I suppose I was given this topic, “The Gnostic
Gospel,” because in 1992, I wrote the book The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back. It’s the
only book of mine that R.C. has endorsed, indeed it’s the only book he’s ever written…
read of mine, but that’s okay. He still remembers that first lecture I had completely
forgotten. He was gracious to endorse it. John MacArthur, I heard, did some sermons
on that book. In terms of Mike Horton, he was still in diapers. But it is a pleasure
to share the pulpit with Mike, my colleague from Westminster. And it’s good to know
that there are younger guys coming up behind us, right? But what these guys don’t know when they
were endorsing and preaching about this stuff was that that book was born out of culture
shock. I taught New Testament in France for 18 years, and of course in godless France,
you didn’t speak about theology or spirituality in public because everybody was secular. And
when I came back to the States in ’91, I was amazed to discover that America that has
always been very spiritual was now changing the focus of its spirituality, and I took
some time to try to figure out what was happening. And I’d studied Gnosticism in various places,
and I began to connect the dots between what was happening in the culture with ancient
Gnosticism. And in that book in 1992, I suggested that all these wildfires that were beginning
to spring up in the culture were actually related by a massive fire burning underneath
just the surface of the culture that actually connected all the dots together in a new ideology,
a new agenda of what I began to call paganism. So these were not simply hot… unrelated
hot button issues, but a full scale alternative to the gospel. Here’s what I said in ’92. “The New
Age has a coherent agenda orchestrated from a diabolical center, moving and reproducing
ineluctably like algae in a lake.” Well, what’s happened since 1992? Here’s what
I want you to take away from this lecture. Gnosticism is both a specific ancient heresy
that the church already faced and defeated, but that it is also the essence of the revival
of religious paganism which has the goal of creating a new pagan, planetary civilization
where the Christian message will be snuffed out if they can do it. That’s threatening
the church, and that’s not new. I lived in France. In fact, in a week’s
time I will be in Lyon in central France, and it was there that one of the first great
anti-Gnostic church fathers Irenaeus was bishop. And just before he got there, the Romans in
Lyon put to death 42 Christians in the arena. And what struck me as I visited that place
some years ago was this, that the struggle for truth was both inside the church and outside.
And that Irenaeus and those Christians faithful to the Word of God were fighting Gnosticism,
paganism within the church and also outside of the church in the culture around them.
And I believe that that is what is happening today, and I hope that that perspective will
help us as we understand what we’re hearing about what is happening in the church that
is a reflection on what is happening in the culture at large. So that’s what I want
you to take away. What about ancient Gnosticism? My New Testament
study set me up for this lecture. While everyone was watching the allied assault on Germany,
– I was not doing New Testament studies then – and hoping for a quick end to World
War II, an Egyptian peasant by the name of Mohammed Ali was making a stupendous discovery,
unearthing in 1945 near the Egyptian village of Nag Hammadi Gnostic texts that come from
the second or third centuries. And you know their message was probably more earthshaking
than the events of the Second World War. Indeed you could almost say that the war for truth
was beginning to work itself out in some kind of very public way in once Christian America
from that time on. One of the most influential American New Testament
scholars, James Robinson, – and my own life intersects with all this stuff because he
accepted me to do a PhD at Claremont (I didn’t eventually do it) – was raised on the Westminster
Confession of Faith. And he said he made an early exit from orthodoxy. And he was the
one who collected together these ancient Gnostic texts and published them, and in his introduction
to the Nag Hammadi library in English, he dismissed the attempt of the church to defend
itself against this paganism as describing the bishops as prejudiced and shortsighted.
