Few doubt today’s American proclivity for eclectic religion. It’s Methodists delving into Buddhism, Catholics experiencing signs and wonders, and New Agers who increasingly choose church-going programming having discarded airport terminals in the wake of 9/11. It’s as personal and unique as "Sheilaism," the religion of nurse Sheila Larson, who does theological cherry-picking to suit whatever state of mind she happens to be in at the time.1

All of this is a result of a post-modern society increasingly miffed at revealed truth and open to religious syncretism driven by basic instincts: the yearning for kinesthetic experience. If I can see it, and feel it, I know it’s real.

John the Beloved wrote the fourth gospel around A.D. 95 for Christians with similar tendencies. They were Ebionites, and Marcionites, and of course, Gnostics, the greatest threat to orthodox Christianity for the first 150 years of its life.

Gnosticism, influenced by Platonic and pagan philosophies, had a dualistic view of life: matter is evil, spirit is good. Thus, since God cannot touch matter, he did not create the world. Instead, he put out a series of emanations, each further from himself, until the last one was so distant from him that it could touch matter. That emanation was the creator of the world. Of course, such a creator was then hostile to God.

Against such heresy, John boldly asserted: "All things came into being by Him [Jesus, the Word], and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being" (John 1:3). Some Gnostic thinkers believed Jesus was a creation of God, a demi-god emanation. Some thought he did not have a body but was only a spirit. To this John countered: "In the beginning was the Word,…and the Word was God.…And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:1–2, 14).

For man to escape this world of matter, a mystical "knowledge" (the Greek word gnosis) was necessary. Gnostics conveniently adapted Jesus into their teachings, as the revealer of a higher saving knowledge over against the God of the Old Testament. This "knowledge" was a mystery available to an elitist few capable of spiritual enlightenment.2 However, John insisted: "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have eternal life" (John 3:16, emphasis supplied).

All of this reminds me of when I pastored in a small Northern California town replete with aging hippies and Christians steeped in Eastern mysticism. They wore nothing red or black, distancing themselves from pain and evil. In Passion plays, the Easter Jesus never died, going from the Last Supper to heaven in one act.

Dear John, on the other hand, tells it to us like it was. The last one of those who had touched and seen Jesus in the flesh sixty years earlier, John wrote a Gospel, in the true brilliance of humble submission to his Master, that was shallow enough for a child to wade in and deep enough for an elephant to drown in.

Gnostic ideas are on the rise again.3 In a major Time magazine article titled the "Lost Gospels" (Dec. 22, 2003), author David Van Biema points to the best-selling book the Da Vinci Code, the Matrix movie trilogy, and the renewed interest in the 1945 discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library as tokens of such renaissance.

The Library includes the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas and contains ancient Gnostic writings from the second century A.D. that are transcending the scholarly world into the real world. "There is a lot of interest in early Christian diversity because many people who have left the church—and some who are still in it—are looking for another way of being Christian," writes Van Biema.

John knew of the struggle then, and the very tangible and very divine Christ he wrote about then knows about our struggle now. Adventists, well educated and well exposed to a myriad mystical views via movies, paperbacks, and plain doubt, are not immune. Our post-modernism is not much different from our religious neighbors’. We, too, have a proclivity to "touch and see," to feel and experience, before we believe. Some, although they shudder at the possibility of a God they cannot perceive with their senses, are disinclined to trust themselves to his mere Word.

Perhaps this is why John tells us the story of Thomas, the doubter who had to feel to believe. Jesus said: "’reach here your hand, and put it in my side; and be not unbelieving, but believing.’ Thomas answered and said to Him, ’My Lord and my God!’ Jesus said to him,…’Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed’" (John 20:27–29).

Questions

1. In what other ways do you see popular culture and eclectic Christianity bringing about old Gnostic ideas? (For example, Church of Scientology and movie stars?)
2. Why must so many experience God before they can trust in him? How could this be reversed? How could I come to trust Jesus more?

Notes and References

1. Robert N. Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, updated ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 219–49.
2. Williston Walker, A History of the Christian Church, 3d ed. (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), 51–53.
3. For more on the subject, see Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Pheme Perkins, Gnosticism and the New Testament (Minneapolis, Minn.: Augsburg Fortress, 1993); Giovanni Filoramo, A History of Gnosticism, Anthony Alcock, trans. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991); and Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Random House, 1979).

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE