I John 1:1-6 Who were the Gnostics
Who were the Gnostics?
The readers of John's letters were confronted with an attractive yet dangerous challenge to the truth, a religious system called Gnosticism. This term comes from the Greek word for knowledge. The goal of this movement was to acquire secret spiritual insight and special knowledge and thereby achieve a state of existence higher than the norm: enlightenment.
The Gnostics believed in two spheres of reality. The physical world was evil and inferior while the spirit-mind world was good and worthy. One of Gnosticism's ideas, therefore, was that Christ could not have had an actual body. To be truly good, the real Jesus was necessarily a phantom or spirit.
Gnosticism produced two kinds of followers: those who pursued an ascetic life, shunning the evil physical world with its false sensual pleasures; and others who indulged in the physical world precisely because it was inferior. For this group, physical pleasure was okay because it was irrelevant to the "real world," namely, the spiritual.
Both versions of Gnosticism perverted biblical teaching about the value of material creation, the relevance of stewardship over the earth (including our bodies), and the importance of moral care. To imagine that Jesus was mere spirit was extremely dangerous to the Bibles consistent teaching that God became a man. To seek enlightenment in abstracted ideas was to direct the soul away from the personal God of love. John directed early believers to avoid this heresy, as we should today. Learn the faith from biblical Christians, not from followers of strange aberrations like this.
Who were the Gnostics?
The readers of John's letters were confronted with an attractive yet dangerous challenge to the truth, a religious system called Gnosticism. This term comes from the Greek word for knowledge. The goal of this movement was to acquire secret spiritual insight and special knowledge and thereby achieve a state of existence higher than the norm: enlightenment.
The Gnostics believed in two spheres of reality. The physical world was evil and inferior while the spirit-mind world was good and worthy. One of Gnosticism's ideas, therefore, was that Christ could not have had an actual body. To be truly good, the real Jesus was necessarily a phantom or spirit.
Gnosticism produced two kinds of followers: those who pursued an ascetic life, shunning the evil physical world with its false sensual pleasures; and others who indulged in the physical world precisely because it was inferior. For this group, physical pleasure was okay because it was irrelevant to the "real world," namely, the spiritual.
Both versions of Gnosticism perverted biblical teaching about the value of material creation, the relevance of stewardship over the earth (including our bodies), and the importance of moral care. To imagine that Jesus was mere spirit was extremely dangerous to the Bibles consistent teaching that God became a man. To seek enlightenment in abstracted ideas was to direct the soul away from the personal God of love. John directed early believers to avoid this heresy, as we should today. Learn the faith from biblical Christians, not from followers of strange aberrations like this.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment