Hermeneutics and The Shape of the Future - Edited by Frank K. Flinn
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Hermeneutics and The Shape of the Future - Edited by Frank K. Flinn |
In any discussion such as this, one needs to define some terms. The word "hermeneutics" is derived from the Greek god Hermes, who ferried messages between gods and men. In this sense, hermeneutics is the art of interpreting divine messages (cf. Plato, The Statesman 290c). In our time, the notion of hermeneutics has a much more limited meaning. In general, hermeneutics for us is understood as the art of deciphering "texts." The word "texts" is taken in a wide sense. We speak of the Book of Nature, for example, which modern science decodes and interprets.
One more thing needs to be said about the notion of hermeneutics before I proceed to the main theme of my essay. Why do we need to interpret at all? The reason is that "texts" are ambiguous. This is particularly true about religious texts which are couched in symbolic expressions. In this narrower sense, hermeneutics is the art of deciphering ambiguous expressions. Ambiguous expressions are what I call symbols. Symbols are contrasted with signs. Signs are univocal meanings which have distinctness and clarity. For example, the sign which is placed above a door to mark the exit has little or no ambiguity about it. Symbols, on the other hand, are multivocal, i.e., they have a plurality of meanings which are attached to them. The expression "Kingdom of God" in the Bible would be an example of a symbolic expression. Signs are referential, symbols are condensational.1 Besides condensing many referential meanings into a unified whole, symbols, according to Victor Turner, also unite a sensory pole with an ideological or normative pole.2 The multileveled dimension of symbols, in the words of Paul Ricoeur, makes them opaque.3
Ricoeur adds that symbolic expressions "mean something other than what is said." The literal meaning gives rise to another meaning, expressed in and through the literal sense itself. Many thinkers, such as Aquinas and Kant, believed that this second meaning arises by analogy. We encounter such analogies in the Parables of Jesus which begin, "The Kingdom of God is like..." In saying that the kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed, Jesus seems to have intended an analogy. We can be too literalistic about the analogy (being literal and literalistic are two different things). In referring to the image of the tiny mustard seed and its growth into a gigantic tree in which birds find their nesting place, Jesus brings at least two meanings into relation in a complex symbol. One way of putting this is to say that the ordinary (a grain of mustard seed) is like the extraordinary (the kingdom of God). The tiny mustard seed gives sensory evidence of extraordinary growth, thereby pointing to the unexpected arrival of the kingdom of God and its immense growth. By drawing our attention to the simple grain of mustard seed, Jesus, as it were, challenges the mundaneness of our everyday perception. Ordinarily, we do not pay attention to mustard seeds. And in our everyday lives we do not read the signs of the things around us as symptoms, so to speak, of the kingdom of God. The Parable of the Mustard Seed pierces us to the heart, thereby making us alive and open to the arrival of the kingdom. To say this in other words, we do not ordinarily live eschatologically, ready and welcoming the imminent coming of the fullness of the kingdom, and the Parable of the Mustard Seed lays bare this tendency in us to succumb to the powers and principalities of our everyday lives.
I have used the Parable of the Mustard Seed to illustrate Ricoeur's statement that symbols mean more than what is said literally. Furthermore, my exegesis, which is not the only possible exegesis but one among many, illustrates how a second meaning (the extraordinary event of the kingdom) arises in and through the image of the mustard seed. The ordinary meaning, taken from everyday experience of horticulture, both points to itself and beyond itself. In sum, it has, at the very minimum, a double meaning. It is this double meaning that calls forth the necessity of hermeneutics. Because symbolic expression is opaque, multivalent, and ambiguous, there arises the need to "dis-implicate" the symbol.
There is one more task of hermeneutics that I would like to point out. On the one hand we have to understand ancient texts in terms of what they meant in their own times and, on the other, in terms of what they mean for us. The first task can be called descriptive and the second can be called interpretive.4 Here, it is not a question of archaizing the text or of modernizing it. Rather, the question is to attain what Hans-Georg Gadamer calls a Horizontverschmelzung (a merging of the horizons) in Truth and Method and what Paul Ricoeur calls a "second naïveté" in The Symbolism of Evil.5 There is a double reflexive character between the descriptive and interpretive tasks. In order to describe the contents of the Bible, for example, I need to translate its categories into the categories of my own times. This "translation," however, will not be authentic if I do not let the horizon of the biblical message enter into and challenge my own horizon. Stated in another way, I cannot read and interpret the Bible if I do not let the Bible read and interpret me.
