Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics by Ancient Faith Publishing

In this thoughtful and well-written book, Robin Phillips offers valu able analysis of a serious theological error surprisingly prevalent among many Christians: modern Gnosticism. Phillips reveals how many concepts popular in present-day culture distort and misrepre sent the true Christian understanding of creation, the human per son, and other critical matters, resulting in spiritual harm and false presumptions.

Drawing important distinctions between contemporary Western thought and the actual views found in the Bible, Phillips artfully com bines historical explanations with real-world examples while demon strating that the affirming, holistic, and balanced beliefs of the early Church have been preserved in Orthodox theology and spirituality.

Dr. Jeannie Constantinou, host of Search the Scriptures Live on Ancient Faith Radio and author of Thinking Orthodox and The Crucifixion of the King of Glory, both published by Ancient Faith Publishing

It’s likely we are all recovering Gnostics, given the widespread belief that the world of matter is inherently opposed to the things of the spirit. Robin Phillips’s book is an excellent guide to extricating one self from that confusion, and for coming to see that all of creation is charged with God’s presence.

Khouria Frederica Mathewes-Green, author

Robin Phillips’s work makes a valuable and timely contribution to understanding the goodness of God’s creation and particularly man kind. He offers a corrector to the modern and ancient misunderstand ings of fallen creation and the place of the body in salvation history. Phillips’s presentation is clear and accessible to all readers. May this work be blessed by God and may all who use it be edified.

Bishop John, Antiochian Orthodox Bishop of Worcester and New England

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Robin Phillips’s journey from his Gnostic Christianity is such a dra matic portrayal of the attraction of new creation that it puts Dan Brown in the shade. Read it with your family and friends and see how God is calling us to a new view of creation.

William Dyrness, senior professor of theology and culture at Fuller Theological Seminary and author of The Facts on the Ground: A Wisdom Theology of Culture (2022)

Gnosticism seems the perennial heresy, one that asks us to think about our relationship with God as something that occurs only in “the spirit,” or awaits some final and perfected denouement that is only tacitly realized now and without roots in the present life. The Gnostics of the ancient Church in their various guises preached a secret knowledge that liberated us from the lie that is our bodies and the present world. Consequently, the beauty of the Liturgy, nature around us, and all good things God has given to us to enjoy, had no place in their theology. For many Christians this is still the case, whether it be crass emotionalism in worship, a disdain for the visual in piety (i.e., icons), or a religion that is largely intellectual in nature. Such things are a corruption of the apostolic deposit, ones that Robin Phillips takes head-on, and to which he gives no quarter, in a study sorely needed in today’s world.

Cyril Gary Jenkins, Van Gorden Professor of History at Eastern University (retired)

It is urgently important that we Christians in the United States take more seriously the implicit charges of apostasy leveled against us by Harold Bloom in The American Religion. Bloom argued that Ameri can Christians—not just some of us, but all of us—have mistaken the

stone of Gnosticism for the original Christian Gospel. Was Bloom perhaps right? The careful and comprehensive account presented here by Robin Phillips helps us answer that question by striking at the heart of American Gnosticism—its conviction that the earth and the body have no future in God’s Kingdom. Phillips’s account of a creation primed for sacramental transfiguration has implications for Christian engagement with ecology, culture, art—and more.

Dr. Timothy Patitsas, dean of Hellenic College, professor of ethics at Holy Cross Seminary, and author of The Ethics of Beauty

Phillips beautifully explains that everything we do in this life can be done for God’s glory, as a coordination with His ongoing efforts to reclaim, renew, and refashion the world. One of the highlights of the book for me is how Phillips describes these efforts of the Lord, working with and through the patriarchs and prophets to gradually extend His realm in the world, leading up to His death and Resurrection which throw open the doors of Paradise to everyone. . . . He encourages us to experience how this vision for life in Christ can transform our marriages, our occupational lives, our artistic endeav ors, our friendships, our economic dealings, even our household chores. And for Christians who have been affected to some degree by the old Gnostic disparagement of matter, he encourages us to beauty in church architecture and furnishings, to return to celebrating the church year, and to return to sacramental/liturgical worship. Phillips presents the traditional cosmic understanding of the redemption of mankind as well as of all of creation with rich and plen tiful use of the Scriptures, the writings of the Church Fathers, litur gical texts, as well as contemporary literature of varying viewpoints. The result is a thoroughly interesting and edifying vision of the full ness of life in Christ, in harmony with His creation, that is possible

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in this world—a life which already participates in the ever-hoped-for glories of eternal life in heaven.

Dr. David C. Ford, professor of church history, St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Seminary

Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation is a remarkable work. It is first an intellectual autobiography, as Robin Phillips describes his grad ual shedding of the Gnosticism that pervades so much of Ameri can Christianity, and now secular thought, and his discovery of the perennial and central Christian teachings of the resurrection of the body and of the coming of a new heaven and the new earth. He finds this in Orthodox theology, a tradition that many Protestants have thought downplayed such things. This story is complexly interwoven with biblical exegesis, reflections on patristics, church history, and historical theology, yet the result is lucid and engaging reading.

Paul Marshall , author of Heaven Is Not My Home and the Wilson Professor of Religious Freedom at Baylor University

This is a deeply personal book—and therefore has something real and profound to offer. Robin Phillips calls us to allow the reality of Christ’s victory to penetrate our daily lives. In Christ, we must not reject the material world but rather must rejoice in new creation and anticipate bodily resurrection. Through critical engagement with the Gnostic heresy, biblical exegesis of Adam-Israel-Christ, and liturgical practice in seeing the world rightly, Phillips develops an Orthodox vision of God’s Edenic paradise reconquering the “wilderness” of this fallen world through the power of the Gospel. Inspiring!

Matthew Levering, James N. Jr. and Mary D. Perry Chair of Theol ogy, Mundelein Seminary, former president of the Academy of Catholic Theology, and co-editor of the International Journal of Systematic Theology

Ancient Gnosticism’s repudiation of the physical world has found echoes, Robin Phillips shows, in much of contemporary Christi anity. He lays out evidence for this assessment, expounds on how the history of redemption laid out in Scripture indicates God’s delight in His creation, urges Christians to welcome their phys icality as basic to who they are and to their redemptive hope, and calls them to discern how this should reshape their approach to life, faith, and vocation. This engaging and wide-ranging book deserves a wide audience.

James R. Payton Jr. Professor of Patristics and Historical Theology, McMaster Divinity College (Hamilton, Ontario) and author of The Victory of the Cross: Salvation in Eastern Orthodoxy

Robin Phillips succinctly depicts the problem of modern man as “caught in the pincer grip of materialism and the machine . . . hun gry for the sublime and the symbolic.” As humanity becomes more and more cut off from the created world and its inherent goodness, neo-Gnosticism is in the air again. Even otherwise well-meaning Christians are unknowingly taking this in. To them, creation is con sidered unimportant, soon to be destroyed anyway, and our culture left abandoned, either as beyond hope or unimportant in spreading the Gospel. And even our physical bodies are disregarded and divorced from spirituality. As Robin was himself led away from this toxic understanding of creation as he became Orthodox, he is able to guide his readers along the same path with depth and clarity. He reminds us that Christ’s work of redemption does indeed redeem everything, and we can approach our bodies, our work, our culture, our world through the light of His Resurrection as things that have deep meaning and importance. Nothing is lost.

