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GNOSTIC
UNDERSTANDING OF
ORIGINAL SIN AND SALVATION
Gnostics come in trillion colors covering the entire
range of religious spectrum in existence. So I will
consider only the Christian Gnostics. Here also
there are many variations. We will therefore
restrict it to the major group.
Legend holds that there was an entire body of
knowledge, which came to be called gnwoij (gnosis),
which the Jesus imparted to His disciples after His
resurrection during this forty day period before His
assumption. Lord taught these secret mysteries only
to a few.
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"To James the Just
and to John and Peter after the resurrection the
Lord conveyed the gnosis, these handed it on to
the rest of the Apostles and in turn to the
Seventy." |
It
is this secret knowledge that has been passed on
from secret teachers to their disciples the Gnostic
Churches beleive to convey.
All
religious traditions acknowledge that the world is
imperfect. This imperfection is seen everywhere in
the common suffering of man and the beasts alike.
They live, struggle and finally die. Every living
being live by consuming another. Life kills life.
Added to this are the eternal cycle of natural
calamities - earthquakes, floods, fires, drought,
volcanic eruptions. Pain and sufferrings are the
norms of life. How did this happen? Evidently the
creation is defective. Thus we will be forced to
admit that the Creator God is the creator of the
defect of the creation - the first cause of the sin.
The Hindu law of Karma expalins only the effect and
the chain of sufferrings and not the root cause of
it false or creator God.
Thus the Gnostic God is not the creator God. God did
not create the Cosmos with its defects. Since God is
the only reality as existed from the begininning
there never had been anything other than God. God
therefore broughtforth from himself the all that we
see as cosmos - both visible and invisible. It is
this Gnostic thesis that was countered by the first
paragraph of the Nicean Creed. As everything is an
emanation from God just as the Advaita Hinduism
assumes everything is of God and nothing beside it.
These emanated beings are called aenonians. However
at each emanation the divine extension lost sight of
the reality of itself and and further emanations (or
creation if one would like to call) became defective
in concept. Creation is done by Wisdom - called in
Gnostic terms as Sphia. In the course of her
development the wisdom got distorted and became the
creator of the material and the psychic cosmos. This
being began to think that He is God. Gnostics call
him Deminurgos or half truth. The demiurgos created
Principalities and Powers and Archons and Rulers
etc.
It
was this God who created man in his own image. Hence
man contains an essence of the divine. Thus man is
bound by his ignorance to unceasing cycles of birth
and rebirth. Left to themselves therefore man cannot
find salvation. However the True God has been
sending his messeners to brign about the salvation.
A few of these messengers only are known to us.
These include Seth (the third Son of Adam), Jesus,
and the Prophet Mani. Jesus is looked upon as the
principal savior (the Soter).
Salvation in Gnostic sense is not from sin, but from
the sin of ignorance. Christ Jesus, the Logos of
True God brought this message. Salvation is not
through his death, which was an accident of history,
but though his teachings and mysteries that he
handed over to the elect few. These mysteries are
transferred and administered through the sacraments.
The
major text of Christian Gnostics is the Gospel of
Thomas.. All Gnostic teachers, taught that Christ
and Sophia await the spiritual man -- the pneumatic
Gnostic -- at the entrance of the Pleroma, and help
him to enter the bridechamber of final reunion. In
the fullness of time, every spiritual being will
receive Gnosis and will be united with its higher
Self -- the angelic Twin -- thus becoming qualified
to enter the Pleroma.
The
eating of the fruit of the knowledge of the good and
evil was indeed a necessary step initiated by Eve so
than man may enter into the second age of growth
from mere body life as a child to an intelligent
mind based level of adulthood. Eve is therefore
characterised as Sophia the Wisdom of God. In the
treatise The Apocalypse of Adam, we find this: "The
disclosure given by Adam to his son Seth in his
seven hundredth year. And he said: "Listen to my
words, my son Seth. When God created me out of the
earth, along with Eve your mother, I went along with
her in a glory which she had seen in the aeon from
which she came forth. She taught me the word of
Gnosis of the eternal God. And we resembled the
great eternal angels, for we were higher than the
God who created us." " The change obviously brings a
lot of new experiences which matures man so that
mankind can enter into the third age based on the
spirit. The saviour in this case is Jesus who send
the Holy Spirit. Holy Spirit is again Sophia in
person. Unless mankind go through the sufferring and
experience of the present age it could never enter
into the final spiritual age.Heb 2:10 In bringing
many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for
whom and through whom everything exists, should make
the author of their salvation perfect through
suffering. Suffering is the means of making one
perfect.
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