SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 5, 2012 - Vital Truths and Viral Pursuits
So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.
See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.
For in Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form, and in Christ you have been brought to fullness. He is the head over every power and authority.
Colossians 2:6-10
Timothy, guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have departed from the faith.
1 Timothy 6:20-21
One thing that sure has not changed across history is the fact that there have always been a lot of crack-pot ideas out there. The early church wrestled for centuries to assure correct doctrine and to fight the ideas ranging from crazy to heretical. The crazy ideas, for example in our time the flat earth defenders, are those that no one in his or her right mind believes. Heresies are more difficult because, by definition, they’re based on partial truth or, in many cases, seem like a reasonable alternative to sound doctrine. That was the case in the early church as it struggled with Gnosticism. This is somewhat relevant today because Gnosticism is the root ideas behind beliefs that are still with us, like Christian Science and some of the new age movements.
In a lot of ways this discussion seems arcane today as in, “who cares?” Well, if we are going to call ourselves Christians, we need to be educated and informed. We cannot be true believers if we hold to any random idea. It’s easier today to do so, hold to any random idea, because the society is rather secular and because it’s fashionable to contend that everybody has a right to their own ideas. And they do. But the idea in the last 50 years, more or less, called “equivalence” is the idea that any idea is as good as any other. We saw this politically in the 1980s, before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, when many contended that Communism is just as good a system as capitalism – until the people living under Communism rose up to overthrow it.
In Paul’s time the people espousing Gnosticism contended that any good thing was fully spiritual and anything material was evil. They said that they were bearers of a higher knowledge, the word Gnostic comes from the Greek “gnosis” meaning knowledge. When Christianity took a strong foothold in the mid first century, Gnostics infiltrated it and tried to change the right doctrine. In the New Testament letters, Paul and John and Peter all declare against Gnostic ideas because, while they sounded good, they were antithetical to Christian truth. They taught that the body was evil, that material things were wrong and that anything that was good was spiritual – this is the Docetic wing of Gnosticism, there were other factions. Believing that anything good had to be spiritual, they rejected the idea that Jesus was fully man and fully God, they made him only God. But that destroys the idea of Jesus’ humanity and mocks his suffering, his sacrificial and substitutionary death and the need for a Resurrection. Jesus was a man who truly lived, experienced humanity, and died on our behalf – so Paul tells the Colossians. Paul and the other Apostles would not tolerate the contamination of the story of God’s redemption. And the later church fathers would not either: the Nicene Creed speaks of Jesus as “fully man and fully God.”
Okay, this relates to us today because some factions of Christianity border on heresy, including the highly legalistic ones and the fruity superstitious ones. The highly legalistic are those that dispose of the freedom of the spirit as they proselytize for lock-step believers. These are the ones who self-righteously say “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” But they do not want you to go look, study and explore for yourself and they sure don’t want you to disagree, believing that their opinion is hand-delivered by God according to their interpretation. Do they believe in the Lordship of Jesus? Yes, but they minimize his humanity, unable to imagine him as a full-fledged man they spiritualize him so he glows in the dark, wears a permanent fashionable halo and floats half a foot above the ground, Nonsense. And having often attached their dogma (at least in the United States) to right-wing ideas, they ‘ve spiritualized the fight against abortion and against homosexual rights much as they did to their fight against racial equality before and after the Civil War.
The fruity superstitious crowd ranges from benignly funny, like the ones who virtually worship angels (unacceptable to Christian truth) and have decided on the name of their own guardian angel, to the destructive ones who contend that if you believe enough you will never have to see a physician, God will heal according to your faith. And these guilt-purveyors also point the finger at you, if you fall into misfortune, that you did not believe well enough or pray hard enough. Another one of these asinine cults is the “prosperity gospel” crowd that argues that if your faith is strong enough, it’s a one way route to personal wealth – but bear in mind that the route to wealth will be paved by your generous contribution to the leader’s coffers.
Baloney abounds (that’s the nice way to say it).
The letters of the New Testament, the parts that expound right Christian theology, work directly to correct the errors of that time and, I’m happy to say, apply to our time because most of the nonsensical ideas of Jesus’ and Paul’s time are still with us, polished up and re-titled and delivered. But Christian truth, while not complex in its basic message, demands some effort on our parts and it appears to be God’s will for us to work on this as believers. If you’re perplexed, talk to me, talk to others, do a web search, check out books on the topic on Amazon or other sites, read decent Christian magazines like Christianity Today. Do not ever believe that you have to agree with anyone. You don’t have to disagree either but keep working. Grow your minds as well as your spirits and do for yourself what Paul tells the Colossians in our Scripture today: “So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught, and overflowing with thankfulness.”
That’s it. Be informed. Stand up against nonsense and if you’re not sure, check it out. Fight superstition. Fight bigotry. And be flush with gratitude.
Blessings,
Nick
