Transcript

Welcome back to Shameless Popery, I'm Joe Heschmeyer, and today I want to explore the Gnostic strain within Protestantism.

And in saying that, I want to be clear up front, I'm not claiming that all Protestants are Gnostics, nor am I saying that only Protestants find themselves tempted by Gnosticism.

But there is a long-standing connection between Gnosticism and Protestantism that I think needs to be called out and condemned.

So, to get there, let's first say, what is Gnosticism?

Then, why does the Bible condemn Gnosticism as Antichrist?

And then, how has this perverted theology found a home within our world, and particularly within elements of Protestant worship and theology?

So to start with that, what is Gnosticism?

I think James White does a good job of capturing what we mean when we talk about Gnosticism.

Gnosticism is a complicated group of ideas, a group of ideologies.

Not every Gnostic believes the same thing.

Nevertheless, I think this is a good, quick, shorthand kind of summary of what we mean when we talk about Gnostics.

Gnosticism is basically a dualistic system.

That which is physical is evil, that which is spiritual is good.

And so man's problem is, you are good on the inside.

Your spiritual self is good, but you're trapped in this evil body.

And salvation is to get out of this evil body, and to be that spark of the divine within you, to be absorbed back into the One.

Roger Olson, the Baptist theologian and professor, puts it like this in his book, The Story of Christian Theology.

In a nutshell, the Gnostics believe that matter, including the body, is an inherently limiting prison or even evil drag on the good soul or spirit of the human person.

And that the spirit is essentially divine, the spark of God dwelling in the tomb of the body.

So where do we see that kind of idea floating around today?

Well, before we get into the particularly distinctively obviously Protestant kind of versions of it, I want to talk about two popular figures, Oprah Winfrey and Jordan Peterson.

First, here's Oprah talking about her own kind of vision of spirituality, and how she considers it something distinct from her Christianity.

We're taking a chance as we tap into our spiritual side.

Anybody know what their spiritual side is?

That's good.

I am not talking about religion.

I am not talking about religion.

I am a Christian.

That is my faith.

I'm not asking you to be a Christian.

If you want to be one, I can show you how.

Okay, so clearly she's saying, I'm a Christian.

But in addition to my Christianity, there's this other thing called spirituality.

What does that mean?

Well, here's how she explains it.

That there is no life without a spiritual life.

I want to say that again.

There is no life without a spiritual life.

Because we are all spiritual beings having a human experience.

So are you ready to open your heart?

Are you ready?

Think about that.

The same crowd that cheered when she said she was a Christian and could show them how to be Christians also cheers when she lays out this clearly Gnostic vision.

This idea that we are spirit beings who are just kind of having a bodily experience.

And if that's something you believe as a Christian, I need you to know right now, that is not what Christians believe historically.

That is not what the Bible teaches about the body.

We are not just spiritual beings having a bodily experience.

That's the heresy of Gnosticism.

We're just like trapped here in these meat suits.

That is not what Christianity teaches.

That's not what this is about.

I'm going to get in more about like why that's wrong in a few.

But for now, I want to highlight a second thinker.

This is Jordan Peterson.

Now, Peterson can be a little elusive, a little hard to pin down in terms of which things he thinks are literally true and which are just nice images within Christianity.

But I think Alex O'Connor, who is a young atheist, very well-spoken on these things, does a good job of trying to pin him on the question that if you treat it all like the resurrection, that sort of thing, as just this beautiful kind of image, that actually sounds much more like Gnosticism.

And Peterson, for his part, acknowledges that and recognizes that the body has to be of great dignity to be authentically Christian.

In that early church community, somebody who said, well, this question of like the resurrection as a physical, you know, historical event, you're kind of missing the point.

The thing that matters is like, you know, the resurrection that takes place inside of every person.

Yeah.

It sort of sounds a little bit like the kind of approach that you would take.

Now, if that's true, that would mean that in the early church, you'd have been condemned as a heretic.

Yeah.

So when a modern Catholic says to you, you know, Jordan Peterson, are you a Christian?

You know, what do you think about Catholicism?

I think that the reason that they're interested is because if it's true what I'm saying, then they would have to say, oh, I suppose at least according to my understanding of Catholicism.

That's a form of Gnosticism.

Like, I can't count you among my number.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think that's probably why people are interested.

And I wonder if you agree...

Well, that's a genuine...

What would you say?

That would constitute a genuine form of inquiry for sure.

I wonder if you feel like you're...

I mean, I don't know.

See, one of the things I really like about the bodily tradition of the resurrection is that it...

See, what it does that's so remarkable is that it doesn't desacralize the body.

That's very, very important.

You know, I think the fundamental problem with Gnosticism is that it becomes a... It's very easy for it to become a doctrine that's contemptuous of the body and contemptuous of the material world.

A great deal of the Gnostic tradition literally believes that the material world is created by an evil demon.

Right, exactly.

Well, exactly, exactly, exactly.

And the insistence on the bodily resurrection is a medication against that.

It's an effective one.

All right.

So that's it in a nutshell.

If you just say the resurrection is a nice image, but it doesn't matter if it's historically true, then you sound much more like the Gnostics.

And the response is, as Peterson rightly recognizes, is to recognize that there is a centrality to the body.

What Gnosticism is presenting is completely opposite Christianity.