Very Rev. Archimandrite Seraphim , Abbot of Holy Cross Monas tery in West Virginia

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Robin Phillips creatively addresses an old heresy too infrequently acknowledged, namely, the Gnostic denigration of creation, which sadly persists in many forms in the Church today. Combining his own story as a “recovering Gnostic” with perceptive cultural analysis, spot-on readings of the Bible, and astute insights from the Christian tradition, Phillips articulates a strong case for, as the title indicates, rediscovering the goodness of creation. In addition to a robust pre sentation of the biblical story of new creation, Phillips provides help ful practical advice on “how not to be Gnostic.” A very fine book. Take up and read.

Steve Bouma-Prediger , Leonard and Marjorie Maas Professor of Reformed Theology, Hope College

Rediscovering the Goodness of CREATION

A Manual for Recovering Gnostics

Robin Phillips

ancient faith publishing chesterton, indiana

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Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Published by: Ancient Faith Publishing

A Division of Ancient Faith Ministries

P.O. Box 748 Chesterton, IN 46304

ISBN: 978-1-955890-34-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022948247

Printed in the United States of America

For Fr. Basil Caldaroni, who first urged me to write this book

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Acknowledgements xvii

Foreword: V. Rev. Dr. Stephen De Young xxiii Introduction 1

Part 1 My Journey from Gnosticism to Orthodoxy

Chapter 1 Confessions of a Recovering Gnostic 13

From Seeker-Friendliness to Fundamentalism 15

From Secret Knowledge to Reading Scripture as a Story 17

From Journalist to Heresy Hunter 20 Questions for Discussion 24

Chapter 2 Continued Confessions of a Recovering Gnostic 26

From England’s Green and Pleasant Land to the Northwest’s Bible Belt 26

From History Teacher to King’s College 31

How Trips to London Helped Me Understand America . . . and Myself 34

From Calvinism to Orthodoxy 38

From Behavioral Health to Gratitude, and Back to Gnosticism Again 47 Questions for Discussion 50

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Part 2 Gnosticism versus Orthodoxy: Then and Now

Chapter 3 New Creation and Its Discontents 53

Resurrection and New Creation 55 New Creation Under Attack 65 Gnosticism’s Assault on New Creation 66

The Strange Jesus of the Nag Hammadi Library 72 Summary 73 Questions for Discussion 73

Chapter 4 An Outbreak of North American Gnosticism, and What It Tells Us about Ourselves 75 How Does My Life Fit into the Picture? 77 Isolation or Integration? 79 Summary 83 Questions for Discussion 84

Part 3 Old Creation, from Eden to Exile

Chapter 5 Genesis 1: God’s Glorious Plan for the Earth 87

The Ancient Near Eastern Context of the Creation Account 88 Kingship in the Ancient Near East 89 Geographical and Numerical Expansion 93

Eden versus Wilderness 96 Shepherding Creation toward Flourishing 98 Vocational Failure and the Defacement of God’s Image 100 Hope Remains 101 Summary 102 Questions for Discussion 103

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the

Chapter 6 Israel: God’s Rescue Operation 104

Abraham and the Story of Israel 105

From Election to Slavery 106

From Torah to Temple 106 From Kingdom to Exile 110 Hope and Messianic Expectation 113 Summary 116 Questions for Discussion 116

Part 4 New Creation, from Incarnation to New Earth

Chapter 7 The Inauguration of New Creation 119

Jesus and the Restoration of Eden 120 The Final Exile and Restoration of Paradise 122 Turning the Wilderness into Eden 127 Summary 134 Questions for Discussion 135

Chapter 8 The Continuation of New Creation 136

Celebrating New Creation through Worship and Renewed Communities 137

God’s Kingdom Is a Process 142 Building for God’s Kingdom 146 Summary 151 Questions for Discussion 151

Chapter 9 The Culmination of New Creation 152

God Will Not Destroy the World 156

“I Saw a New Heaven and a New Earth” 160 What Will the New Heavens and New Earth Be Like? 163

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Table

Contents xiii

Summary 167 Questions for Discussion 167

Part 5 Life in God’s New Creation

Chapter 10 Navigating the “Already” and “Not Yet” 171 God Cares about Culture 176 How to Avoid Worldliness 184 Is God’s Kingdom Political? 187 Confused by Resurrection 192 Summary 192 Questions for Discussion 193

Chapter 11 Transformed by the Paschal Promise 194 Whatever Happened to Resurrection? 196 Denigrating the Physical Body 199 “Bid the World Farewell”: Gnostic Hymnography 202 The Gnostic Funeral 204 Your Fingernails Last Forever 207 What Is a Spiritual Body? 208 The Inrushing of Incorruption 211 Summary 214 Questions for Discussion 214

Part 6 How Creation Is an Icon of Divine Beauty and Love

Chapter 12 Saint Augustine: Recovering Gnostic and Christian Neoplatonist 217

Saint Augustine’s Journey from Christianity to Manichaeism 221 Plato and the Ascent of Beauty and Love 223 Saint Augustine’s Journey from Manichaeism to Neoplatonism 226

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Saint Augustine’s Journey from Neoplatonism to Christianity 229 Saint Augustine’s Journey Back to the Goodness of Creation 231 Beauty and the Heart’s Desire for God 234

Reordered Love and the Quest for Divine Beauty 237 Summary 243 Questions for Discussion 243

Chapter 13 Celibacy, Marriage, and the Heart’s Desire for God 245

How Created Beauty Participates in God 247 Chastity and Platonic Love 249 Marriage and Platonic Love 253 “A Love So Much Refined” 260 Summary 263 Questions for Discussion 264

Part 7 How Not to Be Gnostic

Chapter 14 Four Steps toward Not Being Gnostic 267

Step 1: Get Very Comfortable with God Working through Means 269

Step 2: Build (or Appreciate) Beautiful Church Buildings 272

Step 3: Look After Your Body and Practice Self-Care 277

Step 4: Honor Matter, and Use Creation to Worship God 281 Summary 286 Questions for Discussion 286

Chapter 15 Four More Steps toward Not Being Gnostic

288

Step 5: Observe the Church Year 289

Step 6: Approach All of Life Eucharistically 297

Step 7: Reject Sacred-Secular Dualism 300

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Step 8: Embrace Art and Beauty 307

Summary 320 Questions for Discussion 321

Chapter

16 Ordered Goodness and the Purpose of Creation

322

No Salvation without the Body 322 No Salvation without the World 323 No Goodness without Coherence 324

Confused by Coherence: Ockham, Nominalism, and Jonathan Edwards 325 Beyond “Worldview Thinking” 334 Beyond a Secularized Theology of Culture 335 Beyond Disordered Goodness 339 Bringing Heaven Down to Earth 341 Summary 345 Questions for Discussion 346

Scripture Index 347 Subject Index 350

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Acknowledgements

Mere words are not enough to express the appreciation I feel for everyone who helped make this book a real ity. Although my name appears on the cover, this was really a group effort. While it is not possible to name everyone who helped me with this project, some people deserve special mention.

First of all, I am deeply grateful to those scholars who offered peer review of the manuscript prior to publication, including Dr. Gary (Cyril) Jenkins from Eastern University; Fr. Dr. John-abouna D’Alton at Monash University; and the V. Rev. Dr. Stephen De Young. I also want to thank Dr. Phillip Cary at Eastern University for providing peer review and suggested revisions on chapters 12 and 13, and Dr. David Wang, professor emeritus of architecture at Washington State University, for offering peer review on chapter 1. Two members of the peer-review team, Fr. Stephen De Young and Dr. Jenkins, also made themselves available, with seemingly infinite patience, for answer ing questions and looking over revised sections of the work. Finally, I am indebted to one academic specializing in the history of ideas who wished to remain unnamed, who helped deepen my apprecia tion for Thomas Aquinas’s theological anthropology, offered patient feedback on the last chapter, and used the exodus motif to expand my understanding of the heaven-earth synthesis that is the final object of eschatology.

