“Throughout history, the Christian church has had to guard against the heresy of Gnosticism. Gnosticism is not an ordinary heresy, because it does not manifest itself as a set of beliefs. Rather, Gnosticism is a tendency: the tendency to replace the historical facts of Christianity with philosophical ideas. Gnosticism transforms history into ideology and facts into philosophy.” James Jordan in Chapter 4 of Creation in Six Days
There is something scary about the idea of Gnosticism. James Jordan describes Gnosticism as the replacing of solid truth with ideals. He describes Gnosticism as being one of the motivators of the failing church. James Jordan believes in a completely literal interpretation of the Bible: to take as much from it as possible and to analyze all of it, because it is all the literal words of God. To not believe in Jonah and the Big Fish or Noah and the Ark is as much a heresy to James Jordan as not believing in the literal birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ himself, for to not believe in any of these stories is to doubt the inerrant word of God, and by extension to doubt God Himself. Gnosticism, James Jordan says, is the trivializing of these stories. To see this rich history the Bible gives as mere myths is to start down a dark, crooked path that leads to believing that God did not create the Earth, that the Israelites were not the Chosen People of God, that the apostles made stories up, that Paul imagined Jesus came to him, that the Virgin Mary wasn’t so virgin after all, and that Jesus was just a man who never said He was God, who never really died on a cross, who possibly married Mary Magdelene, and how many other heretical theories about the Bible.
Gnosticism is scary for three reasons. First, there is truth in the dark path story. It is easy to start doubting everything in the Bible once part of it has been demoted to mere fable. If Jonah wasn’t really swallowed by a Great Fish, why should we believe Daniel survived the lion’s den? Why believe Elijah was swept up to heaven by chariots of fire? Noah’s ark sounds a little far fetched. Maybe that is allegorical. I don’t like that the Israelites killed so many seemingly innocent people. Maybe that was exaggerated, or simply made up. No Egyptian sources seem to mention the plagues on Egypt. Maybe those are symbolic, or simply an embellishment of past stories. After all, these stories were written down years after they happened. Something must have been changed in the passing of information from generation from generation, like a game of telephone with eternal consequences. And sooner or later, if one gives in to these thoughts, the question of whether Jesus actually lived the life of the gospels, whether his disciples truly understood his intentions, and even his mental sanity all come into question, because we cannot simply take the Bible’s word for it. This questioning of the deepest foundations of our faith is hauntingly chilling.
The second reason is that Gnosticism tends to view reality as a sort of badness that needs to be punished. This part of Gnosticism takes its roots in Greek thought, where the material world was considered evil and only the spiritual should live on to the next world. Pure spirit and pure thought were the truly sacred. Thinking this way leads to traditions like communion, with real food and real wine (or grape juice), to be thought of first as merely helpful, then as kind of boring, and finally to downright destructive. We begin to see heaven as a sort of ethereal floating spirit world, where we are held timelessly in a state of perpetual happiness, where nothing really happens and nothing really exists except for us in a bright light of pure goodness, which is God. The reason this is a scary side of Gnosticism is that the material world is not our enemy. As so many others have put it so appropriately, God doesn’t hate matter: He created it! And this viewing of our problems as material takes the blame off of ourselves and onto our bodies. It allows us to step back from our responsibility. Most harmfully, we stop worrying about what we’re thinking and only on what we’re doing, even though God says we will be judged on the intentions of our heart.
The third reason Gnosticism is a scary thought is the propensity for us to view truth as relative. When historical occurrences never really occurred, why should any of the Bible really be true? Why shouldn’t all of the Bible be relative? Maybe homosexuality is wrong in Biblical times, but nowadays, we are perfectly justified in saying that we are more advanced and morally mature. Things are different now. The morally ambiguous thrive under this atmosphere. When there is no real right, there is also no real wrong.
James Jordan is right to fear this attitude. Gnosticism is one of the scariest doctrines the church has known.
Here’s the clincher though…
Jesus didn’t only attack the Gnostic.
The Sadducees were the Jewish synagogue’s equivalent of the Gnostic. The Sadducees took very few things as absolutely true, and they often changed their religious views when it was politically convenient. Jesus attacked them once in a while throughout the New Testament.
But who did Jesus really have problems with?
When you think of Jesus’ number one "enemy" so to speak, we all generally jump to the Pharisees, don’t we?
Jesus and the Pharisees did not get along. The Pharisees saw Jesus as a Gnostic of sorts. He often seemed to treat the Law with contempt. He would make outrageous claims. Jesus would heal the sick on the Sabbath and his disciples violated holy laws of cleanliness. Jesus broke the mold.
But at the same time, Jesus was not a Gnostic. Jesus did not believe in a relative truth. Jesus said “I AM the Truth.” What Jesus said, and why it is so hard to accept, is that there IS Truth. It’s just not found in the Law when viewed by itself. Truth is found in Jesus Christ. Truth is not found by reading the Bible. That may sound heretical, but it’s not. The Pharisees knew the Bible. The Pharisees memorized the Bible, forwards and backwards, literally. The Pharisees kept the laws the Bible gave them. The Pharisees today would have been the “perfect Christians”. They would be clean, college-educated pastors and deacons. They certainly wouldn’t have any teen pregnancies. They certainly wouldn’t get drunk. They would be respectable and respected. The Pharisees would teach their children to grow up and act responsibly too. Maybe even home school them because you just can’t trust what public schools might teach your kids.
Jesus calls us to be more than Pharisees. Like it or not, there is a reason the Bible was made. There is an underlying meaning to the stories in the Bible. The Gnostic gets it wrong. There is a reality. There is Truth. But some Christians run so far away from this idea that they run right into the camp of the Pharisee. Instead of God being their God, they make the Bible their God. In following the Law so closely, they break the most important Law of all.
God says to love our enemies. Are we doing that? Jesus today would be a peace maniac. Jesus would probably be a little granola. Jesus was a bit of a rebel. Jesus would hang out with the GLBT community and the liberal left wing. Those are the people Jesus got along with. It’s not because Jesus was gay or even necessarily liberal, although he was definitely a proponent of change. It’s because those people were the ones open to conversation. Conservative Christians tend to do things because they are compelled to. The one who are concerned about reasons are the ones in the liberal camp. The ones open to a change in perspective are liberal. As Christian, we should have, if the not the reckless perspective toward truth that liberals often have, at least the attitude towards change that God has gifted them with.
My propensity is for both. I tend to like a relative truth while being religiously self-righteous about it. How about you? Are you a Pharisee, or are you a Gnostic? Or are you truly seeking after Jesus’ own heart?
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