Part 1 - Two Destructive Aspects of Gnosticism
Gnosticism has been baked into our society, and consequently has seeped into our churches. It's a philosophical ideology that originated with the Greeks, not the Bible. And much of their philosophies have become part of the basis for how Western society thinks today. (some of you know how often I have taught about gnosticism in Jerusalem... this is yet another iteration...)
Gnosticism has a way of distorting good things. There are two specific points from Gnosticism that I want to talk about. First is the idea of salvation through knowledge, and the second is the separation of spiritual and physical. I will first explain these two aspects so that I can explain how these ideas--which were embraced by the church--led us towards what philosophers are now calling neo-gnosticism, the basis for many other ideologies we are dealing with in society today. My goal is to help Christians understand the fundamental differences between their faith and these ideologies. I think many of us know our worldview is incompatible with them, but we don't fully know why. For many Christians, our best answer is, "it's wrong because God says so," which makes God out to be a killjoy for no reason, and doesn't help address the arguments and doubts that we ourselves have.
First we have to root out some false yet ubiquitous teachings within our own camp to understand why these new ideologies are incompatible with our faith (because they certainly are compatible with the false gnostic distortions many of us have unknowingly adopted). This will be a bit of a longer treatment, so get that kettle started...
The first point from gnosticism is the idea of salvation through knowledge. Here we have a good thing, which is knowledge, yet with a distorted twist; a promise that it can do more than it can do. How many times have you had the knowledge to do the right thing and still not done it? Knowledge might save you some time, some effort, some confusion... It might save you in a lot of small and even big ways, but that's only if you have the wisdom to apply it. What it certainly cannot do is save your soul.
By all rights, a normative Christian worldview should hold the pursuit of knowledge in high esteem. Anyone who reads our psalms should know this. But again, we should also know that knowledge is not the basis for the salvation of our souls. Only Jesus saves. And while knowledge is a high value, it still does not rank among the top 3 most important values on our list. Our top three are faith, hope, and love "But the greatest of these is love." (1 Cor 13:13)
This idea of salvation through knowledge has infiltrated the church in a big way. It may not be outright spoken, but there are often undertones and implications of this in sermons and discussions. The Christian gnostic thinker will say "amen," to the statement that knowledge does not save you. You might know in your head that salvation doesn't come through knowledge, but still intrinsically believe this. You might still believe that if we could just know the right things, then we would be truly saved. The best way to figure out if you believe this idea is to see it play out in your logic, actions, and behavior.
Here are some signs of someone who believes in salvation through knowledge... Does most of your Bible study and prayer time involve seeking out special knowledge? Do you mostly follow obscure teachings that you feel, "if only Christians knew about this, they would be true followers of God." Does your church community believe that you aren't even a true believer or follower of Christ unless you believe the specific teachings from your church--teachings about something other than Christ as the son of God dying on the cross to take away the sins of the world? These are things like specific denominational differences, apocalyptic end-times scenarios, specific fasting schedules, following particular holiday rituals, ancient findings which uncover the "true" meaning of scripture which contradicts all of church history's beliefs for 100s of years, specific regiments of how to be holy, and more... Do you feel that the death and resurrection of Jesus is part of the "basics," which you rarely revisit, and in order to become a mature Christian, you need to move on to other, more spiritual concepts of faith? Do you feel that because people don't know about the specific things you know about, that they are totally deceived by Satan, and will not enter into heaven?
Another sign of the belief in this tenet, which also applies to non-Christians, is when you look at the problems of the world, and your first solution is education. And, to be fair, this is a solution to many problems. If only people knew what they were doing, knew the right information, they wouldn't do what they're doing. And this can be true. But the part that I find entirely naïve is the idea that education will automatically improve a person's character. As if our only problems are that of ignorance, and humans are intrinsically good. My experience of the world, and even from the "most educated" has been that some people are simply so full of hate and pain, they know exactly what they are doing, and they do it on purpose. There are people out there who enjoy inflicting pain, and they have had all the material provision and education they've ever needed in life. Sometimes that knowledge makes them smarter and better at inflicting such pain. The only thing I know which has the power to improve someone's character is love. Knowledge has no such power.
