When World Denial Becomes Worldliness

Like the ancient Gnostics faced by the early church, today’s society has adopted an escapist, anti-materialistic, anti-intellectual, anti-institutional, anti-sacramental spirituality. This tendency has been evident both in the secular, Greek strain of Western history (Plato, Neoplatonism, etc.) and in the religious adaptations of that strain (mysticism, much of monasticism, the abundance of taboos designed to keep believers from the world). The early name for this mixture of Christianity and pagan, anti-material mysticism was “Gnosticism,” and according to Marylin Ferguson, a New Age guru, Gnosticism is the fountain of contemporary mysticism. (1)

What on earth, therefore, could Fundamentalism and the New Age movement have in common? There have been many New Age conspiracy theories floating about, trying to implicate nearly everyone, but isn’t this stepping over the line of sanity just a bit? Not really. Let me explain.

An early pseudopygriphal writing (i.e., a document pretending to have been written by an apostle), states the recurring Gnostic disdain for the material world: “It is the spirit that raises the soul, but the body that kills it” (Apocryphon of James). It is this same mysticism one finds in current New Age thinking. It is also the sentiment revived by many forms of Pentecostalism, with comments such as, “Don’t focus on that body of yours….The problem area is not in your spirit; it lies in your mind and body.” (2) And yet, it was a recently published non-Pentecostal, evangelical study guide I discovered which reads, “Our problems arise from living as redeemed spirits in unredeemed bodies.” (3)

Dr. Eric Voegelin, a political scientist at the University of Munich, regards our era as “the revival of Gnosticism,” although he has politics and science, not religion, so much in mind. “The world is no longer the…Judeo-Christian world that God created and found good. Gnostic man no longer wishes to perceive in admiration the intrinsic order of the cosmos. For him the world has become a prison from which he wants to escape.” (4) This Gnostic revival sweeps everyone these days into its wake, or so it seems, from the secularists who just want to make money in order to pay for things which will allow themselves to escape life’s realities, to the fundamentalists who escape earthly responsibility for speculations on the end-times.

First, What Is Gnosticism, Anyway?

It is not a tight, systematic body of beliefs, but an amorphous collection of concepts easily integrated into other mutually exclusive belief systems. Common denominators usually include a dualism of spirit (good) vs. matter (evil), and a constantly developing access to direct, intuitive, divine knowledge which improves and liberates the spirit of the individual from its material and intellectual bonds. As another Gnostic writing, The Gospel of Truth has it, “If one has knowledge, he receives what is his own, and draws it to himself.” The individual is almost exclusively interested in him or her self, and it becomes nearly impossible to distinguish this spiritual self-realization from mere subjectivism.

F. F. Bruce, in The Defense of the Gospel in the New Testament, points out that Gnosticism can be ascetic, as the type attacked in the letter to the Colossians; as well as antinomian, such as that opposed in the letter of Jude. Opposition to secret knowledge of God is displayed in other New Testament writings. Paul, for example, states in 1 Corinthians 15 that he passed on the saving knowledge that he had received: objective historical events with theological meanings, not esoteric mysteries of the spirit-world known only to the spiritual elite.

However, in the American culture we are vulnerable to the loose interpretive framework of Gnostic subjectivism (with more than a dash of Yankee pragmatism thrown in). A belief is true for me if it satisfies a personal need for security. Hence, non-Christian influences, under the guise of spirituality, are often welcomed uncritically into the Church. Again, it is a loose interpretive framework. It is a collection of attitudes, beliefs, and criteria which easily mix with nearly any belief. Its colored glass is the window through which many unwary Christians view their Christianity and the world. In this model, what can’t be seen through this glass is either highly suspect, or unquestionably evil.

Accepting this Gnostic subjectivism as a world-interpreting window means we lose our awareness of God, his character, Word, and purposes, as existing independent of us. That which is true of God and Scripture is that which benefits me spiritually, or confirms what I already want to believe about him. Truth, doctrine, and theology become irrelevant. What matters is how I am progressing with my own personal, private, spiritual agenda. It is always welcome when God’s interests and my own coincide–but if they collide, his statements in Scripture can be dismissed as not being practical, or as being irrelevant to my daily walk.

In the aspects of evangelicalism colored by Gnostic spirituality, God seems distant from our world. He is reluctantly involved, and intrudes only to do something vaguely prophetic in the Middle East. End times prophecy becomes important since the Rapture is the means of getting out of this world. Since many have dumped the doctrines of Creation and Providence, this focus on prophecy is the only way to be sure that God is concerned about this present world (aside from the non-material transformation of the spirit of each Christian). Others ignore the realities of this world by becoming involved, once more like the ancient Gnostics, in cosmic spiritual battles with demons in “power encounters.” How easily we miss the point even of Paul’s discussion of spiritual warfare in Ephesians 6, often the proof-text for such heavenly war-mongering. For in that passage, the apostle makes clear that the spiritual battle in heavenly places revolves around the truth of the gospel and its world-wide proclamation; it is not a blue-print for direct hand-to-hand combat with demons, but a metaphor for the urgency of gospel preaching.

According to the end-times obsession, Christ is significant mostly because he is coming to get us out of here and destroy this material world. After all, isn’t Satan the god of this world? Let it be understood that Satan is the god of this world only in the sense that all in Creation which opposes God proclaims loyalty to Satan by default. God’s Creation (including people and their bodies) is very good: In Genesis 1:31 God said it was. As C. S. Lewis once quipped, “God likes matter. He invented it.” But like us, the material world is affected by the Fall in such a way that an odor of death lingers in it. The visible (and invisible) world is still God’s world, and the devil is still under control. Writes the apostle Paul, “The Creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage to corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. For we know that the whole Creation groans and labors with birth pangs at this time” (Rom. 8:21-22). Our bodies, along with the rest of the material Creation, will be physically resurrected as the finishing touch of the New Creation.