This double reflexive character of description and interpretation presents problems to those who want "to play Bibleland" and maintain that we can naively approach the Bible without any critical interpretation as well as to those who subject the biblical writings to critical historical interpretation and claim that the Bible speaks to an earlier time and a "mythic mentality" that has long since been superseded by modern science. The point is not to reject either naive or critical consciousness but to find the thread of unity. Paul Ricoeur has pointed out how we pass from naive faith to critical consciousness and then again to what he calls a "second naïveté" which synthesizes the former two. James Fowler, applying Piaget's model of structural development to the faith dimension, has shown how individuals pass from a magical-numinous understanding of symbols to a critical translation of symbol into ideas and finally to a universalizing reappropriation of symbolic content in what might be called a post-critical phase of development.6 Those rare individuals who attain this post-critical phase are called "regenerators of symbols" who incarnate the relation between symbols and the wealth of Being on a universal basis. One can cite the examples of St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.
Hans-Georg Gadamer's concept of "the merging of the horizons" and Paul Ricoeur's idea of a "second naïveté" along with Fowler's notion of "symbolic regeneration" can assist us in avoiding the pitfalls of bestowing a "false modernity" on ancient texts like the Bible or of imprisoning it in a "false antiquity". Conservative and fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible often are subject to the first pitfall, while liberal and critical interpretations fall into the second trap. The task of hermeneutics is to ferry the meaning of the Bible across the divides of time in a way that interprets the Bible as it interprets itself and in a way that lets it challenge our self-interpretation of the most important things.
In the first centuries of Christianity the theological concept of the Testaments, Old and New, was developed in relation to the formation of the three Articles of the Creed. The background of the twin concepts of Testaments and Creed was the Gnostic controversy. Today we have a much clearer picture of what this controversy was really about.7 There were many varieties of Gnosticism and it is difficult to come up with any general descriptions which apply to all of them.
There is one general statement, however, which applies to most, if not all, brands of Gnosticism. That statement is: the Gnostics were convinced of the irrelevancy of the body. For some the body was illusion, for others the physical body was positive evil. But, in general, one can say that the material, physical and bodily conditions of existence were irrelevant and that the meaning of salvation was to escape from the inauthenticity of bodily existence to one's authentic home in the region of the spirit.
It is against this background that one must see the struggle in the first centuries to retain the Old Testament as normative for Christianity and to interpret that struggle in light of the priority of the First Article of the Creed. The First Article speaks of creation. The whole creation, material and spiritual, is created by the Father and therefore good.8 To be sure, the Old Testament needed to be interpreted in light of the New by the early Christian theologians. What needs to be pointed out, however, is that the New Testament did not entail, as it did for Marcion, a "cancellation of the creator's claim to his property."9 Rather the creation, subjected to distortion and the structures of domination in the fall, needed to be restored. It is interesting to note that the Second Article of the Creed, which treats of redemption through the Son, speaks of very physical things: Jesus being born, suffering in the body, dying and rising in the body. Likewise, the Ne w Testament stresses Jesus' healing of people's bodies and not just their spirits.
The theme of restoration links the Second Article to the First. The Second Article, for Christians, also goes beyond the First. We may say that Sin (the hare) got a head start on Grace (the turtle) in the Fall, but the dispensation of Grace eventually overtakes Sin. Sin may have increased by arithmetic progression, but Grace, once it got its toehold in the faith of Abraham (Romans 4), grows according to a geometric progression. This is what I take Paul's expression, "Sin abounding, Grace superabounding" to mean (Romans 5:15 ff.) Nonetheless, the Second Article, which generally corresponds to the New Testament is not the end of the story. There is a tension between the "already" and the "not yet" in the Ne w Testament. Paul expresses this tension by saying that in baptism we have died in Christ (the already) but will rise in the age to come. Even the gift of the Spirit is seen as a down payment on the age to come.
The fundamental tension in the Second Article is what motivates the completion of the Creed with a Third Article, which looks to the fulfillment of the restoration. Under the Third Article fall the traditional topics of the gifts of the Spirit, ecclesiology, the communion of the saints (= theological sociology!) and the hope of the resurrection of the dead.
There are two things to keep in mind about the Third Article. First, it deals with the Last Things (the eschata). The Last Things, according to the earlier Fathers of the Church, were like the First Things (the prota). Thus the promise of dominion over the earth (Genesis 1:28) reappears in New Testament passages about the End (cf. I Corinthians 15:24-2 8; Revelation 20:1-3; 21:1-4). Although these passages are written in highly symbolic language, it is important to note that they do not refer to an ethereal "heaven" but concrete flesh-and-blood realities such as wiping away tears from men's eyes.
