Gnosticism and the Early Church (src: Ryan Reeves)

Video

• Link to recording segments on Dropbox

Summary

One of the heresies the Early Church faced came from the gnostics, a group people whose belief system emphasized truth beyond this world (to be attained through mystical experiences), hatred of the material world, and elitist or secret knowledge. The gnostics tended towards a strong form of self-denial and asceticism, and their total shunning of the material world led them to radically different interpretations in some areas, relative to Christianity proper. They were not much concerned with faithfulness to the scriptures, but freely borrowed from other philosophies and religions of their time, and wrote their own sacred texts external to the Bible. Since parts of the Bible clearly contradict their teachings just at first glance, it is no surprise that this group threw it out and went their own way. The gnostics did not pretend to be Christian, but set themselves above and against Christianity. Even today, certain patterns of thought can mirror the problematic beliefs of this long-ago group, so it can be useful to examine the issues with gnostic teachings and how they came about, in order to better understand them and protect against them.

Content

Video intro, and a discussion of docetism

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points and follow-on topics

Summary points:

• Gnosticism was a heresy present in the early church (first couple centuries AD).
• There is a degree of misunderstanding on the part of some as to the nature of gnosticism in the Early Church. But before we get there, let us discuss a related concept: docetism.
• Docetism
  • Short-lived in a relative sense, but helped give rise to the general ethos out of which gnosticism grew.
  • There was no “docetic church” in the sense that it was a clearly definable group. Contrast doctrines that built up physical factions more, like the later heresy of Arianism.
  • Rather, docetism is a tendency, a trend towards certain areas of thought that deemphasize Jesus’s humanity.
• A simple definition of docetism would be the belief that Christ could not have had a human body
  • Might arise due to philosophical commitment to certain views about the created work (cosmology)
  • Or perhaps from an improper emphasis on Jesus’s divinity, at the expense of His humanity.<!– — –>
• While modern people tend to struggle more with Jesus’s divinity (viewing him as just a nice teacher—a guy with some interesting ideas, but certainly not God), the ancients had a different problem. To them, the idea of a god (or rather, God with a capital G) coming down to earth and interacting with creation hardly made them blink. But some people thought the notion that God would in some way take on human flesh was straight up blasphemous.
  • Tends to be tied up with a negative view of creation, and humanity specifically. Flesh = corrupted, sinful. So how can God ever come to be fleshly?
• Or people go so far in trying to defend the divinity of Christ, that in so doing, they all but obliterate mention of his humanity.
  • People might question if Jesus could dread the cross (as in Gethsemane), or experience the strong, decidedly human emotions described in that passage.

Follow-on topics:

