InfoHatter.com

by Brian Vuyk, student at Redeemer University College

Introduction

In the first few centuries of the Church's existence, Gnosticism was a threat. It attacked many of the doctrines which we take for granted, such as those dealing with the nature of God, and Jesus, and the role of Jesus in God's redemptive plan, and directly attacked our doctrines of the sufficiency of scripture.

Gnosticism as a type of theology can be described as “Salvation by Knowledge”. The tern 'Gnosticism' is derived from the Greek word for knowledge: gnosis.1 Most Gnostics did not expressly refer to them selves as such; rather, this name was in most cases applied by early Christian fathers such as Irenaeus of Lyons to refer to those sects which held an emphasis on such a deeper knowledge, among other characteristics.2

The knowledge, or gnosis, which formed the basis of Gnosticism, was “the knowledge of our origin, nature, and destiny, and knowledge which tells Gnostics who they really are, and frees them from their present state of ignorance and imprisonment in an alien body and a hostile world governed by Fate.”3

Gnosticism as a system of theology is well described in the words on Pheme Perkins, “Thus, when we use the term 'Gnosticism', we should remember that it was not a neatly defined sociological entity. Rather, gnosis seems to flourish as a religious or intellectual movement which claims to give the deeper significance of a tradition held by members of a larger group to which the Gnostics also belong.”4

Gnostics were not an organized religion in the way of Christianity, or other traditional religions, and, as we mentioned above, did not even generally refer to themselves as Gnostics. Since the Gnostic system of thought depended on revelations of new knowledge for salvation, Gnosticism could not maintain an orderly development of theology. Rather the fathers of each different sect had revelations, and preached them to their followers, often in conflict with what was preached as truth in other sects. This lead to a very diverse system of theologies all grouped under the heading of Gnosticism

The Gnostics, at the time when Gnosticism was a threat to the church, were a subgroup of Christianity. Whereas most Christians believed the Christian doctrines to the extent that they were revealed to us in the word of God, the Gnostics believed that they held a deeper knowledge of the order of reality, and believed that they were saved by this deeper knowledge.

A point to be made is that some of the early Gnostics such as Simon Magus, Menander, Carpocrates and his followers were skilled in the use of magic. This is well documented by Irenaeus in Adverses Haereses, and is a strong indicator of the power that was present in them. One might hypothesize that Satan empowered them, that they might make themselves more believable.