The second thing we need to keep in mind about the Third Article, is that Christianity has had difficulty in concretely embodying its meaning. The reasons for this are multiple and I cannot hope to entertain all of them in this lecture. I would like to underline the following points. First, as Christianity became more hellenized, so the earlier Christian belief in God's dispensation and, in particular, in the parousia, the coming of the kingdom of the Son on earth, became ontologized into a vertical geography, e.g., "heaven" vs. "earth." In this ontological landscape the doctrine of the Church became a doctrine about an institution (the civitas Dei) alongside other institutions (the civitas mundi). This is St. Augustine's compromise. Luther continues this line of thinking on an inward plane by maintaining that we are simul Justus etpeccator until the Final Days. A second consequence of the delayed parousia (perhaps mainline Christians should call it the permanently procrastinated parousia!) is that it was imagined more and more as a magical and cataclysmic event to be brought about by a Super-hero God. This fantasizing of the kingdom, I suggest, comes from disassociating the Third Article from the First.
Now I find it interesting that we find a correspondence between the Old Testament (Creation and Law) and the First Article and a correspondence between the New Testament (Gospel and Grace) and the Second Article, but we find no Testament which corresponds to the Third Article. There are two ways of looking at this situation. First, in one sense there is no need for a "Third" Testament for the doctrine of the millennium is already contained in the Old and New Testaments. O n the other hand, the freedom that started with the New Covenant, which is the fulfillment of the Old, allows for freedom of interpretation and the construction as it were of a Third Testament. Traditionally, this "Third" Testament was constructed out of certain passages of the Old Testament, especially the Book of Daniel, and of the New Testament, especially the Book of Revelation.
The question of a "Third" Testament presents very thorny problems for it covers things which are "not yet" but which we of the earth may hope for. I will try to cover the question under a number of topics.
1. Prior to the Constantinian Era (300 A.D.), Christianity both was more pluralisric (it had four gospels, various centers of authority, different dates for Easter in different churches, different liturgies, etc.) and more eschatological. Gustav Wingren has shown that this eschatological hope was not sundered from the hope of all the earth.10 Despite persecution and even martyrdom, the early Christian theologians could decipher the work of God in the Creation outside the Gospel. Even in "pagan" writings they could detect zpraeparatio eiangelica, a preparation and yearning for the Gospel. Their Creation faith, so to speak, balanced their Redemption faith and stressed that salvation was not flight from Creation bur hope for Creation.
After the "victory" of Christianity over the Empire, there was an increasing bureaucratization of Christian theology. The Gospel became official, that is, it became legalized and served as the means to preserve the status quo. Within the Holy Roman Empire there was the intramural competition between imperial theology (the Emperors claimed superiority by grounding the divine right of kingship in the will of the Creator) and ecclesiastical or episcopal theology (the bishops countered by maintaining that the Son, from whom they had their office, was not "secondary" to the Creator Father but homoousios, "of the same substance"). The church/state question was a matter of verticality in which the dispensation of God's providence in time got lost. With the addition of Aristotelian categories in the High Middle Ages, the ontologization and verticalization of Christian theology (e.g., in the oppositions between supernature and nature, revelation and reason) became complete. Even today one can visit the medieval cathedrals, which are nonetheless very beautiful, and see the themes of creation, redemption, and final consummation frozen into the "realized eschatology" of hierarchical stones.
2. It was in reaction to this ontologization and verticalization that the neo-apocalyptic movements of the Middle Ages broke out. On one side, the neo-apocalyptic movements touched base with the earlier Christian belief in dispensations and in the parousia in time and space. From another side, the neo-apocalyptic movements were a departure from earlier Christian eschatology. Joachim of Fiore, for example, in his Commentary on the Apocalypse departed from the early Christian Fathers' formula that "the Last Things are like the First Things." Joachim divided and sundered the dispensations from one another in the manner of Marcion. Creation, the Father, and married clergy belonged to the first dispensation; redemption, the Son, and celibate clergy to the second. Though Joachim had overlapping periods of incubation (e.g., St. Benedict begins the New Age), his typology implied that the first two dispensations were "outdated" and over with. The Joachimites, especially the Franciscan Spirituals, looked forward to the final Age of the Spirit, in which there would be no clerical structure, no sacraments and no church, but all would be "monks." Some of the Franciscan Spirituals discerned in the writings and life of Francisa "Fifth Gospel." This, again, is evidence of an impulse toward a "Third" Testament.
