Take this simple true or false quiz: Ready?
- Prayer is more important than mowing your widowed grandmother’s lawn;
- Sharing the Gospel is more important than taking a meal to parents just home from the
- hospital with their newborn baby;
- Doing ‘sacred’ work, such as preaching or being a missionary, is more important than
- ‘secular’ work, such as being a doctor or a lawyer;
If you answered ‘true’ to any of the above, then you have been duped by the ancient heresy of Gnosticism.
The Gnostics (nas-tik) were some of the earliest heretics to infiltrate the church with their poisonous doctrines, arising shortly after the Gospel began penetrating the Roman world near the Mediterranean Sea in the first century A.D. The word ‘Gnosticism’ comes from the Greek word ‘gnosis’, meaning ‘knowledge’. The Gnostics believed there was mysterious or secret knowledge reserved for those with true understanding, leading to the salvation of the soul. Spiritual salvation was of preeminence to the Gnostics because they thought the human spirit was naturally good but entrapped or imprisoned in the body, which was naturally evil or merely an illusion. Their goal was thus to free the spirit from its corporeal prison, and the only key to unlock the doors was the mystic knowledge which they alone possessed.
This radical distinction between our bodies and our spirits led Gnostics to twist the early church’s understanding of who Jesus was and is. The Gnostics saw Jesus as a messenger bringing the special knowledge of salvation to humanity’s imprisoned soul. They believed that when Jesus came to earth He did not possess a body like ours; instead, the Gnostics taught that He only seemed to have a physical body. This is known as the heresy of ‘docetism’, from the Greek verb ‘to seem’. This clearly offended the Christian doctrine of the incarnation —the belief that Christ was both fully God and fully human—the Parousia or ‘ultimate paradox’. The Gnostics went even further; they also denied the bodily resurrection of Jesus, an event Paul argued must have taken place or else our faith is in vain (1 Corinthians 15:12-14, 16-17, 42-44).
These Gnostic beliefs had profound implications for the church. Not only did the Gnostics successfully deceive some people in the church into becoming Gnostics; but their misleading ideas about how Christians should live crept into some church teaching. In practice, some Christians came to the false conclusion that they must literally beat their bodies into submission and live such ascetic lives that they never allowed themselves the enjoyment of sensory pleasures. Others went to the opposite extreme, letting their carnal passions run amok. Those in the latter category justified their libertine lifestyles with the erroneous notion that their evil bodies were destined for destruction; while their spirits, presumed good, stood unscathed.
Regrettably, traces of Gnosticism continue to permeate the thinking of may well-intentioned Christians today. For example, some think that only two things will last into eternity: God’s Word and the souls of men and women—an emphasis on the spiritual and an exclusion of the physical. This is wrong, however. The Bible explicitly teaches that not only will these two last into eternity, but so will our bodies—in a glorified state (John 5:28-29; 1 Corinthians 15:42-44).
The implication that the spirit supersedes the body is the reason why an answer of “true” to any question in our quiz is incorrect. James warns that “pure and undefined religion in the sight of our God and Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (James 1:27). However, we must not conclude that believing the converse is true, either; that the body is more important than the spirit. Both have equal significance in the eyes of God. Paul said:
“Whether...you eat or drink or whatever you do [including praying or sharing the Gospel], do all to the glory of God.” (1 Corinthians 10:31).
We need to glorify God by correcting any warped ideas that our minds—the spiritual part of us—are more important than the matter—our physical selves. Regrettably, much of modern philosophy has marked a course in the exact opposite direction, leading us a long, long, way from God.
Hegel’s Enlightenment became Marx’s rise of proletarian consciousness, today dumbed down all the way to Wokeness. The critical thread running through all three? You either get it, or you do not. You are either enlightened, possessed of consciousness, or Woke; or you are unenlightened, labouring under false consciousness, unwoke.
All of this talk of woke and unwoke sounds hauntingly familiar. Most are unaware of the First Century Christian Heresy which has regrettably endured to this very day. It is called Gnosticism. I have always been fascinated by it, but not in a good way; it is like staring at a cadaver for the first time in your life, but this one sits up and begins to utter impious blasphemies—it is hard to look away.
Gnosticism was founded by that same Simon the Magician who appears in the book of Acts and tries to purchase the Holy Spirit. It is, in fact, the first known of all heresies. I submit that it has been resurrected in this generation in a new, secular form. There are countless local variations, but most or all share some core concepts.
It is a Christian heresy, so there is no overlap with the Orthodox view. The basic differences are that, in Catholicism, no one is beyond salvation, and no salvation is achieved by our own, unaided merit. In Gnosticism, only the enlightened are saved, and their salvation stems from their own inner esoteric perfection. God is thus an impediment rather than the path to achievement of such perfection.
Wokeness is a Gnostic concept. It might sound like Calvinism at first, parallel to the elect and the reprobated, but the differences soon outstrip the similarities. In Gnostic terms, there were three kinds of people: those ruled entirely by desires of the flesh (hylics), those ruled by the mind (psychics) who are confused but curious, and finally those ruled by the spirit (pneumatics) who have achieved the exalted state of enlightenment.
These are Greek words for the soul or mind and for air or spirit. The enlightenment of the pneumatic is always esoteric, a thing that is part of inexpressible reality. Any attempt to put it into words or to reduce to a series of rules and regulation kills the spirit of the thing, and misleads rather than enlightens.
The core of enlightenment is the realization that God is the devil and that we are the real god (“Thou art God”), merely trapped and deceived. The world and all of its moral rules are illusions meant to ensnare us. As our own self-aware god, we become theologically immune from all rules of morality, save those we select for ourselves. Or as Shakespeare put it:
“There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” —Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii. Or as Satan states in Milton’s Paradise Lost, after the archangel Lucifer and his denizens are cast out of heaven and left to dwell on an island in a lake of fire:
“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n. What matter where, if I be still the same, And what I should be, all but less than he Whom thunder hath made greater? Here at least We shall be free: th’ Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition, though in hell; Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n.
—Paradise Lost, Book One, Lines 254-63
Satan later discovers however, to his horror, that he “has become hell”.
This declaration suggests that he has internalized the concept of hell, making it a state of being rather than just a physical location. This realization is the physical manifestation of his own guilt, shame, and despair, which have become a self-imposed torment. In this sense, in making himself his own god, Satan becomes his own hell, trapped in a cycle of anguish and regret. This phrase also underscores Satan’s loss of autonomy and free will, which are ironically lost through his Declaration of Independence from God. Having rebelled against God, he is now subject to his own destructive desires and the consequences of his actions. His “becoming hell” signifies the complete surrender of his will to his own darkness, effectively rendering him a prisoner of his own making. This transformation serves as a cautionary tale about the dangers of unchecked ambition and the devastating consequences of rebellion against God.
Similarly, the core idea of Gnosticism is that we are all trapped in a deceptive universe created by a malign illusion maker. Unlike Christians, who look forward to glorified bodies in a new Earth beneath a New Heaven, and who live in a material universe made by a creator God who declared all He made to be good; for the Gnostics, everything physical is evil. That is why being a female trapped in a male body, or a vice-versa, is a prime Gnostic conception —the body is an evil deceiver. The biological reality of the body can merely be wished away by the Gnostic enlightenment of the enlightened.
Reality could be wished away—as Satan would do while standing on an island in a lake of fire—if only Gnosticism actually worked. It does not, however; all it does is destroy. Once we see the pattern of esoteric knowledge, a world of illusion as the enemy, and the tripartite division of mankind into hopeless, hopeful, and perfect, we recognize Gnosticism wherever it resurfaces, including in modern politics.
The hapless hylics in the modern Gnostic system are the Christians, capitalists, conservatives, the hopeful half-woke psychics who are ‘allies’ such as male feminists, pro-Palestinian Jews, and the like. The enlightened pneumatics are the self-appointed utopia-makers, who use human blood for mortar and skulls for bricks when constructing their fantastic castles in the clouds.
By Gnostic logic, the world system is an illusion. The ancient Gnostics, being religious, held a religious conception much like a Buddhist, that the material world was a false and seductive dream. The modern Gnostics, being crass materialists, hold a secular conception: human institutions, including the human mind and rules of logic, morality and art, are all illusory.
Hence, to them, the Constitution is an illusion promising equal justice under the law, but delivering slavery. To them, our religion is an illusion promising love but delivering Christian homophobic, Islamophobic, science denying bigots. To them, the free market is an illusion, but all it does is produce income inequality, an entrenched plutocracy, and the progressive immiseration of the masses—although we hear less of the alleged progressive immiseration since Queen Victoria’s time, since the poor in the West own cars, cell phones and more suffer from obesity than from famine. Chastity is an illusion; the nuclear family is a trap; masculinity is toxic and femininity is false-consciousness accepting subservience; the business world is a rat race, and so on.
