Rev...
...Pagels either knows or cares too little about the theological diversity and development of "orthodox" Christian theology in the fwst three centiaries to be fair to its defenden in their debates with the gnostics...
...So long as that is the case, he suggests, the nuclear peace will be maintained...
...However satisfying your past has been, Malcolm Miner tel[s you in HEALING AND THE ABUNDANT LIFE how your future can be more exciting, fulfilling and vlctorlous...
...M~dz'olnl tI...
...A whole"library" of gnostic religious writings was discovered in Egypt over thirty years ago...
...that sounds like a cause for gloom to me, but its pessimism doesn't make it untrue...
...Further, the necessary interconnection of community life and authority patterns with images of GOd should perhaps remind some would-be reformers that haphazard shifts in structure or liturgy are hardly enough to be effective...
...the debate over SALT II comes down to an argument over the Russian threat to the Minuteman, which will soon be vulnerable to increasingly accurate Soviet missiles...
...Its only possible utility is to frighten off opponents...
...Like most professional academics devoted to the study of war and peace in the nuclear age, Mandelbaum reveals an astonishing degree of confidence in the stability of the nuclear status quo...
...Finally, she imposes a modernizing psychology of creative, autonomous, individual artistry on an ancient consciousness, which was far from that stage, in order to exhibit the gnostics as champions of the creative individual over against the orthodox...
...Pagels has con~ihuted much to our understanding of gnolticism, and there is much in this book that is both true and insightful...
...The United States might have attacked, the . USSR might have responded, and the world might have gone to bed at peace, and waked up at war...
...The prevailing wisdom comes down to nothing more substantial than common sense, but it is so common, and so sensible, it is hard to image any turn of events which would push the world over the brink...
...10,- 203 pp...
...Both sides in the precarious balance of terror have a capacity for lightning strikes, and the rest of us are dependent on cooler hods...
...Luke the Physician...
...their critics, that revolt will be legitimated...
...This strategic concept is as valid now as it was fifteen years ago...
...Pheme PerirJns w , henever discoveries of ancient manuscripts hit the media, orthodox Christians hope that their traditional positions will be confirmed...
...Secondly, as do many modern Jewish thinkers, the ancient gnostics challenge Christians to .face up to the problematic character of the theological constructions they use to hold "Old" and "New" Testaments together as a unitary revelation of the divine...
...paperbound) $3.75 A perceptive guide to spiritual healing...
Vol. 106 • November 1979 • No. 20