But back to gnostic Christians...
If the gospel--specifically who Jesus is and what he did for you on the cross--is not the central focus and theme of your faith, you are off center. The gospel is not just the basis, it is the entirety. It is the lens through which we should be filtering all other concepts. But gnosticism feels that knowledge is really where it's at. And special knowledge is REALLY where it's at. Everyone wants to feel special, and if you have that special knowledge, then you're in the secret club of special people--the few who know and are saved by that knowledge. This is why Christians throughout history were susceptible to so many cults which claim to have an edge on salvation through "special revelation." It makes you feel that you are part of the chosen ones. It's an exhilarating and exciting feeling to be one of the few. It's the same hubris as the educated: scholars are always tempted to regard themselves as better or more valuable than others; "the elect" so to speak. This is what makes special knowledge attractive. You've got an edge. You're on the inside. You have more value than others. It's a need born out of a lack of a sense of belonging; an insecure attempt to earn love or feel valuable. It's how the world evaluates us, and that can be hard to shake.
But God evaluates us differently. The Bible teaches us that God already chose you from the beginning of time. Jesus literally died for you. You are already in. You are already loved. You already have a place where you truly belong. This is the core message of Christ's death on the cross--the core message of the gospel. You are intensely loved and worth dying for. Can you accept that at face value? Because, after that, there's nothing left for you to prove. You are already in His kingdom, not because you loved him, but because he loved you first. And nothing that you did earned you this love. You simply are loved.
The Bible teaches us that God doesn't play favorites, and that he gave his life for the love of the whole world. Each individual is special and valuable to God. Scripture after scripture paints for us the picture of his deep, personal, and unconditional love for each individual person, but no one is more valuable or better than their neighbor. This one is hard for people. We cling to these things so tightly. All that special knowledge you have will not buy you a ticket into heaven. It will not make you more valuable than the next person. It will not earn you true love. Your knowledge can only enhance your life and even the lives of others if you put it to good use. God will even reward you for your knowledge, and esteem your pursuit of it. But his love does not increase or decrease. And he already accepted you before you knew the right things. Thank God he does not require you to know the right things before he accepts you as his son or daughter. Only what Jesus did on the cross is what gets you into heaven, and it's already done and finished. Nothing you do will buy you that ticket. The ticket has already been bought for you, paid for with Jesus' life. Gnosticism tempts the Christian to replace the cross with knowledge.
The irony here is that I'm trying to give you knowledge to help you get back to center. But this knowledge doesn't save you, it merely strengthens you against false Christian teaching (hopefully).
The second tenet of gnosticism which is very relevant to us today is the separation of spiritual and physical, as if your spirit is only tethered to the body, and when you die, it peels entirely away. We have seen this depicted in movies over and over. This is also where we get the dichotomy of sacred vs. secular. And according to gnosticism, this also means that the physical world is evil, and the spiritual world is good. When this idea is applied to Christianity, you get a major distortion of the gospel. It begins to present logical problems, like, if the physical world is evil, then was Jesus evil? And if he can't be evil, than was he even human? Did he even truly die for our sins? (that idea is an old heresy called Arianism, which is still often believed today). Another logical conclusion might be that there is some sort of hierarchy within the trinity; that Jesus is lesser than God, since he had an evil body, which he overcame through his divine will. There are all kinds of other logical and theological problems which emerge from this thinking.
