John 21:9 As soon then as they were come to land, they saw hot coals, and fish laid thereon, and bread. 10 Jesus said unto them, Bring of the fishes, which ye have now caught. 11 Simon Peter stepped forth and drew the net to land full of great fishes, an hundred, fifty and three: and albeit there were so many, yet was not the net broken.12 Jesus said unto them, Come, and dine. And none of the disciples durst ask him, Who art thou? seeing they knew that he was the Lord. 13 Jesus then came and took bread and gave them, and fish likewise.
Acts 10:39 And we are witnesses of all things which he did both in the land of the Jews, and in Jerusalem, whom they slew, hanging him on a tree. 40 Him God raised up the third day, and caused that he was showed openly: 41 Not to all the people, but unto the witnesses chosen before of God, even to us which did eat and drink with him, after he arose from the dead.
John 20:25 The other disciples therefore said unto him, We have seen the Lord: but he said unto them, Except I see in his hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put mine hand into his side, I will not believe it. 26 ¶ And eight days after, again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them. Then came Jesus, when the doors were shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace be unto you. 27 After said he to Thomas, Put thy finger here, and see mine hands, and put forth thine hand, and put it into my side, and be not faithless, but faithful.
Luke 24:36 As they were talking about these things, Jesus himself stood among them, and said to them, “Peace to you!” 37 But they were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit. 38 And he said to them, “Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? 39 See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.” 40 And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. 41 And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, “Have you anything here to eat?” 42 They gave him a piece of broiled fish, 43 and he took it and ate before them.
Clearly what we can see that the Gospels are trying to have us understand is that when the Lord Christ resurrected He resurrected remaining 100% man. True, His body was glorified so that it had capacities that it did not have before but those added capacities did nothing to negate him remaining very man of very man.
Considering these texts we find the Lord Christ eating. Eating implies digestion. It all very human. We find the Lord Christ putting on display His injured body parts. We find the Lord Christ commanding them to touch him to confirm his bodily resurrection. The Gospel writers went out of their way to communicate a post resurrection human Christ.
This physicality of the Lord Christ was in defiance of the early Church heresy of Gnosticism which taught that the physical and the corporeal body was inherently evil. The Gnostic divided the world into two halves — Spiritual reality and physical reality — and proceeded to say that the spiritual reality was what was really important and the material reality was a lesser reality. The Gnostics denied the bodily resurrection of Christ because for them there was nothing noble in the physical.
Gnosticism taught that salvation was found through secret and hidden knowledge which enabled the redemption of the human spirit from its yucky mortal coil. Salvation in the Gnostic scheme was not from sin and death — and it certainly didn’t include the body — salvation was a setting free of the divine spark that was and is trapped in our material bodies. The goal was to get to a pure spiritual existence. So, for the Gnostics there was a revolt against our creaturliness in favor of the attempt to live a higher form of life that rose above the creaturliness given by the Spirit creator God.
In many times throughout Church History the Gnostics succeeded in reinterpreting Christianity to fit their pagan religion. They superimposed their understanding upon Christianity and co-opted the Christian faith to do service for their pagan faith system. In their scheme the importance of Jesus death and resurrection gives way to the importance of His bringing this special esoteric knowledge to awaken the divine in all of us and so set free the divine spark trapped in all of us living in these humdrum bodies.
The teaching about the person and work of Gnosticism differed from the Christology we find in Scripture. In some forms of Gnosticism it was asserted that both the humanity and materiality of Christ were a deceptions. The Lord Christ did not really become man. It only appeared that way. In other forms of Gnosticism Jesus was only a man though the divine Spirit / Logos came upon him after Baptism and inhabited departing before the crucifixion.
The Scripture resists this by going out of its way to repeatedly give us a resurrected Lord Christ who did things that pure spirits don’t do. He consumed fish with His disciples. He showed off His scars.
This Gnosticism … this desire to get outside of our creaturliness … this trying to rise above the God givenness of who we are … has plagued the Church throughout her history. They’ve had, what sounds to us as funny names. Bogomils, Flaggelants, Albigensians, and Cathari. They’ve been called Diggers, and Ranters, Levelers, and Fifth Monarchists men.
