How many times do we espouse the following:
- The world is evil, and we must shun it.
- Being human is somehow a sin in itself.
- We don't need the church, it's "Me and
Jesus."
- It is the spiritual elite that is precious
to God, most are "carnal" or "soulish"
Christians.
Or perhaps we would go along with this
quote:
Become full of the Spirit, but be in want
of reason, for reason belongs to the soul;
in turn, it is the nature of the soul.
(Apocryphon of James 4:20)
If those sentiments are familiar to you,
welcome to Gnosticism, an ancient heresy
which has plagued Christianity from the very
beginning. People think it has been
eradicated, but it pops up in the most
unexpected places. In an important expose of
the subject, Philip J.Lee, a Presbyterian
minister from Canada, identifies some of
those places in his polemic against Gnostic
inroads into Protestant Christianity in
Against The Protestant Gnostics.
Some say this book should be read side by
side with Harold Bloom's The American
Religion. What Bloom praises as the
essence of American spirituality, Lee
decries.
I must admit that this book is one of the
most challenging I have read, apart from the
Bible. At times, I wanted to shout "Amen,
Preach it," then with the next page I got
angry and wanted to burn the book. But is it
really disagreement, or has he struck a
nerve, exposing Gnostic inroads in my own
spirituality?
The book is divided into three sections. The
first delineates the religion of Gnosticism,
both from the ancient apologists like
Irenaus, and the manuscripts of Nag Hammadi
discovered about the same time as the Dead
Sea Scrolls. These documents contain several
Gnostic books, and give a good outline of
what they believed. He points out that
Gnosticism has made significant inroads in
different epochs of the Church.
Part 2 chronicles the ascendance of
Gnosticism in North Amarica, such as:
- From the gratitude for God's creation to
despair of an evil world.
- From the Holy Event to private
illumination.
- The view of salvation as escape from
nature, from time, history and politics, and
from the body, sex and family.
- Narcissism: From the Sacred Community, the
Church, to the Inner Self.
- Elitism: From the Many to the Few
- Syncretism: From the Particular to the
Nebulous
Part 3 sums it all up: First, giving the
results of a gnosticized Protestantism, then
giving the solution:
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