• There is a doctrine in theology known as the hypostatic union. This would be the teaching that Jesus was, after the incarnation, both fully God and fully man at the same time.
  • Properly speaking, we would say He retained His divine nature and never stopped partaking of the essence of God that He possesses as one of the three members of the Trinity (who are united in the sense of “three persons, one essence”), but gained a human nature at the point of the incarnation.
• Jesus taking on a full, real human nature is what is in view in passages like Hebrews 5:5 and Acts 13:33, which are quoting Psalm 2:7 in a Messianic sense. Jesus’s human nature did have a beginning, we might say, but Jesus’s divine nature is co-eternal and consubstantial with the Father and the Spirit. It therefore makes no sense to speak of it in terms of being “begotten”.
  • The Nicene creed actually gets this confused. Compare:
    • “born of the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father…”
  • The Catholic and Orthodox Churches make a big deal about so-called “hypostatic properties” of the Trinity, saying that the Son is “eternally begotten” of the Father, and that the Spirit “eternally proceeds” from the Father. If you ever get in a debate with someone who believes this sort of thing, ask them what exactly being “eternally begotten” even means. It is a nonsensical idea, for things that are begotten have beginnings, and God has no beginning, for He is the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End (Revelation 22:13).
  • Now, with respect to his humanity, Jesus was the Son of God, and His human nature was begotten in the proper sense of the word. The point is that this is His humanity we are talking about, not His divinity.<!– — –>
• A lot of this confusion likely stems from the etymology of the Greek word μονογενής (monogenes), which does literally mean “only begotten” if you trace the meaning of the two morphemes that compose it. The problem is that etymology is of far secondary value to how words are actually used in practice. As an example of the concept, let’s use a word we talked about a couple weeks back when we were discussing the discipline of the Roman army: “decimate”. Per this word’s origin, it referred to every 10th man being put to death. But in terms of how people actually use it today, it refers to total or complete annihilation. That is, when we say something was decimated, nowadays we certainly do not mean that 90% of it remains!
• So in this case, if you buy that monogenes might mean “one and only” or “unique” in how it is actually used, you can sidestep all this nonsensical stuff about “eternal begetting”. In fact, many Bible translations correctly make this interpretative leap: compare translations of John 3:18. It is my opinion that versions that don’t translate as “one and only” and instead inject this begetting business actually straight up mistranslate, and in so doing, confuse proper interpretation. This is an example of why it is of critical importance for pastors and Bible teachers to study and understand Greek, because English translations are not enough in this case.
• Incidentally, this is also why people who teach that Mary is the “Mother of God” are so terribly wrong: they somehow make a human being the originator of a divine person! Properly understood, Mary was Jesus’s real, human mother… in His humanity. His divine nature had nothing to do with it, as He existed as God long before Mary ever existed. Actually, John 1 makes it clear that Jesus as the divine Logos existed even before Creation itself did, since He was the agent in the creation process.

Ok, back on topic: all of that discussion helps us understand that 1) Jesus received His human nature as part of the incarnation, and 2) the very fact that this can be said to have a beginning (as in Hebrews 5:5; Acts 13:33; Psalm 2:7—He was “begotten” as a son, in the physical sense) means it cannot be a divine nature, because eternity is part of the essence of God = God is not God if He is somehow a created thing. Therefore, since these verses say what they say, Jesus must have been given a human nature (since it is a begotten thing with a definable origin), and was not only divine, as the false doctrine of docetism holds. QED.

Some other things to mention in all of this:

• The doctrine of Jesus being both fully God and fully man is so important a concept that it is part of the central metaphor underpinning communion: the “bread” in communion represents Jesus’s body in the sense of his unique dual-nature. (The wine, if you are curious, represents His spiritual suffering for us on the cross to pay for our sins, which is typically termed “the blood of Christ”. Although do note that this has nothing to do with physical blood, but is entirely about Jesus’s spiritual suffering in His payment for our sins).
• Jesus being fully human has important theological consequences in terms of Him being a truly sympathetic advocate, who was fully tested and tempted in the same ways as us. Compare Hebrews 4:15.
• Jesus did not access His full divine power during the incarnation, despite having both natures. In theology, this doctrine is typically known as kenosis. It is a decidedly complex topic, inasmuch as Jesus clearly knew some things supernaturally (which helps explain how He avoided arrest until “His time had come”, despite all the ruling powers of Jerusalem out for His blood), yet still nonetheless still suffered under the restrictions of the flesh. The point is that He did not go through His life on “easy mode” by using His powers as God, even though He could have at any point.
  • This makes it all the more impressive that Jesus stays true to His path when the soldiers mock Him for not saving Himself in Luke 23:36-37. He could have, actually. It would have been as easy as breathing for God, for He created the Universe out of nothing. The God we serve is not some wimpy philosophical abstraction, but a God with real power.

