Gnosticism or the Kingdom of God

Gnosticism will continue in various ways to undermine the Christian faith until the anthropology underpinning it and driving it is challenged and eradicated. Many Christians who want to challenge Gnosticism will not let go of the animistic anthropology driving it and so their efforts to deal with it will come to nothing and will not change anything. Deal with the anthropology and Gnosticism will be starved of what gives it life. It is pointless railing against Gnosticism, unless one is willing to let go of the Graeco-Roman conception of the soul on which it is based. This is what lies at the heart of it. So far the Church in all branches has shown herself unwilling to abandon this false doctrine. The spectre of animism, still hangs over the Church’s anthropology, and this is ultimately fatal to the further progress of the Great Commission. I believe that dealing with this is essential before further progress can be made.

Animism is belief in the existence of the soul. Soul here being soul in the pagan and Graeco-Roman sense, not the biblical sense of nephesh, namely that which breathes, breath of life. Catharism is probably the best known and most widely understood of the many Gnostic heresies that were based on this belief and on the basic idea of salvation being escape from physical matter—which was believed to be the creation of the demiurge or Satan, not God—and return to the divine essence of which the soul is a spark. This dualistic belief system emerged early in Church history and in many different forms and manifestations from the early Gnostic sects to the Messelians, Paulitians, Bogomils and Cathars etc.

But besides being manifested in these heresies, which were condemned as heresies by the Church, this dualistic perspective also manifested itself within the orthodox Churches as a basic view of reality. The form/matter or spirit/matter dualism of Plato and Graeco-Roman paganism was transformed into the grace/nature dualism of the mediaeval Church, which has continued in the Church, even in the Protestant Church, including the Reformed Churches, into the modern age. This dualism is not just a belief about salvation, though it is that of course, but also an understanding of the nature or structure of reality itself. Anders Nygren called it the Alexandrian worldview. It is antithetical to the biblical view of reality, which has a completely different foundation, namely Creation/Fall/Redemption.

This is not to say that people influenced by this dualistic principle do not believe in Creation, Fall, and Redemption as biblical doctrines, but rather that they are not seen as the foundation of their understanding of reality, their theory of everything. Their Christianity therefore is conflated with a pagan idea and as a consequence syncretistic. While this dualism continues to inform their theology and their understanding of the nature and purpose of redemption what they perceive as the upper storey, the spiritual world, will always be seen in antithesis to what they perceive as the lower storey, the world of physical matter, and so their understanding of spirituality will be affected by this. This is about their understanding of the nature of reality, but it does impact their doctrine of redemption.

Catharism flourished in the south-west of what is now France (Languedoc) in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but the beliefs go back way before this. Sometimes they are called Albigensians. Our term bugger comes from this heretical sect because they got their heresies from the Bogomils who were Bulgarian. Bugger, which is a corruption of the term Bulgar, meant originally therefore a heretic, i.e. a follower of the Bulgarian heresy (Bogomilism), but it got associated with Sodomy because the Cathars were accused of being Sodomites. As far as I can see there is no evidence for this, but because they theoretically thought sex was wrong—because it led to sparks of divinity being trapped in physical bodies—their opponents thought they must be engaging in unnatural sex, and so they were accused of Sodomy (“You don’t believe in sex because it leads to child birth? Well then, you must be a Sodomite”—not very smart reasoning to say the least). This accusation often occurs in such situations and it is sometimes difficult to tell if it is true. In the case of the Cathars, however, from what I have read, there seems to be no real evidence.

The fact is that despite their theoretical rejection of sex they did engage in sex. But extramarital sex was seen as less problematic. It was marital sex that they hated the most, because in their eyes it would most likely lead to childbirth—they had various devices of contraception that they used, some magical and useless, others perhaps a bit more likely to have some effect. This is one of the reasons why it was really one of the worst heresies. The practical effects of this heresy were anything but removed from the world of every day life. Catharism demonised marriage or at least marital sex but saw promiscuous extramarital sex as less problematic despite the theoretical condemnation of sex. Of course Catharism is one particular manifestation of the Gnostic world-view. In saying that Gnosticism continues in some form we are not saying that all those influenced by it accept all that the Cathars taught or all that the various other Gnostic sects taught. It is the basic dualistic view of reality and of the soul that is the problem, which can manifest itself in various different ways.

From the biblical perspective human beings do not have souls, i.e. they are not made of two irreconcilable bits, spirit and matter. This is the pagan view. Human beings are souls. God breathed into Adam the breath of life and he, i.e. the physical creation, became a living soul. I do not have a soul, I am a soul. When we die the breath of life leaves us and we cease to be living souls.

What makes us human is not the possession of souls, since the animals also have the breath of life, but rather our creation in the image of God. Until the Church gets rid of this last vestige of animism from her anthropology she will fail to eradicate the spirit of Gnosticism, the Alexandria world-view, from her life, and this pagan religious perspective will continue to hamstring her efforts to disciple the nations because the basic idea underpinning this veiw of salvation is escape from the world, not transformation of the world into the kingdom of God.

The Bible does not teach a doctrine of spiritual deliverance from matter. It teaches deliverance from sin, which is the transgression of God’s law, and the resurrection of the body. Until that resurrection of the body our job is to disciple the nations and therefore transform the world. The kingdom of God must grow until it displaces and replaces the secular and idolatrous social orders that dominate the nations.

Christ will not return until the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ. The dualistic perspective works against this biblical agenda by replacing the Great Commission and the seeking of the kingdom of God on earth with an escapist agenda based on this false dualistic view of reality and salvation.