Gnosticism has rightly been condemned as Antichrist in the pages of the New Testament.

Well, why is that?

Okay, well, first of all, in 2 John, in verse 7, it's just one chapter, so chapter 1, verse 7, if you want to put it that way, he says, Many deceivers have gone out into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh.

Such a one is the deceiver and the Antichrist.

When we're talking about Antichrist, that word gets bandied about in Christian circles, often with no sense of where it comes from in the Bible.

And it's here.

The Antichrist is the one who denies Jesus' coming in the flesh.

Meaning, so there's different schools of Gnosticism, I kind of intimated.

And the most extreme form of Gnosticism, and you heard Alex O'Connor kind of allude to it as well, views Christ coming in the flesh nearly as symbolic.

He wasn't actually bodily.

He wasn't physically real.

Because the flesh is evil.

Like, if you actually buy this premise, that we're all just spirit beings having a bodily experience, or if you buy the premise that our souls are good and our bodies are bad, this kind of dualistic idea, then it follows from that, that you can't affirm much of the Gospel whatsoever.

I'm going to take seven basic points you can't affirm.

The Incarnation, Jesus' public ministry, the institution of the Eucharist, the creation of the Church as the body of Christ, Jesus' bodily crucifixion, Jesus' bodily resurrection, and our own bodily resurrection.

I'm going to go through these very quickly, giving you explicit passages from the Bible that don't square up with Gnosticism.

Number one, the Incarnation.

John begins his Gospel by saying, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

This divine Word, he then says, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.

Well, if flesh is evil, then you have to say the Word became evil and dwelt among us.

That just launches the whole thing, because then, flash forward from the Incarnation, 30 years to Jesus' public ministry, and Jesus is going about Galilee, teaching in the synagogues, preaching the Gospel of the Kingdom, and here's the kicker, healing every disease and every infirmity among the people.

Why is Jesus healing physical bodies, if physical bodies are prisons?

Like, imagine the great liberator comes, and instead of unlocking the key to your cell, he just spruces it up, so your prison is slightly nicer.

He fixes the water pipe that's broken.

That would be what you'd have to say, if the body is simply a prison of the soul.

Third, the institution of the Eucharist.

In John 6, we're going to get back to this in a big way, Jesus says, unless you eat the flesh and the blood of man, and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

So he is tying, in some way, the eating of his flesh and blood, in the Eucharist, with eternal life.

So the institution of the Eucharist, ends up being this really critical point, in the early fights between the Gnostics and the Christians.

Now, there's much that could be said, you can read Ignatius and Irenaeus on this, in the 100s, and they keep pointing out, that one of the major fault lines, between Christians and Gnostics, is Christians believe the Eucharist, is really the body and blood of Jesus, and Gnostics don't. Next, the church as the body of Christ.

What do I mean by that?

In Ephesians 5, St. Paul reminds us, that no man ever hates his own flesh.

Critical line.

No man ever hates his own flesh, but nourishes it and cherishes it, as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

So the whole relationship of Christ and the church, of head and body, presupposes the goodness of the body.

That you love your body, and that you are right to do so.

St. Augustine talks about this, and he points out that, a lot of people think they don't love their body, but imagine if it was somebody else.

Imagine if your body was actually, like somebody else's body.

If I said, oh I hate that person, but you found out I was feeding them multiple times a day, I was bathing them, and taking care of them, and making sure they got a good night's rest, and everything else, you'd say, I don't know, you don't seem to hate them, you seem to be taking incredible care of them.

But even the person who claims to hate themselves, is still eating and drinking, and you know, washing hopefully, and sleeping, and doing all of these things, they're taking care of their body, even if they have this complicated relationship with it.

So that idea, that no man ever hates his own flesh, we cannot hate our own bodies, the level we can hate somebody else's. We just can't. And getting that is important to understanding, Jesus' relationship to the Church, which St. Paul famously calls, the Body of Christ, which again, presupposes the body as something good, not evil.

Now if you look at Jesus' crucifixion, he bore our sins in his body, on the tree of the cross.

That's what we get from 1 Peter 2. And then of course, his resurrection.

It's emphasized, contra-gnosticism, that even when Jesus rises from the dead, he is still bodily.

Jesus says himself in the Gospel of Luke, See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.

Handle me and see, for a spirit has not flesh and bones, as you see that I have.

So the resurrection, even though St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15, talks about how it's sown a physical body, and rises a spiritual body, spiritual there does not mean, disembodied.

Because it doesn't mean, spiritual like a spirit, a ghost.

It's not a ghostly body.

It is transformed.

It is more than, what it had been before, with physical limitations, but it is still the one in the same body.

And notice that Jesus says, it is I myself, not my meat suit, not the place I'm having a physical experience, or a bodily experience.

He is identifying his body, with him himself.

And contrasting that, with a disembodied spiritual experience.

Finally, all of that prefigures, our own resurrection.

Right?

As St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, as I just alluded to, In fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.

For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.

Meaning, our ultimate salvation, is rising again bodily, not just being spiritually united with Christ.

You might say, that last point seems not controversial.

And here, I think we have a nice segue into, the Gnostic strain within Protestantism.

So, I want to be clear about a couple things, kind of at the outset here.

First of all, again, as I said at the beginning, I'm not saying all Protestants are Gnostics.

