No Longer Gnostic
I am a thief. I half inched the title from an interesting tome about Gnostic beginnings; one of many that have attempted to establish a point of origin for the movement as a whole. However, this has nothing to do with what you are about to start reading.
I was a Gnostic. Not now.
Bible college was the wonderful experience – profound, deep, soul-destroying – that prompted me to begin a journey into an old, once-dead religious movement. A confluence of finding little to no fulfilment in a Western church that had sold itself like a whore to the world around it and a deepening misanthropy that was beginning to spread to my views of the Creator triggered a move away from orthodoxy into heresy. Add to that wildly speculative theology, and Gnosticism had me hooked. It was a love affair that lasted a good number of years. I still have my Gnostic scriptures and find myself dipping into them sometimes. The Apocryphon of John and The Three Steles of Seth remain favourites.
It was not any doctrinal reason that I moved back into faith in Jesus Christ as taught by the Canonical Gospels. It was actually the so-called “Gnostic Gospels” themselves. In them, the Lord Jesus is espousing some very heavy, Greek-influenced dualism and the fishermen that Jesus called his Disciples are all getting it. They all understand and fully accept these concepts from a foreign philosophy. Contrast that with the Canonical Gospels, where the Disciples are anything but geniuses at Greek dualist philosophy, and you cannot get anything more different. That alone did not do it. I was blessed enough to have the Holy Spirit very active in my return, thanks to the fervent prayers of my wife and others who did not share my Gnostic leanings.
Merely to describe such doctrines is to refute them. – Irenaeus of Lyon
It is quite possible that Irenaeus was onto something. To merely read the Gnostic Gospels refuted their veracity to me. I could not relate or connect with the Gnostic Peter or Thomas. But the impetuous and cowardly Peter, who denied Jesus three times, and still became a wonderful servant through the redemption of Christ's forgiveness is far more relatable to a fallible sinner like me.
If you are seeking Truth, I pray and hope you find it. Reach out to me on Mastodon if there is something I can pray about for you.