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I also want to extend sincere thanks to those scholars, clergy, and laypeople who engaged in dialogue with me over the years as I was wrestling with the concepts of this book, including Hieromonk Tik hon, Fr. Gregory Horton, Fr. Daniel Greeson, Subdeacon Barnabas Schaefer, Dr. Peter Leithart, Subdeacon Timothy Wellings, Deacon Joseph Mannion, Dr. William Kabasenche, Anna and Ignatius Pur viance, Fr. John Calbom, Fr. Thomas Hall, Dr. David Bradshaw, Stu art Bryan, Dr. William Dyrness, Steve Hayhow, Devin O’Donnell, Rev. Jason Farley, Alex Fergus, Madeleine Hernandez, Petra Minker, Mark Eckel, Wesley J. Callihan, Dr. Bradford Littlejohn, Ken Myers, Hendrik Mills, and Dr. David and Mary Ford. Certain people deserve to be singled out, including Justin Stout, who spent an entire week end checking every Scripture reference; Gregory Bryant, who helped solicit endorsements; Dr. David Field for his constant reminder that not the least lash will be lost and for planting many of the seeds that eventually grew into this book; Mark Sandford, author of Healing the Earth , who helped fill out my understanding of what the Orthodox tradition teaches about living in a right relationship with nature and who never tired of reminding me that the world is being redeemed along with us.

Of the various dialogue partners to whom I am indebted, Dr. Phillip Cary requires additional acknowledgement. My providential meeting with Dr. Cary in 2019 came at a time when I was ready to transition back to Neoplatonism. Despite his busy schedule, Dr. Cary made time to take a deep dive into four of Plato’s dialogues with me, in addition to helping me analyze key passages from St. Augustine’s corpus. Dr. Cary remained a patient dialogue partner as I explored potential problems with Christian Neoplatonism posed by apophati cism and Palamism.

Some academic dialogue partners volunteered to read through this manuscript in whole or in part, while others read an earlier itera tion of this work as I tested out different ideas that eventually formed

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the backdrop to this project. This includes Dr. Bret Saunders, who offered extensive line-by-line feedback on over 300 pages of text in an earlier draft. Dr. Saunders’s patient but persistent pushback against stereotypes of Plato helped pave the way for later discussions with Dr. Cary, and ultimately, chapters 12 and 13.

In addition to providing peer review, Dr. Jenkins worked with me as I improved the manuscript based on the revisions identified during the review process. His encouragement, constructive criticisms, and suggestions deepened my appreciation for this man who is not only a gentleman and a scholar, but also a friend.

Dr. Dominic Erdozain, now a research fellow at Emory Univer sity, also read through drafts of earlier iterations, using his marginal notes to constantly remind me of the importance of operational theology that emerges from lived experience and may exist in dis continuity from a body’s official teachings. The idea that there can be an operational Gnosticism even in groups that are the loudest in affirming the goodness of creation is an idea I largely owe to Dr. Erdozain’s mentoring.

I am equally indebted to those dialogue partners outside of academia who read portions of the work and offered feedback. This includes Emily Woodroof who, despite her busy schedule teaching at a private high school, took time to offer feedback on this manu script, suggesting which portions could benefit from clarification, rearranging, and rewording. In addition to being a thorough proof reader, Emily often served the role of guinea pig for testing passages and ideas I was unsure about. Where Emily helped on the micro level, my friend Ephrem Hernandez helped on the macro level, engaging in brainstorming sessions to conceptualize the overall shape and flow of the chapters. Special mention must also be given to Jeff Moss, who not only read various sections in draft but engaged in extensive cor respondence as we debated the nature of time and the eschatologi cal implications of balancing the “already” with the “not yet.” Jeff’s

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Acknowledgements

challenge for me to go deeper into the theology of incorruption is hopefully reflected in the pages that follow, especially in chapter 11. I am also indebted to Jonathan Pageau who, despite his busy schedule as an icon carver and public intellectual, volunteered to meet me over Zoom when I was struggling to go deeper into the icons referenced in this work and the significance of Pentecost. Talking with Pageau felt like splashing around in what I took to be a swimming pool, only to be shown that I was actually in a small corner of the ocean.

Finally, it was a joy to be assisted by Fr. Basil Caldaroni, to whom this book is dedicated. Father Basil not only read and commented on sections of this manuscript but also engaged in a fascinating process of due diligence with me as we set out to discover whether our initial anti-Western bias might require rethinking in light of the patristic synthesis. My discussions with Fr. Basil paved the way for much of the methodological approach I took in this work, as well as for some specific content. Father Basil’s directive to be attentive to how the original audience would have understood Scripture acted as a cata lyst for me to go deeper into the worldview of the ancient Near East as well as the Second Temple period. Moreover, by opening up his library to me, Fr. Basil gave me access to a plethora of texts from the ancient world that helped increase my understanding of how a Bronze Age audience would have understood the Creation account.

Some of the most helpful feedback was offered by those who raised concerns about portions of this work that appeared in earlier itera tions. Their criticisms acted as a spur for further research and helped me either strengthen or reject assertions that might be contested. Thinkers falling into this category include Dr. David Bebbington from the University of Stirling in Scotland, Dr. David Ceri Jones from Aberystwyth University, and Fr. Stephen Freeman. Father Stephen’s insistence, after reading an earlier version of chapter 3, that “there is not a ‘new creation theology’ within Orthodoxy of the sort

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Acknowledgements

you describe,” motivated me to dig deeper into the patristic teaching and to give a platform to teachings from our tradition that have been drowned out by louder voices. In an important sense, this entire text is my answer to Fr. Stephen’s challenge. Of the interlocutors who dis sented from key aspects of my project, I felt most blessed to interact with Dr. Hans Boersma of the Nashotah House Theological Semi nary, both because of his gracious manner and the depth of his learn ing. My meeting with Dr. Boersma at the 2020 Touchstone conference proved to be the beginning of a dialogue that was truly blessed even when—perhaps especially when—we did not see eye to eye. Chapter 10 seeks to build on, and contribute to, our ongoing conversation.

I am equally indebted to the staff serving at libraries where I did my research, and their patience and efficiency in handling my (some times demanding) requests for books and journal articles. This includes, but is not limited to, the staff at the British Library and Dr. Williams’s Library, as well as librarians at various public librar ies who, I think, must have worked overtime to track down obscure titles for me.

I am also grateful to those universities and institutions that gave me an opportunity to presents portions of this work in preparatory form, including the University of Winchester, the American Society of Church History, the Jonathan Edwards Society, and King’s Col lege London.

As always, words cannot express how appreciative I am to the staff of Ancient Faith Ministries, who were patient in extending the submission deadline for this manuscript (on numerous occasions!) to give me more time to research and to solicit peer review.

Despite such an amazing team of helpers, any mistakes in the pages that follow are doubtless entirely my own.

In addition to the academic challenges involved in writing this book, numerous friends helped with the practical obstacles

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I encountered along the way. Here again it is possible only to men tion a few. My editors at Salvo Magazine , James Kushiner and Terrell Clemmons, were understanding when, in early 2022, I had to back off from my weekly publication schedule in order to devote more time to finishing this manuscript. Equally understanding was the employer at my retail job, Tim Peterson, who let me use large chunks of time between customers to work on this project. While writing this book, my preoccupation with the importance of the material world some times led me to forget that I was actually living in the world, as I found myself lost in deep thoughts. Here my friend Anna Brown frequently came to my rescue, making sure we spent time together every week to pray. In addition to being an invaluable prayer partner, Anna was a fellow pilgrim with me as we visited different monasteries. These pilgrimages not only provided much-needed relief from the cognitive strain of my demanding work but also helped me go deeper experi entially into the truths I was writing about. The more contemplative and mystical teaching in this book can be traced to many of these monastery visits. Finally, this book could not have reached comple tion without the generous patronage of my parents, Michael and Judy Phillips. My parents believed in this project enough to step in when it was in danger of stalling indefinitely and to offer the financial support necessary for bringing it to completion.