This 1st century Gnosticism remains with us in the Church today. It takes on different forms but it all stems from this denial of God’s pleasure in corporeality. That we have a problem with this ancient heresy is seen in a TIME magazine report.
At the close of the last century Time magazine had reported that two thirds of Americans who say they believe in the resurrection of the dead do not believe they will have bodies after the resurrection. More recently, a Scripps Howard/Ohio University poll interviewed 1,007 American adults and discovered that only 36% of them said “yes” to the question: “Do you believe that, after you die, your physical body will be resurrected someday?” Yet most of these same Americans also acknowledged being believers and going to church.
One of the innovators of this type of belief was a chap named Rudolph Bultman. Bultman’s dates are, 1884-1976.
“An historical fact which involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable,” Bultman admitted. For him, the Easter event is not something that happened to the Jesus of history, but something that happened to the disciples, who came to believe that Jesus had been resurrected. Moreover, the resurrected Jesus is indeed a living presence in the lives of Christians.”
A living presence in the lives of Christians but not a living savior back from the dead.
In a recent conversation I found a modern Gnostic saying,
Gnostic: And that resurrection can only take place when the spirit is free from the flesh, free from the pain and the pleasures of physical existence . . . and that separation of spirit from flesh at the crucifixion is how a Gnostic would describe Jesus’ resurrection. So you see the resurrection of Jesus was not a resurrection of a mass of flesh and sinful temptations, but an rising of the spirit up out of the physical nature.
Robin Phillips tells us
“For the Gnostics Jesus merely appeared to have a material body. In some versions of Gnosticism, such as that reflected in the Gospel of Judas, it seems that Jesus did have a physical body, yet wished to reject His body since it bound Him to this world. In the Gospel of Judas, Jesus gives Judas permission to betray Him in order that through death the spiritual person imprisoned within might be liberated. Again, the basic idea is that the realm of the spirit is at utter odds with the realm of matter, and in order to accept the former one must reject the latter.”
Clearly there is confusion about this matter of the Resurrection. And yet we know that our bodies shall be resurrected because we are told in reference to the resurrection, “Christ the firstfruits, then at his coming those who belong to Christ.” The thrust of this is that as Christ was resurrected bodily so we will follow being bodily resurrected.
This our Catechism confirms reflecting the teaching of Scripture,
What comfort does the resurrection of the body offer you?
A. Not only shall my soul after this life immediately be taken up to Christ, my Head, 1 but also this my flesh, raised by the power of Christ, shall be reunited with my soul and made like Christ’s glorious body.
This denial of the goodness of a bodily resurrection manifests itself elsewhere in different ways in the Church. The idea that physicality is ignoble compared to spiritual categories makes its ways into other thought realms.
What I’m trying to get at here is this original denial of the goodness of our creaturliness and the physical givenness of who we are via the denial of the physicality of Christ began to shape shift into other thought areas. Just as Darwin’s biological evolution eventually became Social evolution in the hands of Herbert Spencer so the denial of Christ’s human physicality by the Gnostic showed up at other intellectual zip codes.
We see this Gnosticism rise up in the Church today where we see a tendency to deprecate the corporeal world through a pitting of spiritual reality against physical reality. We hear Gnosticism when Christians emphasize Christians being separate from the world in the sense of having nothing to do with it because, as I’ve heard some say, “It’s all going to burn anyway.” Material world bad. Living apart from material world good.
This is Gnosticism because it is implicitly saying the world is bad or is not our concern. It springs from the same origin as those who denied the resurrection of Christ. This Gnosticism pushes Christians to focus on the inward and personal to the neglect of the world around us or to public responsibilities. Reading our bibles, prayer, attending Church … GOOD. Seeking to take every thought captive to Christ in that real world out there … BAD.
D. L. Moody, famous evangelist at the turn of the 20th century capture this mindset when he said, “Don’t spend too much time polishing the brass rails on a sinking ship.” The point, of course, is that the physical world is a sinking ship, and rather than polishing its brass rails, it’s better to reach souls for Christ and prepare them to get off the ship. The concern is about souls and not about souls as they live in this world.
The examples of Gnosticism in the Church today are abundant. Here are just a few.