“Myopic heresy hunters,” he called them. And you know that’s still the way liberals
try to present us. President Obama speaking to a group of homosexuals
in the Whitehouse a few weeks ago said that those who oppose the homosexual agenda are
holding onto (quote) “worn arguments and old attitudes.” I believe that homosexuality
is actually the tip of the spear of this new civilization, and I could give a whole hour’s
lecture on that, but I don’t have the time. I did give one, actually, if you’re interested,
at the family research council in Washington a couple of weeks ago, and they have that
online. So he opposed the attempt to describe Gnosticism
as a heresy, and positively he suggested that these texts actually were able to explain
what was happening in the culture of the ‘60s and the ‘70s. He incorrectly argued that
those texts had much in common with primitive Christianity. And of course, it was argued
that the Gospel of Thomas, which was one of those texts, was earlier than all the canonical
gospels. That’s not at all true. He said that these texts had much in common with Eastern
religions and holy men of all times, thus giving a little push to the growing interfaith
movement that was starting in the ‘60s and the ‘70s. And this is the interesting thing
he says, “These texts have much in common with the counterculture movements coming from
the ‘60s.” Isn’t that most interesting? When the hippies went east and the gurus come
west, when they sought to liberate spirituality and sexuality from the boundaries of classic
Christianity, these texts arrive redefining the… so-called, the nature of Christianity.
And it seems to me that what we have actually seen in this very short span of time in one
generation that the agenda of the hippies on the west coast have become public policy
for the nation at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In other words, the modern Gnostics
like James Robinson and just before him Carl Jung, who was in love with the Gnostic text,
– and actually the Jung foundation owned some of these Nag Hammadi texts – saw the
value of these texts as fitting the progressive culture that has been developing since the
‘60s. You know, I want to put what we’ve heard
so wonderfully today in a broader context of what is happening in the culture at large.
If you remember what I said about Irenaeus, that there is a sort of a connection between
the outside and the inside, and if we don’t understand what’s happening outside, I fear
that we won’t truly understand what’s happening inside. Well, where do I see modern
Gnosticism today? We’re living in a time, we are told, of pagan apocalypse, a time of
unveiling where this so-called esoteric knowledge is coming out onto the surface and is being
made available for everybody. Nobody is embarrassed anymore to call themselves esoteric or even
occult. This has become normal spirituality. Peter Berger, the socialist, speaks of the
sacred canopy over a culture. It doesn’t mean to say that everyone believes it implicitly,
but there was a time when the sacred canopy was the Christian worldview. Now that canopy
is being ripped away and another kind of canopy is being put in its place. That ripping away, the unveiling, the apocalypse,
I see in so many ways. For instance, the Jewish Kabbalah used to be reserved only for the
mature. Now it’s being broadcast all over. The New Age people speak of the dawning of
the Age of Aquarius. The radical witches and feminists speak of the Sophianic millennium,
the second coming of the goddess. The spiritual homosexuals predict the coming of eschatological
Sodom. And you know when you realize that between 61 and 75% of the population of the
rising generation believes that homosexuality is a perfectly legal and valid lifestyle,
you realize that this is not just poppycock. The Masons are going public. In December 28,
2009, the Grand Master for Pennsylvania said, “We need to make Free Masonry more contemporary.
Twenty-first century Masonic renaissance starts today.” In other words what Masonic thinking
really wants to say, now is being said clearly. And I found it very clearly said in Dan Brown’s
latest book, The Lost Symbol, where you find at the end of the book that the symbol that’s
discovered is the fact (quote), “That the ancient mysteries,” – that is Gnosticism
– “and the Bible are the same.” Do you see that? There’s an attempt to bring all
religions together under the rubric of these mystery religions, namely of course, Gnosticism.
Others see the Mayan calendar as decisive for our future. The Christian emergents speak
of a deep shift of the great emergents. Apocalyptic Buddhists speak of the coming of Maitreya.
Carl Jung, the great Gnostic, had a book, The Red Book, that was kept for 70 years in
archives by his family. That has been published this year. It’s called The Red Book, and
it shows very clearly the paranormal, occultic, shamanistic character of Jungian psychology. But the most telling, it seems to me, of all
these movements now up on the surface is what’s called the perennial philosophy. It’s believed
that this perennial philosophy, that is to say this philosophy that’s always been there,
is at the very core of all religions, that there is a deep level of agreement between
all the religions and that it is a subterranean stream that is now appearing on the surface.
