Samaritan's Cataphatic/Kataphatic Theology Analysis

The majority of Christian and Samaritan texts support a cataphatic/kataphatic theology; a theology that depicts God in a positive manor. This cataphatic theology revolves around the idea God is a holistically omnipotent being that created humanity with divine and righteous intentions. However, a minority group in the Christian religion referred to as Gnostics believes in an apophatic theology; a theology depicting God in a negative manor. This apophatic theology is uniquely tied to both the origins of a Christian God as well as the ideologies of Greek philosophy. Gnosticism concludes is that there is a divine difference between the creator of our universe and the true God (Burns 55). This conclusion questioned the relationship between the

In Genesis, “God says, ‘let us make humanity according to our image’ (1.26), which allows for the conclusion that there was more than one being around at the time of creation. Malef, and unpublished Samaritan text explains that during the time of creation, there were two separate entities at play (Fossum 221). The first is the entity that is responsible for the “establishment” of Adam’s physical form -YHWH- and the second entity is responsible for the “perfection” Adam through the gift of spirit (Fossum 224). It is assumed that this first entity was a lesser being of God and when it created the body of Adam it also created evil. This view suggests that God is so powerful that He is detached from the physical word and thus could only create humanity through the use of his

The platonic negative theology explains that God is not knowledge, for knowledge has an intangible shape to it: Instead, God is a self-existing being that cannot be explained by any idea or shape because He exists outside of these concepts (Victor Pricopi and Victor A. Pricopi 10). This is eerily similar to the Valentinian negative theology –which is explicitly Gnostic in nature- which explains that the true God is “unborn, he is not in a place, not in time, he has no counselor and he is not of any other substance through which we can know Him with the help of common senses” (Victor Pricopi and Victor A. Pricopi 12). These similarities in theology are in contradiction to the Samaritan theology of God. Samaritan’s assume that through knowledge of God, a person can become enlightened, whereas Platonists and Gnostics believe that the true God is distinctly abstract from knowledge and thus the only type of knowledge is of