Last but not least, my dear children acted as a crucial source of inspiration for me, in the hope that they will one day read this book.

rediscovering the goodness of creation

xxii

Foreword

In his 1992 book, The American Religion, Harold Bloom sought to find a through line, a general tendenz , within religious diversity in the United States. Well beyond merely identifying and describing an American civil religion, Bloom examined the history of the devel opment of the majority Protestant tradition within the United States as well as how other historic religious traditions found themselves transformed when they came to American shores. Across myriad sects and forms of religious expressions—groups which often anath ematized one another—Bloom identified currents of experience and belief that he felt found their fullest expression in two groups: the Southern Baptist Convention and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The former represents the English Puritan tradi tion from the founding of the original colonies to the blossoming of its fullest contemporary American expression. The latter, while now a religious force throughout much of the world, had its origins in the United States in the religious fervor around the Second Great Awak ening. Bloom identified both groups, and the uniquely American reli gious synthesis that they represent, as Gnostic.

For Bloom, this was not a pejorative. He was not seeking to pro mote some version of Christianity, or another religion, over against these groups by condemning them as Gnostic. Bloom, a distin guished humanities professor at Yale and a Shakespeare scholar, him self identified as a Gnostic. As a literary critic, Bloom treated religion

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not as a system of organized authority structures, nor as a list of prop ositional belief statements to be assented to. Rather, he saw religion as a way of viewing, engaging with, and living in the world. He identi fied as a Gnostic because his way of living and being in the world res onated with that of the ancient Gnostic groups that he studied. When he addressed himself to literary works or to the beliefs and practices of religious groups in American history, it was this resonance that he was seeking and which he ultimately believed he had found.

When St. Irenaeus spoke of the Gnostics in the second century, he was exercising a not dissimilar approach. There was, of course, no hierarchical structure uniting the Gnostics in parallel to that of the Orthodox Catholic Church. Rather, among an incredibly diverse and eclectic group of religious sects and expressions, the bishop of Lyons saw a common experience and orientation toward the world and the divine. Instead of addressing an endless stream of particularities, Ire naeus cut to the heart of what united these groups with one another and separated them from the mainstream Christian Faith.

Most texts treating Gnosticism as a religious phenomenon, whether sympathetic or antagonistic, approach it in one of two ways. On one hand, the texts approach it at a purely historical level. Various Gnostic sects and their leaders are described by the times and historical conditions in which they arise, the religious conflicts in which they partake, and their eventual condemnation and extinction. On the other hand, the texts discuss Gnosticism qua ideology. Various communities are boiled down to a set of beliefs. Common propositions are identified across groups, and these are said to represent the essence of what it means to be a Gnostic. Both of these approaches are historical in a way that is innately external.

With this book, Robin Phillips explores Gnosticism internally, beginning with his own spiritual autobiography. Rather than addressing an ancient historical religious expression, he explores the way his own religious experience and way of life was shaped and its

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intersection with the Gnostic experience of God and the material world. Bloom explored the historical road of American religion in general and Christianity in particular, which produced the full flow ering of what he identified as expressions of Gnosticism. Phillips addresses the reciprocal relationship, the way in which those cultural factors shape a person in contemporary society, especially within Christian culture. While Bloom was pleased to find within main stream American religious culture his own co-religionists, Phillips offers a way to begin reorienting.

Changing the belief propositions, the creedal or confessional statements, to which one gives assent is not sufficient. In fact, many if not most people think, behave, and experience the world in ways that are inconsistent with what they profess. Certainly, most people both Bloom and Phillips address would vehemently reject a Gnostic iden tity in favor of a Christian one. Transforming the way one passively perceives, acts, and reacts requires first identifying the currents and influences in the world that have shaped one’s consciousness. Once a person identifies these currents and influences, they can counter these factors and shape a new, Christian consciousness for themselves. When this happens, the propositional statements of the Chris tian creed become real, lived truth.

Phillips has made this beginning himself, within his own person. This allows him to describe the landscape and lay guideposts for those who would follow him. While each person is shaped by larger cultural and community forces, those forces, those communities, and the culture, cannot be corrected and transformed of themselves. The change must begin within the minds and hearts of human persons. The change begins with Phillips and with the reader. It ends with a cosmos transfigured by the glory of God in the Lord Jesus Christ.

—V. Rev. Dr. Stephen De Young

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Foreword xxv

Introduction

Ever since I was a boy, I have loved the good, true, and beautiful things of this world. I have enjoyed music, poetry, dance, art, literature, and above all, the natural beauty that surrounds us in creation. Yet for a long time, I had no idea how to integrate these interests into my relationship with Christ. Unconsciously, I assumed the things I loved were related to this world whereas the spiritual life is about the next world.

Perhaps you find yourself in a similar position. Do you ever feel like your love for the good and beautiful things of earth is disconnected from your spiritual life and maybe even in competition with it?

In my own case, part of the problem is that I grew up in an evangel ical culture that expects Christ’s imminent return to coincide with the destruction of the world. This teaching entails the notion that all the good things of this life have no lasting value. Everything that happens in this world is merely temporary whereas the life to come is eternal. Thus, I looked upon my worldly interests as a distraction from my relationship with Christ.

Maybe this sounds familiar. Perhaps you have also found yourself struggling with a division between the spiritual versus the physical, the earthly versus the heavenly, this life versus the life to come. If you have found yourself entangled in these dualisms, you are not alone:

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many Christians struggle with similar binaries, with the result that they find it difficult to live as whole people in this world of space and time.

Often this confusion finds its focus in the following issues. While each of these issues raises a different set of theological questions, they all hinge on this same struggle to relate our spiritual lives to our expe rience in the material world.

• Vocation. Many Christians have shared with me that they grew up thinking that if they wanted to serve Jesus 100 percent, they would need to go into full-time Christian ministry. Yet as they find their lives moving in more secular directions, they some times feel confused about how their jobs relate to their spiritual vocations.

• The physical body. Many Christians share that no one taught them about the resurrection of the physical body, and thus they assume that the material body is at best spiritually neu tral and at worst something filthy—an obstacle to the spiri tual life. The spiritual life, they assume, is about escaping from the material body. Consequently, how we treat the body at death—whether burial or cremation—is of little importance; the body is just a shell.

• Culture. Are the cultures of this world beyond redemption so that trying to transform culture is like polishing brass on a sinking ship? Is it perhaps even the case that the cultures of this world need to become more evil so that Jesus will come back sooner? For many believers, the answer to these questions is “yes.”

• Ecology. Is God interested in our efforts to protect the planet and its various environments? Should we even try to take care of the earth? Or is this world just passing away, so it does not matter if we pollute and destroy creation?

rediscovering the goodness of creation 2

• Worship. Is it appropriate to involve the physical body and material things in our worship of Jesus? Or does worship become more spiritual the more it is detached from the phys ical world? Many Christians, especially American thinkers, have answered the second of these questions in the affirma tive, while some have even gone so far as to argue that Chris tians shouldn’t raise their hands in worship or make the sign of the cross since worship is more spiritual when it doesn’t involve the body.

