The Serpent’s Gnostic Hiss

P. ANDREW SANDLIN, Culture Change, Apr 15, 2023

Gnosticism is an equal opportunity destroyer. Wherever this heresy goes in the church, it dilutes or destroys the Christian Faith. Wherever it goes in our society, it undermines Christian culture.

Dear friends and supporters:

At the core of the serpent’s diabolical appeal to Eve was the seemingly irresistible invitation to step outside creation to evaluate the world neutrally and objectively. How? “You shall be as gods.” God alone sees the world from an objective angle. Because the cosmos depends before everything else on the Creator-creation distinction, to attempt to erase that distinction is cosmic insurrection. The devilish temptation for Eve to succumb to “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life” (1 Jn. 2:16) appealed to an insurrectionist impulse possible within creation.

By contrast, the temptation to “be as gods” invited a contra-cosmic insurrectionist impulse — “Eve, God’s creation is your big problem. What you need — and can become — is a rival creator.”

Eve was the first Gnostic initiate, and Satan the first Gnostic professor. 

All religions and philosophy must face up to one obvious fact. There are great defects in the world, great evil: hatred, murder, resentment, storms, earthquakes, heartbreak, and death. The world is obviously not what it’s supposed to be, at least not what it could be. How do we account for this? The Christian answer is simple: sin. Sometime in eternity past, God’s highly placed angel Lucifer fell, and he eventually seduced our first parents, Adam and Eve, to fall also. All of the evil that we see around us is the result of this first sin, which we ourselves also bring into the world at our birth. We call this Original Sin. This explains why there is evil and disappointment and anguish in the world.

Gender, a postmodern multivalent substitute for binary (creational) sex, is fluid reality writ large. Reality isn’t something to which we conform; reality is what we say it is.

The Gnostics, the earliest and most pernicious and ever reemerging heretics in the church, gave a much different answer. For them, the defect is in creation itself. Man is not chiefly at fault. Nor is Lucifer. The creation itself is at fault. This means that the Creator is at fault. Creation is the evil from which man needs deliverance.

The Gnostics see the human body as a cage or prison of The Authentic [spiritual, non-material] Self. Salvation isn’t forgiveness of and rescue from sin, as the Bible teaches, but liberation from the material created order. This means the human body, whose creational reality wars against The Authentic Self. This Gnosticism afflicts both postmodern culture and theology. 

Recent Gnostic Culture 

Transsexual “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney has captured the national imaginationby his perverse “365 Days of Girlhood” and his partnership with Bud Light and Nike. The trans collusion with the stalwart conservative Anheuser-Busch corporation discloses the penetrating inroads of the most perverse elements of the Sexual Revolution (SR) in traditionally conservative corporate America, and Kid Rock’s shotgunning a pyramid of Bud Light cans as a textbook conservative reaction will do nothing but repulse the citizen spectators who find both transgender and redneck exhibitionism distasteful.

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