But this was never a Biblical teaching. Jewish thinking has always considered the spirit and the body to be inseparable parts of one whole being, like two sides of the same coin. You are both a spirit and a body, and your body is not evil. Scripture might tell us that we are born with an "evil nature," but this is not an indictment on the entire physical world. Furthermore, as believers, we are dead to that nature, and risen in Christ. Your body is just as much a part of you as your spirit. Your body has intrinsic value. Christian thinking is built on this. Christian thinking even tells us that something of your physical body remains in the afterlife. Jesus kept his wounds. Paul describes death like that of a seed being planted: something of the seed dies, but not all of it. The seed simply grows into a great tree. So something of the physical body lives on in a mysterious way. Not only that, what happens to our bodies directly affects our spirit and vice versa. We all know this instinctively. Our bodies are the means by which we can engage in the world, and we should value, guard, and protect them even from ourselves.
When we see this gnostic duality of physical and spiritual playing out in Christians, two extreme behaviors emerge and a range of things in between. The two extremes are Asceticism, and Hedonism (license to sin, or pleasure-seeking). Ascetics were originally the "beat-your-body monks," who tortured themselves on the outside so as to gain a higher level of holiness on the inside; because the outside was evil and deserving of suffering, and only existed to serve as a vessel for the redeemed soul. Like our body is merely a meat-sack. Here again, gnosticism takes healthy self-discipline and distorts it to an unhealthy level of self-destruction. Then on the other side of the spectrum, you have those who give up and give in. Though true Hedonists of their day believed in moderation, we understand this word hedonism today as constant pleasure-seeking. And the gnostics here believe that since the body is evil, there's nothing you can do about it so you might as well enjoy all the pleasures indulgently. And there's nothing you need to do because Jesus already redeemed your soul. It then doesn't matter what you do with or to your body. Here, gnosticism is taking healthy enjoyment of pleasures and distorting it into an unhealthy level of destructive gluttony and licentiousness. Both distorted extremes live in a sort of disembodied state of mind.
Today, most gnostic Christians don't go so far as to literally beat themselves. And they certainly know that we shouldn't be indulging so licentiously. But they certainly find all kinds of ways to live self-destructive lives. And they still live out a distorted version of Christianity, with a distorted view of who God is. They struggle with the balance between the physical and the spiritual. Physical pleasures are seen at best as lesser or lower things, and at worst as evil things. Only spiritual things like prayer, reading the Bible, being in church, serving the church, and doing righteous acts are worthy of our time. Many of them often think, "what I want is intrinsically opposed to what God wants." unless it is of a spiritual or righteous nature. And thus, most desire is vilified or suppressed.
Sexual desire--because it can be so incredibly intense (thank God)--is especially suppressed. And this gnostic thinking often distorts relationships and marriage. People will turn what could be something beautiful into sterilized contracts devoid of feeling, the choice made in the spirit of obligation. I know people who chose their spouse specifically because they had no sexual desire for the person, and this is because they didn't want their spouse to be a distraction to their ministry! What a destructive basis for marriage! What a gnostic distortion of a good thing! This certainly isn't God's design for marriage. When we look at the narrative of the Bible, God has always brought about his promises through love and desire. At best, for lesser extreme gnostics, if there is love in the marriage, these Christians can still tend to go long bouts without sex, sometimes abstaining from it for "spiritual" reasons, and when they do allow for it, they have boring sex because they are afraid of the intensity of their desire. (Of course boring sex happens to all of us, and there are a plethora of reasons for it, so do not take on condemnation here, but this is one result of gnosticism.)
The desire for food is often denied as well. Gnostic Christians thrive on long fasting regiments. I'm not saying all people who fast are gnostic. I'm also NOT saying fasting is wrong. But Gnostics feel that this makes them more spiritual, that it has earned them something, or makes them somehow more spiritually powerful. None of this is Biblical. There's much more to be said here, but I'll simply say when someone is always fasting, making it known, and can never feast with others, this is probably a sign of a gnostic Christian. (If you feel called to be a monk living in seclusion, I am not talking about you. That is something else entirely).