Or even if they're consciously adhering to Gnosticism.

Anything like that.

I'm instead arguing, number one, that the Gnostic ideas, of the relationship between the soul and body, are very much in the intellectual air that we breathe.

There's a reason, you know, that's why I looked at Oprah Winfrey, Jordan Peterson, there's plenty of other people saying Gnostic sounding things regularly.

And number two, these Gnostic sounding ideas, which are often directly anti-Christ, are sometimes used by Protestants, specific Protestants, not all, in arguing against Catholicism, in arguing against Catholic things, like the idea that baptism does something, that the Eucharist really is Jesus, all those things.

The arguments against it, if you listen to them, are sometimes like, wait a second, that's not even a Christian argument, that's a Gnostic argument.

I'll give you plenty of examples, just bear with me.

So sometimes, what motivates people to reject, kind of the ideas about the sacraments, essentially the Eucharist, is this misunderstanding of the relationship of the body to salvation.

And in getting there, I want to highlight several kind of figures, but I want to highlight two in particular.

Fake C.S. Lewis, I'll explain what I mean by that, and the real Charles Spurgeon.

I'll explain who that is in a minute.

But before I get there, I want to just point out that this is not something that like, I just am saying as a non-Protestant.

This isn't just like a Catholic looking in on Protestantism saying, sounds kind of Gnostic.

Plenty of Evangelicals are sounding the alarm about Gnosticism within their own ranks.

So, for instance, Abigail Favalle, who teaches at George Fox University, wrote a piece called Evangelical Gnosticism for First Things Magazine back in 2018. And she makes a point.

She says, I teach in a great books program at an Evangelical University.

Almost all students in the program are born and bred Christians of the non-denominational variety.

A number of them have been both thoroughly churched and educated through Christian schools or homeschooling curricula.

So, these are not just like surface level nominal Christians.

These are people who have made the decision to go to a Christian college.

Yet, she says, an overwhelming majority of these students do not believe in a bodily resurrection.

A majority, she says.

Now, I can't pull those numbers up myself, but experientially, plenty of Evangelical authors have said similar things for decades now.

In Favalle's words, while they trust in an afterlife of eternal bliss with God, most of them assume that this will be disembodied bliss, in which the soul is finally free of its meat suit, a term they fondly use.

Now, she goes on to explain, that's not Christianity.

That's not historic Christianity whatsoever.

It's not the Bible presents of salvation, anything like that.

That is much more Gnostic sounding.

Now, this idea of being free from the prison of the body, free from the meat suit, which are all explicitly Gnostic sounding, you find things that sound like that in the Reformers.

So, John Calvin, the Calvinist Reformer, obviously, in Institutes of Christian Religion, says that Christ, in commending his spirit to the Father, and Stephen, his spirit, that is, to Christ, simply means that when the soul is freed from the prison house of the body, God becomes its perpetual keeper.

Now, maybe he doesn't mean Soma Sema, the early, like, Platonic and Gnostic expression, that the body is just a prison.

But he is describing the body as a prison house for the soul, which, again, is hard to square.

Now, I realize that you can find, sometimes even in medieval Catholicism, speaking in that way, with such an exaggerated kind of role of the wretchedness of the body.

But that is not Christianity.

Like, that is not the proper understanding of the body laid out by the New Testament or affirmed by the Church for 2,000 years.

So, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to take this one line and build too much of it, except to say that it isn't just, like, modern evangelicals that are saying things that sound like the body is just a bad thing.

You can find that much earlier.

But it doesn't square, as I say, with historic Christianity.

Contrast it with the Nicene Creed, which says we look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

The resurrection of the dead is not a spiritual resurrection.

We already believe that you will be spiritually with God before that.

But that's not the end of things.

That we are looking forward to the days in which our soul, already present with God, is reunited with our now glorified body.

Going back to Favala here, she says this, she says, Without a guiding light to orthodoxy, young evangelicals are developing heterodox sensibilities that are at odds with the Christian understanding of personhood.

The body is associated with sin, the soul with holiness.

Moreover, this sense of the body, especially under the alias flesh, tends to be hyper-sexualized.

And so she makes a point that there is this extreme focus on sexual sin and an under-emphasis on the less bodily forms of sin, you know, pride, that sort of thing.

And that this is a total perversion, a total distortion of Christianity.

It is, you know, again, to quote St. John's words, Antichrist.

To view the body in this way, as just like the body is the problem, completely misunderstands the spiritual problem that we're facing.

So here, I want to transition into Real vs. Fake C.S. Lewis.

There is a fake C.S. Lewis quote that many years ago, I fell for.

I think like 13 years ago.

So, look, past me, not perfect.

And, when you actually think about the quote, it is, well, here's the quotation.

Again, this is not really C.S. Lewis, but it is widely quoted, by Protestants usually, as being Lewis and usually in a positive sense.

You don't have a soul.

You are the soul.

You have a body.

Now, as I say, I fell for this many years ago.

And at the time, it was like, oh, it's great to see somebody affirming the goodness and existence of the soul instead of all these atheists saying we don't have souls.

And maybe that's what's going on when this fake C.S. Lewis quote gets quoted by people like John Piper or Ravi Zacharias, who actually quotes it in one of his books.

