Ancient Gnosticism Never Died. It Moved Into the Church

An Orthodox Christian Reflection on the Ancient Heresy That Still Shapes Modern Faith

Depending on what era you sat down with me at coffee, you may have heard me discuss the subject of gnosticism in a wide array of different terms;

• Back in the 1990s, when I was in full swing studying simultaneously the original writings of the early Church Fathers as well as the pre-Reformation and Reformation writers such as Thomas of Aquino, Calvin, and Luther

• In the 2000s when I was in undergrad and then graduate school studying ancient political philosophy of the Greeks

• Or now as an Orthodox Christian catechist, my approach to gnosticism has both changed and deepened depending on the lens through which I was viewing it.

There were just as many different kinds of gnostics the early Church had to deal with as there are different kinds of coffee blends in our day.

• From Cernethius, who when Saint John the Beloved saw him bathing in the bathhouse, rushed out saying, “We must leave else we might be crushed when God destroys the bathhouse upon the heretic Cerenthius”

• To Marcion who lived in the early second century and quickly deviated from the apostolic teaching by constructing his own abridged canon, removing anything he found objectionable

• And then the later gnostics of the second and third centuries who believed the divine spirit spoke through them as oracles possessing secret knowledge.

Gnosticism takes on different forms as history progresses, and it is a difficult subject to write about as a history teacher, because no matter which particular form I decide to address I am likely to receive emails informing me that I have misunderstood the subject entirely, simply because I did not address the specific branch of gnosticism that the reader believes to be central.

Regardless of such detractors who often seem to have nothing better to do than send me corrective emails, at the heart of gnosticism throughout the ages is a belief that the world is fundamentally corrupted, and in many cases evil; a good and loving God, they argued, could not have created a world that has descended into such chaos. Therefore, the material world must not be of God.

Likewise, many gnostics have a deep suspicion of Holy Scripture, especially any passage that portrays what they call the harsh or immoral God of the Jews, or in common parlance, “the God of the Old Testament”.

I have sat in person with modern day gnostics, many of whom attend churches, some even Orthodox churches, who will say that the God of the Old Testament is not Christ, but something else entirely, a lower being, or a distorted power, and that the narratives of the Old Testament cannot be good because they contain judgment, conflict, and divine command that they find morally unacceptable.

Gnosticism is a force to be reckoned with. While the form I have just described most closely resembles its ancient expression, there are also many subtler branches of gnostic thought which we cannot fully address here.

Sadly, many streams of Western Christianity have, in various ways, been influenced by the gnostic spirit. I remember singing a hymn growing up, though I am not entirely certain where I first learned it, since it was not part of my childhood Methodist church,

“This world is not my home, I’m just a passing through, my treasure is laid up somewhere beyond the blue.”

Perhaps the wording is slightly different in its original form, but that is how I remember it, and I prefer not to consult Google or AI when I write essays like this; when errors creep in to my writing, they serve as reminders of a time when writers worked only with memory, books, and the printed page.

To a certain extent, there is a truth in that hymn; historic Christianity does teach that our eyes are to be lifted up to the mountains, that our help comes from above, and that our citizenship is in heaven.

But that is not the whole story.

Christ did not come to tell us that His creation was evil. Far from it. He came to heal creation, to renew it, to redeem all things.

One of my favorite apocryphal stories is found in the Acts of Peter, where the Apostle Peter encounters a lion with a thorn in its paw, removes it, and the beast is later baptized. Later, when Saint Peter is arrested and his punishment is to be eaten by wild beasts; the baptized lion is present and Saint Peter is not devoured.

The story is not meant to be literal history, but a spiritual image: that in Christ, even creation itself is being restored and made holy.

The story of Saint Peter and the lion was a direct response to gnosticism by the early Christians and demonstrates this idea that all of creation has been baptized through the work of Christ; even the wild beasts of the field.

There has always been a political tension in the West between those who withdraw from the world as though it is nothing but corruption, and those who attempt to absorb the world into a kind of secular salvation.

• One side says, “I am not my brother’s keeper. Leave me alone. Do not interfere with my life.”

• The other side, in its extreme form, attempts to place all meaning, morality, and redemption within the structures of political and social life alone.

Both tendencies, in different ways, carry a Gnostic impulse. One denies the goodness of creation. The other forgets its Creator.

The truth lies neither in escape nor in absorption, but in worship. The Christian life is first and foremost the life of communion with the Triune God, lived in the Church, and from that center flows the healing of the world.

We are called not to abandon creation, but to be healed so that we may help set it right.

That was the responsibility given to humanity in the beginning: to cultivate, to order, to tend.

To create beauty.

To love deeply.

To care for the least of these.

Christ came to trample down death by death, and to those in the tomb He gave life, and that life was not given to be hidden away.

It is not given so that we might hoard it in private piety, disconnected from neighbor and place.

Rather, it is given so that as you and I heal from the sickness of sin, that we might, in love, participate in the restoration of the world.

• By inviting the lonely into our homes.

• By helping the homeless find shelter.

• By feeding the hungry.

• By caring for the sick.

• By restoring neglected neighborhoods and rebuilding what has fallen into ruin.

• By working together, even at personal cost, for the good of others.

• By refusing indifference when mercy is required.

• By choosing patience where the world demands contempt.

• By speaking truth without cruelty, and love without compromise.

In all of this, the Christian does not escape the world, nor does he worship it. He learns to see it as something wounded, but still capable of glory.

The temptation of Gnosticism is always to simplify reality into something clean and manageable. Either the world is wholly evil and must be escaped, or it is wholly self sufficient and must be mastered.

Historic Christianity refuses both reductions. It insists instead on the strange claim that God entered matter, healed it from within, and now calls ordinary men and women to participate in that healing.

Not as spectators, and not as tyrants, but as those who have themselves been forgiven. The world is not discarded. It is being transfigured. And we are invited, quietly and seriously, to take part in its renewal.

~ Kenneth

Furthermore

Sadly, there is a tendency among the many converts we are seeing in the Orthodox Church to bring with them these gnostic tendencies.

The “Orthobro” tendency that has been discussed widely online (myself included) where Christians spend significant time arguing and debating others on the internet, can, at its worst, reflect what might be called a gnostic impulse.

By this I do not mean formal Gnosticism as a historical system, but rather a recurring spiritual temptation: the assumption that right belief alone, clearly possessed and correctly articulated, is itself the primary mark of faithfulness. In that framework, truth becomes something to win or defend, rather than something that slowly forms the whole person through repentance, humility, and communion with God.

This can subtly reshape online discourse into a posture of constant correction: “I am right, you are wrong, and I am called to demonstrate it.”

Even when the content of one’s beliefs is orthodox, the spirit in which they are held can drift toward a kind of intellectual self-certainty that substitutes argument for transformation.

There is much to unpack in those paragraph, but I’m going to leave it at that, as I’ve waded into the subject of needless arguing in previous essays, one of which you can read <here>.

Even More…

Thank you for reading, for writing to me privately, for “liking” my essays, commenting, and for both your unpaid and paid subscriptions. Each of these small acts of encouragement has meant more than I can properly express.

I have been quietly hinting that something significant is on the horizon, a larger project, and a tangible way for my family to say thank you to the many readers who have supported us since the beginning of this Substack.

In a very short amount of time, I will be able to share more details.

For now, I can only say that the nature of what we are building will explain why we are taking care to carefully prepare every detail in advance.

We are making sure that everything is properly aligned before we formally announce it, so that when we do speak more openly, we are fully ready to step into it.

More to come soon.