Principles

The Ecclesia Sophiana is a Christian Church in the Gnostic tradition. It affirms that there is one Great, Unknown and Unknowable God that brought the Universe into being.

Our Church affirms that all beings bear within them the sparks of the Divine. Liberation, or “Salvation”, comes through awareness of our divinity. This awareness comes not from faith or right belief but from an experiential knowledge called Gnosis .

We do not hold that we all attain Gnosis in the same manner. We thus encourage freedom for all to make their own inward journey to the Divine. 

Throughout mainstream Church history the role of the divine feminine aspect of the Godhead has been ignored. We recognise this feminine aspect in the person of the Holy Spirit to whom we give the traditional name of Sophia. 

We look upon the Christ figure or Mashiakh, as an enlightened being who shows us the way to seek that experiential knowledge of God. Manifested in the human life of Jesus, we call him by his original Aramaic name of Yeshua.

We affirm the use of sacred writings that reveal the sparks of the Divine within. We acknowledge the value of the Hebrew Scriptures (i.e. Old Testament) and the Christian Scriptures (i.e. New Testament), but revere also other ancient texts such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Odes of Solomon, the Didache and the Corpus Hermeticum. Central to our devotion are also the Gnostic Scriptures such as those of the Nag Hammadi Library texts. We do not regard scriptures as authoritative but as myth, allegory and metaphor.