Ask · Other Beliefs & Religions
What was Gnosticism, and is it still around?
The short answer
Gnosticism was a family of movements in the second century that taught the material world was made by a lesser, ignorant god, that the true God was reached by secret knowledge, gnosis, given to the spiritual elite, and that Jesus was a revealer who only seemed to have a real body. Irenaeus answered it at length in Against Heresies. It is still around wherever salvation is offered as secret knowledge for the awakened, the body and creation are treated as a prison or an error, and Jesus is kept as a teacher while his flesh, cross and resurrection are explained away.
The fuller answer
Gnosticism was never one church, and the name covers a family of teachers and texts in the second and third centuries. Its common shape is recognisable. The supreme God is remote and purely spiritual. The material world is a disaster or a prison, made by a lesser being, sometimes identified with the God of the Old Testament. Human beings carry a divine spark trapped in flesh, and salvation is waking that spark by gnosis, secret knowledge revealed to the few. Jesus, in these systems, is a messenger from the true God, and his body is often an appearance, since real flesh would contaminate him. The Gospel of Thomas, sayings without a cross or resurrection, belongs to this world.
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our own eyes, which we have gazed upon and touched with our own hands—this is the Word of life.
1 John 1:1 (BSB)
The apostles answered the shape before the systems had names. John opens his letter with what we have heard, seen with our eyes, looked upon and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life. Touch is the anti Gnostic word. The eternal life was not a code to decode. It was a man whose hands could be held, whose side could be examined, who ate fish after his resurrection. Irenaeus, a bishop who had known men taught by the apostles, built Against Heresies on the same ground: the God who made the world is the Father of Jesus, and the flesh is his work, not his enemy.
Who is the liar, if it is not the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, who denies the Father and the Son.
1 John 2:22 (BSB)
John also gives the doctrinal test. Whoever denies that Jesus is the Christ denies the Father and the Son together. Gnostic systems characteristically split what John joins: Jesus from the Christ, the Christ from the Creator, the Creator from the Father. The apostolic faith refuses every one of those cuts. The maker of heaven and earth is the Father. The Son was with him and was God. The man Jesus is that Son in the flesh. A teaching can sound deeply spiritual and still fail here, and John says the failure is not a detail. It is the lie that defines the antichrist pattern.
For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells in bodily form.
Colossians 2:9 (BSB)
Paul tells the Colossians that in Christ the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily. Bodily is the load bearing word. Modern forms rarely call themselves Gnostic, so name them carefully and by their claims rather than by a label thrown at people. The pattern returns in teachings that treat the physical world as an illusion to transcend, sell awakening in levels, retell Jesus as a consciousness teacher whose death does not matter, or divide humanity into the enlightened and the asleep. Wherever those claims gather, the old answer still works: God made the world, the Word became flesh, and the body on the cross was real.
Sources
- Berean Standard Bible (BSB)
- Irenaeus, Against Heresies
- James M. Robinson (ed.), The Nag Hammadi Library in English (1988)
Review status: in-theological-review. Every Contend page passes a human theological review against the Statement of Faith before it is published as approved teaching. This section is in that queue.
Dig deeper
No answer here is a dead end. Follow the question on, test it in practice, or work the method yourself on the Dig deeper page.