Second, How Does This Influence Our Own Lives?

The Gnosticism we see attaching itself to Christianity throughout its history often comes from a misdirected desire to protect true spirituality from intellectualization. However, rather than loving the Lord God with all our mind, as Christ commands us (Mt. 22:37; Mk. 12:30) we seem to avoid the mind’s very existence because of a desire for personal comfort. Perhaps we fear that our understanding of Christianity won’t cut it intellectually, fearful that others, Christians or not, might see a prevailing weakness. That weakness is that we really are not sure of what we are talking about. It is safer to stick to personal experiences, since were often more certain of our own subjective experiences than we are of Scripture.

Refusing to view themselves and their culture through Scripture is a given for unbelievers. Unfortunately too many Christians are guilty of this same sin when they refuse to responsibly screen the influences of our world upon Christian experience. Instead, we are liable to absorb these influences uncritically, and even to defend them as Christian. Such Christian Gnosticism causes us to reject our responsibility as stewards of Creation, and keeps us from admitting that Christ is Lord over every part of his Creation. If we do not admit Him as Lord over all, how can we serve him? And where, if not in Creation? Ironically, this Gnostic irresponsibility of stewardship is all being done in the name of obedience! If anything, this disobedient retreat from our God-given responsibilities means that Christians are ensuring that Jesus is denied as Lord of Creation.

It is obvious that this influence causes our stewardship over the ecological state of the environment to suffer. After all, the environment is material, and it is destined for extermination anyway. Stewardship in just government suffers as well, since no Christian should be involved in worldly pursuits. Talented artists are made to feel guilty if they give too much time to their “secular career”; honest workers and diligent homemakers feel as though they are not giving God their best if they don’t have enough time in the week to give to a whole series of church meetings and activities. Secular work is cut off from spiritual service. While our calling in this world is not spiritual or sacred (being a matter of Creation, not redemption), it does not require a spiritual justification in order to be honoring to God. As was mentioned above in regard to Satan, the worldliness evident in anti-worldly Gnosticism is the net effect of attitudes and beliefs which see all that is material in Creation operating independently of God. The same Gnostic disdain is held for culture in general, including dancing, drinking, reading secular literature, or going to movies.

Surprisingly, such concern for sin does not take sin seriously at all! Rather, this thinking limits sin to things external to us, ignoring completely our guilt for inwardly giving in to the unseen sinful desires operating within us. The Sermon on the Mount, and Mark 7:14-23 clearly present Jesus’ position on this confusion of sin with the external world. Against the revival of Gnostic mysticism in his own day Calvin wrote, “The depravity and malice both of man and of the devil, or the sins that arise therefrom, do not spring from nature, but rather from the corruption of nature.” Therefore, “Let us not be ashamed to take pious delight in the works of God open and manifest in this most beautiful theater” (Inst. I: 14: 20).

Nor are other Christian truths safe from this mess. The Sacraments of the Lord’s Supper and Baptism suffer because they become merely movements of matter in this Gnostic understanding of Christianity. After all, how can spirituality be involved with matter? Imagine what can happen to the Incarnation in this model! After all, if we insist on the notion that the bread and wine in communion are merely symbolic on the basis that they are material things (and this is indeed how many Christians argue today), how can we say that “the Word became flesh” nearly two thousand years ago? While we may, as believers, have differing views of the Sacraments and their efficacy, there is no doubt that the denial of God’s involvement with matter in communicating to us (either in his living Word, Christ; the written Word, the Bible, or in the sacraments) is heretical.

Gnostics new and old may caricature the orthodox as “dead,” bound to the “letter” rather than the “Spirit,” devoted to “head knowledge” in stead of “heart knowledge,” “more interested in what the Lord did yesterday than what he’s doing today,” and so on, but in so doing they are denying the only objective communication they have from God.

Our evangelism certainly suffers as well. If we do not know the philosophies which shape our world-view, it is nearly impossible to communicate the gospel to these people, these other minds. But perhaps we don’t want to be seen in the company of worldly people anyway. Serious Christians might question our spirituality if we know too much about the world. Besides, it might ruin our witness.

Our understanding of ourselves is also affected. As has been cited extensively in The Agony of Deceit, televangelistic Gnostics set the human spirit over the rest of the person in an attempt to put asunder that which God has joined together. A cycle of despair results. Believers start with emotional, psychological, relational, or moral struggles and they are told that such afflictions are the old things which have passed away upon conversion: Now they are to totally surrender and submit those things to God. Believers are to deny not only the reality of sin’s dominion (which Paul does teach here), but to deny the reality of ongoing sinful affections and behavior (which Paul does not teach here…or anywhere). Christians are not, therefore, supposed to deal with these problems at all (for that would involve “the flesh”). They must simply let God fight those battles without their efforts. Immediately, they become aware of their inability to experience such victory in these areas, and feel even more distant from God. At this point they either begin denying the realities of their fallenness, or they try harder and harder to not try at all.

A Christianity which is really a collection of Gnostic experiences then becomes a commodity to be advertised (disguised as evangelism), sold (disguised as acceptance, not necessarily conversion), compared (disguised as fellowship), and hoarded for our own development (disguised as a personal relationship). Francis Schaeffer forewarned us of this new Super- Spirituality, which stands opposed to Creation. We have become interested in saving souls, not people. We deny the Lordship of Christ over the world when we refuse to be involved with his Creation, including employment and culture. God’s gifts to us in Creation, including the intellect, our psychology, relationships, social institutions, and nature, too often are seen as evil by Christians. Isaiah’s warning still calls us to repentance in our disdain for this world: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”