Following the 2003 publication of Dan Brown’s publishing phenomenon, The Da Vinci Code, there has been a renaissance of interest in the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. This ancient heresy has exerted its tentacles deep into the fabric of contemporary life, even influencing the church in many unhelpful ways. (To read about some of the ways that Gnostic ideas have infiltrated the church, see my article, ‘Eight Gnostic Myths You May Have Imbibed’.)
At the heart of the Gnostic heresy was the notion that the material world is bad. If the fundamental antithesis for Christianity was between good and evil, for the Gnostics the fundamental antithesis was between the physical and the spiritual. The material world is bad, they argued, precisely because it is physical. True spirituality involves escape from this world. Whereas the Christian tradition taught that redemption history culminates in the resurrection of the body, Gnostics believed that the goal of salvation was eternal disembodiment.
This is the view found in The Gospel of Thomas, which the ancient Gnostics held up as being an alternative to the canonical accounts of Christ. As I wrote in an article for the Colson Center titled ‘Resurrection and the Sanctification of Matter’.
Because of their anti-creational orientation, many Gnostics them taught that sexuality is at the heart of our fallen condition. Being immersed in the material world has given rise to the unfortunate reality of sexual differentiation, and the existence of beings that are capable of uniting sexually. In the Gnostic utopia, however, the gender polarity will be obliterated, as women migrate into a condition of masculinity. Thus in verse 114 of The Gospel of Thomas, we read,
There is more than mere misogyny going on in the idea that “Every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” For the world-hating Gnostics, the very idea of there being two sexes was anathema. Many Gnostics attempted to achieve a unisex society this side of paradise, teaching an ideal of asceticism that saw celibacy as the only truly spiritual option.
Unfortunately, Gnostic pessimism about sex influenced many of the church fathers, who imported into the Christian faith Platonic and Stoic notions concerning the body. The first-century Stoic Seneca expressed the mood well when he declared...
The idea here seems to be that the body holds the soul back from perfect knowledge, so that the philosophers’ task is to disengage himself as much as possible from the trappings of the physical body.
Given the fact that many of the church fathers were deeply influenced by Platonism, it is not surprising to find early Christian teachers imbibing a Platonic and Gnostic view of the body. Saint Jerome (c. 347 –420) reflected Gnostic assumptions when he taught that the more we love God, the less we will have leftover for human affection.
Jerome was not alone. Saint Augustine of Hippo (354–430) also reflected gnostic and neo-Platonic ideas about the body, arguing that sexuality only came about after, and because of, Adam’s fall.
{Remember Augustine's connection to Manichaenism and Mani's potential links to Mohammed.}
Despite the legacy of the church fathers, as well as the fact that a Gnostic devaluing of human sexuality continued to crop up throughout the history of the medieval church, on the whole the Christian tradition has done a good job in proclaiming the goodness of the world and our experiences in it, including the experience of marriage. The Roman Catholic church and the Eastern Orthodox church have even gone so far as to consider marriage a sacrament.
The Bible itself puts an especially high valuation on marriage. The material world was proclaimed good by God (Gen 1:31), and the marriage bed is particularly honourable (Heb 13:4). We glorify God not by denying our God-given sexual desires, like some in Paul’s day were teaching (1 Timothy 4:3), but by fulfilling those desires in honourable marriage. Marriage is thus the ultimate anti-Gnostic statement, in so far as it proclaims that the material world is good, and that we can glorify God by enjoying the good things in the world that He has given us, such as sex. Thus, the Bible puts a premium on the importance of frequent sex in marriage (1 Cor. 7:5; Proverbs 5:19), and even uses the one-flesh relationship between husband and wife as a type of the love between Christ and the church (Eph. 5:22-33).
More/continued:
Gay ‘Marriage’ and the Revenge of the Gnostics (full article).
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