Interesting to note that the author teaches at George Fox University, not far from where I live in Eugene, OR. George Fox has Quaker roots. Quakers are known for their rejection of baptism and Eucharist, viewing the .sacraments as an inward, spiritual, experience. I remember a fellow with Quaker roots who sojourned for a while with our congregation many years ago. He believed that he didn't need to be baptized with water, because all that was needed was a "spiritual baptism." When we disagreed, he left us.
That said, I think the author is right that this gnosticism is widespread among evangelicals, and not just a phenomenon of the Friends. Reformers like Zwingli, in their zeal to separate themselves from Catholicism, dumped the idea of sacrament and ushered in the concept of "ordinance." (Again because nominalism is foundational for Protestantism, sacraments, which depend upon the concept of "participation" become incoherent.) Then dispensationalism turbo-charged evangelical gnosticism, as Colonel V. Doner argues in "The Gnosticism of Modern Evangelicalism."
https://chalcedon.edu/magazine/the-gnosticism-of-modern-evangelicalism#fbclid=IwAR1mwnCXEw0IC2kaTR2jK5dNVMj_1nzZyrg5nVrnP2Ci8vvDZw53YQ9Mgpo
https://chalcedon.edu/magazine/the-gnosticism-of-modern-evangelicalism#fbclid=IwAR1mwnCXEw0IC2kaTR2jK5dNVMj_1nzZyrg5nVrnP2Ci8vvDZw53YQ9Mgpo
Evangelical Gnosticism
I teach in a great books program at an Evangelical university. Almost all students in the program are born-and-bred Christians of the nondenominational variety. A number of them have been both thoroughly churched and educated through Christian schools or homeschooling curricula. Yet an overwhelming majority of these students do not believe in a bodily resurrection. While they trust in an afterlife of eternal bliss with God, most of them assume this will be disembodied bliss, in which the soul is finally free of its “meat suit” (a term they fondly use).
I first caught wind of this striking divergence from Christian orthodoxy in class last year, when we encountered Stoic visions of the afterlife. Cicero, for one, describes the body as a prison from which the immortal soul is mercifully freed upon death, whereas Seneca views the body as “nothing more or less than a fetter on my freedom,” one eventually “dissolved” when the soul is set loose. These conceptions were quite attractive to the students._______________________________________________________________________________
Resistance to the idea of a physical resurrection struck them as perfectly logical. “It doesn’t feel right to say there’s a human body in heaven, when the body is tied so closely to sin,” said one student. In all, fewer than ten of my forty students affirmed the orthodox teaching that we will ultimately have a body in our glorified, heavenly form. None of them realizes that these beliefs are unorthodox; this is not willful doctrinal error. This is an absence of knowledge about the foundational tenets of historical, creedal Christianity.
At some point in my Evangelical upbringing, I came across a timeline of world history. The timeline started with Adam and Eve, then moved through significant events recounted in the Old Testament, with a few extra-biblical highlights from elsewhere in the world spliced in here and there. The fulcrum of the timeline was the birth of Christ, followed by details from his life and ministry, then post-Resurrection events from the Book of Acts. All these episodes were demarcated by bright colors, with neat lines stretching upward into the margins, connecting each sliver of color to a corresponding label. After Paul’s ministry, however, this busy rainbow of history dissolved into a dull purple rectangle spanning fourteen centuries, labeled simply “the Dark Ages.”
This is an apt illustration of all too many young Christians’ sense of Christian history. The world after the New Testament is blank and uneventful. Even the Reformation is an obscure blip. They are not self-consciously Protestant, but merely “nondenominational.” Their Christian identity is unmoored from any tradition or notion of Christianity through time.
My students are a microcosm of what I see as a growing trend in contemporary Evangelicalism. Without a guiding connection to orthodoxy, young Evangelicals are developing heterodox sensibilities that are at odds with a Christian understanding of personhood. The body is associated with sin, the soul with holiness. Moreover, this sense of the body, especially under the alias flesh, tends to be hypersexualized.
Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the Evangelical emphasis on purity, a word that has become synonymous with bodily virginity. Despite the biblical usage of purity as holiness in a broader, holistic sense, including but not limited to sexual matters, the word “purity” has become narrowly sexualized. It is not a virtue to be continually cultivated, but a default physical state that can be permanently lost.
In Evangelical vernacular, “sins of the flesh” denote specifically sexual sins, and these are the evils that dominate the theological imaginations of young, unmarried Evangelicals, far more than idolatry, say, or greed. I can remember one particularly vivid illustration from my Evangelical youth, when I was asked to imagine myself on my wedding day, in a pristine white dress—and then asked to picture a bright red handprint anywhere that a man has touched me. This image of a bloodied bride, of flesh corrupted by flesh, seared into my imagination a picture of the body, rather than the soul, as the source and site of sin.
This is not a new misunderstanding. The view of embodiment as the epitome of evil was a central tenet of Gnosticism, which St. Irenaeus refuted in the late second century. But the notion that our fall is metaphysical, not moral, persisted. In the early fifth century, St. Augustine faced an interpretation of St. Paul that placed the Apostle’s warning about the weakness of our flesh and our bondage to carnal works within a Platonic framework. For the Platonist, the material world and the spiritual world are distinct and hierarchically ordered; the material is illusory, temporary, imperfect. The body is the seat of harmful desires and passions, from which the soul must be released. The body weighs down and corrupts the soul.
But as Augustine observes in book XIV of City of God, Paul’s litany of “works of the flesh” in Galatians includes faults of both mind and body. The corporeal sins of fornication and drunkenness are listed alongside enmity, discord, and other inner dispositions. Paul uses the language of “flesh” and “spirit” to denote two distinct ways of life: To follow the flesh is to live according to the standards of fallen humanity, whereas to follow the spirit is to live according to the standards of God. And both of these paths—this is the vital point—involve the person’s entire nature, body and soul. According to Augustine, to see the body as the sinful aspect of the person “shows a failure to consider man’s nature carefully and in its entirety.”
In the Christian understanding of sin and human nature, as articulated by Augustine, “it was not the corruptible flesh that made the soul sinful; it was the sinful soul that made the flesh corruptible.” Augustine highlights a painful irony at work in those Christians who affirm a Platonic anthropology: “For anyone who exalts the soul as the Supreme Good, and censures the nature of the flesh as something evil, is in fact carnal alike in his cult of the soul and in his revulsion from the flesh, since this attitude is prompted by human folly, not by divine truth.” In other words, to see the flesh as more sinful than the soul is to follow the way of the flesh.
The tenet of the bodily resurrection is not a peripheral doctrinal issue. It is part of the entire economy of salvation. What could be the point of the Word becoming flesh if our bodies are merely sinful husks that will eventually be discarded? Moreover, as St. Paul makes clear, to live in a carnal fashion means accepting the world’s claim that sin is inescapable and death is final. Both claims crimp our spiritual imaginations and limit our aspirations.
It was in debates about the person and work of Christ that the Church Fathers defended the integrity of the body. For Athanasius and Cyril of Alexandria, salvation was ultimately a matter of theosis, of redeeming humanity so fully that we might share in the divine life of the Trinity. This entails a reconciliation of the human and the divine. To use Athanasius’s famous phrase: God became man that men might become god. This reconciliation, however, does not destroy or overwhelm our human nature. It brings it to perfection. To be human means having a soul and a body; the full redemption of our humanness must have a bodily dimension. Thus, according to Athanasius and Cyril, as mediator and author of our salvation, Christ himself is fully God and fully man. The Incarnate Son unites humanity and divinity in his person—hence the notion of hypostatic (personal) union. Christ effects in his person the reconciliation of Creator and creature.
This was not the Nestorian view, against which Cyril argued. Nestorius was wary of language that seemed to fully unite divinity and humanity in the person of Christ. He preferred terms like “association” and “conjoining,” rather than Cyril’s hypostatic union. He wished to maintain strict metaphysical boundaries between the human and divine. For Nestorius, the claim that God could be said to have flesh and be intimately conjoined to a person who suffers seems to degrade him.
