Authenticating Christianity - And Distinguishing It From Heresy

By Steven S. Jones

This book details the developement of the concept Logos and how the fraudulent Writings of Pseudo-Dionysius Areopagite infected early Christian thought, developed into Neoplatonism, and obscured the authentic doctrine of the Church. The impact of this controversy, largely went undetected, influenced history through the ages and has led to twentieth-century Modernism, Psychology and Relativism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven S. Jones
• Release date: May 8, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393658955

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Authenticating Christianity

Authenticating Christianity

Authenticating Christianity

And Distinguishing It From Heresy

Steven Jones

Jones & Jones Publishing

Copyright © 2019 by Steven Jones

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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Contents

Introduction

Truth?

The Last Gospel

1. The Logos

The Logos as a Divine Presence

2. Heresy–the Denial of the Logos

Ignorance is Bliss: The fraud of Pseudo-Dionysius

3. Seeking Evidence of Christian Tradition

The Provenance of the Shroud of Turin

The Evidence of the Calendar

4. Modernism: Falling into Error

Modern Liberalism and the Neoplatonic System of Justice

Politics: The New Spiritual Possession

Modern Science: From ‘Nothing’ Nothing Comes

A New Morality

Epilogos

Bibliography

Introduction

The grandest of all philosophical questions is, ‘does reality exist independently of the mind?’ How we decide this simple question determines everything, the nature of the truth we seek, and how we pursue it. While our common sense says, ‘yes’, it exists, philosophers over the ages have increasingly said, ‘no’ … and their assault is mounting.

The Bible is in many ways a philosophical text. Between its covers theologians have managed to find two completely opposite stories – which story we see depends on the meaning we give the words. The terms of philosophy are subtle. Is it a religion of the mind, reality, or a unification of both?

Christianity united a new concept to Judaism, that the God the Jews were expecting, the Logos, had been manifested, had been made real. To be meaningful, something ‘manifested’ must declare itself into a reality that is real. In a way, all things declare their reality. This is how they are known.

Yet, what does this mean? I think the problem is not that difficult. I think the very act of cognition, what we call reason, is an act of ‘sentence-making.’ Sentences attempt to declare reality. In this Aristotle was right. As we go, we necessarily begin to create a dialog in our head, attaching definitions to concepts, declaring ‘this’ is ‘that,’ mentally playing this simple sentence-making though like a tape to check its worth. We, quite naturally, internally verbalize our intuitions to make sense of them, so that we can discard them when they do not make sense, and hang on to the when they do. This is reason.

However, somewhere spirituality made a shift – it did not so much set out to declare reality a fraud as it set out to declare this ‘inner voice’ as something more than just an act of reasoning. To do this, it declared that reality was a barbaric prison, and the inner voice was its innocent prisoner. When we made this shift, we created a new religion existing underneath and inside the words, ritual, and history of the authentic one.

I will try to put it succinctly – when Christ came into the world there were several things considered obvious – that reality was real, that words have real meanings, that truth was not just an opinion and was not culturally dependent, that what I call ‘me’ has real meaning, that there is a basis for morality. Yet, over the course of Christianity there has been a near conspiracy to convert it into a spirituality where these default settings have no meaning. It was not that this was so inspiring or appealing, it was the necessary price for converting a simple ‘inner voice’ into a trapped prisoner that must be befriended and freed.

The purpose of this book is not just to declare that the Authentic Christianity was the one consistent with the obvious, but also to illustrate how the conversion into heresy took place.

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Heresy is like a jigsaw puzzle built face down;

All the pieces fit, but you do not get the picture.

Truth?

Should one discard this thesis about reality as being arbitrary and an exercise in pure logic, it would then become extremely difficult not to fall into solipsism.

Albert Einstein

It is not uncommon for teachers to teach half-truths. One of the most common is that Christopher Columbus proved the Earth was round. Much like ‘warp-drive,’ or ‘time-travel,’ Washington Irving was writing Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus and needed a plot-point, so he made-up the flat-earth story, disregarding that Aristotle had determined the Earth was round 2000 years before. Even the Bible has it in. ¹

Over time, Irving’s plot-point became ‘truth.’ Aristotle got that one right.