But the reality is, if you actually think about what is being said there, it's just false.

You are not just a soul who has a body.

You're not just a spiritual person having a bodily experience.

You're the union of body and soul.

And C.S. Lewis actually got that.

So, Joe Rigney, in his book, Lewis on the Christian Life, Rigney is an evangelical author, I believe, and he is quoting Lewis favorably.

That, in contrast to that kind of vision, Christianity insists God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature.

And then there's an ellipsis.

And the line continues.

He likes matter.

He invented it.

Now, Rigney is not doing full service to his quotation.

I get it.

It's a book.

You have to make editorial decisions.

You can't quote everybody at length on everything.

But it does seem striking to me that, for an evangelical audience, what Lewis actually said is kind of censored because what Lewis actually said...

I like that these are actually Lewis's words, unlike Piper and Zacharias quoting an imaginary version of Lewis, where it's not anything he ever said.

But here, it's still censored because Lewis actually uses the Blessed Sacrament, even though he's a Protestant, an Anglican, he uses the Blessed Sacrament as an example of how God wants to work spiritually in a bodily way.

He does this in mere Christianity.

That's where this line is coming from.

And I'm going to give you a lengthy version, maybe more lengthy than I need to, just to make sure you get the context.

He says, when Christians speak of being in Christ, or Christ being in them, that is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ, or copying him.

They mean that Christ is actually operating through them.

That the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts.

We are his fingers and muscles, the cells of his body.

And perhaps that explains one or two things.

It explains why this new life, meaning the life of grace, is spread not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion.

It is not merely the spreading of an idea.

It is more like evolution, a biological or super-biological fact.

Now, we're going to get into this, because as you're going to see, people like Charles Spurgeon, who we're going to talk about in a few, really object to that idea, this Christian idea, that the new life is spread in not just mental ways, but in bodily ways through things like baptism and Holy Communion.

He rejects that communion or baptism can do anything, because he rejects the idea of the body having this role to play in salvation.

But this is clearly a difference of opinion.

Lewis goes on to say, there is no good trying to be more spiritual than God.

This is where it gets quoted earlier.

God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature.

That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us.

We may think this rather crude and unspiritual.

God does not.

He invented eating.

He likes matter.

He invented it.

So you can see Lewis' actual lines are much more Eucharistic sounding.

Even though, again, Lewis is not completely with Catholics on Eucharistic theology, he at least has a much higher view and recognizes that God is doing something bodily and spiritually in the Eucharist.

It's a pretty fascinating kind of line.

You see, frankly, how close Lewis is at times to the Catholic vision of things.

Okay, but I want to turn from Lewis, who gets things largely right, to Charles Spurgeon, who gets things largely wrong.

And I'm not just choosing Charles Spurgeon because he's extremely handsome.

I'm joking there.

For those who aren't watching the video, I've been compared to him numerous times, which I don't know is a compliment, but I'll take it because it is absolutely accurate.

But I quote Spurgeon because he has this incredible place within certain elements of Protestantism.

Spurgeon is easily regarded the greatest Baptist preacher who has ever lived.

But I would add to that, he is the greatest preacher of the English language who has ever lived.

I would add to that, Spurgeon I think is arguably the greatest preacher since the Apostle Paul.

And look, I want to agree.

Spurgeon is a brilliant preacher.

He is extremely eloquent.

Unfortunately, he is often completely wrong.

And so I want to focus on a particular sermon that he preached in 1865 called A Blow for Puseyism.

Puseyism is high church Anglicanism, and so the most famous kind of devotee of this movement was Pusey's kind of protege, John Henry Newman, who famously becomes a Catholic cardinal and now a saint.

But it was a movement in the 19th century, Anglican church, to try to restore its connections to Catholicism and make it less Protestant, more Catholic kind of religion.

In any case, he's going to respond to Puseyism and by extension to Catholic visions of things more broadly by relying on basically a single verse that he quotes over and over and over again.

John 6, 63 in which Jesus says It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail.

The words that I've spoken to your spirit and life.

Now, I've done an entire video on this, but I need to briefly say something on it because it is a pretty major part of his objection.

In this context, the question is, is Jesus deriding his own flesh?

Or is he deriding the value of our unaided flesh?

And the answer is very clearly the second one.

Our unaided flesh is of no avail.

And we know this for several reasons.

First, from John 6 itself, earlier in the passage Jesus says that the bread which he'll give for the life of the world is my flesh.

So when he talks about my flesh, he does not say it is worthless.

He describes it as salvific.

And then a couple of verses later he says, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.

He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.

So clearly his flesh is of tremendous value.

And so how should we understand this passage?

Well, flesh is used in several ways, but when we talk about the flesh as opposed to the Spirit, we don't mean you know, body bad, soul good, the way the Gnostics do.

We mean instead, unaided humanity is incapable of doing the things necessary.

St. Paul talks about this explicitly in Romans 8. He says, those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh.

But those who live according to the Spirit set their minds on the things of the Spirit.

So who are you trying to gratify?

Yourself or God?

It doesn't mean you are wicked and evil and awful, but if you are taking the place of God, that is wicked.

Like if you are serving yourself rather than God, you're serving the flesh.

Even if what you're doing is at the level of, as St. Paul says here, the mind.