The Nestorian interpretation of the Incarnation resisted the idea of God fully entering into the matrix of embodied humanity. Nestorius rejected the notion that the Virgin Mary is Theotokos, mother of God, saying instead that she is Christokos, the mother of Christ. This allowed him to keep the man Jesus of Nazareth from being too closely associated with God, the eternal and unchangeable source of all reality. According to Cyril, this view of Christ keeps God at arm’s length from man, which deprives Christianity of its salvific meaning. It obscures the radical descent of the divine Logos into human nature, a descent that infuses our finite flesh with the power of eternal life.
We need to side with Cyril and other defenders of Chalcedonian orthodoxy to resist the contemporary trend that denigrates the body in the false view that this will elevate the soul. The apostolic tradition carries a radical message that defends the truth of human personhood against the secular tide of pessimism about the flesh. Safeguarding that message requires entering into the mysteries of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, affirming God’s alliance with us in our created finitude, which means in our embodied existence. We do not profess a religion that despises the body. Christ speaks of us as his body, a body that spans the globe and extends through time. To disdain our flesh is to neglect the Incarnation and our membership in this historical communal body.
Abigail Rine Favale is director of the William Penn Honors Program at George Fox University.
The Gnosticism of Modern Evangelicalism
The Historic Roots of the Gnostic Virus
Gnosticism was birthed as a pseudo-Christian heresy in the mid-first century by Simon Magus, a Samaritan sorcerer ("magus" means magician) of astonishing ability (Ac. 8:4- 24). Appropriately, the church fathers referred to him as the progenitor of all heresies. This turned out to be an amazingly accurate prophecy. Accompanied by his consort Helen and thirty or so disciples, he captivated crowds with special revelations, esoteric insight, and "signs and wonders." So impressive was his reputation as a miracle worker and teacher that the Romans erected a statue in his honor, dedicating it: "To Simon, the Holy God." Indeed, most of his fellow countrymen regarded him as "their first God and worshipped him as such" (Arland Hultgren, The Earliest Christian Heretics, 17).
The early church fathers were strongly impressed that demonic empowerment was responsible for Simon’s unusual abilities. No doubt due to his blasphemous prediction that, like Christ, he would rise on the third day following his burial, the early church saw Magus as fulfilling Christ’s warning in Matthew 7:15, "Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves" and in Matthew 24:24, "there shall arise many false Christs and false prophets." Eventually, Simon’s followers became known as gnostics because of the "special knowledge" (gnosis in Greek) that was supposedly imparted to them through Christ and His apostles (of whom Simon, of course, claimed to be the foremost). Acts 8:13 records his "conversion experience" and baptism by Philip (about A. D. 40) after which "he continued with Philip, and wondered, beholding the miracles and signs which were done" (Ac. 8:13). Blazing the trail for millions of gnostics to follow through the ages, after making a "decision for Christ" and cloaking himself in the robe of brotherhood, this wolf in sheep’s clothing immediately began the process of syncretizing the teaching of Greek mystics and pagan philosophers (mostly Plato) with his unique revelations. He attempted to blend this mixture with the teachings of the apostles, whom he doggedly pursued from one village to another as darkness follows light. Unlike today’s evangelical gnostics, he was soundly condemned by the true church (Ac. 8:18-23):
The ancient defenders of the Christian faith regarded [Simon Magus] as the heresiarch par excellence, the incarnation of evil, who in his own way succeeded in spreading the discord of heresy.…Why was Simon considered the primary enemy of the Faith, indeed, as the very incarnation of evil, more even than Caesar? Why were the apostles so vehement in their condemnation of his many followers who so earnestly claimed to be fellow "Christians" (1 Tim. 1:3-4, 4:1-7, 6:20-21; 2 Tim. 3:1-9; Jude 1:4-19; 2 Pet. 2; 1 Jn. 1:3-10, 2:4-11, 2:18-29, 3:7-10; 4:1-6, 5:1-12; Rom. 1:21ff.; 2 Jn. 7-11; 1 Cor. 14:37)? Incidentally, in addition to these Scriptures, a number of Bible scholars suspect that the "servants of Satan" for whom the apostles reserved their fiercest condemnation were not just "Judiazers," but gnostic Judiazers. This theory fits well with Paul’s clear attack on the loose morality found in Corinth which was clearly not a trait of a legalistic Jewish party, but which was easily attributable to the gnostics, notorious for flip-flopping between rigorous asceticism and outrageous libertinism.
Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism, 147
A primary reason the apostles and, later, the church fathers singled out gnostics as "public enemy number one" (above even their pagan persecutors) is precisely because gnostics considered themselves, and represented themselves to be, brothers in Christ (albeit with abilities of superior revelation and a "higher knowledge"). The early church, struggling to establish its doctrinal boundaries, regarded gnostics as more dangerous than their Roman persecutors who targeted the physical body, but left the church’s body of orthodoxy alone. In contrast, heretics professed beliefs that attempted to render crucial doctrines impotent. The New Testament authors (especially Peter, Timothy, Paul, and Phillip) fought gnostics as though they were heretics and schismatics and recognized their considerable abilities to detract from the gospel and redirect its focus (to say nothing of destroying the unity of the church):
"The most dangerous gnostics were those who had, intellectually, thought their way quite inside Christianity, and then produced a variation which wrecked the system.... Paul fought hard against gnosticism, recognizing that it might cannibalize Christianity and destroy it."Paul realized that any restatement of key doctrines by gnostics would eventually direct the faithful away from the outward, world-redeeming, servant-steward mission of the church — a mission they held as a sacred trust — and direct them inward toward themselves — self-knowledge (gnosis) and spiritual perfection, just like many modern pietists, who stress personal religious experience over the objective realities of the Christian Faith.
Paul Johnson, A History of Christianity, 7
Validating the apostles’ concern, the gnostics were (and their modern heirs are no less artful) masters at restating or recontextualizing the gospel. As The Evangelical Dictionary of Theology notes: "Gnostics were perceived as leading Christians astray by manipulation of words and the twisting of Scriptural meanings" (444). Historian Richard Tarnas observes that gnostics were "especially abhorrent to church authorities, because they controverted matters so close to the heart of Christianity" and he cites Gnosticism’s "indifference to the world" (another pietist distinctive) as a major concern to the early guardians of Christ’s world-changing message (Passion of the Western Mind, 183). After all, if Christ had not commissioned the church with power and authority to disciple (and thus redeem nations — Matthew 28), what was Christianity really all about? How would it be differentiated from Gnosticism’s dualistic preoccupation with an individualized salvation — which was disconnected from the rest of God’s creation? A salvation committed to a strictly inward, privatistic piety driven by spiritual perfectionism, directed by a subjective "inner light" and culminating in an escape from the world they so disdained? The NIV Topical Study Bible, in commenting on the "preponderance of many antichrists" in 1 John 2:18, informs us that the term antichrist "referred to any person who opposes Christ or who dispossess Christ" (1405). In other words, to offer a "reversal" of Christ’s gospel or to substitute another (dispossessing) message for Christ’s is to be antichrist. We need to keep this distinction in mind as we examine how this theme unfolds in our present-day churches and how, once again, the ancient enemy has twisted Scripture to redefine the historic Christian mission. As Philip Lee poignantly observes, "Suddenly, we find ourselves not with a slightly altered Gospel but with an anti-Gospel" (Phillip Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics, 28).