One Aristotle didn’t get right was that he believed the Earth was the center of not only the Solar System, but the entire Universe. While Galileo corrected that error by a ‘few’ million miles, moving the center from the Earth to the Sun, the impact of that error was not realized until the twentieth-century when the immense size of the Universe became known. In some ways, Galileo was just as in error for we still have no idea where the center truly is.

Aristotle’s error was not nearly as Earthshaking as academia would have us believe, either. Yes, moving the center made calculations much easier, but they could accurately predict planetary motion almost 2000 years ago, as attested to by the Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient planetary computer built around 200 BC or so. We are taught that Galileo corrected this error, yet, even Rome was suspicious 30 years before Galileo’s trial for it had consulted astronomers like Copernicus and Christopher Clavius to correct the error. Rome hung on to the old system, not so much out of Biblical deference, but because Clavius’ math was better than Copernicus’.

Imagine, however, what would have happened had we continued to teach the error. What if we had decided to hide the truth? What if we were so certain that we were right we were willing to falsify documents and history? That we went so far as to cover our error with ancient hypothetical and forged documents? This is precisely what happened nearly 1500 years ago in theology, fact became myth, and myth became fact … and we still teach the myth.

Letters of Pseudo-Dionysius

The title page of Pseudo-Dionysius, 1556. It was the possession of Roman Catholics James Boyd, Bishop of Glasgow, and James Beaton, the last Archbishop of Glasgow. ‡‡

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This ‘myth’ was so highly regarded as fact that when it was conclusively proven to be false in the late nineteenth-century, the ‘truth’ was put on hold. There was a mad dash by academia and scholars to find alternate ancient texts, obtuse philosophies, anything at all, hoping to find proof that the myth was the fact. Further, for decades, even to this day, so certain are they that the myth must be true, academia often belittles anyone who thinks otherwise.

So what is this fact-myth that’s been hidden? It is not that Christianity is a lie. It is that ‘reality’ is not real. This thought, like a virus, infected Christian philosophy about 1500 years ago and has been gradually building its immunity ever since. The carriers of the virus? The scholars and academia who wanted the text proclaiming this myth so badly to be true they ignored the obvious, it was a fraud. They have not been appealing to Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Gnostic writings, odd artifacts, new historical criticisms, merely to bring Christianity up-to-date, or to make it more academically acceptable. No, ‘their’ brand of Christianity died late nineteenth-century. Rather than accept that they got it wrong and confess, they have been scrambling for the last 100 years to find the slightest proof they were right.

So what was this falsified text? It was the secret ‘gospel’ of Dionysius, a fraudulent text that academics, scholars, clergy, high and low, all accepted as true because it gave them stature and access to a perceived higher wisdom. It made wrestling with the harder points of the true Gospel irrelevant. Rather than accept the truth, they still are determined to preserve the virus.

Idealism

The belief that reality is not ‘real’ is called Idealism. In the very ancient world all belief systems were versions of it. As thought began to mature, naturalists began to wrestle with the idea ‘what is reality.’ Some thought it was water, some fire, some atoms. They laid the groundwork for philosophy.

Idealism was wonderful for the rulers. It was an easy way of controlling your subjects and convincing them that their miseries were not real. ² Realism threatened that scheme, Christianity was the first religion to invest itself fully in Realism. Eventually, a movement came along called Gnosticism that intended to convert Christianity back into Idealism. When this was finally successful, natural philosophy broke off, became science, and went its own way.

However, a curious thing has happened. Science, in its effort to make religion obsolete, has not gone down the path of pure Realism either. Modern science in its highest halls of knowledge, hidden from plain view, has recreated a radical fantasy that in many ways mimics the very idealistic spirituality it condemns. It mimics the very same Gnostic Hellenism (with subtler nuances) that threatened early Christianity, often deriving its ‘default settings’ from the very same sources, as I shall show.

The whole of religion, the whole of philosophy, depends on one issue, ‘what is truth.’ This is the very question Pilate asked Christ at the Passion. Yet, there is a hidden pitfall in this question. Before I can decide whether this doctrine or that doctrine is worthy of my allegiance, I must first decide, ‘is it true?’ The pitfall is that the very definition of ‘truth’ is also a ‘truth’ itself. Can I rightfully call something ‘true’ if I have no definition for ‘truth’ in the first place? While all philosophy seemingly must end in ‘truth,’ it must begin there, also. A misassumption over the nature of truth could spawn other false-truths, eventually jeopardizing the endeavor all together. Before long the very act of knowing, becomes ‘unknowing.’