• Beauty. When you encounter beauty in the world, in things such as art, or even in the physical body, do you unconsciously perceive these as in competition with your pursuit of spiritual goals? Does God even care about beauty?

• Institutions versus relationships. Have you ever come across the notion that institutional religion is at odds with genuine heartfelt faith? Have you ever heard someone say that “Chris tianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship,” where the person making this claim wishes to de-emphasize the corporate and structural connotations that come with the term religion?

• Eschatology. Have you ever come across the idea that there is a complete discontinuity between what happens in this world and what will happen in the age to come? Or have you encoun tered the notion that in the future, God will completely destroy the earth?

When wrestling with some of the above issues, I have often gone to extremes. For example, after I witnessed the crude politicization of the gospel, I was tempted to conclude that God’s Kingdom has nothing to do with this world and its culture; God is not concerned with creation at all, I thought, only with saving souls so that they can escape from this world. Similarly, when I’ve felt a sense of futility about my employment, I have concluded that only Christian Sample pages only. Purchase the full book at http://store.ancientfaith.com/rediscovering-the-goodness-of-creation-a-manualfor-recovering-gnostics/

Introduction 3

ministry counts: it doesn’t matter whether I do a good job at work because my true work is composed of spiritual activities such as sharing the gospel with unbelievers. Or again, after seeing how peo ple associated with the New Age movement have colonized con cepts like protecting the environment, I’ve reacted by assuming the Church shouldn’t concern itself with issues of ecology, conservation, and sustainability. Similarly, concern about grossly materialistic forms of worship has led me to overreact and conclude that the body should play no role in worship and that church is primarily about what happens in the mind.

I think one of the reasons I tend to react in such extremes is because I’ve jumped into these practical issues without first exploring the underlying theological questions that should inform and guide all such inquiry. Ultimately, the fundamental theological questions are twofold:

1. What are God’s intentions for this world, including and espe cially humankind, the pinnacle of creation?

2. How can we, as human beings, participate in God’s purposes for this earth?

Even to phrase these questions this way assumes that God does indeed have a purpose for the earth. But that may not be clear to many. Is God actually in the business of healing the earth, or is this world simply a training ground for the life to come? Is the doctrine of last things 100 percent about heaven and hell, or does a renewed earth play any part in God’s eternal plan? Do the good, true, and beautiful things of this world last forever, or are they part of a tempo ral order that will one day pass away?

On the surface, Scripture does not answer these questions in a straightforward manner. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells His

rediscovering the goodness of creation 4

disciples that they are not of this world1 and later proclaims that His Kingdom is not of this world. 2 When we combine that teaching with passages suggesting that the devil is the ruler of this world 3 and with other passages apparently prophesying the earth’s coming destruc tion,4 we may easily conclude that God’s purposes have nothing to do with this earth. Yet we also read that Jesus is the savior of the world 5 and that He claims authority over the earth, 6 both of which suggest that God’s purposes are very much earth-centered. Faced with these and other biblical paradoxes, it is little wonder many Christians are confused about God’s plan for the world.

I never achieved clarity on these questions until I changed both how I framed them and how I read the Bible. In short, I had to come to see Scripture not as a collection of isolated proof texts but as a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Let me explain.

I grew up around Bibles and Christian books. My father owned a Bible bookstore and was also a Christian author, editor, and pub lisher. But although I was steeped in the Bible from as early as I can remember, I rarely enjoyed reading Scripture, apart from the Gospels. For me, reading the Bible was an “eat your greens” activity I did out of duty. The problem, I later came to realize, was that I was not reading the Bible as a single narrative; instead, I was reading it as a collection of isolated stories and imperatives with little or no relation to each other.

Again, I suspect I am not alone in this respect. Consider how many sermons, Bible studies, and debates about various points of theology end up merely proof texting various Scriptures, or zeroing in on one

1 John 15:19.

2 John 18:36.

3 2 Cor. 4:4.

4 2 Pet. 3:10–11.

5 1 John 4:14.

6 Matt. 28:18.

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Introduction 5

or two passages, without any sense of how those verses fit within the larger matrix of Scripture’s story. I say “Scripture’s story” rather than “stories,” for although the Bible contains many stories, everything in Scripture is really part of one overarching, continuous story. What is that story? We call the story redemption history, and it is the nar rative of God’s purpose for the world, including how human beings can participate in that purpose. For years I did not know about this overarching scriptural narrative, and thus I did not understand God’s purpose for the earth. I had no concept of how Scripture formed one, continuous story of God’s plan for humanity and creation, let alone how my own life fit within that story.

As a teenager and young adult, I sat through hundreds of evangel ical sermons and Bible classes in addition to attending a Protestant Bible college. But for all the teaching I received, no one helped me see how all the interconnected threads of Scripture formed a single nar rative about God’s purpose for the earth. At one particular church, the teaching elders continually reminded us that they were not inter ested in giving us theological training but in simply helping us glean insights from the Bible we could apply to our lives. That pragmatic anti-intellectualism sounded very pious, but without biblical the ology 7 we find it impossible to grasp how the different parts of the Bible fit together into the larger narrative about God’s purpose for the earth. At best, this gave us a very compartmentalized approach to the world where we have a spiritual history and a secular history running parallel to each other, sometimes intersecting, but basi cally proceeding on two different planes. This basic sacred-secular

7 Biblical theology is the term theologians use for redemptive-historical approaches to Scripture, and it is distinguished from—though complemen tary with—other types of theology such as systematic theology, exegetical theology, patristics, dogmatics, etcetera. As a discipline within academic theology, biblical theology explores the progressive nature of God’s unfolding plan in time and space.

rediscovering the goodness of creation 6

dualism left me and my peers unequipped to understand the funda mental question of how the spiritual is related to the physical and the subsidiary questions about how the gospel fleshes itself out within time and space. This, in turn, created a dangerous vacuum in which pessimistic concepts about creation could emerge in denial of Scrip ture’s teaching that “God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good.”8

Most of us think we believe in the goodness of God’s creation. Yet merely affirming the goodness of this world does not guarantee your thinking hasn’t been unconsciously tinctured by practices, assump tions, and biases that run counter to that affirmation. The process of writing this book impressed this upon me. As I spoke to people from all the major branches of Christianity about these concepts, I was surprised by the pushback I received. Doctrines that I did not con sider particularly controversial became a matter of dispute. If any thing, this negative feedback confirmed my suspicion that much of Christendom has become the unwitting prey to heterodox assump tions about the material world, its role, and its purpose. We genuinely need to rediscover the goodness of creation.

Perhaps you too will find yourself challenged as you encounter these teachings. Be prepared to feel uncomfortable! But also, be prepared to be amazed as you learn things from the Bible and the Church Fathers that you’ve likely never heard before. Above all, be prepared to reframe how you ask some common questions about Scripture. Instead of asking you to look at verses in isolation and then puzzle over some of the paradoxes I mentioned earlier, I’ll invite you to analyze these questions in light of where we are and where we are going within the larger story of earth’s redemption. In the process, I’ll also invite you to rethink common assumptions about redemption itself.

8 Gen. 1:31.

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Introduction 7

One assumption I’ll invite you to rethink is the popular view that the locus of redemption is primarily individual persons. We will find that the redemption wrought by Christ stretches as far as the curse is found—which is to all of creation, including the natural world and the products of human creativity. This means that Christ’s redemp tion does not just speak to our moral lives as if the goal of Christianity is simply not sinning; nor does Christ’s redemption merely cover our spiritual future as if the goal of Christianity is simply to get to heaven. Rather, the redemption wrought by Christ covers the entire mate rial world, including all the little nooks and crannies of existence. In short, the Incarnation, Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ changes literally everything.