The history of the Western millennial groups -- Beghards, Brethren of the Free Spirit, Ranters, Levellers, etc. -- has been traced by Norman Cohn in The Pursuit of the Millennium.11 Cohn takes a rather dim view of all these movements and sees in them the precursors of modern totalitarian-fanaticism. In The Ritual Process Victor Turner gives a much more balanced view of millennial groups.12 Millennial movements begin among liminal or threshold groups on the fringes of structured society. In millennial movements, communitas, equality, propertylessness are opposed to the structured societas, ranking, property, and status, etc.13
I think that one of the most interesting aspects of millennial or communitas movements is that they point toward the future (the Kingdom in Judeo-Christianity, the Pure Land in messianic Buddhism, etc.) by pointing backwards to the common shared humanity of all living men and women. This is not unlike the early Christian belief that "the Last Things are like the First Things." The communio sanctorum, which belongs to the Third Article of the Creed, is both the hope of the future and the rediscovery that all men and women are created equally "in the image of God," a teaching that belongs to the First Article. Secondly, the initiators of movements which re-envision the communitas -- Turner compares the examples of St. Francis and Chaitanya, the Bengali founder of the religious group we know as the "Hare Krishnas" -- embody the communitas by undergoing humiliation, anonymous existence, "nakedness," suffering, and deprivation. They touch base, so to speak, with the earth itself and the religious movements which follow these initiators incorporate this "religion of the earth" in their communitarian and egalitarian ideals.
Yet one of the problems which has always beset Western millennial movements has been the tendency to drift either into spiritualism, as was the case with the Franciscan Spirituals and their successors, or into materialistic hopes for power, as was the case with Thomas Miintzer's Peasants' Revolt. There has always been a problem in co-ordinating the regeneration of inwardness with outward restoration of fallen structures of society. In North America the Great Awakening (ca. 1740 A.D.) portended both the spiritual and social regeneration of America. In the next century this double desideratum degenerated into Evangelicalism, which stresses inner conversion almost exclusively, and the Social Gospel movement, which devoted itself to the outward renovation of society.
3. In modern cultures, millennial communitas movements carry in their wake a regeneration of symbolic content that both points toward the openness of meaning and promulgates a shared praxis toward realizing new meaning. In the framework of interpretation I have pointed out, these movements tend to generate what I have called "Third" Testaments. Those who have status within a given society have great difficulty in classifying these new Testaments. The orthodox do not know whether they are "inspired interpretations," "tangential commentaries," or just plain "fictions."
In North America we have had several such "Third" Testaments, most notably Science and Health by Mary Baker Eddy and The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith. The criterion by which "orthodox" Christianity has judged these is that "the Bible itself is not merely interpreted; it is added to, with an authority and novelty which exceed the limits of sober, scholarly interpretation."14 What this statement by A. Leland Jamison fails to take into account is that "sober, scholarly interpretation" more often than not serves the hermeneutical interests of the establishment and the status quo. Traditionalist hermeneutics even of the "higher critical" kind, is devoted to literal-historical analysis of the text. According to Jiirgen Habermas, traditional hermeneutics is directed toward "the maintenance of the inter-subjectivity of mutual understanding" which, in turn, has the practical interest of maintaining control within a given community.15 Literal-historical exegesis, while leading toward "the attainment of possible consensus among actors in the framework of self understanding derived from tradition,"16 also runs the risk of objectifying the "text" and thereby of sterilizing knowledge and locking history up in a museum.17
Against this hermeneutical closure arises what may be called dialectical, emancipatory hermeneutics which attempts to liberate the "text" from the class interests of the status quo. Critical, emancipatory hermeneutics naturally gravitates toward those passages in the Old and Ne w Testaments which the tradition-bound community chooses to leave in symbolic obscurity. It seeks to make plain the "Last Things." One of the risks of emancipatory hermeneutics is that it can precipitate into chiliastic catastrophism. Such was the case with the Millerite millenarians in the first half of the nineteenth century.18 When the literal Second Coming failed, people substituted scientific progressivism and moral gradualism for the "Last Things," thereby reducing the latter to the categories of temporal evolution. The problem with eschatological hermeneutics has always been the problem of finding a mediate way between chiliastic catastrophism and mundane gradualism. There is also the problem of how to relate inward regeneration with outward reformation.
