Mertcan Bulak
@MBulak
1183 okur puanı
Ağustos 2020 tarihinde katıldı
The Gnostics liked the idea of the good God sending Christ, so they thought that the ultimate deity sent one of his subordinate powers, called Christ, into the world to free people from the chains of matter. Christ, however, could have no real contact with matter, so at the baptism of Jesus of Nazareth, or thereabouts, the Christ descended into him; then at the arrest of Jesus, or thereabouts, the Christ withdrew. What was scourged and slain could not have been Christ.
Reklam
The basic belief of the Gnostics was dualism. They believed that the world is ultimately divided between two cosmic forces, good and evil. In line with much Greek philosophy, they identified evil with matter. Because of this, they regarded any Creator God as wicked. Creation by a deity, they felt, was not so much impossible as it was indecent. Their own supreme being was far removed from any such tendency to “evil.”
Since the ultimate deity could have no contact with the material world, the Gnostics explained creation by a series of emanations. If we think of God as a kind of sun, these emanations would be sunbeams—extensions of his nature, yet distinct from him. These supernatural emanations (subordinate “powers”), however, were capable of producing other inferior powers until they had fashioned, as Charles Bigg, the Oxford scholar, once said, “a long chain of divine creatures, each weaker than its parent,” and came at last “to one who, while powerful enough to create, is silly enough not to see that creation is wrong.” This, according to the Gnostics, was the Creator God, the God of the Jews.
The first position was held by a Jewish-Christian sect known as the Ebionites. They taught that Jesus was a mere human who by his scrupulous obedience to the Law was “justified” and became the Messiah.
The opposite position was called Docetism. The word comes from a Greek verb meaning “to seem.” The title comes from their teaching that Christ was not really a man: he was a spectral appearance. He only seemed to suffer for humankind’s sins, since we all know divine beings are incapable of dying.
Theology comes from two Greek words: theos , meaning God, and logos , meaning word or rational thought. So theology is rational thought about God. It is not identical with religion. Religion is our belief in God and our effort to live by that belief. Theology is the attempt to give a rational explanation of our belief: it is clear thinking about religion.
Emperor Decius (249–51) took another important step. Caesar worship was made compulsory for every race and nation within the empire with the single exception of the Jews. On a certain day in the year, every Roman citizen had to come to the Temple of Caesar, burn a pinch of incense there, and say, “Caesar is Lord.” When a person had done that, they were given a certificate documenting that they had done so.
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