Likewise in Ephesians 2, he says, among these we all once lived in the passions of our flesh, which doesn't mean sexual passions like it might to an evangelical ear.

He says, following the desires of body and mind.

That's much bigger than sexuality.

This means that there can be purely disembodied things, like for instance, pride, that are still fleshly in this sense of flesh.

Fleshly here does not mean bodily.

You'll notice in this use of flesh, Paul explicitly highlights both body and mind.

So if your idea that flesh to Paul or to John means body, when it's used in this negative sense, it does not.

And you can see that in several places like here.

Augustine talks about this.

I'm going to get into that.

But what you need to know here is that's not how Spurgeon reads this.

Spurgeon reads it in a much more Gnostic way.

To say, okay, well if John 6.63 is true, that the Spirit gives life and the flesh is of no avail, that must mean, for instance, that true Christianity is this internal thing rather than an external thing.

The Jews commonly thought that religion lay in ceremonial observances, in eating certain meats, or abstinence from them, in washings of the hands before meat, in diverse baptisms, in going up to the temple to pray, and such like outward performances.

Jesus tells them to their faces that this flesh religion profiteth nothing.

It is dead, unquickened, and unquickening.

So if all this external stuff that he keeps saying the Jews tried is just ceremonial and worthless, what is true religion according to this view?

What then is the life of godliness?

What is the vitality and essence of acceptable worship?

His answer virtually is It is not your outward observances but your inward emotions, desires, believings and adorings which are living worship.

Then he adds, in effect, My words are not concerning outward observances, but are of a spiritual character.

I come not to you with touch not, taste not, handle not, or with wash, vow, stand, sit, kneel.

My words deal with inner life and spirit and are addressed to your spiritual natures.

The words which I speak unto you are spirit and life.

Our first point will be the unprofitable flesh, the external observances of religion in themselves utterly unprofitable.

So that's the contrast.

I mean, you could not have said this better if you were just directly quoting an Gnostic.

That all the external stuff is completely worthless and all that matters is this interior thing.

Your thoughts and emotions and feelings and all that.

That is quite opposite Scripture.

Like, religion that is pure and undefiled before God according to James, in James 127 Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is as to visit orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

Now you'll notice that involves external actions.

Likewise, when St. Paul is describing spiritual worship, he doesn't mean spiritual worship as disembodied.

He says instead, in Romans 12 This is the contrast you're going to see.

St. Paul's idea of spiritual worship is bodily worship.

Spurgeon's idea of spiritual worship is disembodied, purely internal worship.

This impacts how they view everything else.

Spurgeon, for instance, argues strongly against the Eucharist.

As I alluded to earlier, this is at the heart of why he's preaching this.

He's really upset about this idea that some Anglicans want to restore a higher vision of what the Eucharist is.

Ultimately, Spurgeon is going to make a couple of arguments against the Eucharist.

He just thinks it's ridiculous to think that Christ could give us his body and blood to eat and drink.

And in fairness, that was the same reaction the Jews had in John 6. This sounds too fantastical to be true.

That's not an unexpected reaction.

But he then argues that actually this can't be true, because if it was true, it would just be cannibalism.

Ironically, St. Augustine, when he's talking about what John 6.63 means, he points out that a fleshly understanding of Jesus' words, the kind that he prohibits us from taking, would be that to eat his flesh and drink his blood, we have to cut his flesh into pieces like a carcass.

In other words, to imagine that the only way we could receive Christ's body and blood, truly, would be to eat his flesh and drink his blood, would be to cut his flesh into pieces like a carcass.

To perceive Christ's body and blood, truly, is, through cannibalism in this way, just like ripping him up, shows one not being quickened by the Spirit in their understanding.

This is Augustine's argument, that Spurgeon's interpretation is fleshly.

Now, obviously, he's not directly responding to Spurgeon, because Augustine's alive in the 300s.

Spurgeon is 1,600 years later repeating the same errors that Augustine warns against of misinterpreting John 6.63. But Spurgeon's second argument, or really, third, if you count the just laughing at it as an argument, so you've got scoffing at it, you've got, oh no, this would be cannibalism, and then third, you have him articulating explicitly the view that grace can't work through the body, which is a shockingly Gnostic misunderstanding of grace.

And in the next place, you cannot derive any virtue therefrom, for Jesus Christ tells you at once, it is the Spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing.

If you did actually eat the very body of Christ, it would affect your digestive and secretive organs, and through them your flesh, just as other bread, or if you like it better, other flesh would do.

But how could this affect your heart and soul?

Does grace operate through the stomach and savor through our bowels?

Prove this, and you will make converts of us.

Great, I would love to prove that, and hopefully make converts of anyone buying into this Gnostic view.

To begin with, look at the manna in the desert.

In John 6, Jesus compares the Eucharist to the manna, and in 1 Corinthians 10, St. Paul describes it as our spiritual, sometimes it's translated supernatural, but the word there is literally spiritual food.

So spiritual food, according to St. Paul, includes the manna which was eaten at a bodily level.

St. Gregory of Nyssa, another one of the early Christians, also writing in the 300s, says that since the human being is a two-fold creature, compounded of soul and body, St. C.S. Lewis uses the example of man being an amphibian, you know, it's this union of body and soul.

You're not just your body, you're not just your soul.

