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Join Ligonier ministries for our 2026 Ligonier Conference, chosen by God September 25th and 26th. You'll hear gifted teachers explore how the doctrine of election anchors our assurance of salvation in God's sovereign grace, knowing that he will complete his good work in US. Register today and save 20% with the discounted rate@ligonier.org London when the promise is
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given to you that there is a special secret formula, the magic bullet of truth that you can have, apart from the Scripture, run from your lives. If you want to have a stable Christian life, remember that we are called to try the spirits to see if they be of God, and the place where we know the Holy Spirit is active and speaking is in the Word.
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The Apostle Peter commands Christians to always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you, yet do so with gentleness and respect. Are you prepared to give a defense, a reason for the hope that is in you? Welcome to the Monday edition of Renewing youg Mind, and this week you'll hear from two of R.C. sproul's teaching series on the subject of apologetics, Apologetics of the Early Church and Defending youg Faith, and you can request access to both series when you give a donation in support of Renewing youg mind@renewingyourmind.org to start this week's study, here's RC on the false teaching known as Gnosticism versus the truth
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a few years ago I had the opportunity to sit down at a meal and have a lengthy discussion with a person who was a member of the Baha' I movement or the Baha' I movement, and I was fascinated to hear what this particular person believed. And he carefully explained to me that he believed that all of the great religions of the world at bottom were one, they all taught basically the same thing, and that the great spiritual leaders of human history, such as Confucius and Buddha and Mohammed and Jesus, were all more or less different avatars or incarnations of God himself, but that they all basically taught the same thing. And I was a little bit puzzled by this and I began asking him questions, specific questions like how do you reconcile Jesus teaching on such and such a subject with that of Buddha, or the difference between Buddha and Mohammed? How do you reconcile these things? And it was clear in our discussion there that this fellow had absolutely no knowledge of Buddhism and nothing of Islam and next to no knowledge of historic Christianity. He had been indoctrinated in the teachings of Baha' I, and there he learned that all the different religions were the same, but he had never examined the different religions of the world to see their points of tension and their points of conflict. And in a sense, what he was articulating was a modern form of. Of eclecticism, where you take a little bit of content from one religion, a little bit from another one, and a little one from another one. You get this smorgasbord theology which I've talked about in the past in terms of the concept of syncretism. In fact, I just mentioned that the other day, and I remind you that syncretism involves the blending or the amalgamating together of. Of disparate ideas from different traditions or different religions and. Or philosophical systems. Well, the grand movement of syncretism of the second century, which scholars argue about when it actually began, there's some evidence that it even antedated the advent of the Christian church. And certainly the church in the first century had to deal with elements of it. But it moved into its strongest period and the period of greatest threat in the middle of the second century. And that was the movement called Gnosticism. Now, when we spell Gnosticism, we spell it with a G, G, N, O, S, T, I, C, I, S, m. And Gnosticism comes from the Greek word gnosis, which is also spelled with a silent G, G, n o, s, I, s, which is simply the Greek word for knowledge. We get the word agnostic from this, or diagnosis or prognosis. All of those English words contain the root of that Greek word for knowledge. Well, the Gnosticism of the second century was an attempt, much as modern Baha' I ism, to seek a universal religion, a religion that would borrow the best from all of the competing sources of religion and philosophical inquiry. And in the case of this early form of Gnosticism, elements of Persian religion, which was dualistic, elements of Egyptian religion, elements of Jewish religion, elements of Greek philosophy, and elements from Christianity were blended together into this new kind of theosophy or philosophical religion. Now, one of the things we also realized that Gnosticism itself was not monolithic. It had various different groups and sects attached to it. One would be emphasizing more the dualistic element, another one would be emphasizing something else. But they all shared in this same commitment to a special kind of knowledge that only a spiritual elite group ever is able to achieve. And church historians have said that the greatest threat to Christianity in the second century was Gnosticism. And as I said, its influence extended earlier than the second century. But it reached its zenith, say, between the years 135 and 160. I want to take some time to look at this not only as we seek to understand the impact that this had on. On the writings of the great apologists of the second century, but also of the enduring concepts of Gnosticism that have affected even our own times. Again, before I go into further exposition of this movement, let me just alert you in passing that the emergence of what is called New Age religion or New Age philosophy in our day, that is making a tremendous impact on the thinking of many people. There are many New Age bookstores that devote themselves exclusively to the propagation of the literature that espouses New Age which borrows elements from Indian religion of reincarnation, psychic religion, as well as spiritual aspects from Christianity. Peter Jones, a professor of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary in Escondido, California, has written a book, a very important book, called the Gnostic Empire Strikes Back, in which he gives a deep and comprehensive analysis of the modern forms of Gnosticism that are out and about and in a sense, re injecting the main