Indeed, any system of merit-based rewards, from wages to prizes is a sham, since they claim to be awarded on merit but never are, the proof offered being how unfairly excluded minorities are due to racism and misogyny. My first encounter with Wokeness was in the form of “white privilege”, a term I had never heard before. When I asked the person accusing me of possessing such privilege to define her terms—a thing every lawyer and philosopher does in each case—she reacted with a phony, exaggerated display of contemptuous disbelief, as if I had committed an unforgivable solecism, but was too low and dull to realize my faux pas.
My alleged crime was to ask her to clarify her jargon. Her response was that it was beneath her dignity to explain herself, and that it was thus my duty to Google it and become aware of the rites, rhetoric, and rubric of her chosen cult. The cult of self-esteem, coupled with moral relativism, and the idea that we select or our own truth for ourselves, is merely a secular way of saying “Thou art God.”
The knowledge of Woke is esoteric. It cannot be taught or expressed in words. The world is a deception produced by capitalists or Jews or whites or heterosexuals or all of the above— depending upon the precise brand of modernism. The goal is to break the system by waking the hopeful out of their sheeplike stupor; but the enlightened have no time to waste upon the hopeless, since they are by definition reprobate.
These modern leftists are not liberals. They do not believe in liberty of any kind. None of the buzzwords of liberalism issue from their mouths. None speak of free love; they instead speak of objectification of woman and the horror of the male gaze. None speak of women’s liberation; they instead defend Muslims with honour killing of women and genital mutilation.
Leftists are a political cult, not a political party. They are the secular versions of the ancient Gnostics. Somewhere in hell, Satan is smiling. He awaits the coming of his children to him.
But what about the rest of us, the ones left here on earth to battle heresies like Gnosticism and Wokeness? What strategies, if any, abound in terms of how Christians ought to properly engage the cultural West that is on the brink of moral and spiritual implosion?
The answer to the question—How does the Christian engage an unbelieving, secular culture? —is not monolithic. Here are four options.
The Benedict Option
Rod Dreher’s 2017 bestselling book, The Benedict Option, is modelled after the monastic priest, Benedict of Nursia (480-547 A.D.). Let us call this one strategic withdrawal. After the fall of the Roman Empire, Benedict built a series of communities for monks surrounded by the Christian faithful, who decided to rebuild the community of faith amidst the rubble of the Pax Romana.
Benedict’s theory was based upon the belief that people of faith should withdraw to be strengthened to fight another day in the changing cultural milieu of the day. Using his renowned ‘Rule of St. Benedict’, a template was set for renewal and restoration amongst the religious leaders of the church that then filtered down to the laity. In some measure, Benedict’s strategy worked. Rome fell but the Church survived.
For us, this would mean building strong churches, families, and schooling options that are set over against the secular systems of the world; living near and interacting with other believers in ways that build healthy relationships, families, businesses, and alternatives to the secular, Gnostic systems in place.
The Boniface Option
The Boniface Option is based upon the life and ministry of the 8th century British monk, St. Boniface (680-753). He heroically attempted multiple times to evangelize the Germanic people in the region known as Frisia—the coastal region along the North Sea that now covers parts of the Netherlands and Germany. Boniface’s methodology was not strategic withdrawal, but rather bold, relentless engagement.
Though ejected by the Frisians at first, he returned to seed churches, preach the Gospel, and confront the idolatry of the pagan Germanic tribes. His most famous act of confrontation was ‘felling the Oak of Thor (Jupiter)’, a massive tree in the Hesse region believed to be animated by the powers of the thunder god and assigned mythic powers. Boniface’s defiant destruction of this Germanic god was treated as a model of how to oppose paganism. Though this act and others like it ultimately cost him his life, his martyrdom epitomized heroic, bold cultural engagement in service of the Gospel.
For us, this would involve a high level of engagement in secular institutions: school boards, social service clubs, government lobbying, passing legislation, fighting legal battles, and holding public officials to account. It would also entail deliberately engaging WOKE culture at the most critical point on hot button issues, i.e. LGBTQ, abortion, marriage and family issues, CRT, and climate hysteria.