You're the union of those two things.

You're a two-fold creature in Gregory's words.

He says, therefore it is necessary that the saved should lay hold of the author of the new life through both their component parts, that Christ in other words, does not just come into the world to save your soul, but to save your body as well, because he wants to save all of you.

This is why the incarnation is necessary.

The early Christians were very fond of saying that which is not assumed is not redeemed.

That Christ doesn't become an animal, and so we don't believe that animals receive divine life.

Christ does become a man.

This is why it matters that he's fully God and fully man.

That he has a human body and a human soul, and even a human will contrary to modern Protestants like William Lane Craig.

He needs to be fully human if he's going to save us in the fullness of our humanity.

What Gregory of Nyssa is saying here okay, so he wants to save us both body and soul.

How does he save us at the level of the soul?

Very clearly.

The soul being fused into him through faith, derives from that the means and occasions of salvation.

That if we were merely souls and not bodies, if we were like angels, disembodied creatures, if we were just spirit beings having a bodily experience, then faith alone could save you.

But it can't, because that would only save your soul and not your body.

And so he says, the body comes into fellowship and blending with the author of our salvation in another way.

What way is that you might ask?

Well, in no other way can anything enter within the body but by being transfused through the vitals by eating and drinking.

So now, the Eucharist suddenly makes more sense, because the soul receives things through faith and contemplation, the body receives things by eating them and drinking them.

And so Jesus comes to us in both ways.

Gregory concludes, since that body which was the receptacle of the deity received this grace of immortality, and since it has been shown that in no other way was it possible for our body to become immortal, but by participating in incorruption through its fellowship with that immortal body, therefore, he's going to say in a much longer passage I'm not going to quote all of, we need the Eucharist.

That's early Christianity.

Now notice here, this isn't paganism.

This isn't like, oh, the Eucharist came in from pagan ideas.

No! The pagans were the ones who were arguing for this Gnostic idea of disembodied salvation, and the Christians, looking at Jesus and how he heals body and soul, were saying, that's not it.

Now the third thing I'd point out here is that even though Spurgeon doesn't believe that the body has this role to play in grace, he does view eating as being really important for sin.

This is a fascinating double standard.

Here he is talking about Adam and Eve.

Adam in the garden wanted no salvation.

He was perfect, pure, clean, holy, and acceptable.

Before God he was our representative.

He stood as the representative for all the race.

And when he touched the forbidden fruit, and ate of the tree of which God had said, you shall not eat thereof, or you shall surely die.

When he so transgressed against God, he needed a savior.

And we, his offspring through his sin, are born into this world, each of us needing a savior.

I find that double standard bizarre and fascinating.

Because he's completely comfortable with the idea that the literal way original sin happens is that there is bodily eating and drinking.

He doesn't take that part metaphorically.

He's like, okay, they literally ate and drank, and therefore sin entered the world, and now we need a savior.

And yet, when that savior comes, he doesn't think that the remedy for Adam's sin might also involve eating and drinking in the way the sin does.

I mean, think about that.

So, bad things can happen spiritually to you through eating, but good things can't? This is part of a broader thing.

And once you kind of hear it, hopefully you'll be able to identify it.

Maybe in your own life, or if you're from a Protestant background, or you're currently Protestant, look around and look at where this double standard comes up.

But there's this idea that there can be spiritually evil things that are physical, like a Ouija board.

But there can't be spiritually good things But there can't be spiritually good things that are physical, like holy water.

At best, they're only good if they remind us of good things.

But the evil things aren't only evil if they remind us of bad things.

The spiritually evil things, Ouija boards, tarot cards, the like, they can actually be conduits of wickedness.

But there's this idea that for some reason, the body and physical things cannot be conduits of grace.

And yet, that is absolutely how the early Christians understood them.

And absolutely how the Bible presents them.

So there's much more that could be said about the Eucharist.

I actually take Spurgeon on pretty directly in that book, The Eucharist is Really Jesus.

But I want to turn to other parts of his sermon that I don't cover in that book.

Namely, things like Apostolic Succession.

Now, this is a really critical one in the fight against Gnosticism.

Going back to Roger Olson here, again, who is a Baptist, he points out that in Irenaeus of Leon's Critique of Gnosticism, one of the important points that he makes is that the Gnostics were the ones who broke the unity of the Church.

They were the schismatics.

Irenaeus, he says, highly valued the Church's visible unity that consisted in the fellowship of the bishops appointed by the Apostles.

The Gnostics stood outside of that and were parasites on it.

So if you're not familiar, in 180 in Against Heresies, St. Irenaeus, the guy who gives us Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the four Gospels, is arguing against mostly the Gnostic heresy.

That's the chief set of heresies in Against Heresies.

He writes this encyclopedic, in both good and bad ways, it's very boring sometimes, encyclopedic description of what it is these heretics believe, and then he refutes them.

And one of the ways he refutes them, one of the prominent ways, is because they don't have Apostolic Succession.

And Irenaeus points out in Book 3 that it is within the power of anyone in every Church to go and trace the lineage from the time of the Apostles down to his own day.

To trace what he calls the succession of these men, meaning the bishops, to our own time.

Those who neither taught nor knew of anything like what these meaning the Gnostics, rave about.

