Joe Heschmeyer reveals how the heresy of Gnosticism has permeated Protestant doctrine.
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Jamus Poria. I’m Joe Heme, and today I want to explore the gnostic strain within Protestantism. And in saying that, I want to be clear upfront. I’m not claiming that all Protestants are gnostics, nor am I saying that only Protestants find themselves tempted by gnosticism, but there is a longstanding connection between gnosticism and Protestantism that I think needs to be called out and condemned. So to get there, let’s first say what is gnosticism? Then? Why does the Bible condemn gnosticism as antichrist? And then how has this perverted theology found a home within our world and particularly within elements of Protestant worship and theology. So to start with that, what is gnosticism? I think James White does a good job of capturing what we mean when we talk about gnosticism. Now, I want to be clear. Gnosticism is a complicated group of ideas, a group of ideologies. Not every gnostic believed the same thing. Nevertheless, I think this is a good quick shorthand kind of summary of what we mean when we talk about
CLIP:
Gnostics. Gnosticism is basically a dualistic system that which is physical is evil, that which is spiritual is good. And so a man’s problem is you are good on the inside, your spiritual self is good, but you’re trapped in this evil body and salvation is to get out of this evil body and to be that spark of the divine within you to be absorbed back into the one.
Joe:
Roger Olson, the Baptist theologian and professor puts it like this in his book Story of Christian Theology. In a nutshell, they gnostics believe that matter, including the body, is an inherently limiting prison or even evil drag on the good soul spirit of the human person, and that the spirit is essentially divine, the spark of God dwelling in the tomb of the body. So where do we see that kind of idea floating around today? Well, before we get into the particularly distinctively obviously Protestant kind of versions of it, I want to talk about two popular figures, Oprah Winfrey and Jordan Peterson. First, here’s Oprah talking about her own kind of vision of spirituality and how she considers it something distinct from her Christianity.
CLIP:
We’re taking a chance as we tap into our spiritual side, anybody know what their spiritual side is? That’s good. I am not talking about religion. I am not talking about religion. I am a Christian. That is my faith. I’m not asking you to be a Christian if you want to be one, I can show you how.
Joe:
Okay, so clearly she’s saying I’m a Christian, but in addition to my Christianity, there’s this other thing called spirituality. What does that mean? Well, here’s how she explains it,
CLIP:
That there is no life without a spiritual life. I want to say that again. There is no life without a spiritual life because we are all spirit beings having a human experience. So are you ready to open your heart?
Joe:
Are you ready? Think about that. The same crowd that cheered when she said she was a Christian and could show them how to be Christians also cheers when she lays out this clearly gnostic vision, this idea that we are spirit beings who are just kind of having a bodily experience, and if that’s something you believe as a Christian, I need you to know right now that is not what Christians believe historically. That is not what the Bible teaches about the body. We are not just spiritual beings having a bodily experience. That’s the heresy of gnosticism. We’re just trapped here in these meat suits. That is not what Christianity teaches. That’s not what this is about. I’m going to get in more about why that’s wrong in a few, but for now, I want to highlight a second thinker. This is Jordan Peterson. Now Peterson can be a little elusive, a little hard to pin down in terms of which things he thinks are literally true and which are just nice images within Christianity. But I think Alex O’Connor, who is a young atheist, very well-spoken on these things, does a good job of trying to pin him on the question that if you treat it all like the resurrection, that sort of thing as just this beautiful kind of image that actually sounds much more like gnosticism and Peterson for his part acknowledges that and recognizes that the body has to be of great dignity to be authentically Christian
CLIP:
In that early church community. Somebody who said, well, this question of the resurrection is a physical historical event that you’re kind of missing the point. The thing that matters is the resurrection that takes place inside of every person. It sort of sounds a little bit like the kind of approach that you would take. Now, if that’s true, that would mean that in the early church you’d have been condemned as a heretic. So when a modern Catholic says to you, Jordan Peterson, are you Christian, what do you think about Catholicism? I think that the reason that they’re interested is because if it’s true what I’m saying, then they would have to say, oh, I suppose, at least according to my understanding of Catholicism, that that’s a form
Of gnosticism. I
Can’t count you among by number. So I think that’s probably why people are interested and I wonder
If you agree, what would you say that would constitute a genuine form of inquiry?
For sure, and I wonder if you feel like you, I mean, I dunno.
See, one of the things I really like about the bodily tradition of the resurrection is that it, see, what it does that’s so remarkable is that it doesn’t deac the body and that’s very, very important. I think the fundamental problem with gnosticism is that it becomes a, it’s very easy for it to become a doctrine that’s contemptuous of the body and contemptuous the material world.