Clearly, any religion worth its salt must address this issue, especially Christianity. If Christianity is to survive, it must do it not only in a relevant way, but in a profound way. Indeed, the problem with modern Christianity is that it often offers no ‘truth’ that stands it apart from any other Idealism. Modern Christianity takes no risks – it thinks it is safe promoting a doctrine of ‘love’ that cannot be falsified.

Christianity is also burdened with volumes of ‘stories’, most no longer generally believed true. So, it continually apologizes and reconfigures them. To most, the Bible has become an antiquarian version of Aesop’s Fables.

Modern clergy approach this dilemma fairly lack-lusterly, if they are troubled by it at all. Typically to avoid the dilemma they resort to several techniques: illuminating obscure facts; finding subtle word nuances; illustrating weird cultural circumstance of the day … all trying to show how the story in question was hip to our modern approach to ‘truth,’ despite the misguided traditional understanding. The laity, for their part, are willing accomplices — they want their foibles affirmed.

Yet, even if you took a class at a local community college, you would expect to learn something ‘true,’ a ‘teaching’ that is not only practical, but insightful, perhaps even profound. A ‘teaching’ is just another word for ‘doctrine,’ and apart from the modern contrived Golden Rule, the Church today has none. Once the essence of good manners, the Golden Rule of today has become ‘I permit you whatsoever, so long as you permit me the same.’

If you think this is the disease of just the Liberal Church, it is not. The Conservative Church merely arrives at the same destination by a different route: whatever responsibilities I might have to a ‘true doctrine’ Christ has absolved me of, for I have proclaimed myself ‘saved.’

To the outsider, both methods seem to be ways to finesse this fact: the Church is obsolete, it is in denial. Still, modern society seems to be yearning for an answer. We live in an era where ‘truth’ has little to do with what ancient man thought truth to be. ‘Truth’ was once an appeal towards an absolute, a tangible doctrine.

If one were to look up ‘truth’ today you would find an indifferent definition like, ‘truth is what most people believe,’ shielding the word from failure. The ancient definition of ‘truth’ was this:

Truth is conformity of mind to reality.

Here we have the essence of all real philosophy. We have the observer and the observed, me and everything I perceive, and a connection between the two. Yet, this ‘connection’ is not perfect. We see the world imperfectly as through a ‘veil’ that must be overcome. This is the Egocentric Predicament. Every time I declare this ‘is’ that, I try to brave this predicament. If I fail I risk falling into Skepticism.

The Skeptics argument is essentially this: if Realism is true, it should be able to describe everything accurately, thoroughly, and completely. If it cannot it must be false.

No one’s perceptions are without error, the world around us is never perfectly known. Further, my description of the truth can never be as elaborate as the truth I am trying to describe – the fault is not reality, the weakness is mine. Therefore, truth is continuously a risky endeavor of trying to understand things as we perceive them, and communicating them ‘as they are.’ My truth is only as accurate as it depicts faithfully the reality I live in. My ‘truth’ is only useful insofar as I can communicate it and act upon it. It is only eternal insofar as it resolves in the Most High. Yet, this is not the modern definition of truth. Nor is it the one the modern Church generally teaches.

Modern truth comes in two forms, both symptoms of the fact that the modern world does not know how to bridge the predicament between ‘me’ and the world I perceive anymore. Therefore, the modern era seldom makes a commitment to ‘what is.’ We end up with ‘two truths’, one representing ‘that which I am certain of,’ and ‘everything else that I can never be certain of.’ In this scheme the only thing I can be certain of is ‘me,’ everything else is ‘the other.’ These two notions of truth, permanently at odds with each other, result in the ‘two-truth’ misconceptions of truth:

Truth, the truth I hold dear, is my own thoughts, the sincere notions I ponder about myself, the emotions I hold, the things relevant to me, whatever serves me best. Truth merely represents my current predicament, as everyone else’s truth represents theirs.

Truth, in general, is just the general mood of society, a political endeavor, an eclectic collection of people’s opinions. It is not philosophy, it is politics. Like all politics, it changes with the wind – there are no eternal answers. Merely values that suit the mood of the day and the current direction of the majority. Reality is opinion.

