JANUARY 19 2014
HOW SHOULD WE THEN LIVE? (Part Three)
THE REAL AMERICAN RELIGION
Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah, pilgrim through this barren land.
Caution: some of you may not like this Part Three.
“Guide me O Thou Great Jehovah” is quite a common Christian hymn: it also is quite unabashedly unchristian. The melody is majestic but the words are pure pagan because it preaches nothing but Gnosticism, that age-old heresy clearly condemned by the early Christian Church, but now so prevalent in Christian North America that we no longer recognize its heretical content: it is indeed a perfect example of the Real American Religion. Perhaps Dietrich Bonhoeffer, after a visit to the USA in the late 1930’s, pinpointed the cause. He lamented that “God has granted American Christianity no Reformation.”
Harold Bloom agrees. This foremost literary critic in his book The American Religion writes “The United States of America is a religion-mad and religion-soaked country. We think we are Christian. But we are not. So creedless is the American Religion that it needs to be tracked by particles rather than by principles. The American Religion is post-Christian, despite its protestations, and even that it has begun to abandon Protestant modes of thought and feeling.”
Bloom argues in his book that the American Religion, which is so prevalent among us, masks itself as Protestant Christianity, yet has ceased to be Christian. It has kept the figure of Jesus, a very solitary and personal American Jesus, who is also the resurrected Jesus rather than the crucified Jesus or the Jesus who ascended again to the Father. He quotes President Eisenhower notorious for remarking that the United States was and had to be a religious nation, and that he didn’t care what religious it had, as long as it had one. Bloom takes a sadder view: “we are, alas, the most religious of countries, and finally only varieties of the American Religion will flourish among us, whether its devotees call it Mormonism, Protestantism, Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, or what-ever-you-will. And the American Religion, for its two centuries of existence, seems to me irretrievably Gnostic. It is a knowing, by and of an uncreated self, or self-within-the-self, and the knowledge (gnosis) leads to freedom, a dangerous and doom-eager freedom, from nature, time, history, and community.”
Bloom shakes his head in unhappy wonderment at the politically correct younger intellectuals, who hope to subvert what they cannot begin to understand, an obsessed society wholly in the grip of a dominant Gnosticism, typified by Fundamentalism. “Fundamentalists are everywhere where learning is too heavy a burden for mortal minds to carry,” observed one American scholar. Writes Bloom: “Fundamentalists, as unwitting Gnostics, do not believe that God made them. Their deepest knowledge is that they are no part of the Creation, but existed as spirits before it, and are as old as God himself.” The most treasured emblems of these people are the flag and the fetus. The paradox is that the fetus must not be aborted, but whether the infant starves or not seems a secondary matter.
Political Power, the Poor and the Bible
This past week Paul Krugman, in his column in the New York Times, wrote: “It’s much more difficult for Republicans, who are having a hard time shaking their reputation for reverse Robin-Hoodism, for being the party that takes from the poor and gives to the rich. And the reason that reputation is so hard to shake is that it’s justified. It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that right now Republicans are doing all they can to hurt the poor, and they would have inflicted vast additional harm if they had won the 2012 election. Moreover, G.O.P. harshness toward the less fortunate isn’t just a matter of spite (although that’s part of it); it’s deeply rooted in the party’s ideology, which is why recent speeches by leading Republicans declaring that they do too care about the poor have been almost completely devoid of policy specifics.”
Yet the Bible and especially the Psalms constantly tell us to protect the poor and look after those who have trouble managing their lives. But, writes Ellen M. Rosenberg in The Southern Baptists: “The Bible is less read than preached less interpreted than brandished…The Book has become a talisman.” This notion of the Bible is not so much Christian as Muslim, and has resulted in a disastrous anti-intellectualism rejecting most of Western intellectual history in favour of an inerrant icon, the limp leather Bible, hardly ever read as Scripture and understood what it really conveys: that God created, that we uncreated and that Jesus rectified the wrong by dying on the cross. Gnosticism’s knowledge is not knowledge in the usual sense. The early church father Irenaeus called it ‘pseudo knowledge’, an aberration of knowledge. Nowhere is this more evident than in American ‘gnosis’, for the end-product of that gnosis is the profound and relentless anti-intellectualism that has plagued and continues to plague American Religion and American Life as a whole.
Why is Gnosticism so wrong?
My NIV study Bible, in its introduction to the letters of John, has this to say: “One of the most dangerous heresies of the first two centuries was Gnosticism. Its central teaching is that spirit is entirely good and matter is entirely evil. From this unbiblical dualism flow the five errors of which the three most important are: (1) Man’s body is evil. (2) Salvation is escape from the body, achieved by special knowledge (gnosis). (3) Christ’s true humanity is denied in two ways: Christ only seemed to have a body, and/or the divine Christ joined the man Jesus at baptism and left him before he died.”
