Comments on Peter Burfeind’s Book (2014) Gnostic America

By Razie Mah

In Gnostic America: A Reading of Contemporary American Culture and Religion according to Christianity’s Oldest Heresy (2014), a Lutheran pastor, Peter Burfeind, sounds the alarm. The American culture has fallen under the influence of a resurgent, modern Gnosticism.
How could an ancient heresy re-appear and achieve dominance in the modern world?
Burfeind presents an excellent account, but he cannot detail the logic inherent in the Gnostic mindset. He does not have the semiotic tools to do so.
These comments provide a definition of the word “Gnosticism” based on the categories of Charles S. Peirce. They follow the ground-breaking work, How to Define the Word “Religion”.
The relational structure of the Gnostic origin myth is revealed and applied to Burfeind’s arguments. The result complements Burfeind’s text. Open these books to see: The current disaster is a re-enactment of the Gnostic myth in contemporary Western society.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Razie Mah
• Release date: Aug 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781942824251

Razie Mah

See website for bio.

Book preview

Comments on Peter Burfeind’s Book (2014) Gnostic America

By Razie Mah

Published for Smashwords.com

2016

Notes on Text

This 23,100 word essay comments on a recent book by a Lutheran Pastor about heretical influences in contemporary American society. The author is Peter Burfeind. The title of the work is Gnostic America: A Reading of Contemporary American Culture according to Christianity’s Oldest Heresy (Pax Domini Press, 2014). Please have this book at hand for the full story.

These comments are not a close reading. They situate Burfeind’s text with category-based models. These models were proposed and developed in How to Define the Word Religion, plus Primers 1 through 10. They were refined in the Course on Implicit and Explicit Abstraction. They portray relational and logical structures.

Also, my discussion presumes the first singularity. Gnosticism was cultivated in an early ancient civilization. As such, I expect its origin myth to be a fairy tale about the first singularity. The first singularity is discussed in the Crystallizations of the Fall series plus An Archaeology of the Fall, available at www.smashwords.com.

In short, these comments apply a suite of postmodern scholastic hypotheses to Burfeind’s excellent text. They are different from, yet complementary to, Burfeind’s passionate argument.

These comments, along with Burfeind’s text, constitute a short course titled, How to Define the Word Gnosticism.

‘Words that belong together’ are denoted by single quotes or italics.

Student instructions are colored in burgundy.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part 1: Developing A Working Model

Compare to Suarez’s Model of Mind-Dependent Being

Gnostic Models with Christian Terms

Troubadours and Cultural Studies

Science and the Gnostic Origin Myth

Gnostic Meaning and the First Singularity

Part 3: Gnosticism and Politics

Compare to Model of Society Tier

Compare to Three-Tier System

Part 2: Find Yourself

Part 4: The Neo-Evangelical Response

Introduction

0001 Peter Burfeind wrote Gnostic America: A Reading of Contemporary American Culture according to Christianity’s Oldest Heresy (Pax Domini Press, 2014).

This book is composed of four parts. The first part covers the fundamentals of Gnosticism as a Christian heresy. The second and third parts explore cultural manifestations. The fourth part applies these fundamentals and explorations to contemporary American Neo-Evangelical Christian churches.

0002 Burfeind argues that two Gnostic movements contend for sovereign power, progressives and Neo-Evangelical Christians.

To me, the big government liberals (BGLs) beat these Christians to the punch. The federal government has established a religion. It is not Christian. BGLs run Gnostic bureaucracies where authorities deny that they are religious at all. BGLs are the self-anointed angels (or more accurately, daemons) of a New Age dawning in America.

Christians who self-describe themselves as spiritual, but not religious accommodate BGL’s increasing sovereign power and aggression.

0003 Burfeind is not alone in this awareness. Over 60 years ago, Eric Voegelin expressed similar ideas in his short but significant book, The New Science of Politics.

For me, this raises a question. What is the meaning, the presence and the message underlying the word Gnosticism?

With this question in mind, I turn my attention to Burfeind’s text.

Part 1: Developing A Working Model

Chapter 1

Students should read chapter 1 of Burfeind’s text before proceeding.

0004 From Burfeind’s introduction, I know that Gnosticism is a very old heresy.

How old?

From chapter 1, I suspect that Gnosticism predated Christianity. Indeed, the death and resurrection of Jesus rebuked Gnostic intuition. Why would Jesus retain the evil material shell of His body?

Jesus highlights all the ways that the Mosaic tradition offended Gnostic sensibilities. Both Christians and Jews are enamored of the material world. How disgusting.

0005 The Judeo-Christians believe in one God. So do the Gnostics. But, the one God of the Judeo-Christians is not the same as the Gnostic Source. The Source is a Monad, a complex singularity capable of putting everything into perspective. The Monad is the source of meaning.

0006 The Monad plays a key role in the Gnostic origin myth. The myth begins with the Source, beyond spoken language and in eternal time. From the Monad, male and female pairs emanated, each according to its aeon. The totality of the aeons is called the pleroma.

For the last era, our own, the female of the pair acted without her male consort. He was missing in action, so to speak. Sophia became pregnant with Yaltabaoth, half lion and half snake. She thought to herself, This is not me. So she took action, ripping the monster from her womb and hiding him in a cloud.

0007 Born yet aborted, living in a fog, Yaltabaoth decided to build his own world. He decided to create. What else was this demiurge supposed to do? He constructed his own world, which is our universe. He assigned archons (powers and governors) to rule his cosmos.

He was proud of his accomplishments.

0008 What else does this builder god do?

He manufactures our physical bodies. He steals a spark from the Monad (a soul) and pulls it into his world. As the soul descends, Yaltabaoth adds matter. At birth, each person is a spark wrapped in a mortal cloak. The spark is not material. The body is material. The two will war with one another.

0009 Therefore, Sophia pities us and offers this myth. The Self has a mission: Return to the Source. Sophia offers secret knowledge, gnosis, opening a path out of Yaltabaoth’s apparently all-encompassing cloud.

In fact, this myth, which joins cosmic and personal origins, contains a secret. It describes a location where you can find your Self.

0010 Clearly, this origin myth provides meaning. This meaning coincides with the model of social construction in How to Define the Word Religion. This model is further detailed in A Primer on the Category-Based Nested Form and A Primer on Sensible and Social Construction.

0011 The model is an interscope, a nested form of category-based nested forms. The interscope offers nine slots. Features in the above myth associate with different slots.

Here is the open interscope, before any associations.

0012 My intent is to associate elements of the Gnostic origin myth with slots in the interscope of social construction.

0013 My first association concerns the Monad. The Source has the potential to put the situation into perspective, so it goes into slot 1c. The pleroma automatically becomes the nomal context of the perspective level (slot 3c). The pleroma3c brings the possibilities inherent in the Monad1c into relation with the actuality of Sophia2c.

0014 So what is the secret about Sophia?

Sophia is Personified Wisdom. It is not much of a secret. After all, philosophy is rooted in love (philos) and Wisdom (sophia).

0015 If Sophia2c is the mother of the builder god, Yaltabaoth, then I should put the builder god into slot 2b. Yaltabaoth2b situates our universe within the normal context of blind rationality (slot 3b).

Or should I say, mindless rationality?

The builder god lives in a cloud, isolated, without awareness of even his own mother. Sure, he snatches sparks from the Monad. He does this