Greetings in the Name of the Lord, 

     Last week we discussed some of the historical context of a central phrase in our communion liturgy and how it might help us to overcome the perceived polarization that surrounds us through rooted mainline protestant theology: 

     We touched on how it may have come to be used by the early church and how it reflects Greek influence on the early church, particularly the idea that the term mystery refers to a kind of special teaching. The early Church held up three mysteries in particular: the Bible, Liturgy and theoria/contempliato. These mysteries, when studied and practiced, were intended to help a practitioner of the faith get to know God better. If you would like to review last week’s article, here is the link.  If you would also like to go back to the week before and read the intro to this series, here is the link for that article. 
     This week we dive a little deeper into what the phrase “Great is the Mystery of Faith” can teach us about the early church and how it bears the imprint of a particularly toxic series of fights that emerged during the 2nd and 3rd centuries.
     Let us return for a moment to the term mysterion. As I mentioned last week, the use of the term in the early church highlights the influence of Greek culture on Christianity.  Remembering that Christianity started as a subset of Judaism, the influence of outside cultures was surely not always received well. To put it another way, the early church was very diverse and dynamic and did not always agree with itself.  Not surprisingly, mysterion and what was meant by “secret knowledge” had various interpretations across the early church. Some took the Greek concept of secret knowledge quite literally and preached that Jesus had taught the twelve disciples something different than what he taught the crowds, knowledge that was intended only for those who had been appropriately “initiated”.  The folks that interpreted mysterion in this way came to be known as Gnostics (gnosis is Greek for knowledge).
     The Gnostics caused all sorts of issues for the early church, arguing that the commonly held texts and orally passed down accounts were incorrect and that everyone else was missing the true meaning of things. The Gnostics would regularly claim that they were the only ones with the true knowledge of Christ. During this time period, there were many gospels being written and shared (the notion of having four specific gospels was not fully agreed upon until roughly 200 CE) . Some of those written gospel accounts came from the Gnostics, most notably the Gospel of Thomas and the Apocryphon of John, both rediscovered with the dead sea scrolls in 1945. It should also be noted that the Gospel of John has a lot of gnostic leanings, particularly the language of the first chapter where the author of John discusses the Word or Logos in both esoteric and borderline formulaic phrasing, highlighting a specific kind of knowledge to be passed down.
     There were quite a few different sects of Christians around this time, but one that stood in particular contrast to the Gnostics were the Mystics. To be fair, the Mystics almost certainly did not refer to themselves this way, the term was used later in history to refer to a particular group of early Church Fathers. Regardless, those now identified as the Mystics represented in many ways an alternative to the secret knowledge and special initiations of the Gnostics. The Mystics understood the term mysterion in a very different way than the Gnostics did. They understood mysterion to be a kind of teaching that revealed something about the true nature of God. For example, the Bible was a mysterion for the Mystics. The Mystics would have studied it in formal ways specifically seeking understanding about the nature of God. This does not sound too dissimilar from what we do today, but it would have clearly stood in contrast to the Gnostics who often approached the Bible looking for hidden formulas and secret numbers and for clues to the secret teachings Jesus was passing on to the disciples.
     Liturgy was another mysterion which the mystics understood as a divinely given gift that offered a window into the true nature of God. This persists today in the way we approach Communion, as a way of encountering God. The language of Liturgy also mattered to the Mystics, as specific prayers and canticles (think the Lord’s Prayer, the Magnificat, the Song of Simeon, the psalms, etc.) were understood to be inspired by the Holy Spirit. In hearing these ancient words, and reflecting on them, there was in it access to the divine. The contemporary Mainline Protestant Church mostly views Liturgy through a different lens, with the focus nowadays on its ability to inspire, but we still use quite a bit of ancient language and cannot feel too separate from the original approach of the Mystics. This understanding of Liturgy certainly stands in contrast to the Gnostics who would have understood liturgies as formulaic rites of initiation, with language that often bordered on the magical interspersed with the secretive.
     These two mysterions are certainly things we still take very seriously and that still guide the Church today, particularly us Presbyterians where we regularly impress upon the importance of Word and Sacrament. Beyond these two, the third mysterion, known as theoria/contempliato (silent prayer & meditation), which was as central to the Mystics as the other two, has been shied away from by Mainline Protestantism. Yet, looking back at the history of the church, particularly the debates of the second and third century, I firmly believe it was this third mysterion that was able to deliver the Church through those challenging times.
     Next week we will get more into the specific arguments and where the phrase “one iota’s difference” came from. The arguments and debates that emerged around the Gnostic movement almost tore the church apart before it was truly able to establish itself.  Again, it was ultimately this third mysterion that proved so important and allowed for the Mystics to provide much of the foundational theology the Church today relies on. 
In Peace,
Mike