A great deal of gnostic tradition literally believes that the material world is created by an evil demon.
Right? Exactly. Well, exactly, exactly.
And Jesus wants to save us
On that. The insistence on the bodily resurrection is a medication against that and it’s an effective one.
Joe:
Alright, so that’s it in a nutshell. If you just say the resurrection is a nice image, but it doesn’t matter if it’s historically true, then you sound much more like gnostics. And the response to this is Peterson, rightly recognizes, is to recognize that there is a centrality to the body. What gnosticism is presenting is completely opposite Christianity. Gnosticism has rightly been condemned as antichrist in the pages of the New Testament. Well, why is that? Okay, well first of all, in second John in verse seven, it’s just one chapter, so chapter one verse seven if you want to put it that way. He says, many deceivers have gone out into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh. Such a one is the deceiver and the antichrist. When we’re talking about antichrist, that word gets bandied about in Christian circles, often with no sense of where it comes from in the Bible and it’s here, the antichrist is the one who denies Jesus’ coming in the flesh, meaning, so there’s different schools of gnosticisms.
I kind of intimated the most extreme form of gnosticism, and you heard Alex O’Connor allude to it as well, views Christ coming in the flesh merely as symbolic. He wasn’t actually bodily, he wasn’t physically real because the flesh is evil. If you actually buy this premise that we’re all just spirit beings having a bodily experience, or if you buy the premise that our souls are good and our bodies are bad, this kind of dualistic idea, then it follows from that that you can’t affirm much of the gospel whatsoever. I’m going to take seven basic points that you can’t affirm. The incarnation, Jesus’s public ministry, the institution of the Eucharist, the creation of the church as the body of Christ, Jesus’s bodily crucifixion, Jesus’s bodily resurrection and our own bodily resurrection. I’m going to go through these very quickly, giving you explicit passages from the Bible that don’t square up with gnosticism.
Number one, the incarnation. John begins his gospel by saying, in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God, this divine word. He then says, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. Well, if flesh is evil, then you have to say the word became evil and dwelt among us, that just launches the whole thing because then flash forward from the incarnation, 30 years to Jesus’s public ministry in Jesus is going about Galilee teaching in the synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom and here’s the kicker, healing every disease and every infirmity among the people. Why is Jesus healing physical bodies? If physical bodies are prisons? Imagine the great liberator comes and instead of unlocking the key to your cell, he just spruces it up so your prison is slightly nicer. He fixes a water pipe that’s broken.
That would be what you’d have to say if the body is simply a prison of the soul. Third, the institution of the Eucharist in John six, we’re going to get back to this in a big way. Jesus says, unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. So he is tying in some way the eating of his flesh and blood in the Eucharist with eternal life. So the institution of the Eucharist ends up being this really critical point in the early fights between the gnostics and the Christians. Now there’s much that could be said. You can read Ignatius and IUs on this in the one hundreds and they keep pointing out that one of the major fault lines between Christians and Gnostics is Christians believe the Eucharist is really the body and blood of Jesus and Gnostics don’t next the church as the body of Christ.
What do I mean by that? In Ephesians five, St. Paul reminds us that no man ever hates his own flesh critical line. No man ever hates his own flesh but nourishes it and cherishes it as Christ does the church because we are members of his body. So the whole relationship of Christ in the church of head and body presupposes the goodness of the body that you love your body and that you’re right to do so. Saint Augustine talks about this and he points out that a lot of people think they don’t love their body, but imagine if it was somebody else. Imagine if your body was actually like somebody else’s body. If I said, oh, I hate that person, but you found out I was feeding them multiple times a day, I was bathing them and taking care of them and making sure they got a good night’s rest and everything else you’d say, I don’t know.
You don’t seem to hate them. You seem to be taking incredible care of them. But even the person who claims to hate themselves still eating and drinking and washing hopefully and sleeping and doing all of these things, they’re taking care of their body even if they have this complicated relationship with it. So that idea that no man ever hates his own flesh, we cannot hate our own bodies, the level we can hate somebody else’s, we just can’t. And getting that is important to understanding Jesus’s relationship to the church, which St. Paul famously calls the body of Christ, which again presupposes the body as something good not evil. Next, you look at Jesus’s crucifixion, he bore our sins in his body on the tree of the cross. That’s what we get from one Peter chapter two, and then of course his resurrection. It’s emphasized contra, gnosticism that even when Jesus rises from the dead, he’s still bodily.
