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’,

The Gospel of Thomas… gives esoteric insight into the spiritual realm, but fails to offer either vision or hope for the present world. Whereas the canonical gospels carefully chart Jesus’ ministry within the context of Israel’s story line, showing how Christ brings the narrative of Israel to its climactic fulfillment, Thomas completely neglects this larger narrative of redemption history.

The absence of a redemptive-historical narrative in Thomas is not surprising. For the Gnostics, there is no redemption history of the world because salvation is not about what happens in this world. Rather, redemption is about escaping from the world.

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,

Simon Peter said to Him, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of Life.”

Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

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,

“All love of another’s wife is shameful; so too, too much love of your own. A wise man ought to love his wife with judgment, not affection. Let him control his impulses and not be borne headlong into copulation. Nothing is fouler to love a wife like an adulteress. . . . Let them show themselves to their wives not as lovers, but as husbands.”

This devaluing of conjugal love within the Gnostic and Stoic traditions was reinforced by the influence of Platonism within Mediterranean society. Though not all scholars agree that Plato took a pejorative view of the body, in Plato’s Phaedo Socrates talks about the body in ways that deeply resonated with the later Gnostic movement:

Plato

 

“We are convinced that if we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must get rid of the body and contemplate things in isolation with the soul in isolation…. If no pure knowledge is possible in the company of the body, then either it is totally impossible to acquire knowledge, or it is only possible after death, because it is only then that the soul will be isolated and independent of the body. It seems that so long as we are alive, we shall keep as close as possible to knowledge if we avoid as much as we can all contact and association with the body…”

 

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.

“It is hard for the human soul to avoid loving something, and our mind must of necessity give way to affection of one kind or another. The love of the flesh is overcome by the love of the spirit. Desire is quenched by desire. What is taken from the one increases the other….In paradise Eve was a virgin… virginity is natural while wedlock only follows guilt…”

For Jerome, Marriage was a necessary evil in order that virgins could be produced:

“I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins. I gather the rose from the thorns, the gold from the earth, the pearl from the shell.” The thirteenth-century French Dominican Vincent of Beauvais put the matter rather brusquely: “a man who loves his wife very much is an adulterer. Any love for someone else’s wife or too much love for one’s own is shameful.”

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.

St. Jerome

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).

What is interesting about the movement to legalize same-sex ‘marriage’ is that in many respects it is a return to Gnostic ideas about the body. Advocates of gay ‘marriage’ will frequently downplay the physical aspects of marriage, urging instead that marriage is not primarily about becoming one-flesh physically, but a spiritual and emotional connection for which our physical experiences are extrinsic rather than intrinsic.

In downplaying the importance of consummation in marriage, advocates of same-sex ‘marriage’ have tried to reduce the meaning of marriage to merely a loving and committed relationship between two adults. It’s an emotional and relational union that creates the necessary conditions for marriage, they argue, not what you do with your bodies. In fact, the physical anatomy of the adults in question is irrelevant. Marriage is first about the communion of souls in a committed and affectionate relationship and only secondarily about physical union.
By contrast, in traditional marriage one cannot disengage the relational and the physical aspects of union. As Robert George wrote back in 2009 in an article for First Things,

“A human person is a dynamic unity of body, mind, and spirit. Far from being a mere instrument of the person, the body is intrinsically part of the personal reality of the human being. Bodily union is thus personal union, and comprehensive personal union—marital union—is founded on bodily union.”…

“Arguments that true marriage is something other than or broader than the union of two sexually complementary spouses necessarily suppose that the value of sex must be instrumental either to procreation or to pleasure, considered as an end in itself or as a means of expressing affection, tender feelings, etc. Thus, critics of traditional norms of marriage and sexuality say that homosexual sex acts, for example, are indistinguishable from heterosexual acts whenever the motivation for such acts is something other than procreation. That is to say, the sexual acts of same-sex partners are indistinguishable in motivation, meaning, value, and significance from the marital acts of spouses who know that at least one spouse is temporarily or permanently infertile. Thus, the argument goes, the traditional understanding of marriage is guilty of unfairness in treating sterile persons of opposite sexes as capable of marrying while treating same-sex partners as ineligible to marry.”

For the homosexual community, what we do with our bodies is irrelevant because what really matters is the motivation behind it; therefore, if the motivation behind the sex acts of homosexual partners is the same as the motivation behind the sex acts of heterosexual married couples, then the former should be able to qualify as an instance of marriage. The fact that homosexual sex acts are completely different to full sexual intercourse in marriage is irrelevant within the neo-Gnostic paradigm of the gay community: for them what really matters is what happens in the mind, emotion and soul and not the body. In fact, if their mantra that “marriage is a relationship between two committed individuals” were taken at face value, the body has little or nothing to do with marriage at all. As Adam G. Mersereau pointed out,

Some gay activists try to meet that burden by claiming that marriage is, at its core, the legal recognition of a committed, loving relationship between adults. But that is incorrect. Marriage is not, and has never been, the mere recognition of committed and loving relationships between adults. Lots of adults love one another and are committed to one another (a grandmother and her adult grandchild, or war buddies, or close sisters, and the like), but these commitments have never been considered marriage. No one would argue that these relationships are essentially the same as a heterosexual marital relationship. So it remains an open question why two homosexuals should qualify for marriage merely because they claim to love one another dearly.

Within the Christian tradition, bodies are important and help to define who we are. Our bodies are not, as homosexuals claim, an irrelevancy like race.

