We can’t know what God knows.
GNOSTICISM
Definition
The theory of salvation by knowledge. Already in the first century of the Christian era there were Gnostics who claimed to know the mysteries of the universe. They were disciples of the various pantheistic sects that existed before Christ. The Gnostics borrowed what suited their purpose from the Gospels, wrote new gospels of their own, and in general proposed a dualistic system of belief. Matter was said to be hostile to spirit, and the universe was held to be a depravation of the Deity. Although extinct as an organized religion, Gnosticism is the invariable element in every major Christian heresy, by its denial of an objective revelation that was completed in the apostolic age and its disclaimer that Christ established in the Church a teaching authority to interpret decisively the meaning of the revealed word of God.
Not only historians and sociologists but novelists are writing about the “Gnostic” character of the soup that we call spirituality in the United States today. In a recent article in Harper’s, Curtis White describes our situation pretty well. When we assert, “This is my belief,” says White, we are invoking our right to have our own private conviction, no matter how ridiculous, not only tolerated politically but respected by others. “It says, ‘I’ve invested a lot of emotional energy in this belief, and in a way I’ve staked the credibility of my life on it. So if you ridicule it, you can expect a fight.” In this kind of culture, “Yahweh and Baal-my God and yours-stroll arm-in-arm, as if to do so were the model of virtue itself.”
What we require of belief is not that it make sense but that it be sincere….Clearly, this is not the spirituality of a centralized orthodoxy. It is a sort of workshop spiritu-ality that you can get with a cereal-box top and five dollars….There is an obvious problem with this form of spirituality: it takes place in isolation. Each of us sits at our computer terminal tapping out our convictions….Consequently, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that our truest belief is the credo of heresy itself. It is heresy without an orthodoxy. It is heresy as an orthodoxy. (2)
While European nihilism denied only God, “American nihilism is something different. Our nihilism is our capacity to believe in everything and anything all at once. It’s all good!” All that’s left is for belief to become “a culture-commodity.”
We shop among competing options for our belief. Once reduced to the status of a commodity, our anything-goes, do-it-yourself spirituality cannot have very much to say about the more directly nihilistic conviction that we should all be free to do whatever we like as well, each of us pursuing our right to our isolated happiness. (3)
Like Nietzsche himself, who said that truth is made rather than discovered and was described by Karl Barth as “the man of azure isolation,” Americans just want to be left alone to create their own private Idaho. While evangelicals talk a lot about truth, their witness, worship, and spirituality seem in many ways more like their Mormon, New Age, and liberal nemeses than anything like historical Christianity.
We would prefer to be left alone, warmed by our beliefs-that-make-no-sense, whether they are the quotidian platitudes of ordinary Americans, the magical thinking of evangelicals, the mystical thinking of New Age Gnostics, the teary-eyed patriotism of social conservatives, or the perfervid loyalty of the rich to their free-market Mammon. We are thus the congregation of the Church of the Infinitely Fractured, splendidly alone together. And apparently that’s how we like it. Our pluralism of belief says both to ourselves and to others, ‘Keep your distance.’ And yet isn’t this all strangely familiar? Aren’t these all the false gods that Isaiah and Jeremiah confronted, the cults of the ‘hot air gods’? The gods that couldn’t scare birds from a cucumber patch? Belief of every kind and cult, self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement of every degree, all flourish. And yet God is abandoned. (4)
As far back as the early eighteenth century, the French commentator Alexis de Tocqueville observed the distinctly American craving “to escape from imposed systems” and “to seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason for things, looking to results without getting entangled in the means toward them.” He concluded, “So each man is narrowly shut up in himself and from that basis makes the pretension to judge the world.” Americans do not need books or any other external authorities in order to find the truth, “having found it in themselves.” (5) American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) announced that “whatever hold the public worship held on us is gone or going,” prophesying the day when Americans would recognize that they are “part and parcel of God,” requiring no mediator or ecclesiastical means of grace. Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” captured the unabashed narcissism of American romanticism that plagues our culture from talk shows to the church.
During this same period, the message and methods of American churches also felt the impact of this romantic narcissism. It can be recognized in a host of sermons and hymns from the period, such as C. Austin Miles’ hymn, “In the Garden”:
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.
And he walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.
If moralism represents a drift toward the Pelagian (or at least semi-Pelagian) heresy, “enthusiasm” is an expression of the heresy known as Gnosticism. A second-century movement that seriously threatened the ancient churches, Gnosticism tried to blend Greek philosophy and Christianity. The result was an eclectic spirituality that regarded the material world as the prison-house of divine spirits and the creation of an evil god (YAHWEH). Their goal was to return to the spiritual, heavenly, and divine unity of which their inner self is a spark, away from the realm of earthly time, space, and bodies. With little interest in questions of history or doctrine, the Gnostics set off on a quest to ascend the ladder of mysticism. The institutional church, with its ordained ministry, creeds, preaching, sacraments, and discipline, was alienating-like the body, it was the prison-house of the individual soul.
Pelagianism and Gnosticism are different versions of what Gerhard Forde called the “glory story.” Following Luther’sHeidelberg Disputation, which was following Romans 10 and 1 Corinthians 1, the Reformation contrasted the theology of glory with the theology of the cross. As Forde explains,
The most common overarching story we tell about ourselves is what we will call the glory story. We came from glory and are bound for glory. Of course, in between we seem somehow to have gotten derailed-whether by design or accident we don’t quite know-but that is only a temporary inconvenience to be fixed by proper religious effort. What we need is to get back on ‘the glory road.’ The story is told in countless variations. Usually the subject of the story is ‘the soul’…what Paul Ricoeur has called ‘the myth of the exiled soul.’ (6)
In neither version does one need to be rescued. Assisted, directed, enlightened perhaps, but not rescued-at least not through a bloody cross.
...
There is an explicit revival of Gnosticism in our day, however, in both the academy and popular culture, from Harvard Divinity School seminars to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. The “Gnosticism” aisle in the average bookstore chain (next to religion and spirituality) is evidence of renewed interest in pagan spiritualities. Matthew Fox, repeating the warning of self-described Gnostic psychologist Carl Jung, expresses this sentiment well: “One way to kill the soul is to worship a God outside you.” (7) Other writers in this issue focus on this revival of explicit, full-strength Gnosticism, so I will focus on the “Gnosticism Lite” that pervades the American spirituality today.
This watered-down Gnosticism does not require any explicit awareness of, much less attachment to, the esoteric myth of creation and redemption-by-enlightenment. The opposition, however, between inner divinity and enlightenment and redemption, an external God, the external Word, an external redemption in Christ, and an institutional church offers a striking parallel to America’s search for the sacred.
Your Own Personal Jesus by James White