Three Basics of Gnosticism

Gnosticism gets its name from the Greek word gnosis (γνωσις), which means knowledge. Knowledge in this context refers not to the idea of propositional knowledge but something more akin to the Eastern concept of enlightenment. There are three basic premises of Gnosticism:

1. Dualism of Matter and Soul

Like Christianity, Gnosticism teaches that reality is both material and spiritual. Unlike Christianity, it teaches that spiritual reality is inherently good, while material things are inherently evil. Human souls are holy, but they are trapped inside a corrupt body. Through accessing secret knowledge, one can free oneself from the limitations of matter and bring out one’s own capacity for divinity.

2. A Transcendent God vs. an Ignorant Creator

The Gnostics believed in an unknowable, transcendent God who is the Father of Jesus, but they did not equate Him with the Old Testament Creator. They saw the creator-god of the Old Testament as inept and hateful, and they blamed him for creating a flawed physical universe. The Gospel of Phillip goes so far as to say, "the world came about through a mistake. For he who created it wanted to create it imperishable and immortal. He fell short of attaining his desire.” Certainly, this view of God is not just unorthodox, but blasphemous.

3. Christ as Immaterial Teacher

Since the Gnostics rejected the idea that God was knowable and that God could take physical form, their idea of who Jesus was and why He came was very different than that of the first Christians. Rather than being the incarnation of God who came to redeem mankind from sin and make the Father known, they believed He was an apparition who taught mystical secret knowledge to His followers to help them free themselves from ignorance. He did not actually suffer and die, but only appeared to do so. The Gospel of Thomas removes 114 sayings attributed to Jesus from any narrative or space-time context and includes vague, metaphysical statements not recorded in the canonical gospels.

Clearly, the fundamentals of Gnosticism are at odds with the basics of historical Christianity. The Gnostic gospels do not paint an accurate picture of God, Jesus’s nature and purpose, and the meaning of redemption. Next week, we’ll examine the Gnostic gospels themselves: are they gospels at all?

Works consulted/ For more information

Introduction to the History of Christianity, ed. Tim Dowley

“Gnosticism and the Gnostic Jesus,” and “The Gnostic Gospels: Are They Authentic?” by Douglas Groothius

#YOLO

If you’ve been on facebook much or on Twitter at all this summer, you’ve probably become familiar with the #YOLO trend. YOLO stands for You Only Live Once, and it’s usually tacked onto the end of a statement about the poster doing something unusual, risky, or just plain silly.

While staying fun and casual, #YOLO is quite a metaphysical claim. Several worldviews have something to say about that.

#YOLOATSE: You Only Live Once And Then Stop Existing

If there is no God and no supernatural, humans are stuck in a world void of purpose and moral obligations. This gives us two options: either we’re basically animals subject to an impersonal universe and our own biology, or we’re capable of creating our own meaning, destiny, and identity.

The first option is naturalism. If it’s true, “let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,” and we might as well find sensual pleasure in the material world before we plunge into oblivion. Our desires and choices come from our DNA and our environment; we don’t really have control over our lives.

The second option is secular existentialism. Existentialism means that you exist before you know who you are and what life is really all about. In SE, you have no inherent purpose or destiny, so you make them up. You authenticate your existence by acts of the will, choices that make you who you are. If there is no God, you take the place of God in your own life.

If SE is true, #YOLO is the perfect response. The more choices and experiences you create, the more meaningful your existence is.

#YOLOAOAO: You Only Live Over And Over And Over

Eastern religions hold to pantheism, a belief system in which reality is primarily spiritual and everything is part of a divine Universal. Hinduism and Buddhism teach that human souls are reborn many times into different bodies as they progress towards unification with the Universal. This way of thinking was resurrected (reincarnated?) in 19^th-century Romanticism and the recent New Age movement.

To become one with the Universal, which in modern versions often includes discovering that you are Divine yourself, pantheism encourages meditation, becoming more “in touch” with nature, treating animals and humans with kindness (Hinduism makes an exception for "untouchables", sadly), and various spiritual rituals.

#YOLOF: You Only Live Once—Forever

Theism teaches that human souls live on after death and are either rewarded or punished based on actions done in the body. The only way to avoid a sucky eternity is to find favor with God or the gods.

Notice that I’m not to Christianity just yet. Theism has been dominant for most of human history. The Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Norsemen tried to please their gods with sacrifice, displays of courage, and good works; Muslims try to keep the Five Pillars to please Allah; and Jews have tried to please God by keeping the Mosaic Law and traditional regulations and by celebrating holy days. Theists tend to take #YOLOF pretty seriously.

As Christians, we believe that we find favor with God by faith; believing God means taking on His righteousness. This is possible because God’s Son, Jesus, found favor with His Father while taking on a human nature. In Jesus’ substitutionary death, God attributed human sin to Jesus and attributed Jesus’ righteousness and favor to anyone who believes.

While faith determines where you spend eternity, God has commanded us to spread the good news and to do good works in the short mortal lives we have now. Believers will not face condemnation, but we will be judged nonetheless.

#YOLOF, but for now, #YOLO. Make it count! 

Big Beliefs Mean Bold Action: What Is Faith? Pt. 3

[Continued from Part 2]

I: Involves Action

In the last two articles in this series, we’ve established that faith isn't a feeling or a sense of optimism. The Bible clearly teaches justification by faith and not works (Ephesians 2:8-9). Still, we all know that ideas have consequences. Beliefs determine behavior. If you believe that you can please God with your own righteousness, you’ll try to get into heaven by doing good works. If you truly believe that Jesus is Lord, God’s promised Messiah raised from the dead, you will begin to act in accordance with His lordship over your life.

