Gnosticism

(From Lesson 3 — 1 John)

One particular view that came up in the early church is called Docetism. Docetism comes from the Greek word dokeo [dokew] which means to appear. Docestism taught that Christ’s human body was just an illusion; He wasn’t true humanity. He didn’t have a physical body because if God was to align Himself with real matter then that would destroy God. Their slogan was, “If He suffered He was not God, and if he was God He did not suffer.” This was a direct assault on the entire Christian teaching of suffering and the way God uses suffering in the life of the believer to bring them to maturity. Docetism was extremely popular among the Greeks since it rejected a physical body for Christ, and removed the scandal that was in the minds of many Greeks that there was a God who became actual man. So it is a compromise with worldly thinking in order to take away the offence of the incarnation.

Docetism then developed into another type of thinking called Gnosticism. We have to understand the problem of Gnosticism to some degree. But that is not to say that the problem in 1 John was Gnosticism. Gnosticism hasn’t really developed yet, but these ideas in an unsophisticated form were present in the culture at the time.

What is Gnosticism?

1. It is difficult to define because it attached itself to various religious groups and absorbed religious ideas from just about everybody. It could take many forms. It primarily merged ideas from Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Platonism and oriental mysticism.

2. Gnosticism did not exist as a full-fledged system until the middle of the second century AD.

3. Gnosticism had two central beliefs. First, there was a belief in dualism. Ultimate reality was comprised of good and evil. We see dualism today in Buddhism and in eastern religions. There was belief in a secret code of knowledge: that somehow if I learned this secret knowledge I will be able to overcome life in the physical plain.

4. Gnostics believed that matter was evil and the spirit is good. Therefore they had a problem explaining how a good God could create an evil world.

5. In Gnosticism there is no necessity for an atonement. It is just a judicial penalty that the human Jesus had to put up with but the spirit of Christ disappeared or left the body before the cross because there is no way that the physical death could be related to the problem of evil.

6. In Gnosticism true knowledge comes through intuition. They just had these intuitive insights into the nature of reality, therefore they knew what truth was. They had this experience with gnosis, whereas in Christianity knowledge comes through the revelation of God that he has spoken into history through mankind, that He has directed men through the Holy Spirit in the process of inspiration so that His will and His Word would be accurately recorded without error in the original documents.

7. Gnosis means knowledge and simply relates to an academic and abstract knowledge which in itself becomes an object of worship. That is why we must always guard against making knowledge of Scripture the end-all of the Christian life. It is not; it is the filling of the Holy Spirit plus the knowledge of doctrine plus the application of doctrine that produces spiritual growth.

8. Gnosticism also has many parallels in modern society. What we see in the ethical system among the Gnostics is that they looked at the life of Jesus as something of a myth, so that in the early church they mythologised the life of Jesus. In some places like Corinth and Colosse they worshiped intermediate spirits, demons and angels. They also tried to demythologise the Scripture just to get the heart of who the real Jesus was and what the secret Gnostic teaching was in the Bible.

9. That has parallels in 19^th century religious liberalism. That means that much of modern Christianity has been rendered vulnerable to the mystical insights of new age methodology which has come across especially in the more charismatic wing of Christianity because they claim to be open to the Spirit. But the failure in Pentecostal theology is to make a distinction between the intuitive insights of a Muslin or a Buddhist and their intuitive insights, and if we look at the Word of God when God reveals Himself to man, even if it is subjective, there is always objective verification; it is testable and verifiable. That is why Jesus performed the kind of miracles that he did. He gave sight to a man who was born blind. There were the healings of people who had leprosy. These had constitutional defects they could not have any psychosomatic root or solution.