Confessing Evangelical

Continuing with Gavin White's book, The Mother Church Your Mother Never Told You Of (see yesterday's post), this time looking at the chapter on Gnosticism:

Gnosticism spread through the church of the second century like a computer virus. Masquerading as the real thing, it worked its way into churches all over the Mediterranean and proceeded to eat away at the Christian faith, doing untold damage until detected.

It was then cast out into utter darkness from which it was only brought back by nineteenth-century Liberal Protestants who thought it was liberal, which it was not, and protestant, which it was not. It was flying saucer stuff.

White argues that Gnosticism was not a heresy, "since it was not an exaggeration or distortion of Christian doctrine", but instead "at least partly an outside body which had broken in and multiplied, at the expense of the churches on which it fed".

What was the appeal of Gnosticism? First, its apparent simplicity:

As religions go, Christianity is difficult. The material world is made by God, and it is good, but then it has gone wrong, and if it is not bad, it is certainly flawed, and human nature was good, and then was flawed, and is getting back, thanks to Jesus Christ, to a state in which it will be as good as it was and perhaps much better. The Christian is called to be in the world but not of it, to flee the world and to save it.

If all this does correspond pretty closely to the mixture of good and evil which everyone meets in real life, it is not easy to grasp overnight, and the Christian faith requires a long process of growth.

White goes on to give what is currently a very topical illustration, when he refers to the computer Deep Thought in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, that was set the task of finding the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything:

After many years it pronounced the answer to be forty-two. This is a multiple of seven and six; in the New Testament seven is perfection or good, and six is imperfection or bad, so forty-two is a multiple of both good and bad.

It would be far easier to have six as the answer and consider the world to be simply bad, or even to have seven as the answer and consider the world to be simply good. Gnosticism took the answer to be six.

Furthermore, quite apart from the complications of the Christian worldview, in which the Answer is most certainly forty-two (though one day, I'm tempted to add, it will be forty-nine), Gnosticism also claimed to speak to the experience of the individual Christian, who might be finding the Christian life hard-going:

[T]here are troughs as well as peaks in prayer and devotion. It is during one of the troughs, when all seems black, that the Christian is approached by the salesman for the product with the secret ingredient. Christianity really is easy, and it really does everything for you with little effort, and it is quite clear and simple.

(Discuss, with reference to the contents of the average Christian bookshop, or the output of the average Christian TV or radio station.)

Of course, while Gnosticism claimed to give a simple and clear alternative - the world is evil and was made by an evil god, and our aim is to escape the material world and return to being the happy free souls we once were - it still had to face the question of why this teaching cannot be found either in the Scriptures or the traditions of the church:

The answer to this is easy; those closest to Christ knew that most people would not be worthy of the true knowledge (or "gnosis" in Greek) and so they kept the true knowledge for the few who could appreciate it, while providing a surface religion for the rest.

But you are clearly worthy of this true knowledge and have been selected - anyone who has received junk mail telling them they have been chosen for a chance of a tropical cruise or a new car or an electronic toothbrush will be familiar with the technique.

So what was the appeal of Gnosticism to nineteenth-century Liberal Protestants? Basically they believed that Gnosticism represented the simple fellowships of true believers that had been swept away by their catholicising enemies, who had bound the church in rules and dogmas and then misrepresented Gnostic teachings in order to cover their tracks:

But the theory that Gnosticism had been distorted by its enemies could only be believed while the Gnostic writings were lost, save for odd scraps found in quotations from those determined to do them down.

This train of thought came to a juddering halt when the Gnostic writings of Nag Hammadi were discovered in 1945, which revealed that:

...Gnosticism had been what its enemies had always said it was. The ideas of the fellowships of believers with their simple faith in goodness as set forth by the teacher of Galilee were swamped by the strings of passwords and names by which the initiates could gain control over heavenly beings, and be passed up the line from one to another.

So what defeated Gnosticism in the early church? Usually this is credited to the "defensive works of Christian thinkers", such as Irenaeus:

Yet there is a much more likely reason why it faded. It did not work. It could not work. Like most simple systems which claim to get to the root of the matter and avoid complications, it did not get the root of the matter and it did not avoid the complications.

Simply explaining away the world as evil and saying that we had been kidnapped from heaven was all very well, but people couldn't escape the fact that they "had to live in a world which was clearly a mixture of what was good and what was bad."

But in some respects Gnosticism was a necessary enemy for the church to face as it grew: "The church needed Gnosticism in order to reject it". And, White suggests, "perhaps every Christian needs to pass through some sort of Gnostic phase in order to outgrow it":

[I]t may be that each Christian finds the real thing too difficult or too slow or too demanding, and goes for some alternative with the secret ingredient, and only when that fails, returns to the painful encounter with the real thing.