by libr8tr
Dear friends,
It doesn’t matter what your Christian background is, there are only two theologies; The theology of Glory and the Theology of the Cross. The best (and most edifying) work on understanding these is Gerhard Forde’s, “On Being a Theologian of the Cross”. I guarantee that if you can get past any prejudices you might have because of the title and/or cover, you will be encouraged in the Christian faith.
The following is a tremendous quote from Gerhard Forde on the Theology of Glory:
Philosophers speak of the soul being trapped in the world of matter, decay, and death through some cosmic misadventure on the part of either the gods or mortals. The basic scheme is what Paul Ricoeur has called “the myth of the exiled soul.” The sould is exiled from its home. It is slumbering or has forgotten its way. Its true destiny is to return. The way of return is by knowledge, gnosis, the awakening of the soul to its immortal destiny and, consequently, behavior appropriate thereto — which usually means a purging or shucking off of the flesh and its lusts. But through all its variations, the scheme remains pretty much the same: the exile of the soul from the “one” and its return (On Being a Theologian of the Cross, 5)
Justified Journal 
I would like to see the rest of this incomplete post. The concept that was being described, “Gnosticism,” was generally considered a heresy by early Christians because it assumed that God had somehow created the human body, matter, and indeed our entire existence on earth as something “low,” or “dirty” or “inherently flawed.” Jesus never taught anything like this. However, this way of thinking was particularly popular in the Greek-speaking early Christian communities because so much of Greek philosophy, including Plato’s teachings, Stoic philosophy, and Manichaeism (Persian/Aramaic religion founded between 200 and 300 AD based on Greek philosophical thought of that time) was based on this same dichotomy between spirit = good, flesh = bad. Obviously this concept is not unique to Gnosticism because we see shades of it in every major religion, where teachings for example may include washing, fasting, meditation and forms of discipline or self-sacrifice (“giving up” some material pleasure or activity) to cleanse or prepare the body for spiritual experience: all ways of “separating” the body from whatever is unclean, unworthy, or distracting from the spiritual experience. Jesus’s teachings resembled the Greek Platonic philosophy in that Jesus clearly preached a detachment from money and material concerns in order to prioritize relationships with God and with other people. However Gnosticism took this further than mainstream Christianity or other major religions by saying that, escaping the material body WAS THE MAIN POINT of life. As opposed to, say, “Do Unto Others as you would have them do unto you” (the Golden Rule) or Acknowledge Jesus as your Lord and Savior or Worship Allah according to the teachings of Mohammad, or the other major world religions where self-denial or renunciation of worldly things was merely part of a process of spiritual attainment. (Buddhism of course considers the renunciation of worldly things as central to the point of life, and in this way resembles Gnosticism, except that the process to achieve the desired afterlife is very different in these two religions.) So I was wondering where this was going and how Gnosticism– an impulse that is rightly motivated toward spiritual attainment, but perhaps going too far in renouncing materials existence as “bad”– relates to the distinction between the Theology of Glory and the Theology of the Cross. Please continue.
Good question. More to come!