In many discussions between mainline Christians and Unificationists I have detected a hermeneutical gap. I think there is an explanation for that gap and it is that most mainline Christians are speaking out of a framework whose perimeter is the New Testament and the Second Article of the Creed whereas the Unificationists are speaking out of a framework whose perimeter is the First and Third Articles of the Creed and an implied "Third" Testament. This situation is further complicated by the fact that theology in the twentieth century has not been simply christological but christomonistic. Karl Barth, for example, subordinates and derives the First and Third Articles of the Creed from the Second: "Indeed, the second article does not just follow from the first, nor does it just precede the third; but it is the fountain of light by which the other two are lit."19
The christomonistic stance has important consequences. First, it implies a "No" to the "old Adam" (creation rather than a restoration). Secondly, eschatology is reduced to an "inner event" (Bultmann) and the work of God in time and space remains hidden, not even identifiable with the Church. These consequences, I suggest, amount to a Docetism of the First and Third Articles of the Creed.
It is precisely the First and Third Articles which are most amply a nicula tedm Divine Principle (cf. esp. Divine Principle, pp. 51-57;pp. 129-37). Yet the presentation of the doctrines of Creation and the Last Things in Divine Principle has presented problems to those of a more orthodox temperament. This can be explained in part by the fact that there are several hermeneutical levels in the articulation of these two doctrines in Divine Principle. Below I will try to indicate some of these levels.
A. Messianic Shamanism. There is a saying that in pre-technologized Korea, the average Korean was "a Confucianist in social relationships, a Buddhist when philosophizing and a Shamanist when in trouble." Shamanism has been the persistent background of Korean religion. The word "shaman" is derived from the Tungus tribes in Upper Mongolia. In Korea the word is mudang (or moo-tang), and almost all who are adepts in spirit communication are females who, in more traditional sectors of the society, pass on their skills to their offspring.
We in the West have been chiefly interested in the techniques of shamanism. The important thing to point out in this context is that shamanism in the Far East is the "democracy of religious belief and has been the source of revitalization movements both in Korea and Japan.20 Often this strand of religious belief is combined with messianic Buddhism. The important feature of shamanistic belief is that it holds that there can be contact between heaven and earth, the spirit world and the physical world, through a special medium.
Shamanism, I think, accounts for one hermeneutical level in Divine Principle.21 This shamanistic strand, however, goes beyond the nationalistic religious revival of the nineteenth century Tong-Hak movement in Korea.22 Like the Tong-Hak movement, Unification emphasizes the "chosenness of Korea" and the earthly paradise, but unlike Unification, Tong-Hak stressed the opposition between "the eastern way" (= Tong-Hak) and "the western way" (= So-Hak, especially Catholicism). In Divine Principle the nativist strand in Korean religion has been universalized and globalized.
B. Dispensationalism. A second hermeneutical level I detect in Divine Principle is its dispensationalist framework. Behind this dispensationalist framework is the belief that God's dealing with Israel is the type of universal history, (cf. Divine Principle, pp. 405-48). This typologization of history is not unlike the kind of typologizations depicted in medieval representations of the tree of life nor unlike the kind of dispensationalism one discovers in the Scofield Reference Bible.
In the Scofield Bible one can find seven dispensations, beginning with the dispensation of Innocency (Genesis 1:28) and ending with the dispensation of the Fullness of Times (Ephesians 1:10). It is worth noting that Ephesians 1:10 does not etherialize the kingdom but states that "in the dispensation of the fullness of times {God] might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven, and which are on earth." Likewise the Scofield Bible enumerates periods of "providential time-identity," e.g., the seventh and the last of the ordered ages is "identical with the kingdom covenanted with David" (The Scofield Reference Bible. New York, 1945, p. 1250, n. 3).
We ought not to forget that Unificationism is shaped by the kind of American dispensationalist Calvinism represented in the Scofield Bible. The singling out of Korea as a "chosen people" is an extension of the Puritan tenet that America was a "new Israel." In Divine Principle we see an Oriental indigenization of what was once an American type of dispensationalism. In conversation with Korean converts to Presbyterianism I have learned that the identification with ancient Israel is far from accidental. First, the Korean high-god Hananim (the term used to translate God in Korean Bibles) is a more personal god, like the God of the Fathers in Genesis, than the more abstract Confucian term ti-en ("Heaven"). Secondly, Korea in relation to the history of the Far East was suspended between the two great empires of China and Japan just as Israel was the nodal point between Egypt and Assyria. Korean Presbyterians often attribute one of their motives for conversion to Christianity to their identification of the history of Israel with the history of Korea and to the recognition in the God of the Fathers a kinship with their native god Hananim.
