On Paul's Gnosticism

 

On Paul’s Gnosticism

February 7, 2022

 

In the first century CE, when Paul was spreading the good news of Jesus Christ around the eastern Mediterranean world, there was a philosophy that sometimes competed with and even affected the development of the Christian faith. It was called Gnosticism. The word Gnosticism comes from the Greek word gnosis, which means knowledge. Gnosticism was an anthropology of sorts, an understanding of the existential nature of us human beings. Perhaps you have heard humans described as inspirited bodies. In this way of thinking the human body isn’t bad, it is a temple of the divine. Gnosticism turned that understanding of the human upside down. The Gnostics taught that in our true essence we are spirit. The human existential dilemma isn’t sin, it is that we don’t know that what we really are is not flesh but spirit. For the Gnostics our good, even divine spirit, is trapped. It is imprisoned in a body of evil flesh. Knowing that we are really spirit is the basic gnosis, the knowledge the Gnostics thought we needed to know but didn’t.

The Christian tradition considers Gnosticism to be a heresy. The theology that Paul expresses in his authentic letters is of course considered to be orthodox not heresy. Paul does however at times skate awfully close to the line between orthodox Christianity and the heresy of Gnosticism. Here’s an example of him doing that from his letter to the Galatians. We’ll see what he has to say here about both human flesh and the Spirit.

 

Live by the Spirit I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh….Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you….Those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. Galatians 5:16-21 with omissions.

 

Here's what he says about Spirit as he continues, with a jab back at flesh at the end.

 

    By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. Galatians 5:22-24.

 

Pretty clear, isn’t it? When Paul gives us vices and virtues lists like this one (there are others in his writings) that for him human flesh is bad and the Spirit of God into which Paul calls us to live is good.

If that attitude toward human bodiliness, toward our physicality, sounds like something you’ve been taught in church, there’s a good reason that it does. See, Gnosticism lost the battle with orthodoxy over the nature of the body, but in the long run orthodox Christianity absorbed so much of Gnosticism that it often sounds like Gnosticism won the war. The Christian tradition came to have quite a negative attitude toward human physicality. It has taught in particular that our sexual desires, especially those of women, must be suppressed as something bad or even downright evil. Why else would the Roman Catholic tradition, which was the tradition of us Protestants too before the sixteenth century CE, insist that Jesus’ mother Mary is “ever virgin?” Why else would the Roman Catholic Church teach to this day that sexual relations are permissible only between a woman and a man who are married to each other and even then only if the sex act carries with it the possibility of the woman becoming pregnant? Protestant churches too have preached a narrow sexual morality that sure seems to be grounded in the belief that sex in and of itself is somehow bad, sinful even.

Well, a lot of us Christians, and even a lot of us ordained Christian clergy like me, do not believe that sex in and of itself is bad or necessarily sinful, though of course we humans are quite able to turn it into something bad, and we do it all the time. No, many of us today take a different view of the body from Paul’s, and it’s just as biblical. Consider these familiar lines:

 

Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image according to our likeness’….

 

So God created humankind in his image,

   in the image of God he created them,

                  male and female the created them….

 

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. Genesis 1:26a, 27, and 31a.

 

What did God make that was indeed very good? All of creation, and Genesis specifically includes God’s creation of humans as female and male, that is, as sexual beings, as very good. I assume that Paul knew the creation story with which the Hebrew Bible opens. It opened with that story in his time too. Unfortunately, he chose to emphasize the Bible’s second creation story, the one about Adam and Eve, over the Bible’s first creation story, and he blamed Adam for bringing sin into the world. See Romans 5:12. Paul preferred the very ancient and quite primitive story of Adam and Eve to the beautiful and less ancient (though still very old) story of God creating all that is, including the sabbath, in seven days simply by speaking all that is into existence. That doesn’t mean, however, that we have to do the same. Genesis 1:27 recognizes that God made us humans as physical, sexual beings. And indeed it was very good.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Human sexuality is God’s good gift to us, but in order to keep it from becoming sinful, that is, to keep us from corrupting that gift, we must exercise our sexuality very carefully. I need not list all the dangers associated with sex. We all know what they are. Still, sex is part of our good creation in the image and likeness of God. We must make sure we practice it only as God’s good gift.

So Paul, I know that you were Christ’s apostle to us Gentiles. I know that you developed the theology of justification by grace through faith that is the basis of our Protestant Christianity. For those things I give thanks to you and to God. But your take on human physicality is just too gnostic for me and for many people today. We are not good spirit trapped in evil flesh. Both our spirits and our bodies are part of God’s good creation. Let’s treat both of them as the good gifts that they are. May it be so.