themes and of early Gnosticism into the secular culture, but not only into the secular culture, but also into the Christian community. I remember before the popularization of New Age again, when I was a graduate student in Europe in the mid-60s. Perhaps the most significant or influential New Testament scholar of that era was the German scholar Rudolf Bultmann. And Bultmann had been somewhat radical in teaching that the New Testament is composed of two elements, historie, as he called it, and mythology. And it was Bultmann who championed the program of demythologizing the Bible. That is, if the modern reader is to gain anything of importance or of interest or of value from reading the Scriptures, they first had to cut through the various myths and legends of Scripture to penetrate the historical core or the kernel of truth that has lasting value. And of course, he himself sought a synthesis between Christian thinking and the philosophical system of Martin Heidegger. But that's another question. But what I remember in the debate in the 60s, how on the continent, more conservative scholars, men like Oscar Kulman of Basel in Switzerland, accused Bultmann of being a neo Gnostic, a neo Gnostic. And I thought that was an interesting appellation to bolster Bultmann in that time, because I hadn't really made the connection in my own analysis of Bultmann with early Gnosticism. But there were several points of contact, two of which the critics of Bultmann in the 60s referred to frequently. That Bultmann, on the One hand rips Christianity out of the plane of history. Whether there was even a historical Jesus is insignificant. For Bultmont's salvation takes place vertically, not horizontally. It takes place in what he called the hiccat nunc, the here and the now Zankrecht von Oben, directly, immediately, an intrusion from out there, existentially, where you are in the moment. And it has nothing to do with. With the movement of history itself. Of course, people like Oscar Cullman Kuhlmann wrote a trilogy to combat this, and the third volume was Salvation and History, in which he was trying to make it clear that the New Testament stands or falls on its claim to be rooted and grounded in true history. That the Christ who appears on the pages of the New Testament is the one who comes in the fullness of time, is the one who had been predicted by the Old Testament prophets and the one who was born of the seed of the woman and in the line of David and so on. And that that historical framework or context was essential to the New Testament Gospel. And any gospel that rips the Christ of the New Testament out of history and dehistoricizes the New Testament is not Christianity. But it has more in common with this mystical knowledge that people have, not only on the ordinary plane of common sense, where we meet people in the flesh and so on, but only through some spontaneous, direct, vertical experience that some mystic has. Now, that's the second point of agreement between Bultmann and the old Gnosticism, in that somebody reads Bultmann, he says, you can't get any meaningful answers from the Scriptures unless you ask the right questions from the Scriptures. And you need to come to the Bible with what he called a certain a prior understanding. And the key to that prior understanding is supplied by the existential categories of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. What does that mean? It means, well, unless you're a student of Heidegger and have mastered the subtle nuances of existential philosophy, you're not going to get anything of any value out of reading the New Testament. So now the contemporary relevance of the teaching of the Bible is limited to that handful of people who have a grasp of this somewhat esoteric philosophy. And the critics of Bultmann in the 60s talked about Bultmann's constructing a gnostic elite group, an elite group of philosophers and scholars who had advanced knowledge of some kind. And they're the only ones who really can grasp the significance of what Jesus was about. And again, the good news is then wrested from the community of people. I remember once I lectured on the covenants, the relationship of the Old Covenant and New Covenant. And I was talking about Christ's work in fulfilling the terms of the Old Covenant by becoming cursed on the cross. And somebody in the audience, a heckler, was very much opposed to my teaching that and hollered out out loud in the middle of my lecture, that's primitive and obscene. I was caught off guard and I said, what did you say? He said, I said, that's primitive and obscene. I said, I like your two descriptive terms. There's. Let's start with the second one. And the cross is obscene. If indeed God imputes the sins of his people entirely to one person, the person who is wearing that garb has to be the most obscene creature ever to appear on the face of the earth. And at the moment that Christ is on the cross where this transaction is taking place, God won't look at this obscenity. I like your word. I particularly like the other one, primitive, because that's the way the Scriptures communicate the drama of redemption in quite primitive terms. Taking a goat or a bull in the Old Testament and chopping it up and smearing its blood upon the altar. What could be more primitive than that? And I said, no, my question is, why is it primitive? One of the things that I'm committed to is that I believe in a God who's concerned about the redemption of all of his people, even those who don't have a PhD in philosophy or in theology. That we are primitive, and the way God communicates to us is in a kind of simplicity that on the surface appears to be quite primitive. And yet when we begin to analyze it and probe it, we find that there's enough depth to it that it takes us a lifetime to unravel. And even then we haven't reached the apex of knowledge. But again, what I was hearing from that heckler in that crowd was a kind of spiritual arrogance, a kind of elitism that sort of looked on its nose at the simplicity of the truth that is communicated to us by Christ and the apostles. Now, in any case, this Gnosticism of the second century blossomed, as they say, in the middle of the century. And their leaders traced their own tradition back to a character who appears in the New Testament. He does not appear in a very favorable light. The man who is seen as the origin of this kind of Gnosticism was Simon Magus Simon the