The result of all this is: what was once a ‘connection’ between me and reality, a declarative ‘is,’ is now merely a subtle nuanced negotiation. Like a used car, if truth does not suit me I don’t have to ‘buy it.’

The old definition of truth resulted in absolutes. It strived for certainty. The modern attempt is anything but. It thrives on ‘uncertainty,’ it considers reality ‘an opinion’ as it is always in flux. Uncertainty, or relativism, hides the fact that things can be known. While it places no confidence in a causal, purposeful reality (making God obsolete), it allows me to do as I will when I will – ‘there is no truth, therefore all is permitted.’

Real truth demands a moral imperative. To believe in real truth means I must act like I believe and have convictions. This leads to the ancient definition of morality:

Morality is conformity of what I do to what I believe.

You see, without conformity of mind to reality, philosophy cannot begin. Without philosophy, science cannot begin. Without the certainty that the reality I see is essentially the same for others, there are no moral imperatives, only situations.

One might ask, so what? The fact is this simple dilemma: if I cannot be sure that the world around me can be known with certainty, then I am necessarily alone. Like the tests conducted suspending people in anechoic isolation chambers, within a short time madness ensues. Ultimately, the ‘self’ loses definition, what I conceive of as ‘me’ becomes merely a thought, a phantasm of no consequence. Without some certainty, Man has no purpose. Society becomes a hedonistic scheme for getting what you want. Morality becomes a rule for everyone else, an arbitrary obstacle for impeding the prosperity of others, so that you can get more for yourself.

I will attempt to show that the issue of ‘truth’ was once the central issue of Christianity. That this issue was best represented by the Scholastics, who were not merely an odd anomaly of the late Middle Ages, but had hit on the main core of Christian thinking, the reconciling of the real to the ideal.

Before the twentieth-century, it was the job of competing schools of academic discipline to keep other disciplines in check, to make sure that they were complimentary to each other. The twentieth-century’s convoluted philosophical scheme has rarely kept these disciplines in check within themselves. This has led to absurd philosophies of paradox such as: Nihilism and Existentialism; physics that embraces absurdity; self-contradicting and self-defeating historical analysis; mathematics with infinite infinities; etc., etc… To put it simply, academia has taken humanity on a wild ride of intellectual mysticism and cultivated in him a thirst for unbridled freedom.

There is a growing rage in science against not only religion, but philosophy. I think the motive is clear: science knows it cannot complete itself, it cannot explain ‘mind.’ Therefore, what it cannot reduce to nonsense through psychology, it must destroy through propaganda – Man is the last visible Icon for the new Iconoclasts. Atheism is no longer an opinion, it is a weapon.

However, we today have access to more information than ever before … it’s time to call the bluff. This mysticism of modernism seeks to not only overthrow the basis of reason itself, but the book of morality that was long assumed closed. This l’enfant terrible not only has created a new ‘spirit of the times’, it seeks to undermine the true Spirit itself.

There has been an emerging rebirth of genuine Christian Apologetics, primarily focusing on the actual historicity of Biblical events now challenged by the New Atheists. I would like to add my voice to their’s, but further show that the basis of most of these modern criticisms is not the sound scholarship they would have us think. Rather, it is the very Gnosticism that was corrupting ancient society long before modern science was even born. Inspiring the New Atheists is not reason, but an Idealism that is philosophically corrupt and absurd, and cannot work. It is Hellenistic Mysticism dressed up with technical jargon.

The New Atheists are not merely trying to topple Christianity, they are trying to advance the very philosophical heresy that threatened reason even before Christianity. Ancient Gnostic heresy was not merely a denial of Christianity, it was a denial of reality altogether. The threat to modern Christianity is not just an attempt to delegitimize Christianity, but to further legitimize radical Idealism, where ‘nothing is true, and all is permitted.’

