Against the Protestant Gnostics

Gnosticism was an early heresy that challenged Christianity by believing the spiritual to be good and the material world to be evil. The Gnostics believed that salvation involves an escape from the body and the material world to become a purely spiritual being. The way to accomplish this kind of salvation is through higher and higher degrees of knowledge (the Greek word for knowledge is gnosis). A good book on this subject is Against The Protestant Gnostics by Philip Lee. This book articulated for me the Gnostic tendency in some contemporary forms of Protestant Christianity. Many Protestant churches have come to treat the creation as something evil while quoting Genesis 1 which calls the creation good. Some Protestant groups teach that alcohol is evil so that anyone drinking a beer is living in sin. This is treating a created good thing, beer, as evil. Another way some Protestants have some Gnostic tendencies is the way that some talk about life after death. I have talked to many modern, conservative Protestants who believe that they will live in heaven for all eternity as a pure spirit but of course this is in direct contradiction to the Christian teaching of the resurrection of a physical body at the Lord's second coming. Many Protestant funerals do not even mention the resurrection of the body in their funeral services. A clear place that reveals the Gnostic tendency of Protestant Christianity is in the Protestant view of Holy Communion or the Lord's Supper. The Protestant view usually denies that Jesus Christ is present in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. One view is that Holy Communion is merely a remembering of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. According to this view, knowledge of Jesus is what is important and so what the believer receives in the Holy Communion is simply a remembering knowledge (gnosis) of Jesus. One wonders why we need bread and wine to remember Jesus... could not someone just read their Bible? Another Protestant view is that the believer partakes of the body of Jesus Christ but only in a spiritual manner. This view denies that the bread and the wine become the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. These views in practice assert the spiritual over the material just like the early Gnostics. The Christian view is that the material elements of bread and wine are offered to God in Holy Communion and God changes the bread and wine into the very body and blood of Jesus Christ our Lord. This is indeed a mystery of God but the point is that we partake of God through matter that God has called tov meod (very good). As an Anglican I thought that I was avoiding gnostic tendencies until one day I started thinking of Gnosticism in terms of the Anglican view of the church. I later discovered that every Protestant Church including Anglicanism has to define the one body of Christ, the Church, in a Gnostic way. The Protestant has to define the "One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church" as is confessed in the Nicene Creed in a spiritual sense because she does not share any visible unity with the other churches. However, in order to interpret the Nicene Creed in its ancient context, the Church has to be visibly one as Christ is visibly one and united because the Church is the body of Christ. Christ was physically and visibly one, so to define the church as a spiritual unity is in a practical way denying the incarnation of the Word of God and to hold a view that is really Gnostic. There are only two churches that are visibly united and claim to be the "One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church". They are the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. So there are only two options for those who want to avoid a Gnostic understanding of the church (ecclesiology) and maintain an incarnational view of Christ and His Church. It was when I discovered this that I really started to be concerned about my Anglican ecclesiology because I had been trying hard to avoid Gnosticism. This really leads to an interesting study in seeing how a church's ecclesiology does or does not fit orthodox Christology which is something I began to struggle with.