Anti-Excellence Gnosticism in the Church

Critics of Calvinism have mistaken it for many things. One such criticism has been Gnosticism. When G. K. Chesterton called it a modern form of Manichaeism, he really meant the same thing: a dualism of light versus darkness without remainder. We can understand easily enough what someone has in mind when they call Calvinism “Fatalism” or “Libertinism.” The implications of these attributions are that sovereign grace eliminates free moral agency, or that since God “does it all,” we might sin that grace may abound. The misinformed premises behind these tiresome straw men are simple to spot. But what does the critic mean when they link Calvinism to Gnosticism?

Here is the basic thinking. Gnosticism taught that nature was bad. In fact, the real God could not have directly created it or be involved in it. To even speak of sin “entering” the world is a misnomer for the Gnostic because for him, the world simply is evil by virtue of it lacking the pure spiritual essence of God. Such a world as contains bodies, or is made of composite matter, and where we grope around by the senses, this is all to be trapped in a prison. Not only does God have nothing to do with it, but we are to have nothing to do with it. 

A softer form of Gnosticism can use the language of sin and fall and redemption, but here the basic suspicions of nature remain. The biblical storyline is retained, but the distinctions between the original nature of man and his fallen nature, between bodies per se and sensuality, between reason as an objective principle and reason’s subjective performance—all such distinctions are sucked up in the reduction of nature to the cursed cosmos.

In this way, there can be a Gnostic Calvinism. And unfortunately the twentieth century saw the influence of Karl Barth over more liberal Calvinists and Cornelius Van Til over more conservative Calvinists issue forth into exactly this sort of recasting. A hammer is the tool when everything is a nail. By the latter half of the twentieth century, every issue in the Reformed mind was the nail of evil-nature, so that God’s sovereignty became all hammer and no blueprints, or any other tool or activity. 

Now there are many ways to respond to straw men set up against one’s own view. One of those ways is by not living up to the caricature. In fact, as I’ve told people on occasion, when you live up to a caricature too many times, it isn’t really a caricature anymore. And the sphere that we all have the most control over is the sphere that our own selves are standing on—not only our own souls and bodies, but that sphere of time, talent, and treasure that each of us has been given by God as a stewardship. Each of us can be either Gnostics or else God-glorifying image-bearers with the natures of our own persons and with the natures of those things most near to us. 

Excellence: Where the Anti-Gnostic Rubber Meets the Road to Glory

“Tell me you're a Gnostic without telling me you're a Gnostic.” That’s the way the kids are saying it these days. In memes all over social media, one catchy concise way to expose that someone is being hypocritical or shallow or whatever, is to say, “Tell me you’re an X (fill in the undesired designation) without telling me you’re an X.” And then the example is a statement by the person one is exposing who was, no doubt, clueless as to how revealing their words were when they said it. 

So for our purposes, what I want to show is that there is no more tell-tale sign, at least in practical theology, that one has embraced Gnostic presuppositions than how they respond to the call for excellence. Now typically one will not hear this about one’s own line of secular work. No one says to their boss: “Hey, Mr. Jones, the reality is that God is God, and whatever will be will be. If I don’t show up tomorrow, it will be because God ordained it,” or “Sure, I have a tendency to skip the mailboxes on every other street, but that’s not the gospel, is it?” 

But what do we do with excellence in things where the spiritual realm more obviously brings itself to bear in the realm of time and space? We say things that we would never say to our employer, or even to our dentist. When it comes to organized Christian education, right doctrine, trained leadership, skilled presentations, or effective cultural, technological, or political engagement, the nature-downers start coming out of the woodwork. “Oh, now, now, God isn’t interested in our resources.”

To be sure, he does not need our resources, and we are very fine idolaters of our resources. But when we say that he takes no interest and that neither should we, then we signal that we have already embraced a theology that would have been foreign to our Reformed forefathers. 

Gnosticism is also at work when we dismiss the reasons for young men defecting from the faith. It is true that those who “lose their faith” never actually had biblical faith. However, it is not true that artificial stumbling blocks to real faith are not placed before them by the church and that we are not morally culpable for insisting on these stumbling blocks. Artificial stumbling blocks are to be distinguished from proper spiritual stumbling blocks, such as the scandal of the cross (1 Cor. 1-2). The latter cause rejection because the natural man cannot accept them. The church must be unashamed of these.

However, artificial stumbling blocks are those actual absurdities and evils which all right-thinking men ought to find strange as settled doctrines or practices in the church.

It is a Gnostic premise that brushes all this aside on the ground of the spiritual realities determining faith since it pits the level of spiritual realities, and specifically divine causality, against what sort of reasoning one ought to accept with the mind. In addition to being shallow theology, all of this excuses us from excellence in word and deed.

We even do this out of frustration or disappointment, when one thing is missing in the body of Christ, it is the easiest thing in the world to begin blaming another thing that is being done with excellence in that same body. Here there is a kind of zero-sum fallacy at work. It is a Gnostic inference to conclude that greater rigor of the mind or greater sense of urgency to add souls or their gifts to the body—that this, in and of itself, depletes some other affection or action to that same body. Now nature is not merely contrary to God, but nature is against nature!

Such a misgiving also ignores Paul’s teaching about those gifts that God himself has fit into the body by his own wise plan. Each member in the body is a distinct image of God, their calling and abilities being real objects with God-designed natures.

“All these are empowered by one and the same Spirit, who apportions to each one individually has he wills … But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose” (1 Cor. 12:12, 18).

So their exact place in each local body is ordained by God with as much sovereignty as all of the other things we might be more used to ascribing to divine sovereignty.

At root, though, the Gnostic premise is working its way out through all such discomfort with excellence. If about life under the sun, the Preacher can say, “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might” (Ecc. 9:10), then it makes all the more sense for the man or woman whose might has been redeemed to say, “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31).