The Bonhoeffer Option
This option is based upon the life of the German Pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945). Let us call this one radical confrontation. Though a pacifist most of his life, Bonhoeffer was executed by the Nazi regime in the waning days of WWII for his participation in a scheme to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer methodically decided that the evil of Hitler was so great that it justified radical action. To not oppose such evil was in itself evil.
Bonhoeffer did not argue that participating in Hitler’s assassination was not sinful. Taking another man’s life is in some way, regardless of the justification, is a result of sin (war) or directly sinful (murder). Rather, Bonhoeffer argued that though the murder of Hitler was sinful, the evil of the Nazi regime was so vile and wicked that it called for radical action. Caught in the scheme to assassinate Hitler, Bonhoeffer was sentenced to death on 8 April 1945 and executed mere days before Germany surrendered. Ultimately, Bonhoeffer was correct in surmising that Hitler’s death would precipitate peace.
For us, this would mean public and peaceful protests, intentional organization with other like-minded groups, and taking on the very principalities and powers behind the evil and corruption harming society.
The Jesus Option
After considering these three options, we might be tempted to ask “what about Jesus and His way?” This is an excellent question that gives surprising answers.
Jesus actually employed all three options, depending upon the circumstances He faced. This is a lesson that we all need to learn.
Jesus employed the Benedict Option by frequently withdrawing to pray and to be spiritually restored (Mt. 14:13, 15:29; Mark 1:12, 35; Luke 4:42, 5:16; 6:12-13, 31-32). Though completely God in the flesh, He was also entirely human and needed seasons of prayer, refreshment, nourishment, and drink. In fact, just before the greatest test of His life—the crucifixion—He prayed alone in the garden of Gethsemane (Mt. 26:36-46). Jesus knew that not every battle was necessary until the ultimate battle arrived that would lead to His death and resurrection. In other words, Jesus would strategically withdraw to fight another day.
Jesus also employed the Boniface Option at times. He could be as tender as a lamb with the wounded sinner and as caustic as a salty sage with the elites of His day (Mt. 23). Jesus even called His adversaries ‘enemies’, ‘liars’, hypocrites, sons of Satan, and a whole host of other names that would make granny blush. Just like Boniface, He boldly and relentlessly cut down their trees of religiosity, pride, arrogance, and self-righteousness.
Jesus employed the Bonhoeffer Option as well. Hold your horses: I know what you are thinking—should we use violence to advance the kingdom and to thwart evil?
Jesus does not command His disciples to murder, harm, or do violence to enemies of the Cross; but He did radically confront the powers of darkness and sin in two key ways.
First, Jesus reminded His followers that He did not always come to bring peace but a sword that would be divisive (Mt. 10:34). Further, if even only for self-defense, He commanded His disciples to sell their cloaks and bury a sword, perhaps even two (Luke 22:35-38). If we live by the sword we may die by it; conversely, if we wield the sword of God’s Word, it may be just as lethal (Eph. 6:17).
Second, Jesus entered into a battle with and an assassination attempt against Satan’s regime; against sin, death, hell, and Satan at the cost of His own life. Unlike Bonhoeffer, Jesus succeeded. As John Owen argued in his 1648 magisterial book, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ, in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the death of death was accomplished. Christ’s actions confirmed the truth that sometimes evil is so great, so sinister, and so deadly, that it requires radical confrontation—even if it costs us our lives. The wages of sin once were death, but Jesus wiped all of that away through His own self-sacrifice, taking on the sin of the world.
When Jesus faced frantic, often selfish unrelenting and needy crowds, He strategically withdrew to serve another day. When He faced the haughty elites, He boldly and relentlessly engaged them with such caustic words that He was murdered as much for what He said as for what He did and who He was. And when He faced ultimate evil and sin, Jesus radically confronted evil by assassinating it with His own life, death, and resurrection.
We, too, must be wise as serpents and gentle as doves when deciding to withdraw and rebuild, when to boldly and relentlessly engage and, if necessary, when to radically confront the powers that be; as we assassinate evil, not with weapons or violence, but with our own lives, knowing that He who resurrected Jesus will raise us up also by the power of the One who conquered death.
They cannot kill those of us who are unafraid to die; so let us pick an option based upon the season we are in, and then march undaunted into battle against the principalities and powers attacking truth all around us.