Further discussion

Introduction to gnosticism proper

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points and follow-on topics

Summary points:

• There are lots of misconceptions about it
  • Gnosticism was not a clearly defined religion or movement in the sense that some people think (cf. what we said earlier about docetism—same general idea), and it is not something Christianity up and borrowed from (as if Christianity came after it, and stole ideas from it).
  • Rather, gnosticism came after Christianity. At least, that is current scholarly consensus, in large part: that gnosticism is essentially a corruption of Christian ideas, not the other way around.
• Discovery of the Nag Hammadi library upended some past scholarly theories of gnosticism’s interactions with Christianity.
• Due to it being more of a “trend” or a “tendency” (rather being a full-blown religion or philosophy, per se), there was diversity of opinion in early gnostic thought.
• Until discovery of the Nag Hammadi texts, a lot of our understanding of gnosticism came mostly through the texts of those who argued against them. Compare Irenaeus (c. early 100s to 202 AD), who was a bishop in Gaul.
  • He explained gnosticism as a sort of single movement or philosophy… but Irenaeus is just a single source. Now that we have the Nag Hammadi texts, it is irresponsible to pretend like they don’t exist when discussing the question of “what gnosticism was”. We therefore shouldn’t rely on Irenaeus alone too much, in other words.
    • Perhaps where he was, the heretics were a bit more unified in thought? Perhaps he misunderstood some of their arguments and simply lumped them all together? (This is very common in polemical writings = to sort of shotgun categorize the beliefs of your opponents, even if that turns out to be more a rhetorical strategy than in accordance with the true positions). Or there could be all manner of other reasons. Point being: as scholars, we must not look at single sources in a vacuum. This is similar to what we talked about last week in our discussion of persecution of the Early Church.<!– — –>
• So who were the gnostics, exactly?
  • A group of people who had a particular set of views related to the created world, salvation, and the life of the believer.
  • The term “gnostic” comes from the Greek word gnosis, meaning “knowledge”.
  • Gnostics believe they had a specific sort of mystical spiritual enlightenment and knowledge that other people did not have.
• Gnosticism was a sort of “smorgasbord philosophy” (Cf. also Manicheanism, a belief system present around the same time), in that it took bits and pieces of Christianity, but also grabbed and pulled from other philosophies and religions of the ancient world, and then presented itself as above and against Christianity.
  • Gnosticism, in other words, was an amalgam.
  • Given that it came about after Christ lived and died, many of its texts seek to correct or edit or otherwise change elements of the scriptural accounts as we know them.<!– — –>
• Heresy in the ancient world (as opposed to the looser way some people bandy the term about): a purposeful or willful attempt to change things.
  • The changes in gnosticism are not like what would happen with oral traditions drifting over time from the original account, but rather, they are very clearly a conscientious reaction against the scriptures.
• How?
  • Gnostics shun the material world.
    • Some sort of mystical belief in a dualistic cosmology/world order, with the material being viewed as explicitly evil.
    • A common element in gnosticism is alternative “creation myths”.
      • Rather than a benevolent all-powerful God, in some of these, it is more like a low-ranking deity who fumbles and bumbles into creating the natural order. This would be why it ended up broken and malformed, so the thinking goes.
  • Salvation
    • Salvation, for them, was defined in terms of self-denial and asceticism. They believed this led them to some form of spiritual enlightenment.
    • If you buy the premise that everything in the material world (food, drink, sex, etc.) is inherently evil, then this has its own sort of internal logic, we would say.

Follow-on topics:

• How early did gnosticism come about, exactly? Some of the early verses in the gospel of John, and much of the book of 1 John in particular, seem written almost as if they are arguing against gnostic ideas (like the idea that Jesus did not have a real physical body/docetism proper). So were gnostics already around at the time John was writing?
  • This gets into that tricky bit about them sort of being hard to define as a group, given that it was sort of a decentralized way of thought rather than organized movement. I think for our purposes, we can kind of wave our hand at it and say “John wrote in such a way that he intentionally headed off proto-gnostic ideas/incipient gnosticism”, and not concern ourselves with it much past that.
  • The point is that the Bible itself contains wording relating to some of this. I think it is a mistake to not mention gnosticism at all when we discuss such wording, because it is part of explaining why John worded things the way he did regarding Jesus’s physical body, and his ability to bleed.

