These Three

Thank you, oh, so much, Skip! This is so awesome! This helps me so very much. You said it so well.

So gnosticism says the animal we call a duck is a collection of attributes that you can list and hold in your mind, but the Bible says the only way to hold a duck is to catch one?

In Skip’s book, God, Time, And The Limits Of Omniscience, he lists those attributes of God that gnosticism gives us, and we dutifully check it off whenever we think we see a God (hmm, let’s see; does this God have omniscience (check), omnipotence (check), etc; IF SO, then He must be God). I don’t think he is saying that God is not powerful or that He cannot make statements (we call them “prophecies”) about what we see as the ‘future’: I hear him saying that those attributes do not DEFINE Him: He, in fact, gives those attributes whatever ‘meaning’ that they do have. “All-powerful”, then, is not a statement about God: “God” is a statement about power.

We get upset, for example, whenever we think we see God acting in ways that seem to suggest that He does NOT ‘have’ (exercise) complete power, but power itself is a choice God makes; it is not a thing He is. I see us getting upset when we think we see Him doing things that ‘limit’ (or negate, even) whatever attributes we have made into our God checklist, but isn’t that because we forget that those things have no meaning except what being God gives to them? We say “oh, God CANNOT or MUST do – or be – whatever”, not knowing that that is a gnostic statement; for, of course, God can choose to do whatever He likes to get the job of love done.

I have a suspicion that argument itself is a gnostic invention, for argument is unique in that it has to exist on a platform of agreed-upon, or, shared, attributes: you cannot argue apples and oranges, for example. This is why it is impossible to ‘argue’ with the truths in the Bible, for they do not ‘share’ attributes with anyone or anything: they DEFINE them. This has to produce one giant gnostic squirm in all of us.

Yeshua pointedly NEVER made a qualifying (gnostic?) statement about Himself – Who exactly He is. I see people questioning Him then (and now!) about this, but we are left with the task of making that statement ourselves (faith). I have noticed He did not show up and tell everybody “I am God”, or “I am NOT God”; surely the gnostic in us has to be going crazy over this! It is!

We are left with what He did say. He did not say “I have come to tell you about the Father” (gnostic statement). He said “I have come to SHOW you the Father” (functional statement). He lived in an age where false messiahs were rampant. He never said point blank “I AM Messiah”. He obliquely referred to verses in the Tanakh about Messiah, leaving people to draw their own conclusions.

Statements of knowledge leave no room for faith; no room to draw our own conclusions. Statements of fact, in fact(!) leave no room for choice; no room for our own conclusions or resulting practice. Gnosticism, and its attendant ‘facts’, has left a long, sad history of force in its wake, for the facts of knowledge leave no room for choice; only compliance or noncompliance. Gnosticism has started most of our wars and crusades and inquisitions. You are either ‘right’ or wrong’. With gnosticism, its always Judgment Day; forget choice. I have noticed God never has operated like that: He has always left it up to us (free will). Hmm

The life we live is the “statement” of our belief or otherwise in the Messiah. A reflection of God’s glory or the detritus of our own messy chaotic creation. We choose. Choose life.

Had a perfect illustration of this on my way home from the Y this morning . I was listening to the local Christian radio station. The nationally known radio preacher [I’ll protect the guilty, although we attended the same seminary] was preaching out of the book of Revelation. He was talking about how different churches were not living up to Christ’s expectations. In the midst of this message, he references a man who “DOESN’T VIOLATE DOCTRINE”, i.e., one who doesn’t deviate from Christian dogma. In other words, it is a “sin” to deviate from established Christian dogma. Is this not Gnostic to the core? Two years ago, I would have been completely ignorant of this mental conceptualization and deification of Christian dogma. I say deification because it is tightly and vociferously protected. When someone gets off the Evangelical or Fundamental Christian dogma rails, the wheels come off the train and salvation is put in jeopardy or lost [or if they are of the Calvinist variety, “he was never saved to begin with”]. Persecution follows.

Another illustration. I had a long-time Christian friend, within the last year, accuse ME of becoming Gnostic by “falling into Hebrew Roots.” [He also graduated from the same seminary, pastors a church, and travels extensively throughout Latin America preaching the “Gospel.”] But he didn’t say this to my face. This libelous accusation was sent in an eight page letter to my wife [without my knowledge or communicating with me] excoriating me, my character, and the “cult” I was now a part of. My wife is so distraught over my “defection” from Christianity, that she now believes I have violated my marriage vows, committed spiritual adultery, probably not “saved,” and have destroyed our marriage. Why? I practice Shabbat and fellowship with members of a “cult.” I am “under the law” and “trying to work my way to heaven.” You know the mantra.

I said all that to illustrate just how potent Gnosticism is. In the Western mind, knowledge isn’t just power, it is King. It rules with an iron fist and spares no expense to crush its subjects. Yes, Skip, you are right. Gnosticism is alive and well in the twenty-first century. But, “Greater is He who is in you, than he who is in the world.”