Jesus says himself in the gospel of Luke, see my hands and my feet that it is I myself handle me and see for a spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have. So the resurrection, even though St. Paul in one Corinthians 15 talks about how it’s sown of physical body and rises a spiritual body, spiritual there does not mean disembodied because it doesn’t mean spiritual like a spirit, a ghost. It’s not a ghostly body. It is transformed. It is more than what it had been before with physical limitations, but it is still the one in the same body. And notice that Jesus says it is I myself, not my meat suit, not the place I’m having a physical experience or a bodily experience. He is identifying his body with him himself and contrasting that with a disembodied spiritual experience. Finally, all of that prefigures, our own resurrection, right as St.
Paul says in one Corinthians 15, passage is SA alluded to, in fact Christ has been raised from the dead. The first fruits of those who fallen asleep for by a man came death by a man has come also the resurrection of the debt, meaning our ultimate salvation is rising again bodily, not just being spiritually united with Christ. You might say that last point seems not controversial and here I think we have a nice segue into the gnostic strain within Protestantism. So I want to be clear about a couple of things at the outset here. First of all, again, as I said at the beginning, I’m not saying all Protestants are gnostics or even that they’re consciously adhering to gnosticism anything like that. I’m instead arguing number one that the gnostic ideas of the relationship between the soul and body are very much in the intellectual air that we breathe.
There’s a reason, that’s why I looked at Oprah Winfrey, Jordan Peterson, there’s plenty of other people saying gnostic sounding things regularly. And number two, these gnostic sounding ideas, which are often directly antichrist, are sometimes used by Protestants, specific Protestants, not all in arguing against Catholicism in arguing against Catholic. Things like the idea that baptism does something, that the Eucharist really is Jesus. All those things, the arguments against it if you listen to them are sometimes like, wait a second, that’s not even a Christian argument. That’s a gnostic argument. I’ll give you plenty of examples, just bear with me. So sometimes what motivates people to reject kind of the ideas about the sacraments, especially the Eucharist, is this misunderstanding of the relationship of the body to salvation. And in getting there, I want to highlight several kind of figures, but I want to highlight two in particular fake CS Lewis.
I’ll explain what I mean by that and the real Charles Spurgeon, I’ll explain who that is in a minute. But before I get there, I want to just point out this is not something that I just am saying as a non Protestant, this isn’t just like a Catholic looking in on Protestantism saying sounds kind of gnostic. Plenty of evangelicals are sounding the alarm about gnosticism within their own ranks. So for instance, Abigail Valle who teaches at George Fox University wrote a piece called Evangelical Gnosticism for First Things magazine back in 2018, and she makes a point. She says, I teach in a great books program at an evangelical university. Almost all students in the program are born and bred Christians of the non-denominational variety. A number of them have been both thoroughly churched and educated through Christian schools or homeschooling curricular. So these are not just surface level nominal Christians.
These are people who’ve made the decision to go to a Christian college. Yet she says an overwhelming majority of these students do not believe in a bodily resurrection, a majority. She says. Now I can’t pull those numbers up myself, but experientially, plenty of evangelical authors have said similar things for decades. Now in Val’s words, while they trust in an afterlife of eternal bliss with God, most of them assume that this will be disembodied bliss in which the soul is finally free of its meat suit, a term they fondly use. Now she goes on to explain that’s not Christianity, that’s not historic Christianity whatsoever. It’s not the Bible presents of salvation, anything like that that is much more gnostic sounding. Now this idea of being free from the prison of the body, free from the meat suit, which are all explicitly gnostic sounding, you find things that sound like that in the reformer.
So John Calvin, the Calvinist reformer obviously and institutes of Christian religion, says that Christ in commending his spirit to the Father and Stephen, his spirit that is to Christ simply mean that when the soul is freed from the prison house of the body, God becomes its perpetual keeper. Now maybe he doesn’t mean Soma sema, the early platonic agnostic expression that the body is just a prison, but he is describing the body as a prison house for the soul, which again, it’s hard to square. Now I realize that you can find sometimes even in medieval Catholicism, people speaking in that way with such an exaggerated kind of role of the wretchedness of the body, but that is not Christianity. That is not the proper understanding of the body laid out by the New Testament or affirmed by the church for 2000 years. So I don’t want to take this one line and build too much of it except to say that it isn’t just modern evangelicals that are saying things that sound like the body is just a bad thing.