Another assumption I’ll invite you to rethink is why it’s important to affirm the goodness of creation. Much of modern, seeker-friendly Christianity—with its knee-jerk reaction against legalism and fundamentalism—has no problem affirming the goodness of cre ation and using such an affirmation as a cloak for worldliness. What it misses is that the things of creation, while genuinely good, possess a merely derivative goodness. Just as an icon receives its meaning from its prototype, so the good things in this world—from our perception of beauty to our enjoyment of artistic creativity to our experiences of love—receive their coherence from participation in divine beauty, creativity, and love. We become not fully human, but only subhuman, when we use and appreciate the many good and beautiful things of this world in such a way that goodness and beauty become final ends rather than icons pointing toward the original goodness and beauty of God Himself.

Finally, a word about what this book is not. This is not a book about heresy. Our topic is the goodness of the world, God’s promise to bring creation to perfection, and what this means for you and me today. Given that various heresies (such as Gnosticism, Man ichaeism, Docetism, etcetera) have led to misunderstandings about

rediscovering the goodness of creation 8

God’s purpose for creation and humanity’s role in it, we must address these misunderstandings as we go along. Indeed, I intend to provide a handbook for those whose thinking has been tinctured by opera tional forms of these heresies, especially Gnosticism. Yet the fun damental focus of this book is not the heresies themselves but the solution: what the Bible teaches about the purposefulness of the material world, the goodness of the human body, and the eschatolog ical hope of a transformed universe.

Part 1 of this book looks at my journey through various forms of incipient Gnosticism and explores how I came to learn that the patristic denunciations of this heresy—rooted always in a robust affirmation of the goodness of the created world—provide a template for addressing a range of questions arising in our own day.

Part 2 introduces the reader to Gnosticism more fully while explor ing how this false teaching came into conflict with the proclamations of the early Church. We will see that something transformative and world-changing occurred on Easter morning that still has ripple effects throughout the very structure of matter itself. But as people who live in the wake of Easter morning, we don’t always clearly see how our individual lives fit into the picture. Specifically, does God call us to isolate from the world and culture or integrate with them? This part of the book will frame the basic contours of these questions.

Part 3 explores God’s plan for creation and humanity from Genesis to the nation of Israel. We will see that God originally intended for men and women to act as His vice-regents in making the earth a temple suitable for His presence. After this plan got off track through sin and death, God began a rescue operation for the earth focused in the nation of Israel. His goal remained the same as in the Garden, namely that the entire earth would become Edenic under the loving stewardship of His images. Yet this rescue operation seemed to fail as God exiled the Israelites from His presence and cast them out into the wilderness. Sample pages only. Purchase the full book at http://store.ancientfaith.com/rediscovering-the-goodness-of-creation-a-manualfor-recovering-gnostics/

Introduction 9

Part 4 discusses how God’s rescue operation for the earth reached fruition when God became human Himself to fulfill the human voca tion of connecting heaven and earth. Through Christ, the story that began at the Garden of Eden and continued through Israel reaches its happy fulfillment in new creation, namely, the transformation of all things through the work of Christ and the new order this trans formation brings to the cosmos. Yet new creation does not happen immediately: it is a process with a beginning (inauguration), a mid dle (continuation), and an end (culmination).

Part 5 looks at how God’s promise to renew the world provides incentives for a variety of cultural, ecological, and political projects. Specifically, the hope of physical resurrection—so often eclipsed in modern Christianity—gives meaning to our lives and context to the present Christian struggle.

Part 6 looks at how the good things of creation—particularly beauty and love—act as icons to disclose the goodness of God. In this path of ascent from creation to Creator, one of the greatest recov ering Gnostics of all time, St. Augustine of Hippo, will guide us. But while earthly experiences of beauty and love disclose the goodness of creation, such experiences remain only hints or instances of the infinite beauty of God. The Augustinian teaching on reordered affec tions helps us to look through the beauty of creation to divine beauty and in the process to approach both chastity and marriage in their true eschatological context. We will see how the goodness of the physical body and human sexuality—so often a target of Gnostic and Manichaean attacks against creation—are signposts in the journey toward a transfigured world.

Part 7 offers a toolbox to help us avoid being Gnostic. We will explore how everything from liturgical worship to church architec ture to the practice of art can guide us in living out the truth of cre ation’s goodness.

rediscovering the goodness of creation 10

Part 1 My Journey from Gnosticism to Orthodoxy

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Confessions of a Recovering Gnostic

Having grown up a Christian, I would always have said I believed in the resurrection of the body. However, my primary concern was the immortality of the soul. Without giving it much thought, I simply assumed that the doctrine of resurrection was shorthand for going to heaven when you die. Even though I had read the Gospel accounts of Christ’s Resurrection many times, and even though I was familiar with Paul’s lengthy discussion of bodily resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15, I still unthinkingly assumed that the resurrection of believers would be nonphysical.

My belief in a nonphysical resurrection was part of a larger per spective that de-emphasized the importance of the physical world. In some of my earliest writings as a teenager, I argued that during the Old Covenant the Lord had focused His work on the material world, whereas in the era of the New Covenant His work was purely spiri tual. Accordingly, what happens in the material world is unimportant to God. The best we can hope to do, or so I thought, is prepare for the next life. In the next life, the soul will be liberated from the body that now imprisons it.

Along with this anti-material outlook came an exaggerated antith esis between the sacred and the secular, the physical and the spiritual,

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13 Chapter 1

this world and the next. My framework for thinking about the spiri tual life had no place for how Christ’s lordship might extend to thisworldly areas such as social justice, art, education, ecology, and the vast gamut of human culture. At best, these domains were “things of the earth” that distracted Christians from their primary calling. We ought to focus entirely on the life to come, not on the secular world. I wrote that Christians should retreat from the public sphere, not com promise their faith by trying to improve the present order of things.

Although my parents raised me in an ecumenical environment and facilitated a variety of religious experiences ranging from Presby terianism to Episcopalianism, I instinctively sought out the most rad ical type of evangelicalism, imagining that holiness resided there. But while the Protestants I looked to for spiritual counsel were strong on getting saved and going to heaven, they didn’t offer much guidance about what happens in between. In fact, they often saw a strong dis junct between the earthly and the spiritual as a sign of piety. One of my mentors who was animated by this dualistic logic went on record saying that it was a sin for Christians to vote. After all, hadn’t Christ explicitly declared that His Kingdom is not of this world? To underscore this point, another mentor frequently drew attention to how bad the world is, proclaiming, “Just look around you—clearly Christ isn’t Lord of the world; the devil is!”

When these ideas combined with belief in Christ’s imminent return, I came to eschew any planning for the future: after all, I rea soned, why would I want to plant trees or save money since doing so might signal lack of faith in Christ’s imminent return? Moreover, by focusing too much on earthly renewal, I might inadvertently delay Christ’s Second Coming.

My pessimistic views about the physical world made me instinctively suspicious of Christian traditions that incorporated tangible gestures of piety into their worship—gestures such as raising hands, making the sign of the cross, kneeling during confession, and so

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of a Recovering Gnostic

forth. I preferred to attend churches that did not sully the worship experience with earthly things such as ornate Communion tables, pictures of saints, or even beautiful church buildings. After all, mate rial things are in competition with spiritual things.

Others who thought similarly surrounded me, including some who went so far as to burn down their church building. “What a pow erful testimony to the fact that God’s Kingdom is not of this world,” they reflected while watching their former sanctuary go up in flames.

