What Is Gnosticism

Folk religion and life after death part 2

Continuing on from where I left off…

So, traditional Christian belief about life after death is, I believe, virtually disappearing from American Christians’ consciousness due to folk religion conveyed through popular culture, funeral sermons, popular hymns and songs and the lingering influence of Spiritualism (a type of gnosticism) in American religious history.  A major recent influence on this disappearance of traditional belief about life after death is the spate of books and television programs about so-called “near death experiences.”  Unfortunately, too many Christians are basing their ideas about life after death on all of these rather than on sound biblical teaching or theological reflection.  I have found many committed evangelical Christians (and others) highly resistant to any correction of their folk religious visions of life after death.

The prevailing folk religious view is that upon dying a person goes immediately and directly to “heaven” in the sense of the fullness of being in God’s presence–the consummation of the blessed hope of redeemed existence with Christ and all the saints.  Lost is any idea of an intermediate state distinct from the future resurrection, judgment and new creation that forms the true blessed hope of the New Testament.  I have yet to see or read in any of these reports of death experiences any reference to bodily resurrection, new creation (new heaven and new earth), future universal judgment or an intermediate state called “paradise” where the dead in Christ await all of that.  Rather, nearly all the popular images portray the afterlife as complete and final immediately after death.  In other words, at best, the consummation of God’s promises to the redeemed is collapsed into a bodiless spiritual bliss in a heavenly realm with God, Christ and all the saints sometimes even including mansions, pearly gates, streets of gold, etc.

Sidebar: SOME Christian scholars reject traditional Christian teaching about the intermediate state of conscious but bodiless existence in paradise with Christ awaiting resurrection and heaven for reasons not related to folk religion.  This is a completely different phenomenon.  One could mention Oscar Cullman, Stanley Grenz and a host of other mostly 20th century theologians who rejected the intermediate state–collapsing it into the future resurrection and fullness of heaven (new heaven and new earth).  The reasons usually given (I had many long talks with Stan Grenz about this) have to do with belief in a holistic unity of the human person–a so-called “Hebraic” versus “Greekish” view of human personhood.  I won’t get into that very much now; suffice it to say I’ve never been convinced that a cautious duality (not dualism) of body and soul/spirit is necessarily “Greekish.”  It seems to me to be presupposed everywhere in Scripture.

Gnostic Christadelphian: What is Gnosticism

For Philo (20BC to 54AD), a bible passage was like a human being. It had a body (i.e. a literal meaning) and a soul (an allegorical meaning). He accepted the literal meaning of many scriptures (e.g. the Mosaic Law) but he also believed that only the allegorical method could reveal the true inner meaning that God had encoded in them. Further Philo believed that hidden meaning lay behind numbers and names. More ingeniously, he also found it by playing with the many possible meanings of the same word and by regrouping the words of a biblical passage - (Introduction to Biblical Interpretation: Klein Blomberg and Hubbard) Origen, the early church father (185 - 254 AD) contended that God has inspired the original biblical writer to incorporate the allegorical meaning into his writing. thus what Origen consider the highest meaning of scripture, its deaper spiritual truth, was already implicit in scripture, not something invented by the interpreter. In fact he believed that every scripture had a 3 fold meaning (literal, moral and allegorical) (Klein, Blomberg and Hubbard).

What is Gnosticism?

First century gnosticism, Its origin and motifs

Beyond gnosticism, myth, lifestyle, and society in the school of Valentinus

The Many Gospels of Jesus, Sorting Out the Story of the Life of Jesus

The Beliefnet Guide to Gnosticism and Other Vanished Christianities