Jason Peters: Gnosticism Redux

Jason Peters sees a strange paradox between the resurgence of Gnosticism and the prevalence of materialism. No critique of Gnosticism would be complete, of course, without the acknowledgment that the pop eschatology of much of mainline evangelical Protestantism is itself a dangerous form of this ancient heresy.

We’re the Neognostics. We long to be delivered from the life of the body, notwithstanding its having been declared “very good” by its Creator, a founding pronouncement ratified by that same Creator in the Incarnation.

But a high doctrine of Creation and a robust doctrine of the Incarnation aren’t exactly in high demand at the Church of the Hip Jesus (http://www.ComeRockWithGod.com).

Which is to say that if education is essentially gnostic, mainline Protestant Christianity is quintessentially gnostic, especially that part of it that its adherents are pleased to call ‘eschatology.’ Indeed, one of the most lucrative forms of Gnosticism is ‘Rapture Theology,’ popularly imagined in the apocalyptic delusions that line the shelves of the Family Christian Bookstore. We owe this strange phenomenon to a man named John Darby, who apparently couldn’t be bothered with Church history or the decisions of ecumenical councils.

And a couple of really wealthy theological ignoramuses wielding limited literary talent owe him even more.

The problem, of course, is that these Left Behinds have grossly misled a lot of theologically unarmed and unprepared readers and essentially supplied them with a gnostic eschatology that assures them an exit strategy from the vile world. Above all, they have given Christians of a particularly ignorant and historically uninformed stripe easy permission to despise this wonderfully refulgent world. Whereas orthodoxy (to say nothing of the New Testament) has always regarded pilgrimage through creation as the only means of salvation, we now have salvation by flight from it. So easy a doctrine of salvation will lead, and obviously has led, to a disregard for the creation—as when former Secretary of Interior James Watt, when asked whether future generations might need the federal land he opened to mining and logging, famously replied, “I don’t know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”