And what is interesting is that – we should have had him speak here actually, it’s too
bad – the Gnostic bishop of Los Angeles – why didn’t you think of inviting him?
– of the Ecclesia Gnostica of Los Angeles says that the perennial philosophy is another
term for Gnosticism ancient and modern. So very subtly, you see, ancient Gnosticism is
back with us as this underground stream of eternal, endless truth about religion. Well what does this perennial or Gnostic philosophy
say? What’s its good news? Well the good news is first of all the good news about God.
God is the Father of the totalities, that is he is the all, and God joins the opposites.
You notice the title of the book I’m bringing out, One or Two. You don’t join everything
into one. And you need to see a world of difference. Well, the god of Gnosticism, ancient and modern
wants to join the opposites. Often revealed in female form as Sophia, as the goddess he/she
states, “I am androgynous. I am both mother and father since I copulate with myself.”
This seeks to express the divine mystery of everything finally being one, everything joined
together. Everything emanates from this divine spirit,
and emanates is a term in the Gnostic text and is crucial because God doesn’t create
anything because true existence cannot be created. And if you’re a Gnostic, you have
this true creational existence. As Harold Bloom said, who became a Gnostic, – he’s
professor of Shakespeare at Yale University – when he became a Gnostic he said, “I
am eternal, as old, uncreated, as old as God.” You see, that is the seduction of Gnosticism.
It is the experience of coming to realize somehow with some kind of technique that you
are as old as God, uncreated. In the Gospel of Thomas, which is supposed
to be the most Christian, you have this pantheism. “It is I who am the all, says Jesus. Split
a piece of wood, and I am there. Lift up a stone, and you will find me there.” Rendering
understandable what one of the great experts, Kurt Rudolph, said about Gnosticism, that
it is dualism on a monistic background. Isn’t that interesting? We always think of it in
terms of, you know, the spirit and flesh, and that there is this big separation, which
is true, but at the same time it espouses the whole of reality, and it’s just one
more form of monism, or what I’m calling more and more for simplicity, one-ism. So
one-istic, pagan pantheism is at the heart of this kind of Gnosticism, ancient and modern. Hippolytus, one of the Church Fathers, noted
this connection a long time ago. He documented that the so-called Christian Gnostics of his
day of the third century were interfaith perennialists, who sought (quote) “the wisdom of the pagans.”
That’s what liberals have always done. They seek the wisdom of the pagans. The Christian
Gnostics, he said, attended the ceremonies of the Isis-worshipping mystery cults in order
– I love this statement – in order to understand the universal mystery, the perennial
philosophy that flows just under the surface that allows us to see the truth about everything. So that’s the true God. The true God is
that spirit behind everything, who brings the good news to his followers that we are
divine like him. The false God of Gnosticism is the Creator of heaven and earth. He is
called a blind fool and a joke because he thinks (quote) “that He is the true and
living God.” He says, “I am God and beside Me there is no other,” the text you cited
last night. That is dismissed by the Gnostics as God being totally ignorant of what is actually
there behind Him. He doesn’t know this, and so He is a joke. He doesn’t know that
the goddess Sophia is the mother of the universe, and because of His dastardly work, He is actually
called the devil himself and is cast into hell as any devil worth his salt should be
by the goddess. These are in the Gnostic texts. So what is Gnosticism? It is, I believe, a
Christianized or Judaized form of paganism that’s always been with us, the one great
perennial philosophy. And I bring for proof the statement of an English witch. I love
English witches. American witches you can keep, but English witches they are really
worthy of being listened to. And this one Caitlin Matthews is a priestess of Isis, and
she says this, “Gnosticism serves most admirably as a bridge for paganism to infiltrate Christianity
in our time.” And she’s the one who announces the second coming of the goddess, the Sophianic
millennium, the era of the goddess where all peoples and all faiths will be united together.
And of course, at that moment Yahweh must be silenced. And so, many radical feminists
have attempted to do that. Naomi Goldenberg said in 1979 at the beginning of this movement,
“We women are going to bring an end to God. We are engaged in a slow execution of Christ
and Yahweh.” A Lutheran scholar dismissed the Creator God
of the Bible as (quote) “insane,” “pathologically violent,” and suffering from “multiple
personal [sic – personality] disorder,” states which are the result of “an archaic
first century understanding of God as a theistic being.” You see the whole rejection of theism,
of God separate from us, of what I call two-ism, that there are two kinds of existence in the
whole of reality. One is the Creator, who never has a beginning, and everything else
is creation, which began when God said at that moment, “Let there be.” And believe
me, you are on this side of that moment, and everything is. And Harold Bloom is on this
side of it too. But there is this tremendous rejection today of the notion of God the Creator.
Something we didn’t expect, did we, just 20 or 30 years ago, such that in the San Diego
gay parade a few years ago, I read on a T-shirt, “He’s your God. They’re your rules.
You go to hell.” You see totally relativizing what for so long we took as central to everybody’s
thinking. But you see how radical Gnosticism is. It is the very rejection of theism. It’s
the very rejection of the idea that God is separate from us. We’re all one together,
and that means, of course, that when this kind of thinking takes over, you will be public
enemy number one. There is an attempt to sort of hide the true
notion of Gnosticism. A so-called objective historian, Elaine Pagels – I was with her
in Holland, so my own life intertwines with these people – tried to rehabilitate the
Gnostic Christians, arguing of course that the Patriarchal bishops were attacking the
spiritual victims of Gnosticism and proposing Gnosticism as a wider, valid expression of
Christianity, and that the Gnostic gospels were merely complementary to the canonical
gospels. That is total scam. That is a spin zone. I do watch FOX. Douglas [sic – Duncan] Greenlees, a modern
Gnostic who is not at all a Christian says this, “In its wording Gnosticism is Christian,
while its spirit is that of the latest paganism of the West.” The two great Gnostic scholars
Hans Jonas and Kurt Rudolph never saw Gnosticism as Christian. Rudolf says that Gnosticism
is an independent world religion and not… should not be narrowly limited to a Christian
heresy. It was a parasite, he said, prospering on the soil of the Christian religion. So that’s a very quick background of what
is Gnosticism. It is a very serious ancient and now modern view, spiritual view of existence.
And the question is, what’s its future? And I’ve already intimated to you that I
think that it has its eye on a planetary civilization. We didn’t realize this in the ‘60s when
the hippies were looking for personal, mystical enlightenment, but that has become much more
than a footnote. We have seen during this period the demise of secularism, which has
not survived the bringing together of the East and the West, and that this change of
joining the East and the West of Eastern mysticism and Western technology is really the essence
of our world today. And in many ways, you can understand present politics, but I won’t
go into that, in those terms. But there are some in the vanguard of this
new vision of the world, this progressive, cutting edge, new thinking that have said
things about the future. Lloyd Geering, an apostate Presbyterian, yes we do have some,
argues that tomorrow’s culture will be post-Christian. He first of all in the ‘60s simply denied
the physical resurrection. And the New Zealand Presbyterians didn’t take him to task for
it. Now he denies the entirety of the Christian message, and he says this, “The time for
glorifying the Almighty God, who supposedly rules, is not over.” And he predicts that
sometime in the future the calendar will be renamed and the year 2000 will be rechristened
as the year 1 G.E., Global Era. The Lord’s Supper will be only significant as significant
human fellowship, and Christmas will be a family holiday. He says, “Tomorrow’s culture
will be religiously pagan. Mother Earth will be the consciously chosen symbol referring
to everything about the earth’s ecosystem. And he makes this observation. By the way,
his work is being promoted by the Jesus Seminar. It was founded by Robert Funk, Mike, who was
raised in a fundamentalistic home, and his parents put on him a white suit and white
shoes and pushed him out at the age of 10 years of age to preach. Don’t do that to
your kids. Anyway, his books are being promoted by the Jesus Seminar. He says then that the
loving care of Mother Earth is in many quarters replacing the former sense of obedience to
the Heavenly Father. That’s just one of these thinkers. A crucial man to know is Thomas Berry, an
ex-Roman Catholic priest, who just died a year or so ago. He calls himself a geologian.
