gnostics and lutherans

[phygelus]

Quite often latter-day gnostics will choose to emphasize, first and foremost and sometimes to the exclusion of any other teaching, that gnosticism does not require an intermediary between the individual and God.  This is just a warming-over of the Protestant doctrine of the "priesthood of all believers", which the Catholic Encycopedia charmingly

Comments

[xephyr]

My take on the long-running feud between the Catholics and the Gnostics was that it was part of a larger, global complex of inter-related political gambits designed to secure control between all the various churches and congregations. From the time of Constantine, the Church hasn't cared about the gnosis of its individual members, it cared about who was able to dictate what the faith was and was not.

Dogma management was a key means to maintain and grow the populations of any specific religious movement. The Catholic method was to absorb as many different populations as possible, which is why the Nicean Creed is so weird (and still only universally accepted with certain omissions). From this standpoint, however, it is difficult to imagine that there was any kind of "special knowledge" that interested the Church.

I do agree that the term "gnostic" is horribly overused, and it's a neat idea to tie it to "special knowledge", but I'm really not sure that this adds anything to the message. I don't hang out with the people who really dig on Gnostic theology, so I can't say that there aren't some elements of deistic polarity that some would claim as fundamental to claiming the title of "Gnostic".

To answer your question about how to distinguish Lutherans from Gnostics, I'd say that you just have to compare creeds and theologies and see which one seems the better match. This may not be a satisfactory answer for you, but I think you'd be hard pressed to interview any particular congregation at random and guess what specific denomination they are based solely on what the congregants told you that they believed.