Rev. (Presbyterian) Philip J. Lee wrote Against the Protestant Gnostics. In it he quotes the great Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber: “The perpetual enemy of faith in the true God is not atheism (the claim that there is no God), but rather Gnosticism (the claim that God is known).” The fundamental problem between biblical faith and gnostic faith begins with two different world views. Biblical faith insists that the Creation is well made. Gnosticism denies that there is any direct link between the Creation and God. No wonder (Christian) Stephen Harper, Canada’s P.M., a fanatic adherent of Gnosticism, doesn’t care for Climate Change and pursues Economic Growth at all costs.
Yes, that full-throated- belt- it out- tune of which the opening line is Guide me, O Thou Great Jehovah, Pilgrim through this barren land, is the unadulterated Gnostic gospel. Some versions have replaced Jehovah – which has ‘Witness’ connotations – with Redeemer, but since Gnosticism has no use of redemption (their adherents are pure spirits) this does not make the hymn any better. The song, in a very personal, individualistic way, asks for guidance on the way to heaven, but the Bible is no guide-book to heaven. It always appeals to the corporate body of believers. Faith is the opposite of finding ourselves; it is being found by God. Rev. Lee quotes 1 Cor. 1:9: “God is faithful, by whom you (plural) were called into the fellowship (koinonia) of his Son.” Koinonia is the Greek word Paul used to describe the particular form of participation with one another by which Christians are bound together. The form of the Lord’s Supper also uses koinonia: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation (koinonia) in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break is it not a participation (koinonia) in the body of Christ? In 2 Cor. 13 this is again used: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the fellowship (koinonia) of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
The Kingdom = the Coming of the New Creation
Johan Herman Bavinck, in his forth-coming book, simply called The Kingdom, writes that “the central point of the gospel is not us poor humans and our pain and suffering, but its entire focus is aimed at that unique, that powerful reality that God wants to reinstate his Kingdom. It is God’s intent to unite all fractured parts of his creation into one overarching harmony. There is no such thing as individual salvation. All salvation is of necessity universal. The goal of our life can never be that we personally may enjoy God and be saved in him. The goal of our life can only be that we again become part of the wider context of the Kingdom of God, where all things are again unified under the one and only all?wise will of him who lives and rules for ever.”
Those are revolutionary words in North America bypassed by the Reformation.
So much for the “me” in Guide me. The rest of the line also goes against everything the Bible stands for. Pilgrim through this barren land agitates directly against the Genesis creation story where God, after each phase calls his act of creation ‘good’ and when our cosmos was completed, looked back to see what he had done, called the world and they who dwell there in ‘very good’. Pilgrims? No way. We are ‘adam’: of the earth, forever.
Rev. Lee makes an interesting observation regarding faith healing and speaking in tongues. He writes: “the purpose of such healing is obvious: it is to prove that although nature is evil, is crippling, blinding, deafening, deforming, killing, super-nature is healing, restorative and saving. ….A similar concept is involved in speaking in tongues: (at work is) the breaking of natural language barriers, the refusal to be bound by the linguistic rules of an earthly community.”
Gnosticism sees the function of religion as escape. Moody – after which a Bible Institute is named – in a sermon, told his audience: “I look upon this world as a wrecked vessel. God has given me a lifeboat and said to me, ’Moody, save all you can.’”
It is apparent to me that no denomination is free of Gnosticism. Where some confessions state it differently, almost all church members see Heaven as the believers’ final destination which is nothing else than a form of escapism, an integral part of Gnosticism.
Let me conclude with a quote from Johan Herman Bavinck taken from his magisterial chapter on the Kingdom where God’s Kingdom – the New Creation- is the believer’s final destination.
“In the first place we must realize that God’s Kingdom has a cosmic character, which means that it comprises the entire world as we have come to know it. Not only are we humans part of that Kingdom, but it also includes the world of animals and all plants. Yes, even the angels are part of this wider context: they too have a place in the harmonious totality of God’s Kingdom.
This implies that all parts of the world are attuned to each other. Nowhere is there a false note, a dissonant that disturbs the unity, as everything fits harmoniously into the greater scheme of the totality. This applies both to each individual specimen but equally to the various circles or spheres found in creation. The celestial bodies have their orderly trajectories and do so according to God’s royal will, obeying his voice, and so, in their course they sound a melodious note in the great concert in which all creatures participate. The mountains rise up high above the water?saturated earth, their summits piercing the clouds; they stand there in proud loftiness but even these mountains are nothing but servants of Him who has planted and secured them by his power. On every page the Bible makes plain that the meaning of creation lies only in the one overarching motif: the motif of God’s Kingdom. That is why Scripture and Creation are never at odds: they always form a unity where the one reinforces the other.”
Yes, not heaven, but this renewed earth, God’s Kingdom, so well described by Bavinck, is the Christian’s final ‘resting’ place. The refusal by the Church (even those denominations that treasure J. H. Bavink’s words) to even consider calling God’s Creation holy, is a direct result of gnostic influences.
The church is almost totally preoccupied with the written Word, the Scriptures, which are indeed called Holy. Father, Son and Holy Spirit form a unity. God’s direct Primary Word, Creation and the Written Word also form a unity. Reluctance and refusal to see the two Words as One is a typical characteristic of Gnosticism: we can’t have one without the other.
No wonder Gnosticism is the Real American Religion.
Next week: Part Four: Prophets