In other words, one of the ways you can disprove Gnosticism is they've reinterpreted Christianity in a way that earlier Christians didn't believe.

How do we know that?

Partly through Apostolic Succession.

We have this lineage of bishops going back to the Apostles, and we can show that this just is not true.

Spurgeon hates this argument.

Spurgeon thinks this argument is absolutely ridiculous.

He comes out swinging against it.

Here he is attacking Apostolic Succession.

Hear ye this word, the flesh profiteth nothing.

The mere fleshly connection between bishop and bishop established by successive layings on of hands and anointings is utterly valueless.

Earlier in the same sermon, he suggests that the people who believe in Apostolic Succession belong in bedlam, like the mental institution.

And so he, I mean, when I say he hates it, he really hates it.

Because it means that he's not a true minister.

He doesn't have this authority, this calling from God.

He has not been called.

How can they preach unless they are sent?

St. Paul says in Romans 10. He hasn't been sent.

Who sent him?

He sent himself.

He founds his own church.

He literally does.

And yet, so, contrast this idea that Apostolic Succession is fleshly with the way the laying on of hands is presented in Scripture.

It is not treated in Scripture as a mere fleshly outward observance.

In Hebrews chapter 6, we're told let us leave the elementary doctrines of Christ and go on to maturity.

And what are the mature doctrines?

Instructions about ablutions, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment.

So, you have to have the basic foundation, things like justification, the repentance from dead works, and faith towards God, and then you're ready to get the more sophisticated understanding of what Christianity is all about.

And laying on of hands is on that very short list of Christian doctrines, along with things like the resurrection of the dead, and the last judgment.

So, laying on of hands isn't just some ceremonial frivolity in the biblical vision.

Laying on of hands is really important.

Now, I should point out that the phrase laying on of hands is used in three different ways in the New Testament.

One way not relevant to us is arrest.

You know, they laid hands on the apostles and brought them to jail.

That's obviously not what Hebrews 6 is talking about.

The other two ways are sacramental.

The laying on of hands is used to describe the gift of holy orders, which is going to be the relevant part for apostolic succession, and it's also used for the gift of confirmation.

This matters because there is very clearly in the New Testament a belief that spiritual authority is imparted through the physical act of the laying on of hands.

We get this, for instance, in Acts chapter 8, by the gift of confirmation.

Simon, the magician, saw that the spirit was given through the laying on of the apostles' hands.

That's Acts 8 18. And then he asked for that power also, that anyone on whom I lay my hands may receive the Holy Spirit.

And he's condemned for this.

He doesn't have that authority, that power.

The apostles clearly do.

They don't say, oh, you've misunderstood.

This is a mere external thing.

We're reminding them by laying hands of them that the Holy Spirit exists somehow.

Now, clearly, the laying on of hands is imparting a spiritual authority here.

That spiritual authority this time is confirmation.

But like I say, the other way you see it used is in ordination.

So, for instance, St. Paul reminds Timothy in 2 Timothy chapter 1, verse 6-7 Hence I remind you to rekindle the gift of God that is within you through the laying on of my hands.

How does he get the gift of God within him?

Through the laying on of Paul's hands.

For God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but a spirit of power and love and self-control.

So the idea that the laying on of hands is just a fleshly observance could not be more contrary to the way the New Testament talks about.

Okay, let's pivot now to just talk more broadly about liturgical beauty in Christian worship.

Because Spurgeon's view, because it's all about just internal stuff that matters, he's going to reject liturgical beauty as being important.

He actually is even going to reject things like eloquence being important, which is kind of funny given how eloquent of a preacher he is.

But here he comes out swinging against liturgical beauty, thinking it's just worthless.

We are told nowadays that the pompous array of ministering priests, the beauty of symbology, the painting of windows, the smoke of incense and so on, tend to draw people into the place of worship, and that when there, they aid in elevating their minds.

What says Scripture about it all?

This thing was tried among the Jews, and Christ's remark when he comes to sum up the long trial is, it is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh profiteth nothing.

Two things I should point out here.

Number one, this constant pitting Christianity against Judaism, again, sounds much more like Gnosticism than it does like New Testament Christianity.

The Gnostics were convinced the Old Testament God was evil, or, you know, the world of matter, because it's so bodily in the Old Testament.

But notice here, this is not just a trial among the Jews.

God explicitly tells the Jews to have worship in this way.

So, for instance, in Exodus 30, they're told to make an altar to burn incense upon.

It isn't like they just came up with incense because they wanted a pompous ceremony.

God instructs them to do that.

We'll talk about why in a minute.

But heavenly worship is like this as well.

It isn't just like, this is some man made error, and now Christianity comes along, and we're remedied of it.

St. John in the book of Revelation, Revelation chapter 8, describes heavenly worship in these words.

Another angel came and stood at the altar with a golden censer, and he was given much incense to mingle with the prayers of all the saints upon the golden altar before the throne.

And the smoke of the incense rose with the prayers of the saints from the hand of the angel before God.

This is what biblical worship looks like in both the Old and the New Testament.

And so it is bizarre that he responds based just on one verse, John 6, 63, which he does not understand, to act as if all this external stuff is completely worthless.

Now, I want to again, I don't want to paint all Protestants with a broad brush, and so I want to actually highlight another Protestant who I think gets this really well.