magician, who sought to purchase the Holy Ghost from the Apostle Peter. But one of the things that was important about Gnosticism was that Gnosticism was profoundly concerned about salvation. It involved a religion of redemption. But the key to salvation was not faith, but Gnosis or this elite knowledge. In a word, if I can paraphrase it for them, the article upon which the Church stood or fall was the doctrine of justification by Gnosis alone, just justification by knowledge alone, not by faith alone. Now, the knowledge of which they spoke they distinguished from ordinary kinds of knowledge. They understood that the ordinary way in which we gain knowledge is either through intellectual reflection or investigation, through logical deduction, or through the powers of observation and the using of our senses, what we would call empirical knowledge, through the five senses, through seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling, and so on. Now they eschewed that kind of knowledge, either of the rational sort or of the empirical sort, and talked about a higher knowledge, a superior knowledge than that came through again the conduit of direct mystical or intuitive apprehension. And those who had the gift to understand this higher knowledge were called the gnostokoi. That little ending, O I is simply the nominative plural ending in the Greek and it means the those in the know. Again, there were those who were in the know and those who weren't in the know. And what happened at this time in Church history is that the Church was flooded, if I can mix my metaphors with an avalanche of literature purporting to be apostolic, that is fraudulent writings were unloaded in the Church and claiming to have been written by this apostle or that apostle, like the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Thomas and that sort of thing that carried the ideas and the doctrines of the Gnostic writers. Because their strategy to infiltrate the Church was to try to come in under the guise of apostolic authority. And yet at the same time what they were teaching was designed to undermine and overthrow the the authority of the apostles. Now, at first they didn't attack them directly, they sort of tolerated them and patronized the apostles by saying, well, yes, the apostles communicated to you the truth of God through the common ordinary means of learning, through intelligible propositions and rational statements and appeals to what they saw with their eyes and heard with their ears and, and so on. But the real truth is the truth that these latter day prophets have been given who have this direct pipeline to God. And basically what they were doing was seeking to correct the teaching of the apostles and to supplant the apostles with their own leaders as being the supreme authorities in the Church. So the highest level of redemption was that level that was really limited to the Gnosticoi. And these were the ones who alone had Access to true divine revelation. And their pursuit of this gift of intuition was aided by mystical or mystery rites that again showed heavy reliance upon earlier mystery religions that had these cultic practices, like even in the Dionysian cult, where the Dionysian cult celebrated the festival of Bacchanalia for the God Bacchus. And the idea was that they would become satiated with strong drink to such a point as they would be intoxicated. And that had a religious significance to it, because once they were to a deep level of intoxication, they were now, in a sense, out of their rational minds and now were able to receive this supra, rational, transcendent, special knowledge that you get through Gnosticism. And so they participated in these types of rites as well as into rigorous forms of self denial and asceticism thinking, if they went into starvation modes, that then the mind would come to a certain acute openness to the superior truth. Well, these are only some of the elements of Gnosticism which we will be looking at in, in the days to come. I think it's important for Christians today to be aware of the basic strains of historic Gnosticism, because as I said, these ideas, though they may be quashed for a moment and may even be condemned and driven out of the church at different periods in church history, have a tendency to linger and to stay around and to come back maybe in not quite as organized a fashion or under different pettings and different rubrics and different guises. But the ideas persist and we need to be alert to them when they raise their heads in our day again. That's why I commend this book that was written by Professor Jones on the Gnostic empire. I think is very helpful for Christians who are trying to feel their way through this maze of ideas that sound very much like elementary forms of either Montanism that we've already looked at, or of Gnosticism. And when the promise is given to you that there is a special secret formula, the magic bullet of truth that you can have, apart from the scripture, run from your lives if you want to have a stable Christian life, remember that we are called to try the spirits to see if they be of God. And the place where we know the Holy Spirit is active and speaking is in the Word. And I don't think there's ever been a time in the history of the Church where we more desperately needed to, as it were, tie ourselves to the mast by keeping to the written word of God.
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Oh, how important it is to stay tied to the word of God and not to be carried away by feelings or so called secret knowledge. This is the Monday edition of Renewing youg Mind. I'm glad you're with us today to equip us to defend the faith. This week you'll Hear messages from Dr. Sproul's series on apologetics of the early church, along with messages from his series on how to defend the faith. If you'd like Lifetime digital access to these two series plus a copy of Defending youg Faith on a special edition DVD, simply call us with a donation at 800-435-4343 or give your gift at renewingyourmind.org your support today keeps Renewing youg Mind freely available to listeners around the world. So please give your gift@renewingyourmind.org before this offer ends. Thank you for your generous support. Well, tomorrow RC continues his examination of apologetics in the early church, so I hope you'll join us here on Renewing youg Mind.
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Sam.