Thankfully, I never went so far as to personally incinerate churches. However, the various dualisms in my thinking—matter versus spirit, sacred versus secular, this world versus the next, nature versus grace—resulted in a deep distrust of institutional religion in addition to causing me to be deeply divided. It was as though my Christian faith overlaid my experience in the world, and I kept it in a separate compartment labeled “the spiritual realm.” I understood the Christian life as little more than getting saved, trying to live a life of obedience, and then waiting to get to heaven. Although I felt deeply drawn to things of this world such as art, poetry, music, and literature, I had no idea how the Logos permeated these pursuits, nor how I could pursue these domains as an outgrowth of Christian discipleship.

From Seeker-Friendliness to Fundamentalism

In my late teenage years, I began visiting different churches in a search for a more integrated approach to the faith. Ironically, even the churches that claimed to offer a more optimistic mentality toward the material world still ended up assuming a basic disjunction between the spiritual and the physical. At age nineteen, I attended a seeker-friendly church in California where the pastor believed in using anything and everything to make the gospel more attractive. This pastor, whom I will call “Pastor Hip,” had been kicked out of his

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Confessions

previous church after arranging for people to drive motorcycles up to the pulpit. He never tired of telling us that “we should use anything in the world unless it’s actually a sin.” (Pastor Hip, with his crude bib licism, only considered something a sin if a scripture verse explicitly forbade it.)

As parishioners of this church, we believed that Christ had come to give us abundant life, yet we conceived that abundant life as sim ply more of what we already had as pleasure-seeking, comfort-loving Americans. This over-realized eschatology conflated the Kingdom of God with the present order of things. Ironically, this posture of extreme earthly-mindedness ended up devaluing the material world since it took the world to be spiritually neutral, reduced to so much raw material that could be exploited for evangelistic purposes. As the goodness of the material world became entirely instrumental ized, any organic connection between the spiritual and the material was lost. By losing sight of a horizon beyond the present order of things, we lost any context for seeing how the present life could be ennobled, dignified, and exalted through participation in something beyond itself.

At the age of twenty, I left California and moved to a Bible college connected to a fundamentalist church. This church took the opposite approach from Pastor Hip: for it, the world is not the friend of faith but its relentless enemy. The contents of my dorm room were searched on two occasions to make sure I wasn’t harboring worldly substances such as jazz, rock music, or love songs. Along with the other parishioners, this church taught me a fundamentalism that denigrated cul ture and an anti-intellectualism that despised academia. The church used the pulpit to teach a truncated vision of the gospel with little to no understanding of how the material world might fit within God’s plans. At best, they saw the material world as spiritually neutral; at worst, they declared it the enemy of faith. They perceived new cre ation as a future reality that had minimal contact with the present

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of a Recovering Gnostic

space-time order. Significantly, the Bible school associated with this church gave no attention to integrating scriptural principles with this-worldly concerns such as economics, art, psychology, literature, anthropology, or philosophy.

In time, I came to understand that the extreme heavenlymindedness I encountered at the fundamentalist Bible school was simply the other side of the coin from what I had experienced a year before in California at the seeker-friendly church. Both extremes sev ered the connection between God and the material world through rendering the latter passive and spiritually neutral. Indeed, an uncrit ical appropriation of the world and its cultures, no less than an uncrit ical rejection of it, both hinged on a shrunken view of the gospel that could only relate itself extrinsically to the materials and institutions of this world.

From Secret Knowledge to Reading Scripture as a Story

In the early 2000s, I moved to the UK, got married, and began pursuing undergraduate studies. During that time, I got involved with a British group that had accumulated a series of secret revela tions over the past fifty years. These secret texts, which the group showed only to a chosen few, purported to offer a hidden glimpse into the world of angels, archangels, and fallen angels, as well as a range of paranormal phenomena.

The group (which we avoided referring to as a “church”) gradually initiated me into their secret mysteries. They gave me access to a fil ing cabinet where our leader (whom we assiduously avoided referring to as a “pastor”) kept his prophecies, which I read alongside the Bible for my morning devotions. I began to have prophecies of my own, helping to advance a corpus of extra-biblical revelations that swelled to nearly the size of the New Testament itself. We often stayed up until 2 or 3 am poring over prophecies, texts from the ancient world,

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Confessions

and a range of esoterica as we attempted to systematize, make contact with, and ultimately control the spiritual entities that pull the strings for earthly events.

Our leader initiated only eight of us into the full secrets, leading to an elitism that fed the worst human passions. Through personal reve lation in the form of dreams, visions, and prophecies, we imagined we had attained the true secret meaning of numerous scripture passages. In our hubris, we believed we had all been archangels in a previous life, sent to earth to perform various missions. We even believed we discovered references to ourselves in the Book of Revelation. With our more exalted type of Christianity, we felt justified setting aside clear biblical injunctions and using dreams and visions to rationalize our sinful passions. This resulted in a strange amalgam of legalistic moralism and antinomian licentiousness.

We associated the rest of world Christianity (especially institu tional religion) with Babylon, the beast system we were working to destroy. Our destructive mission focused close to home: one of the church members had dreams and visions which seemed to indicate that our leader had actually been my father in a previous life and that my biological father was associated with the Antichrist. I responded to this by writing a letter to my dad cursing him and formally renouncing his fatherhood.

But even when I had most deeply immersed myself in these deceptions, God was at work in my life through the works of Francis and Edith Schaeffer and through various members of the UK homeschooling community who befriended my family and recommended books to us. Recorded lectures from the Schaeffers first led me to understand the biblical doctrine of physical resurrection. The Schaef fers articulated the historic understanding that the separation of body and spirit that occurs at death is an aberration from the proper order of things, and that even the saints in heaven anticipate the final resurrection when God will renew all things.

rediscovering the goodness of creation 18

The Schaeffers’ discussion of what it means to have a Christian worldview also intrigued me. Christianity is not just true in a reli gious sense, they taught; rather, when we say that Christianity is true, we mean it is the correct understanding for all reality. This compre hensive understanding of worldview forced me to start reflecting on how the Christian Faith might apply more fully to my experience liv ing in the material universe. I was particularly interested in how to reconcile my love of the arts with my Christian faith.

Despite my newfound interest in thinking Christianly about all of life, I could only practice this on one cylinder, so to speak. Not read ing Scripture in light of God’s overarching purpose for the earth held me back. Moreover, I still thought that dreams, visions, and prophe cies led to true understanding of Scripture.

Things began changing for me in the summer of 2001 when Fran cis Schaeffer’s son-in-law, Ranald Macaulay, organized an intensive theological study program at Cambridge for two weeks. When I heard about the program, I jumped on a train from Lincolnshire and headed south toward Cambridge University. Macaulay invited Dr. Richard Pratt from Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, to help us understand the Old Testament. Dr. Pratt, one of the world’s leading Old Testament scholars, walked us through the Creation account in Genesis as its original audience would have understood it. He showed that by taking the scriptural texts in the context of their original ancient Near Eastern meaning, we can approach a clearer understanding of God’s overarching purposes for the earth itself and the role that we play in that ongoing story. He walked us through the history of the Old Testament, particularly the various covenants, showing how they all connected in a single narrative leading to Christ and, ultimately, the new heavens and the new earth.

Throughout the classes, Dr. Pratt kept showing that the cultural mandate of Genesis 1 applies to every area of human culture and that all human activity can grow out of our vocation as images of God.

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Confessions of a Recovering Gnostic

Moreover, while the world is still fallen, through Christ we now experience the firstfruits of a new order known as “new creation.” We can be ambassadors of new creation by pursuing everything we do as an outgrowth of our vocation to act as God’s images. For me, this began a process of linking my Christian faith to my interests in art, literature, and culture. It also began my lifelong quest to under stand the entire Bible as a single story instead of just a collection of isolated proof texts—a story that, significantly, focuses on the earth and God’s renewal of the present space-time universe.