1.) Traction is being gained in the Church today for a doctrine called Full Preterism which teaches that all the prophecy in Scripture without exception has been fulfilled. Christ has returned. The resurrection has occurred. The final judgment past. The Gnosticism is found in this doctrine when it insists that our physical bodies are not resurrected. Consistent Preterism teaches that our persons are resurrected but not our bodies. There are many problems with Full Preterism but the one we are considering today is this form of Gnosticism with its denial of the resurrection of the physical body. Quite to the contrary we see the full orbed commitment to a bodily resurrection in one of the oldest books of the Bible,
Job 19:26Even after my skin has been destroyed, yet in my flesh I will see God. 27 I will see Him for myself; my eyes will behold Him, and not as a stranger. How my heart yearns within me!
2.) Another example of Gnosticism in the Church today is found in the canker that is eating the Reformed Church whole .. a cancer that is seemingly predominant in Reformed Seminaries across the country and that cancer is the cancer that is Radical Two Kingdom theology. R2K is Gnostic inasmuch as in R2K God is only really concerned with the realm of grace. R2K fanboy Darryl Gnostic Hart reveals his Gnosticism when he writes,
“After examining myself and studying historical subjects I am not so convinced that religion is so basic to a person’s identity….
In other words, life as a Christian is complicated. The best word to describe that is one that the intellectual historian, David Hollinger, coined in his book Postethnic America — hyphenation. To recognize that people (even Christians) are a mix of different responsibilities and loyalties is to admit that “most individuals live in many circles simultaneously and that the actual living of any individual life entails a shifting division of labor between the several ‘we’s’ of which the individual is part….
It strikes me that admitting this complicated outlook is basic to being human as opposed to living up to some sort of super-spiritual ideal of a life dedicated and consecrated to Christ 24/7. “
What Dr. Hart is calling a “hyphenated-life” is just a clever replacement for the word that has always followed Gnosticism and that is the word “Dualism.” Hart is advocating for a Dualism in Christian living and dualism has always been part of what Gnosticism means with its “spirit good, matter bad” insistence. Instead what we are getting with the R2K crowd is spiritual really important, the material world … not so much.
This Gnostic dualism is seen again by Dr. David Van Drunen when he says;
“Traditional marriage is part of the created order that God sustains through his common grace, not a uniquely Christian institution, and society as a whole suffers when it is not honored. Christians are responsible to commend the goodness and benefits of marriage in the public square…. To call attention to that evidence in the public square is a way of communicating that marriage is not a uniquely Christian thing, but a human thing, and that all people have an interest in getting marriage policy correct.”
The Gnostic dualism is easy to see here. Marriage exists in the common realm and not in the realm of grace. Because of that there can be no such thing as Christian marriage vis-a-vis a non-Christian marriage.
This is all Gnosticism. Perhaps one could say it is not 100 proof belly up to the bar Gnosticism but it remains Gnosticism all the same. And the reality here is, is if you pull the string of all this back to its origin you’ll find that it stems from a problem with the resurrection. Ideas have consequences.
Dorthy Sayers, living a few decades after some of the gnostic chaps we’ve quoted understood that Christianity does not equal Gnosticism. Sayers was a Christian and associated with Inklings was an informal literary discussion group associated with the University of Oxford. Other members included C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield.
Sayers did battle with Gnosticism during her time and once wrote,
“Notice how entirely different [Christianity] is from the Gnostic and Neoplatonic thought which characterises the great Oriental religions and so often tried to infiltrate into Christianity. For the Gnostics, creation is evil, and the outflowing of the One into the Many is a disaster: the true end of the Many is to lose the derived self and be reabsorbed into the One. But for the Christian, it is not so. The derived self is the glory of the creature and the multiplicity and otherness of the universe is its joy. The true end of the creature is that it should reflect, each in its own way and to its capacity great or small, some tiny facet of the infinite variety comprised within the unity of the One.
The characteristic belief of Christendom is in the Resurrection of the Body and the life everlasting of the complete body-soul complex. Excessive spirituality is the mark, not of the Christian, but of the Gnostic.
