Against the Gnostics

Via Confessing Evangelical comes a discussion of The DaVinci Code and various pseudo-Christian neo-gnosticisms by N.T. Wright (go to page 22 of the PDF). Wright points out, among other things, that it was orthodoxy, not the privatized spirituality of the gnostics, that provided a challenge to the political status quo:

[T]he divinity of Jesus is already firmly predicated by Paul, within twenty or thirty years of Jesus’ death. John and Hebrews – and indeed Luke and Matthew, who are almost as explicit – are written by 90 or so at the latest, quite possibly much earlier. The idea that Jesus was ‘just a good man’ who ‘walked the earth and inspired millions to live better lives’ is a modern trivialization that, to do them justice, even the Nag Hammadi documents do not perpetrate.

In particular, the resurrection of Jesus was central to early Christianity; and his death was consequently interpreted, from extremely early in the movement, as (a) the fulfilment of the Jewish scriptures, (b) the defeat of all rival spiritual powers and (c) the means of forgiveness of sins. Early Christianity was not primarily a movement which showed, or taught, how one might live a better life; that came as the corollary of the main emphasis, which was that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had fulfilled his age-old purposes, had dealt with the powers of evil, and had launched his project of new creation upon the world. The early Christian gospel, which was then written up in the four canonical gospels, was the good news, not that a new teaching about hidden wisdom had appeared, enabling those who tapped into it to improve the quality of their lives here or even hereafter, but that something had happened through which the evil which had infected the world had been overthrown and a new creation launched, and that all human beings were invited to become part of that project by becoming renewed themselves.

In particular, this included from the start a strong political critique. Not the tired old left-wing harangue in Christian dress, of course, but a more subtle, more Jewish, more devastating critique: Jesus is Lord, therefore Caesar isn’t. That is there in Paul. It is there in Matthew. In John. In Revelation. That is why, from at least as early as the second century, the Roman empire was persecuting the people who were reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul and the rest – not, we note, the people who were reading ‘Thomas’, ‘Philip’ and the other Nag Hammadi codices. Why would Caesar worry about people rearranging their private spiritualities?

[…]

One of the basic fault lines in the contemporary western world is the line, which does not coincide with the huge left-right polarisation in America or its equivalents in Britain and Europe, between neo-gnosticism on the one hand and the challenge of Jesus on the other. Neognosticism (‘search deep inside yourself and you’ll discover some exciting things, and the only real moral imperative is that you should then be true to what you find’) is not a religion of redemption. It appeals to both the pride that says ‘I’m really quite an exciting person, whatever I may look like outwardly’ – the theme of half the cheap movies and novels in today’s world – and to the stimulus of ever-deeper navel-gazing (‘finding out who I really am’). The challenge of Jesus, in the twenty-first century as in the first, is that we should look away from ourselves and get on board with the project the one true God launched at creation and re-launched with Jesus himself. The gospel demands that we submit to Jesus as Lord and allow all other allegiances, loves and selfdiscoveries to be realigned in that light.

God’s project, and God’s gospel, are rooted in solid history as opposed to gnostic fantasy and its modern equivalents. Genuine Christianity is to be expressed in self-giving love and radical holiness, not self-cossetting self-discovery. And it lives by, and looks for the completion of, the new world in which all knees will bow at the name of Jesus; not because he had a secret love-child, not because he was a teacher of recondite wisdom, not because he showed us how we could get in touch with the hidden feminine, but because he died as the fulfilment of the scriptural story of God’s people and rose as the fulfilment of the world-redeeming purposes of the same creator God. If there is any Holy Grail hidden in Durham, it might be the memorials to Lightfoot and Westcott, who gave us a century ago the solid scholarship upon which a robust and refreshing view of Christian origins can still be founded.