My time at Cambridge launched me into a number of theological inquiries that would eventually culminate in the unraveling of the various deceptions I had embraced in the aforementioned group. But for the time being, I remained in the group and even began taking a more active leadership role.

From Journalist to Heresy Hunter

In 2005, a year after finishing my undergraduate work, I took a job as a journalist for a magazine published by a UK Christian lobby group. Working in the public realm forced me to continue thinking more deeply about what role, if any, the Christian Faith might play in culture and in the arena of public life we call politics. Does Christian ity simply give us a set of rules on how to be good, or does biblical vir tue enable us to flourish in our humanity, as individuals, as citizens, and as nations? Related to this was the more fundamental question, “What does it really mean to say ‘Jesus is Lord’?” Does Christ’s lord ship extend over all aspects of human experience or simply a circumscribed set of spiritual activities?

A year later, in 2006, the National Geographic Society announced the discovery and publication of a curious document called The Gos pel of Judas. As a journalist I had the opportunity to report on this third-century papyrus text which some people saw as offering an

rediscovering the goodness of creation 20

alternative reading of the events leading to Jesus’ death. Coming two years after Dan Brown’s wildly popular The Da Vinci Code , the Judas text seemed to give credence to Brown’s contention that there were many alternative Christianities, each with its own textual tradition. Written in Coptic, the so-called Gospel of Judas turned the Cruci fixion story on its head, making Judas the hero. In this work, Jesus seems to give Judas permission to betray Him in order to throw off His physical body. In this retelling of the Christian story, the Cross is important not because it is the means to the world’s redemption but because it enables escape from this world. In an article appending the publication of The Gospel of Judas, Bart Ehrman summarized the outlook of the movement behind this text: “We are trapped here, in these bodies of flesh, and we need to learn how to escape. . . . Salva tion does not come by worshiping the God of this world or accepting his creation. It comes by denying this world and rejecting the body that binds us to it.”1

My boss at the magazine let me use some of my work time to study this newfound interest. So for a few weeks, I became a heresy hunter. I learned that the anti-material narrative behind the Judas text was part of a larger family of heresies named retroactively by modern his torians as Gnosticism. These ancient heresies, which had been popu lar in the Mediterranean world of the first few centuries, disparaged the physical world and offered various forms of hidden knowledge. This hidden knowledge showed the chosen few how to escape from the prison house of matter.

The term Gnosticism can be misleading if we think of it as one homogeneous group. In reality, during the first four centuries a wide variety of sects taught that our enemy is not sin but material ity. Despite the great variety of Gnosticisms, these groups shared

1 Bart Ehrman, “The Alternative Vision of the Gospel of Judas,” in The Gospel of Judas, eds. Rodolphe Kasser, Marvin W. Meyer, and Gregor Wurst (Washing ton, DC: National Geographic, 2006), 84–101.

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Confessions

of a Recovering Gnostic

in common the belief that the problem with the world is not that it is fallen but that it is physical. Consistent with this anti-material outlook, the Gnostics routinely denied the bodily Resurrection of Christ. Whereas the early Christians saw Christ’s Resurrection as the ultimate act of sanctifying matter, the Gnostics spiritualized the Resurrection into something nonphysical. In order to escape from the material world, one needed to attain hidden, esoteric knowledge that bypassed the Orthodox Catholic tradition.

The more I learned about Gnosticism, the more it intrigued me. I noticed numerous parallels between this ancient heresy and my own thinking. Had I unwittingly been a Gnostic without realizing it? When I asked this question, I was thinking almost entirely about Gnostic pessimism concerning the material world and not about their claims to hidden knowledge and elitism. The group I belonged to clearly echoed the Gnostic obsession with accessing hidden knowledge only available to the chosen few; however, by correcting my pessimistic ideas about the material world, I could congratulate myself on not being Gnostic even while I continued believing I had been granted hidden gnosis inaccessible to the wider Church.

Around this same time, friends began sending me letters to sug gest that perhaps Gnostic texts offer us special insight into the true historical Jesus. Maybe traditional Christianity had got it wrong about Jesus and the four Gospels, they suggested. They further speculated that perhaps the only reason the four Gospels occupy a place of prominence in the canon is because the Church of the fourth century colluded with reigning political powers, hushing up the truth about the Jesus we glimpse in alternative textual traditions. The Gospel of Thomas was one of the spurious texts they pointed to. Discovered in 1945, this ancient book contained a similar outlook to that of the Judas fragment, quoting Jesus making a variety of disparaging statements about the material world and the physical body.

rediscovering the goodness of creation 22

One of the reasons the early Church developed a canon was specif ically to distinguish the writings of the New Testament from the spu rious works written by Gnostics and others. But might the Church have gotten things wrong? Should the writings from non-orthodox sects be given equal priority with texts such as Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John? Everyone asked these questions in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Throughout these discussions, voices in the sec ular media began pointing to Gnosticism as an alternative approach to Christian origins.

Hoping to get some clarity about these issues, I attended a confer ence in 2006 put on by The Gospel and our Culture Network. One of the conference speakers was Dr. N. T. Wright, then the Anglican bishop of Durham. Wright spoke about the history of Gnosticism and the challenge it posed to the early Church’s teaching on the goodness of creation. At one point in the lecture, Wright turned to his audience and asked us to stop thinking of Gnosticism as a heresy external to the Christian community; Gnostic-type ideas about the physical world, he explained, are alive and well within the heart of Protestant Christianity. Wright even gave some examples of familiar hymns he refused to sing because they illustrated what he called “nineteenth-century Gnosticism.” Anyone interested in learning more about this, he said, should go away and read Philip Lee’s classic 1987 work Against the Protestant Gnostics.

Meanwhile, what happened in the Gnostic cult I had been attend ing? I never experienced a sudden epiphany, only a gradual awakening. As I continued reading N. T. Wright, as well as Reformed authors recommended by friends in the homeschooling community, and as I continued studying the Bible through the historical lens I had acquired at Cambridge, the Holy Spirit began helping me connect the dots. I began to understand that for all the corruption and sin in religious institutions, the Church remains the vehicle by which Christ advances new creation in this earth. Moreover, God leads the

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Confessions of a Recovering Gnostic

Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation: A Manual for Recovering Gnostics

Rediscovering the Goodness of CREATION

A Manual for Recovering Gnostics

Robin Phillips

Table of Contents

Part 2 Gnosticism versus Orthodoxy: Then and Now

Part 3 Old Creation, from Eden to Exile

Part 4 New Creation, from Incarnation to New Earth

Part 5 Life in God’s New Creation

Part 6 How Creation Is an Icon of Divine Beauty and Love

Table of Contents

Chapter 13 Celibacy, Marriage, and the Heart’s Desire for God 245

Part 7 How Not to Be Gnostic

Chapter 14 Four Steps toward Not Being Gnostic 267

Chapter 15 Four More Steps toward Not Being Gnostic

16 Ordered Goodness and the Purpose of Creation

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Introduction

Part 1

My Journey from Gnosticism to Orthodoxy

Confessions of a Recovering Gnostic

From Seeker-Friendliness to Fundamentalism

From Secret Knowledge to Reading Scripture as a Story

From Journalist to Heresy Hunter

Articles inside

Acknowledgements xvii Foreword: V. Rev. Dr. Stephen De Young xxiii Introduction

From Journalist to Heresy Hunter

From Secret Knowledge to Reading Scripture as a Story

From Seeker-Friendliness to Fundamentalism