So this is from Doug Wilson's church up in Moscow, Idaho and a guy by the name of Ben Zorns.

And I don't know much about him, I probably there are plenty of areas I disagree on theology, but I thought he did a fantastic job of laying out the case that if we understand that we are both soul and body, then we understand why things like the externals in religion matter, and why things like bodily motions, like kneeling which we'll talk about in another episode, and the role of the body in worship is something that he's trying to bring back in view for Protestants who may be oblivious to it, or who think that the body and the external trappings are totally irrelevant.

And the Gospel doesn't liberate your soul from the prison of the body, rather the Gospel brings you truly to life.

The word we preach is life to the body, health to the soul, vitality to the spirit.

This is why we shouldn't think of our worship as an attempt to escape the body.

Rather we bring our whole self, body, soul and spirit, risen by Christ's grace, to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice.

And so we adopt various postures throughout our service.

We stand in attention to hear God call us to worship.

Our voices resound in songs and prayers.

We kneel in hope-filled contrition.

We stand again to hear God's word.

Our ears are opened by the Spirit to hear what He says to the church.

We turn our eyes forward to see the bread broken.

We open our mouths to feast and to drink.

Our hands extend the bread and wine to our brothers and sisters.

We lift our hands in holy praise.

The minister lifts his hands to bless us in the triune name and we extend open hands to receive this gift.

There's still a question here though, like why?

Why does God meet us in this way?

Why is worship so bodily?

Why is spiritual worship from the Christian and not the Gnostic sense something that isn't disembodied?

Well ironically I think Spurgeon makes a pretty good case that once you understand the nature of man and soul and body you see why it's really important if God wants many of us to be saved.

Now ironically Spurgeon is going to use this as an argument against the externals but the early Christians saw this as an argument for them.

The most of mankind cannot get on with a religion in which there is nothing to see, nothing to please the ear or to gratify their taste.

It is only the spiritual man who is so overwhelmed with the glories of God that he does not need the glories of man.

So overcome with the splendor of Christ that he does not want the splendor of the mass.

So taken up with the magnificence of the great high priest that he does not care for gorgeously appareled priests.

So on this point I want to stress that I think largely Spurgeon is right.

If Christianity really were this disembodied thing it wouldn't be accessible to most of the people God desires to save.

Very few would be able to live in this totally denuded sort of way.

And this is one of the points that St. Athanasius of Alexandria points out in the 300s as for why the incarnation happened in the first place.

He puts it like this.

The minds of men had fallen finally to the level of sensible things.

We were so distracted by the material world.

God doesn't just abandon us.

Rather, he says, the word submitted to appear in a body in order that he as man might center their senses on himself and convince him through his human action that he himself is not man only but also God the word and wisdom of the true God.

In other words, the remedy to idolatry is that Christ comes bodily into the world.

You want a God you can worship visibly?

Here's a God you can worship visibly.

And so Christ comes into the world bodily and he gives us things like the Eucharist.

So this isn't idolatry this is the remedy to idolatry.

This is kind of by way of closing I want to just get to the heart of this.

Because as I say, Gnosticism is Antichrist, biblically speaking.

And yet we find these arguments being used by Protestant authors over and over again.

Not all Protestants, not all the time, not in a full encapsulation of everything the Gnostics believed, but enough that this should be of some alarm.

There is often this idea that, as I said earlier, this idea that the reason Catholic Christianity is so bodily and all of that is because of Paganism.

That this is the introduction of Paganism into what had otherwise been this purely spiritual early Christianity.

That could not be further from the truth.

The reason Catholic Christianity is so bodily is because Christianity is so bodily.

Because Christ is bodily.

And so I want to close with Gerard van Groningen, the Reformed theologian, in his book, First Century Gnosticism, he makes the point that it's exactly along these lines.

That the Gnostics are indebted not to Judaism which they tend to loathe, but to Paganism.

He says it like this.

He says, the Old Testament idea of salvation is definitely contrary to the Gnostic.

The Jewish and Christian view is that of salvation from sin.

Gnostic salvation is in the Pagan category, released from fate.

The strains and stresses of this life and from the bondage of the stars.

Meaning you're free from like both fate and like the material cosmos.

The Gnostic concept of man as a divine being imprisoned in this material world and separated from his true abode by the barriers of the cosmos also sets forth the basic difference from Jewish thought.

That's the idea.

That if you want to understand what's going on here it's not Catholic Christianity is bodily because of Paganism it's the opposite.

Catholic Christianity's bodily-ness made it contrary to the educated Paganism of its day.

And it's because of Pagan thought that you get Gnosticism and then those seeds that get planted and come up again and again in Christian history in heresies like the Cathars, have also taken root.

Often in a strained, not a fully fledged out form, but you can certainly see it in many of the arguments against Catholicism from certain Protestant quarters.

I would love to hear your response to this.

I've tried very much, I hope you can tell, to be fair to the Protestants who I know are not consciously Gnostics.

But I would love to hear your own experience.

Have you found in your current worship if you're a Protestant or maybe former worship if you're a former Protestant strains of Gnosticism?

Were there elements of this that I missed?

Yeah, I'd love to hear more about this.

Because I think this is something that's a serious problem that I don't see us addressing enough.

For Shameless Potpourri, I'm Joe Heschmeier.

God bless you.