This principle is how Scripture can say both that “one is justified by faith apart from works” and that “faith apart from works is dead.” (Romans3:28, James 2:26) One version of the law of non-contradiction states that “It is impossible for the same thing to belong and not to belong at the same time to the same thing and in the same respect.” (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, emphasis mine) Since Paul and James are talking about different kinds of works, there is no contradiction.

The passage in James mentions Rahab, the prostitute who helped the Israelite spies when they came to Jericho. (Read the story in Joshua 2!) She told the men that the entire city had heard about the Lord’s miracles and was afraid. So why was she saved when the rest of the city was destroyed? Her actions proved that she believed that God would follow through with His promise to give the Israelites the land. Her faith was not an abstract fantasy; it involved taking bold action.

T: Takes Courage

Not only does faith require action; it sometimes requires bold, risky action. Hebrews 10 pits fear and faith as opposites: “But we are not of those who shrink back and are destroyed, but of those who have faith and preserve their souls.” (Hebrews 10:39) 

The next chapter tells of saints who did outrageous and even impossible things through faith. For some, God came through with impossible miracles in their lifetime, such as Noah, Moses’ parents, and Rahab. Yet many of them, as both verses 13-6 and 35-40 point out, actually suffered for their courageous faith and weren’t rewarded—at least not yet.

It takes courage to give everything for an unseen future. Martyred missionary Jim Eliot is often quoted as saying, “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.” When God makes promises, He keeps them. God does reward those who seek Him, and He has prepared a much better city for us. Yet that doesn't exempt believers from suffering in the meantime.

So believer, don’t be afraid to take action based on God's truth and promises. Whether you see people raised from death or you face death yourself, know that you were created for an eternal country of glory, and keep “looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith.” (Hebrews 12:2)

And the plot thickens... take a shortcut to the conclusion in Part Four!

Wow, Look at That Idea!: Jesus as the Word of God

Consider this: are words physical or conceptual things?

On the one hand, words are empirical; they can be heard aloud or seen when written. The letters or characters on a page can be measured and touched, and with the right instruments, sound waves can be measured according to size and frequency. They are made with one’s mouth and hands, certainly physical things.

On the other hand, we know that words aren’t just squiggles or vibrations. The Declaration of Independence isn’t important as a piece of paper with ink, but because the ideas it contains were central to the founding of our country. Telegraphs in Morse code existed because the buzz of dots and dashes contained a message from someone far away, not because people were still waiting for dubstep to be invented. Words mean things. If they didn’t contain an idea, they wouldn’t be words.

In other meaningful squiggles, it’s a trick question: words are both physical and conceptual. Words communicate thoughts and ideas between people by being concrete, empirical units. They convey the invisible by being visible.

The apostle John called Jesus the Word of God in his gospel and first epistle: 

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God… And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John 1:1, 14)
 That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life— the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us— that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you, so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ. (1 John 1:1-3) 

 I've heard explanations of the Greek term “logos” as meaning some sort of mystical force of reason in the universe, and while the ideas of the ancient Greek philosophers are fascinating, I'm not persuaded that the context supports this claim. (That's not saying it can't have a double meaning, of course.) Both passages describe Jesus as the eternal God who took on physical human form to reveal God more fully. Jesus Christ Himself is the communication of the Father to humanity. He conveys the invisible by being visible. He is The Word of God.  

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation… For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily (Colossians 1:15, 2:9)  

Who Made God?

I admit, this question I received from a student in my 4^th grade Sunday School class made me smile. Still, it’s a fair question, if not entirely correct.

Atheists love to go after this. The idea of a supernatural being Who has always existed—isn’t that unscientific?

Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote Five Ways that the existence of God can be demonstrated. The first three are cosmological (that is, having to do with the nature and origin of the universe), the fourth is more abstract, and the fifth is teleological (having to do with purpose). Read them for yourself! 

1. Motion. Aquinas argues that everything that is in motion needs to be moved by something else. His analogy of fire is a little confusing, but considering that Aquinas died over four centuries before Newton published his Laws of Motion (Principia, 1687), which state that an object at rest will remain at rest until acted upon by an outside force, this is actually pretty brilliant. This means that there must be a First Mover that needs nothing else to move it. This argument borrows heavily from Aristotle.

2. Causation. Next, he argues that everything has a cause, and nothing can cause itself. It doesn’t make sense to have a regressively infinite series of causes, because a series of causes must have a beginning. Therefore, there must be a First Efficient Cause, one which is uncaused. This Cause is God.

3. Contingency. Everything we see is contingent on something else for its existence. So why does something exist instead of nothing? If there used to be nothing, there would still be nothing—unless there is something in the universe that necessarily exists (that is, it is impossible for this thing or person to not exist). The being Who necessarily exists and on Whom everything else is contingent is God.

Taking these three arguments, it seems reasonable to believe that there is a supernatural being who is the First Mover, is the First Efficient Cause, and has always existed. What does atheism offer? Without God, matter and energy would have had to always exist or spontaneously to come uncaused into existence. Matter would have exploded, with nothing causing the explosion.  Plus, there is no explanation for why anything exists at all, because there should be nothing.

See? It’s really naturalism that’s unscientific in explaining the origin of the universe. The theory is implausible given the basics of physics. (Someone who says that the laws of science didn’t always apply has to take that assertion by faith.)

So, who made God? The answer is that nobody made God. He is, by definition, the Unmoved Mover, the First Cause, and The One Who Necessarily Exists. And there’s nothing unscientific about that.

“For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be glory forever. Amen.” (Romans 11:36)