Gnostic Dualism
Historians agree that the cardinal gnostic doctrine was its unmitigated dualism which it adapted from the Platonic schools and attempted to syncretize with Christ’s teaching. Contrary to the early church’s teaching that God was committed to redeeming all His creation (cosmos); that all things God created were good (Gen. 1:31); that man’s job was to steward God’s creation, make it productive and enjoy its fruits (Gen. 1:26-28; 9:1-3), and to disciple (redeem) the nations (Mt. 28:18-20), dualism saw our present world as beyond redemption (a la premillennial dispensationalism) and, furthermore, viewed the physical or "non-spiritual" as essentially evil and, therefore, not worth redeeming. In its campaign to distort the early church’s preaching, Gnosticism denied both the goodness of the original creation and the efficacy of Christ’s sacrificial redemption, teaching that evil, not Christ, was controlling the physical world (Satan is not only alive, but in control of planet earth!). It is here that the gnostics executed their most egregious maneuver, taking legitimate "Christian dualism" — a good, all-powerful King redeeming His territory from a defeated and inferior evil prince — and reversing it so that the King has lost the battle for His creation and must now fall back on an emergency evacuation of His defeated forces (the Rapture).
Gnostic dualism is a reverse Christianity; it is a defeatist, escapist, "bad news" gospel that the early church and apostles consistently referred to as antichrist. This dualistic worldview that God’s physical creation (the world and all it contains) is evil, worthy only of destruction, and that only "spiritual" pursuits are of true value, has influenced vast sectors of nineteenth- and twentieth-century evangelicalism. To cite just one sobering example, it’s instructive to note the gnostic approach to interpreting the Old Testament. Magus devoted himself to exegeting the Old Testament to prove that its God, full of wrath, violence, and vengeance could not possibly be the God of love whom Christ taught about. His denigration of both the Old Testament and its God is frighteningly similar to the way many evangelicals disregard or downgrade (or, in the case of dispensationalists, outright dismiss) the Old Testament (and its harsh God with His unreasonable laws) in favor of the New Testament (and even then, with an unbalanced hermeneutic, selectively focusing on "people-friendly" attributes of love and grace). Whatever the rationale, the unstated implication is that the Trinity of the Old Testament has somehow changed their modus operandi, if not their very nature, rendering the Old Testament little more than an anachronistic curiosity. (Go to the head of Simon’s class.)
Further Gnostic Distinctives
A number of gnostic distinctives increasingly form the basis for contemporary evangelicalism. These gnostic guideposts include:
Gnosticism has survived to our present day by its ability to adapt, adopt, merge, or permeate and to employ whatever tack is most useful at a particular juncture. Due to its uncanny ability to "shape shift" and rapidly change tack in order to adjust itself to local church terminology and cultures, the only way for the early church to defend itself against this constantly mutating and difficult-to-identify spiritual virus was to establish clear boundaries of Christian orthodoxy (consisting of various creeds and doctrines, i.e., the dogma of the universal church). To the extent that we as Christians ignore the creeds and confessions, remain ignorant of church history and orthodox doctrine, and are oblivious to the need for church authority, we open the gates wide to Gnosticism’s latest deception. As Harold O. J. Brown notes, "It [Gnosticism] has seldom gone by that name since the early centuries, but Gnosticism has continued to reproduce itself within Christianity and reappear from time to time in new guises" (Heresies, 39).
- Subjectivism and Mysticism: The deification of one’s own subjective experience as the final arbiter of spiritual truth, a modern evangelical "sacrament" which has contributed to the self-idolization and "spiritual" narcissism so rampant in our evangelical world.
- Antinomian Individualism: A revulsion for church authority, doctrines, and creeds and a consequent enshrinement of the "inner light" leading to hyper-individualism. Its tendency toward theological elitism is perfectly mirrored in today’s "anything goes," smorgasbord style of Christianity. Take what you like, ignore church doctrine and authority, simply move on to another "community" when your church fails to please you (or, heaven forbid, attempts to discipline you) and be sure to follow your "inner light" (most commonly referred to today as "the leading of the Spirit"). This intensely individualistic and subjective religious culture has no room for God’s objective law-word, systematic theology, or the wisdom and boundaries developed by two millennia of Christian martyrdom, prayer, insight, and exegesis, as expressed in the church’s historic creeds.
Topics: Conspiracy, Creeds, Church History, New Testament History, Dispensationalism
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