You can find that much earlier and that doesn’t square, as I say with historic Christianity, contrast with the nice creed which says we look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come. The resurrection of the dead is not a spiritual resurrection. We already believe that you will be spiritually with God before that, but that’s not the end of things that we are looking forward to. The day in which our soul already present with God is reunited with our now glorified body. That’s the Christian vision vis-a-vis gnostic one, going back to Valle here, she says this, she says, without a guiding light to orthodoxy, young evangelicals are developing heterodox sensibilities that are at odds with the Christian understanding of personhood, the body of associated with sin, the soul with holiness. Moreover, this sense of the body, especially under the alias flesh tends to be hypersexualized.
And so she makes a point that there is this extreme focus on sexual sin and an underemphasis on the less bodily forms of sin, pride, that sort of thing, and that this is a total perversion, a total distortion of Christianity. It is again to quote St. John’s words, antichrist to view the body in this way as just like the body is the problem completely misunderstands the spiritual problem that we’re facing. So here I want to transition into real verse fake CS Lewis. Now what am I talking about here? There is a fake CS Lewis quote that many years ago I fell for I think like 13 years ago. So look past me, not perfect, and when you actually think about the quote it is, well here I’m just going to, here’s here’s the quotation again, this is not really CS Lewis, but it is widely quoted by Protestants usually as being Lewis and usually in a positive sense
CLIP:
You don’t have a soul. You are the soul, you have a body.
Joe:
Now, as I say, I fell for this many years ago and at the time it was like, oh, it’s great to see somebody affirming the goodness and existence of the soul instead of all these atheists saying we don’t have souls, and maybe that’s what’s going on when this fake Theist Lewis quote gets quoted by people like John Piper or Ravi Zacharias who actually quotes it in one of his books. But the reality is if you actually think about what is being said there, it’s just false. You are not just a soul who has a body. You’re not just a spiritual person having a bodily experience. You are the union of body and soul and CS Lewis actually got that. So Joe Rig in his book Lewis in the Chris on the Christian Life rig is an evangelical author I believe, and he is quoting Lewis favorably that in contrast to that kind of vision, Christianity insists God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature, and then there’s an ellipsis and the line continues.
He likes matter, he invented it. Now Rig is not doing full service to this quotation. I get it. It’s a book. You have to make editorial decisions. You can’t quote everybody at length on everything. But it does seem striking to me that for an evangelical audience, what Lewis actually said is kind of censored because what Lewis actually said, so I mean I like that these are actually Lewis’s words unlike Piper and Zacharias quoting an imaginary version of Lewis where it’s not anything he ever said, but here it’s still censored because Lewis actually uses the blessed sacrament even though he’s a Protestant, an Anglican, he uses the blessed sacrament as an example of how God wants to work spiritually in a bodily way. He does this in mere Christianity. That’s where this line is coming from and I’m going to give you a lengthy version, maybe more lengthy than I need to just to make sure you get the context.
He says, when Christians speak of being in Christ or of Christ being in them, that is not simply a way of saying that they’re thinking about Christ or copying him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them. That the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts. We are his fingers and muscles, the cells of his body. And perhaps that explains one or two things. It explains why this new life, meaning the life of grace is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and holy communion. It is not merely the spreading of an idea, it is more like evolution, a biological or super biological fact. Now we’re going to get into this because as you’re going to see people like Charles Spurgeon who we’re going to talk about in a few really object to that idea, this Christian idea that the new life is spread in not just mental ways but in bodily ways through things like baptism and holy communion.
He rejects that communion or baptism can do anything because he rejects the idea of the body having this role to play in salvation. But this is clearly a difference of opinion. Lewis goes on to say there is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. This is part that gets quoted earlier. God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual, God does not. He invented eating, he likes matter, he invented it. So you can see Lewis’s actual lines are much more eucharistic sounding even though again Lewis is not completely with Catholics on Eucharistic theology. He at least has a much higher view and recognizes that God is doing something bodily and spiritually in the Eucharist. It’s a pretty fascinating kind of line. You see frankly how close Lewis is at times to the Catholic vision of things, okay, but I want to turn from Lewis who gets things largely right to Charles Spurgeon who gets things largely wrong. And I’m not just choosing Charles Spurgeon because he’s extremely handsome. I am joking there for those who aren’t watching the video, I’ve been compared to him numerous times, which I don’t know is a compliment, but I’ll take it because it is absolutely accurate. But I quote Spurgeon because he has this incredible place within certain elements of Protestantism.
CLIP:
Spurgeon is easily regarded the greatest Baptist preacher who has ever lived, but I would add to that he is the greatest preacher of the English language who has ever lived. I wou... Read more on Catholic.com