The visible universe is not an illusion, nor a mere aspect of Divinity, nor identical with god (as in Pantheism), still less a ‘fall into matter’ and an evil delusion (as in the various Gnostic or Manichee cults). The Universe is made by God, as an artist makes a work of art, and given a genuine, though contingent, real existence of its own, so that it can stand over against Him and know Him as its real Other.
This Gnosticism that the inspired authors of Scripture fought, that the Church has fought throughout History, that Sayers inveighed against is ubiquitous and unrelenting in the Church today.
Gnosticism shows itself in the Church when you
* run into the pietistic idea that the Biblical worldview is primarily about what happens in our heart, rather than something that applies to all of culture and the world. Churches around the world sing this every year, “You ask me how I know he lives … he lives within my heart.”
* hear someone say that Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship, where the person who says this is wishing to de-emphasizes the authoritative revelation of God’s word in favor of one on one alone time with Jesus. Again… the emphasis is on the personal and individual and invisible relationship.
* hear anybody suggest that doctrine and theology is stuffy whereas what is really important is “spirituality.” We even hire people in our Seminaries to do and teach “spiritual formation” when all that is really needed is repeated dosages of good systematic theology well understood. This would itself do the trick of “spiritual formation.”
* come across the idea that there is a complete discontinuity between what happens in this world and what will happen in the age to come so that this world is sinful while the heavenly world is where we should be focusing upon.
* come across the notion that institutional religion and/or religious rituals are at odds with genuine heart-felt faith, and that whatever we give to the former is less we have left over for the latter. The result of this is that the importance of the visible Church and of Word and Sacrament are severely diminished in favor of one on one time with Jesus.
The teaching of the gnostics emphasize Christians being separate from the world, and would have Christians focused on the inward and personal to the neglect of the outward world and the public.
This gnostic tendency can be found everywhere,
We see it in changing Protestant funeral liturgies. In his book Accompany Them With Singing: The Christian Funeral, Thomas Long shows that a ‘disembodied, quasi-gnostic cluster of customs and ceremonies’ now surround the Christian funeral. (p. 72). Wheras we once spoke of the saint as with God awaiting the resurrection and the glorified renewal of heaven and earth, we now more commonly hear about how the disembodied deceased is in heaven looking down on us as a Spirit and giving us strength. Funerals are no longer about not the deceased who is completing his Baptismal journey by travelling to Christ, but about the mourners, on an intrapsychic journey from sorrow to stability. (p. 96-97)
And that’s just in the Church. Outside the Church Gnosticism, with its belittling and even denial of the material, corporeal, physical world is what is driving us to suggest that our lineage and / or gender is just a social construct that we have to escape. Our physical bodies will not stand in the way of who we say we are. Our creaturliness and the givenness of who God has made us to be, as evidenced by our bodies, is something that can be denied or changed out. We must be free of the testimonies of our bodily existence. This is 21st century gnosticism.
And so the Gnostic impulse accounts a great deal for the desire to ink ourselves, pierce ourselves, and transgender ourselves. It cuts us off from our lineage and our past as well as our progeny and our future since grandfathers and grandchildren are yucky corporeal stuff. Gnosticism is the root idea that has strange consequences. We will not accept our creaturliness … our givenness and so we will seek to escape it to get in tune with our spiritual self … our inner self … our gnostic selves.
All this hubbub this past week in Indiana is really just Gnosticism on display. Christianity insists that the gender that God has created us with is static and cannot be changed or altered and that such a view that allows for this cannot be countenanced in the public square. To act as if gender isn’t important is to insist that the body parts are meaningless. In the end Indiana legislated in favor of Gnosticism.
And how does Christianity fight all this?
With a Resurrected savior eating fish and drinking wine in communion with His disciples. Christianity fights this ubiquitous Gnosticism with the continued invitation to examine the scars and to come and see and touch. It fights this with Catechisms that teach that Christ as very man has ascended and is at the right hand of the Father. It fights this by the constant reminder that this world, despite the fall, has been Redeemed and a Kingdom has come that pronounces this World, as Redeemed in Christ, very good.
The bodily Resurrection of the Lord Christ is the only truth that will set us free of the self destructiveness of Gnosticism all about us. God grant us Reformation in this physical world.
Christ is risen.