RE: What Bible? (Elaine Pagels)

Is Elaine Pagels the wife of the late physicist Heinz Pagels who died in Colorado in a mountaineering accident?
 
Moorad

________________________________

From: asa-owner@lists.calvin.edu on behalf of Clarke Morledge
Sent: Sat 3/11/2006 11:34 AM
To: Mervin Bitikofer
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Subject: Re: What Bible? (Elaine Pagels)

Merv,

I'd like to add my 2 cents on Elaine Pagels...

I have mixed thoughts about her. On the one hand, she is quite an engaging
and gifted writer. She is really good at presenting scholarly historical
research for a lay audience. I also learn a lot reading her. Pagels
makes for a very enjoyable read. It is difficult to find a comparable
conservative writer who is as accessible and good as she is.

On the other hand, her presuppositions unfortunately place her not only
outside historic, evangelical orthodoxy but also outside the mainstream in
church history research. She is clearly to be commended for trying to
integrate her personal struggle over tragic family loss with scholarly
research. But she finds traditional evangelical approaches to
theodicy to be lacking -- and that forces her to place more of her hope in
rehabilitating Gnosticism as a viable Christian option. Unfortunately, it
just will not work so easily.

The scholarly consensus she assumes for an early date for the Gnostic
writings, such as the Gospel of Thomas, simply isn't there. Furthermore,
I am constantly suprised by her embrace of the Gospel of Thomas when the
last verses of the work are so clearly misogynist. As it concerns ASA
members, classic Gnosticism pretty much severs the connection between
science and faith by divorcing the doctrine of creation from the doctrine
of redemption.

Here is a review of one of her earlier books, _The Origin of Satan_, which
is also quite good in some ways. But the reviewer, Jeffrey Burton
Russell, is able to identify the problems with Pagels and her tendency
towards revisionism as found in all of her writings:

http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9511/russell.html

Maybe, Pagels simply wants to keep the good and throw out the bad in both
Gnosticism and Orthodoxy. She once attended an evangelical church when
she was a teenager. There are probably a lot of things that she misses
about that experience. But the attempt to bring in Gnosticism as
something that simply broadens our horizons is tragically misleading.

I, for one, find it very hard to accept the Gnostic claim that anyone can
have any "secret" direct insights into the "real" teaching of Jesus that
bypasses the the orthodoxy of Nicene faith.

Blessings in Him,

Clarke Morledge
College of William and Mary
Information Technology - Network Engineering

On Sat, 11 Mar 2006, Mervin Bitikofer wrote:

> I would guess that you are probably a reader of Elaine Pagels -- am I
> correct? The questions you ask below could come straight from her book:
> "Beyond Belief" -- which I'm in the middle of at the moment. I may not
> come to the same conclusions as I anticipate she might (I'm not a Da Vinci
> code fan -- although I haven't read that one at all yet, and only know about
> it by hearing various responses to it.) But I am learning some excellent
> Bible history from Pagels' work. According to her, the pre-Nicean body of
> believers was so diverse and eclectic that they could not agree even on the
> things that eventually came to be embraced as orthodoxy. She points out
> that every 'canonical' source of truth had claims to close proximity to Jesus
> -- and yet the actual authorship of each has also been called into doubt.
> This applied to the writings that were eventually rejected as well as those
> embraced. Each group had their own underlying assumptions and emphases.
> Is it so wrong that some church fathers found the 'decide what truth is for
> yourself' mentality alarming and felt compelled to delineate and define what
> truth is? We can always quibble over whether or not their version of it was
> right -- but the alternative to abandoning the quest for absolute (community
> -- even world-wide) truth in favor of more individualistic "just search
> within" type of interpretations seems dangerous to me. And yet to throw out
> committment to a ('the') sacred text, seems to me to invite just such a
> conclusion. I'm eager to finish her work to see what conclusions she draws
> -- I already suspect I won't be in complete agreement with them, but I'm
> learning a lot about early church history that I didn't know.
>
> --merv
Received on Sat Mar 11 13:59:45 2006