Neo-Gnosticism and the denial of bodily reality
Derived from the Greek word “gnosis,” which means knowledge, the various Gnostic sects shared one feature: a secret knowledge that led to the denigration and rejection of creation and its Creator.
From an Amazon review of “Wonderfully Made: A Protestant Theology of the Body” (John Kleinig, author), by Chad Bird – I like very much what he has to say, here:
During my first year of seminary, while taking a class on early church history, the professor commended to us a truth that I have never forgotten. He argued that, of all the times in church history, the one which most closely resembles our own is the second century. During that time, the church was a minor player on the world stage. She could boast no political power. At times, she was persecuted, often violently. It was not popular or culturally acceptable to be a Christian. Indeed, at the time, the followers of Jesus belonged to an illicit religion; it was literally against Roman law to be a Christian.
Most significantly, in the second century, the threats to the church’s orthodox teachings came dominantly from the popular, amorphous religious groups known collectively as Gnostics. These groups often portrayed themselves as variety of Christianity, if not “pure” Christianity itself. Derived from the Greek word “gnosis,” which means knowledge, the various Gnostic sects shared one feature in common: a secret knowledge that led to denigration and rejection of creation and its Creator in favor of the inner spirituality of the divine individual.
Gnostic books, even some claiming to be “Gospels,” taught that creation was the work of an inferior and bad deity. Because of this, Gnostics held that our created human bodies are (at best) irrelevant or (at worst) evil fleshly prisons of the soul, impediments to “true spirituality.” The body you see in the mirror is not reflective of reality. You are not a man. You are not a woman. You are part of divinity. For now, you are trapped in a dungeon of flesh, but that must not dictate how you define yourself and your eternal destiny. In modern parlance, Gnostics would say that the “real you” is the inner person, shorn from whatever your body might say you are.
Though no longer [or rarely] called by this name, Gnosticism today is a — if not the — pervasive religious sentiment, especially in matters involving the body. For instance, at a funeral, even a Christian funeral, when someone refers to the body as “just a shell” and the soul or spirit as the real person, Gnostic theology is afoot. When the body is treated as something external to us, such as this comment from a Reddit thread, “My body is not me. It’s just a meat sack that I live in,” this too would be applauded by Gnostics.
And, needless to say, the reigning cultural divorce between sex and gender, along with the smorgasbord of confusion in matters relating to all things sexual, is very much the byproduct of a gnosticizing of our bodies. The result is that the biological, anatomical facts of human existence become irrelevant in the determination of who we are. We decide who we are [say the neo-gnostics]; the kind of body a man or woman happens to have [or his or her genetic makeup, a viewpoint ironically held by many who loudly claim to “follow the science” in other regards] is utterly beside the point.
Therefore, living as we do in a second-century kind of twenty-first century, we need teachers such as those early Christians had in Irenaeus of Lyons, who exposed the errors of the Gnostics and explained, in detail, all the wonderful and saving ramifications of creation being the handiwork of a good and gracious God who has become incarnate — flesh and blood! — in Jesus Christ.
While I have several friends who consider themselves to be Gnostics, I discovered all the way back in undergraduate college – and found much more evidence to confirm this in graduate divinity school – that historical Gnosticism was not all it was cracked up to be. Orthodox, catholic Christianity is actually much more supportive of women, the body, and healthy sexuality than is Gnosticism, either of the historic or “neo-” varieties.
And as the extensive contributions to the development of science made by professed Christians (see also here, here, and here) – not to mention the absurdity of many positions held by neo-Gnostics today, who claim to follow science, but in fact deny scientific reality – clearly shows, Christianity is actually far more friendly to science and reason (which is, after all, a gift from God) than are the often-fantastical musings of the Gnostics… past or present.