C. Post-millennialism. Another factor shaping the hermeneutics of Divine Principle is its post-millennial stance. Unificationists believe that the Fullness of Times has already begun. However, they do not subscribe to the millennial catastrophism that was in evidence in nineteenth century America, nor do they capitulate to scientific and cultural progressivism. They are not simply waiting for the kingdom but striving to bring it about. For this reason, they do not see the eschaton as an "event," whether internal or external, but as a process eschatology that dovetails with the process of completing the creation.
By linking the Fullness of Times with the theme of creation, Divine Principle develops what might be called a realistic eschatology. God allows political, social, and intellectual structures to arise on the basis of the creation and intervenes only at providential moments to bring to fruition creational processes. This reason saves Divine Principle from much of the pre-millennial esoterism which afflicted the millennialist groups of nineteenth century America. The millennialism of Unification is a relational and unifying millennialism. From the start, the Unification movement has not taken a sectarian stand toward the world or even toward other religions but rather seeks to unify "the family of religions" and the interests of science with the interests of religion.
Despite these different hermeneutical levels in Divine Principle, it has a consistent viewpoint. Mainline Christians may argue that we are not in a post-millennial situation, but I do not think that they can argue about the consistency of the theological language. Some may object that the language about "give and take" belongs to an Oriental mode of thought that cannot be reconciled with the Bible. But biblical scholars are quick to point out that Second Isaiah employed and transformed mythic language from Mesopotamia, just as the Ne w Testament was not above employing language derived from Orphism and the mystery religions. Likewise, the Church Fathers resorted to the language of late Hellenistic philosophy to articulate the Creeds of Nicaea and Chalcedon.
Although Divine Principle is not the complete articulation of "the Principle," it functions as a "Completed Testament" for the Unificationists. Yet it is not an addition to the Bible. I have used the phrase "a post-millennial inspired interpretation" to define it. This is not to deny that it proclaims a "new truth;" but that new truth does nor appear in a vacuum but is related to prophecies both in the Old and Ne w Testaments.
1 Cf. Edward Sapir, "Symbolism," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences 24, pp. 492-93.
2 Victor Turner, Forest of Symbols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), p. 28.
3 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), Pp. 11-13, 30-31.
4 Cf. Krister Stendahl, "Biblical Theology," in The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible (New York: Abingdon, 1962), I, 419-20.
5 Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamar, Truth and Method(New York: Seabury, 1975), pp. 273-74; and Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1967), pp. 3-17-57.
6 Cf. Jim Fowler and Sam Keen, Life Maps, ed. Jerome Berryman (Waco, Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1978), pp. 87-95, 99.
7 Cf. Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random, 1979); Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon, 1958); and Gilles Quispel, Gnosis als Weltreligion (Zurich: Dorigo, 1951).
8 See especially Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. iixxx. 7-9.
9 Jonas, p. 139.
10 Gustav Wingren Creation and Gospel (New York: Mellen, 1979).
11 Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Harper and Row, 1961).
12 Victor Turner, The Ritual Process (Chicago: Aldine, 1969).
13 Turner, The Ritual Process, pp. 106 ff,
14 A. Leland Jamison. "Religions on the Christian Perimeter," in The Shaping of American Religion. ed. James W. Smith and A. Leland Jamison,(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), I, 181. 15 Jiirgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests, trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro (Boston: Beacon, 1961). p. 176.
16 Habermas, p. 310.
17 Habermas, p. 316.
18 Cf. Whirney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), pp. 287-321.
19 Karl Barth, Dogmatics in Outline (New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p.65.
20 Cf. Ichiro Hori, Folk Religion in Japan, ed. Joseph M. Kitigawa and Alan L. Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 217-31.
21 Warren Lewis, "The Hero with the Thousand-and-First Face," in A Time for Consideration, eds. M. Darrol Bryant and Herbert W. Richardson (Toronto: Mellen, 1978), pp. 274-89. I do nor agree with Lewis that Rev. Moon is a "shaman." Rather, Unificationism issues from a cultural base where shamanism (the communication between the spiritual and the physical) serves as a preconditioning background.
22 Cf. Roger Leverrier, "Arriere-plansocio-politiqueetcaracteristiquesdes nouvelles religions en Coree: les cas du Tong Hak," Social Compass. 25, No. 2 (1978), 217-37.