Further discussion

Gnostic fundamentals

Video clip from Ryan Reeves

Summary points and follow-on topics

Summary points:

• There is some variety in the specifics, but as a generalization, these three points are decent in terms of explaining “what makes something gnostic” (=worthy of the label):
  • 1. Belief that the world isn’t real: it is ephemeral, and it is lying to you. A modern pop-culture parallel would be “The Matrix”, but in antiquity, there was Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, and platonic idealism as a philosophical concept. When gnostics argue that the world isn’t real, they are speaking of knowledge. What they mean is there is no truth to be discovered within the world. Truth (=mystical enlightenment, for them) comes from knowledge or experience beyond this world. This is mysticism proper we are speaking of here.
  • 2. Hatred of the material world: that this material world is inherently rotten and corrupted—that sin is fundamentally physical and tied to the physical.
  • 3. Elitist/secret knowledge. They saw no need to evangelize. To them, they saw themselves as having some sort of mystical personal spiritual knowledge that only they could access; something just for them. Cf. modern cults like Scientology that don’t try to proselytize, but are content lording their supposedly “secret knowledge” over everyone.<!– — –>
• To use labels for these areas of belief, we would say the first deals with epistemology (how we come to know/relate to truth), the second to cosmology (the nature of the world), and the third to soteriology (salvation = by what means one becomes saved).
• When people use the label of “gnostic” today, what is meant is usually not that someone is a full blown modern practitioner of gnosticism, but that their thoughts or beliefs in some way follow one or more of these general trends.
• Gnostic thought tends to manifest itself in hyper-ascetic moralistic tendencies: finger-wagging about this physical world being all terrible, and how mystical spiritual knowledge is supposedly the answer. Adherents tend to believe that “forsaking” living in the world is some sort of spiritual virtue that will help them on the path to spiritual enlightenment… unlike the rest of us who don’t make such choices.

Follow-on topics:

• There is something to the notion of the flesh being evil and wicked. This deals with a doctrine in theology typically called the sin nature. I should note that this is different from the concept of imputation of sin that Augustine teaches, which I view as a false doctrine. Compare the difference in wording in 1 John 1:8 and 1 John 1:10.
  • Jesus being born of a virgin is actually extremely important theologically, for the sin nature is passed through the male line, as part of the so-called “Genesis curse”. Jesus did not possess a sin nature because of the virgin birth, so His “human nature” did not have all the negative characteristics that typically make us scorn the flesh. I should note that Jesus still faced real temptation even without a sin nature. How do we know? Well, Adam and Eve did not possess sin natures before the fall, and yet they still sinned, right?<!– — –>
• Similarly, there is something to the idea that the current world is broken and corrupted after the fall. For example, Romans 8:21 clearly teaches some form of this, in that this verse describes (current) creation as being in “bondage and decay”.
• So what then is wrong with what the gnostics taught, if there is a grain of truth in these things?
  • Well, one point is that they came up with all these weird creation myths to explain the fallen state of the world, rather than leaning on a proper understanding of Genesis 3. God created the world perfect, and it is through human sin it came to be corrupted; it was not always so, and will not be so in the New Heavens and New Earth. So clearly it is not physical matter itself which is evil, otherwise Jesus would not have had a physical body after the resurrection (for example), and neither would we in eternity.
  • But even more than that, the problem is largely in viewing the world as unredeemable because of its physicality. Like, it is a false view of what makes creation broken that is the problem. If we go back and read the context of that verse in Romans 8, the mention of creation’s current brokenness is inextricably linked to the concepts of hope and redemption. That doesn’t show up in the teachings of the gnostics, because to them, the idea that physical things can be redeemed is anathema to the teaching that everything material is inherently evil. I hope that makes sense.
  • Further, the Bible contains examples of physical things that are essentially already redeemed and not subject to the same corruption that generally permeates creation. For example, the institution of human marriage is fundamentally tied to material creation, but it is not something we teach is inherently evil on that account. Of course, given that human beings are imperfect and sinful, no marriage will be perfect, but the point is that marriage itself is not inherently evil on account of it having physical aspects to it (like man and woman becoming one flesh, for example, which is literally the institution of marriage as God describes it—Genesis 2:24).

Further discussion

Review Questions

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