Within the Christian understanding, on the other hand, our bodies are important and help to define who we are. I relate to the world as a man, and this is rooted in my biological experience as a male. Similarly, my wife relates to the world as a woman, and this is grounded in her experience being biologically female. The different perspectives we bring to the world as men and women is something to be embraced, relished and enjoyed, not trivialized. By contrast, many within the homosexual community argue that our experience as members of one particular gender is really irrelevant to our functioning in the world.

The biological sex that one happens to be is like one’s race, they argue. Indeed, one of the most frequent arguments for same-sex ‘marriage’ is that opposition to it is akin to opposition to interracial marriage. Just as race is, or ought to be, irrelevant to marriage, so they argue that one’s gender is similarly irrelevant, that my actual physical anatomy is as irrelevant to my experiences in the world as the colour of my skin.

This Gnostic-like trivializing of the body has led homosexual activists to claim that one’s biology as either male or female makes absolutely no difference to a person’s experience as a parent. A dad is just the same as a mom because our biological differences are irrelevant to our lived experiences in the world. Listen to what Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse said in an article reflecting on her debate with Judith Stacey:

I crossed swords with Judith Stacey…at a debate at Bowling Green State a few years ago. I asked her point blank if she believed men and women were completely interchangeable as parents. In front of that very friendly audience, she said absolutely: the gender of parents doesn’t matter….
Treating same sex unions like marriage amounts to saying that mothers and fathers are interchangeable. It is a coin toss from a child’s point of view, whether they have two moms, two dads, or one of each.

This trivialising of our identity as men and women is something that is completely alien to the earthiness of the Christian worldview. It is a throw-back to the Gnostic movement, and to the idea in The Gospel of Thomas that in paradise there will be no sex differences. The only difference is that while the Gnostics expected that to occur in the life to come, the homosexual community is attempting to bring it into the present age. It is an attempt to achieve the sexless utopia described by feminist writer Susan Moller Okin near the end of her book Justice, Gender and the Family: “A just future would be one without gender.  In its social structures and practices, one’s sex would have no more relevance than one’s eye color or the length of one’s toes.”

By reducing our physical experiences as men and women to irrelevancy like this, the feminist and homosexual communities have colluded with the Gnostic lie that our bodies do not ultimately matter.

 

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8 COMMENTS

  1. I read that book, because of all the rave reviews, and I felt myself being sucked into its lies. It is a very poweful and hypnotic book, I will say that. I didn’t think the people in it were realistic, they seemed like cardboard cutouts to me, (not like Dickens or Jane Austins book people, they seem real) and really the whole story is like clothing for a theory.

    The Leonardo Da Vinci picture shocked me, as I have seen that image before but never really thought about the girly looking men in it. I think that Dan Brown was a bit dishonest for not explaining that Leonardo Da Vinci was probably homosexual.

  2. I suppose that the way will have to be prepared for the fake son of God. Pretending that Jesus had children and that the blood line has been kept alive would be a really crafty way of doing it. There have been some really silly attempts to con people with discovered so called ancient artifacts, such as that mad looking Fred Flintstone style so called stone age book that the so called experts “found”. Anders Behring Breivik said he belonged to the Knights Templer, that poor deluded mass murderer claims that he didnt act on his own, and I believe him, I don’t really see how one man could have done what he did all by himself. Julian Assange belonged to something called The Family or The Children of God, and can’t help wondering if he is being set up as some sort of Messiah figure for us all to worship. I think its really weird the way that RT had my photo on their television program, with me wearing a great big enormous cross and that bright yellow and orange dress (that I made out of old curtain materiel), and Brian Gerrish knew I was going to be at that Stafford conference wearing that dress, and so why did they make a gigantic banner the exact shade of my dress, then put me right in the middle of it for the photograph? And I asked RTs Max Keiser (real name Timothy Maxwell and if you look at his face he looks a lot like Robert Maxwell so much they could be son and father!) if, seeing as he had had me on the RT program (just my photo) please could I go on the telly, and he has not bothered to reply.

    I feel so violated by being tricked, but please that the Lord is so kind and watches over me, and others who put their trust in him and hold tight his hand. The people who hate him are trying to do all sorts of tricks, and they do fool people, because I fell for the Leonardo Da Vinci stuff and started to wonder if Dan Brown was telling the truth about Jesus having been married for a while, what a powerful lie that is, that it can even sway someone who is strong in the Lord!

    When the Lord comes back He will come back in exactly the way the Bible describes, just exactly as he said, Jesus doesnt tell lies.

  3. I only made that yellow costume because we had a rally against child abuse in London, and we sang a hymn (Fight the Good Fight) and we burst 29 red balloons for the children who Womens Aid had reported on dying as a result of secret family court intervension. I wasnt pretending to be a vicar or anything, I was just trying to make people look. I have cut that costume up now and made it into cushions for my garden chairs, and a bag for my mandolin. I didnt want to make a spectacle of myself at all, I just wanted the horrible abuse to stop. They made me scream and cry in the secret family courts, they were very very very cruel to me, and I kept begging people to help and some people wanted to, Lord Ramsbotham for example, he really wanted to help, but no-one could, because its like the system is being taken over eaten away from the inside by people who have no love of God. But I prayed and Jesus helped me, I dont care if people laugh at me and call me a nutter or anything, I know what happened, I know I had no chance of helping myself against the big gang that ganged up against me, and I know that it was the Lord who helped me. I cant prove it, but I know he is alive and that he is very very kind.