Among the more extreme gnostic Christians, they can barely have a normal conversation because they have to keep the topic on spiritual things. They can't live normal lives because they have to spend all their time in prayer. And when they do indulge in physical pleasures, it also must be for a spiritual reason, or they must somehow spiritualize it. They find all kinds of "spiritual" ways to justify the behavior of their physical bodies. Even joy is redefined. Happiness is an especially vain pursuit; it is shallow and fleeting, whereas joy is apparently defined as some deep and lasting sorrow, which is accompanied by some spiritual comfort. And death is the only real escape from this evil world. Gnostics long for death to save them, but, of course, suicide is a sin...
Every indulgence in physical pleasure can make a gnostic Christian feel guilty, and so often you will see them mask their constant guilt for existing with pious over-spiritualizing, and this comes across as self-righteous. This can really make a person seem very "holy." It's difficult to relax and let loose around these people. One is tempted to compare and even feel intimidated. And sometimes they really make you feel like you're not good enough with their disapproval of your way of life. They struggle to make friends because no one is "good enough," for them unless they too have a life of regimented spiritual self-destruction--I mean--"discipline." And they quickly "lose respect" for those who fail to constantly exercise these spiritual behaviors as often or as rigorously as they do. (Guys, this is a recipe for spiritual codependency...)
So, we see that a gnostic Christian projects these standards onto others. Again, no one who does not constantly fixate on purely spiritual endeavors is good enough. This is to the detriment of relationships and families. The relationally destructive behaviors include but are not limited to: seeing spouses and even children as merely distractions to ministry (even though their families ARE their first ministry), not being able to relax and enjoy simple pleasures with their families; devaluing family bonding time because it's not spiritual enough; monopolizing family time with only spiritual topics or too many church events; serving the church or the ministry at the expense of the family; not taking care of personal physical needs in favor of the spiritual things; burning out on self-denial, thus becoming emotionally unavailable; not meeting the physical needs of others because they are not important; not acknowledging or appreciating the physical accomplishments of others... or if they do, it's still a sort of lesser kind of appreciation.
Close friends and family often get pushed into three behaviors around these people: 1) constantly feeling like they are not good enough and give up, often even rejecting the faith, 2) striving to develop the same kind of gnostic spirituality, or 3) developing a codependency on these "more spiritual" gnostic Christians. Codependency is quite damaging because now their faith hangs on the success or failure of the "more spiritual" person, which is the absolute wrong foundation of faith. Because, what happens when they inevitably fail? Our faith should rest on Jesus and what he did for us on the cross, not on the moral success or failure of any human being. I could write much more on these 3 things, because I have experienced all of them at different stages of my faith.
God does not call us to an endless denial of physical needs. For every physical need, God has provided a healthy, enjoyable, and even pleasurable way for us to fulfill it. And every sin is simply a legitimate need fulfilled in an unhealthy way. God "delights in the well-being of his servants." In the Christian journey, God wants us to have good times, to enjoy earthly pleasures, to kick back and relax. He does want us to pray, because he wants us to spend time with him. He wants us to read our Bibles so our faith is strengthened, and he wants us to gather with other Christians so we can encourage and build each other up. He wants all these things for us because he loves us and wants us to thrive. He doesn't want us killing ourselves to make ourselves into something "acceptable" to him. He has already accepted us as we are. And as we spend time with him, he is the one who does the work of transforming us into happier, healthier, more peaceful and righteous people, full of love, and with a sound mind. For him, it really is more about having a relationship than it is about us trying desperately to be a good boy or girl.
The irony is that the practice of constant self-denial actually leads us into sin. Suppression has a horrible way of creating internal pressure, which builds up. When it finally is allowed to release, the result can be much more serious and damaging than we ever thought was possible. When we dismiss all of our real, God-given physical needs, we become worn-out, tired, weak, and most susceptible to temptation. We burn out. And burn-out is an extremely vulnerable and dangerous place to be. Being in this state for long enough usually leads to huge moral failure. If we don't let the stream of desire flow in normal, healthy, God-given pleasurable ways, it will cut a new path, where we don't want it to go; where it's not supposed to go... Eventually we look back and wonder where it all went wrong. We watch ourselves unravel and cause so much destruction as if someone else is calling the shots. This is one major way so many big-wig ministers fail. They finally reach the end of their willpower. And all this destruction that results isn't what we really want in our heart of hearts, and yet, we are doing it, and it can feel impossible to stop it...
