This is a prophetic book. When the late Dr. Alvin Boyd Kuhn finished it in 1963, very few, if any, would have foreseen the remarkable developments that came to influence the spirituality of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Our author notes the discovery of The Gospel According to Thomas in 1945 and of the Dead Sea Scrolls two years later, both but small waves of a floodtide of revelations to come. Several years after that discovery, the entirety of the now well-known Nag Hammadi Library was published, followed by Elaine Pagels's pioneering classic, The Gnostic Gospels. A large number of books of academic scholarship as well as those of a popular nature ensued. The prophecy implicit in Kuhn's title has come true: what Elaine Pagels in one of her later works (Beyond Belief, 2003) aptly called "Alternative" Christianity has indeed been reborn.
Moreover, the consequences and implications of Kuhn's work cannot be seen as in any way negligible. His thesis that the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity for the most part do not portray historical truths, but symbolic and mystical metaphors, represents the very cornerstone of the approach of Gnostic, or alternative, Christianity. Myth and symbol have always been the primary means whereby mystics and Gnostics have attempted to document their own ineffable experiences of transcendental realities. The mystical Jewish milieu of the centuries BC and AD wherein the Christian tradition originated had a keen sense of myth, symbol, and metaphor. The late pioneering scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom G. Scholem, expressed this sense in unmistakable terms:
The historical aspects of religion have a meaning for the mystic chiefly as symbols of facts which he conceives as being divorced from time, or constantly repeated in the soul of every man. Thus the exodus from Egypt . . . cannot, according to the mystic, have come to pass once only in a place: it must correspond to an event, which takes place in ourselves, an exodus from the inner Egypt in which we are all slaves. Only thus conceived does the Exodus cease to be an object of learning and acquire the dignity of immediate religious experience.
Today it is becoming increasingly evident that early Christianity abounded in writers and teachers of Gnostic orientation. Many of these persons were partakers of nonordinary states of consciousness and seemed to possess first-hand knowledge of the spiritual realities they proclaimed. The literary genre they employed was appropriate to their experiences; it consisted of myth, metaphor, poetry, and symbol. It was not until the second and third centuries that the mounting influence of certain prosaically disposed church fathers suppressed this literature and the spiritual orientation it embodies. Gospels such as The Gospel According to Thomas were replaced by The Gospel of John and the synoptic Gospels. Alternative Christianity ceased its open existence; it became a "lost light," as Alvin Boyd Kuhn named it.
The author of A Rebirth for Christianity has devoted much of his life to the task of assembling scholarly data and adding to it his outstanding interpretative insight. His was a transcendental and transhistorical vision that pointed beyond physical history to a timeless land of inexhaustible inspiration and wonder. This keynote runs like a golden thread through all his works, including The Lost Light, Who is This King of Glory?, The Shadow of the Third Century, Sex as Symbol, and India's True Voice. Regrettably, with the passage of time and the author's death, all of these remarkable books have gone out of print and are found now only in some libraries. It is thus doubly felicitous that his very last book, A Rebirth for Christianity, is now reappearing in a new edition.
Finally, a concluding word about Alvin Boyd Kuhn. I consider it one of the major blessings of my life that I met him in the early 1950s and that I maintained close contact with him until his death in 1963. He listed among his rare distinctions the fact that in the early 1930s he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University by writing a thesis on Theosophy. (This currently flourishing academic field of the study of esoteric movements was nonexistent at that time.) Dr. Kuhn was an accomplished student of Egyptian hieroglyphics and thus was able to trace many elements in Jewish and Christian scriptures to Egyptian sources. Inspired as he was by nineteenth-century esoteric spirituality, he was keenly aware of the trends of scholarship and the culture in the twentieth century. It was thus that he discerned the coming of a certain rebirth of the once lost, but now rediscovered, alternative or Gnostic Christianity. Today, even as he did several decades ago, he has much to say to us. It is to be hoped that many will be listening!
Stephan A. Hoeller
Los Angeles, 2005