However, there is an underlying dilemma. Some of the most vocal critics against the New Atheists are a new breed of Evangelical Christians. Much of their scholarship is impeccable. Yet, they claim to represent an ‘orthodoxy’ that would leave a true Eastern Orthodox Christian bewildered. It appears that they are a new, more advanced version of what was once best represented by the old King James fundamentalists. But they have moved on. While they base their ‘authenticity’ on an adherence to traditional Christian historicity, what they define as ‘orthodox’ seems confined to a sort of advanced Bible Alone Calvinism. My suspicion is that they carry within their bowels the very essence of that very same disease they seek to cure. While they may indeed be better Christians than I, their pedigree runs through the very heresy they seek to defeat. The Church they envision is not Orthodox, but orthodox as they define it, stripped of everything but their Bibles. They have correctly tagged the evil from without … and missed the evil from within.

This is not the first time Christianity was threatened by a new ‘spirit of the times.’ In the late Middle Ages a sect referred to as the Cathars attempted to reduce Christianity to a similar scheme. We are tempted to see their innovations as prefiguring a modern spirituality, yet hidden underneath was something suspicious, something unearthly, something wickedly corrupt. To illustrate here is a dialog from Montaillou: The promised Land of Error:

"One day, says Mengarde Buscailh of Prades d’Aillon, the next village to Montaillou, I met my brother-in-law, Guillaume Buscailh, on the way to my parish church.

‘Where are you going?’ asked Guillaume.

‘I am going to church.’

‘What an excellent ecclesiastic you are!’ answered Guillaume. ‘You would do just as well to pray to God in your own house as in the church.’

I answered that the Church was a more suitable place to pray to God than one’s own house.

Then he simply said to me: ‘You are not of the faith.’

Thus for Guillaume Buscailh, so zealous a supporter of Cathar ideas that he one day tried to make his sister-in-law stop feeding her baby and let it die…"

To the Cathars, not only was the Church a graven image, so was reality. Once again we are going down that same path.

The core dilemma – a false philosophical assumption

As has been said, ‘Truth is conformity of mind to Reality.’ Its counter is typically, ‘but is your truth the same as my truth?’

There is an issue here that I think does not get enough attention. It is perhaps a source of much of the problem. It might also shed light on why ‘the word’ is so important.

Within the word ‘mind’ lies a hidden ‘assumed truth,’ what is called an enthymeme.

Because of this, when we speak of the process of science, the process of philosophy, the process of cognition, there is a hidden step that is seldom acknowledged.

If someone were to throw a rock at your head, you would quite naturally duck. This is totally rational and reasonable, yet you did not say to yourself first, ‘quick, I must duck.’ If you did, you might now have a bump. Later, however, when you thought about it, you probably created an inner dialog using words to internalize the experience.

Every time we think about truth, every time we try to share truth, we inevitably at some point try to convert the experience, the thought, or the principle, to words. When I say, truth is conformity of mind to reality, am I referring to my intuitions, or my verbalized account of those intuitions?

When I see a beautiful pastoral scene, my words necessarily fail me. Any verbalization is out of necessity a reduction of the actual truth – yet, when I debate ‘truth’ I am invariably trying to defend not the truth itself, but this necessary verbal reduction. When I say to myself, ‘that is beautiful,’ I seldom capture all that I mean.

This is the cause of much consternation. It is not whether the truth exists or not, but whether a verbalized description can be infinitely elaborated to cover every possible nuance, and every possible challenge. This is precisely why philosophy usually sticks to ‘simple’ truths such as identity and non-contradiction, or conformity.

Every philosophical point, every scientific theory, every theological essence at some point must be reduced to language not only to communicate it, but to reason with it. In a very real way, science does not discover reality, it attempts to describe it, so we can internalize it, learn from it, to make it predictable. But these internalizations alone are not reality.

Almost all Idealism begins with a confusion, that our internally verbalized descriptions are what is actually real. This has led to two major errors that correlate with both inner and outer misconceptions of what Truth is:

That the true ‘self’ is not one’s simple essence, but this internal dialog. They identify not with the true self, but with this inner chatter.

That the Logos, the highest principle of all Christian thought, is likewise a divine inner cosmic voice struggling to emerge and be known within the minds of the elect. Again, they do not seek Truth, the Logos they seek is this same inner chatter.

These two misconceptions when united are not only the basis of Gnosticism, but the basis of all skepticism. All descriptions of reality are necessarily limited, by nature and in scope. Idealism wins its arguments by forcing its opponents to a verbal standard it knows full well cannot be met. By claiming ignorance, the Gnostic forces the mind to probe deeper and deeper pleading for an answer it cannot find, but