When scripture says God is strong in our weakness, it is the tendency of the gnostic to assume it means we should seek to live in weakness, or to revel in our weakness, or even celebrate our weakness. No! When God says he is strong in our weakness, he means that when we reach the limits of our own strength, which we've cultivated and cared for, he can go even further. Nothing is impossible with God. This should be an encouragement and an inspiration to reach our potential, not a mandate to make ourselves weak, to live in pitiful self-denial and misery. It also means, where we would normally fail because of our weaknesses (and we all have weaknesses), God can overcome. Gnostic Christians will struggle to reach their full potential, because they can't allow themselves to be themselves. This is because they see their own needs and desires as evil, or at least as opposed to God. They aren't capable of properly caring for themselves, and therefore they don't have the capacity to truly care for others. And their children watch them suppress their every desire, so what will their reaction be to avoid that?
It can be true; your desires might manifest in a way that would be clearly wrong to indulge in, and definitely in opposition to God. Let's take a less serious example like food: you might prefer to eat junk food over something your body actually needs. And if you cultivate a habit of denying your body the nutrients it needs, you'll come to hate what's healthy. You'll also see an overall decline in your health over time. In this case you need to exercise some healthy self-discipline to fix that. But ultimately what you want is health, is it not? Your body needs nutrients. That distorted desire is appearing because of a legitimate need in your life. If you keep denying yourself all the right ways to fulfill that need, you'll end up seeking out the wrong ways. This will ultimately harm you and others who love you. This is an argument for self-discipline, but in a way that helps redirect your physical desires, not deny or suppress them. The same goes for spiritual things. But the metaphor breaks down quickly when we get into more serious sins, because while it's not a sin to eat the occasional brownie, cheating on your spouse is never an acceptable indulgence.
Gnostics will also struggle to have a normal relationship with Jesus. Following Jesus means living a life doing things I don't want to do, because clearly if my flesh is evil, then that means my desires are also evil, so I must do the opposite of what I want... Honestly, this is such a perversion of the truth. Jesus is the object of our desires. He is also the source of our delight. And when we have him in the center of our lives, the pleasures of the physical world become immensely more enjoyable--even, dare I say it, SEX!
Jesus isn't gnostic at all. He made the world and called it good. He came to the world as a baby, completely vulnerable to all the dangers of this world. He experienced the world and the temptations in it. His physical body wasn't evil. He ate, burped, farted, and pooped. His mom probably made sweet treats which he indulged in. Maybe his young teen heart even felt attraction to the girls. His clothes weren't cheap, and he drank wine. He laughed, made jokes, and smiled. He learned a trade, and made friends. He "grew up in favor with God and man." He even cooked fish for his disciples and washed their feet. He fed five thousand people. He turned water into wine--and it was the good stuff--so the wedding party could keep on gettin' down into the night. He was taking care of physical needs, and even wants. And even on the cross, he made sure someone was appointed to take care of his mother (when he told John "this is your mother"). Of course he prayed often. He was exceptionally adept at learning and interpreting scripture and therefore also spent a lot of his time in the temple. He had a vibrant relationship with his heavenly father. He lived an integrated, incarnational life.
You might already see the line of logic leading towards other ideologies we are dealing with now. When you devalue the body, all kinds of other things lose their value and tend towards destruction; things like relationships, marriage, children, family, and even community. When Christians themselves don't even understand the value of these things, they won't be able to stand in the face of these other ideologies which devalue them. These Christians have already laid a foundation for their children to embrace the plethora of ideologies which have come through gnosticism. This is what I will be discussing in Part 2.
Photo by Kaleb Nimz on Unsplash
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