And he is at the head of a cohort of Western intellectuals, closely identified with the
United Nations, seeking to transform our planet into a world that worships at the feet of
Mother Nature. His best selling book, The Great Work, has as its goal to (quote) “reinvent
the human at the species level.” This term “the great work” intrigued me. I did a
little bit of research, and I discovered that actually this book that is a best seller,
and everybody reads it, and it’s, you know, a programmatic statement of what the future
world will be, but the title itself is interesting because you find the phrase, “the great
work,” in all the occult books of the past. Theosophist Alice Bailey, who actually put
great store in the United Nations for bringing the world together spiritually, called that
view “the great work.” Aleister Crowley, another occultist, said “the great work”
is the uniting of opposites, the uniting of the soul with God, of the microcosm with the
macrocosm, of the female with the male, of the ego with the non-ego. And in his Gnostic
mass this is what he said, “The priest says, ‘The Lord will bring you to the accomplishment
of your true wills, the great work.’” The great work then is something that is out
there and appears to be ecological and interplanetary and so… or planetary, but behind it is this
occultic spirituality. Thomas Berry’s writing lays out a blueprint for a whole new civilization,
a powerful origin story, which is not the origin story of the Bible but is based upon
mythical evolution, a powerful, pagan spirituality, is a philosophical sophistication based on
quantum physics, committed to ecology, working out a new pansexuality and a new ethic, a
this worldly eschatology, a new psychology, transpersonal neo-Jungian psychology, which
is basically reintroducing the world to Shamanism, a geopolitical program, a new educational
philosophy, a new legal theory. That I believe is the future, and it behooves us to realize
that the opposition ahead of us is massive and extremely intelligent and determined to
work out this theory and bring it into practice. But there’s one scholar I want you to note
more than any other. His name is Ken Wilber. Into this triumphalist spirituality steps
a new Gnostic prophet by the name of Ken Wilber, who wrote a book in 2001 entitled A Theory
of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality. The new
term, by the way so that you don’t look silly, is not New Age but Integral Spirituality
or Progressive Spirituality. These people don’t like the New Age people because they
were focused on themselves, you see, because their agenda is now worldwide, and they don’t
want to be identified with some little small group anymore. So Integral Spirituality is
at the head of this big push. Wilber asked the question and tries to answer it, how can
everyone be right? And he tries to show that everybody is right, and he’s produced a
massive philosophy based on that. The universe is not winding down. It’s winding up. And
a new metanarrative of deep religion with global consciousness will descend on a collective
humanity. His system is based on what he calls holons, that is to say everything is a whole,
but as a holon it can be integrated into another whole, and so you can build a holistic system
by transcending and including. That’s the term. You include something by transcending
it, and so he lays out a whole transformation of human thinking. He has nine phases. He
calls the first six phases first tier thinking, archaic magical power gods, mythic order.
That, by the way, is theism. Number four. Scientific achievement is number five. The
sensitive self is number six. Then you move to what he calls second tier consciousness.
And he and all his cohorts occupy phase seven, the integrative followed by the universal
holistic and ultimately the integral holomic. Are you following me? But believe me, this
is not fooling around. This man is read by anybody who’s anybody. It’s Gnostic because
the ultimate goal is integral spirituality, which is the direct spiritual experience of
everything joined into one. I said this is not fooling around because he is being read
right now by Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Tony Blair, George Bush, Jeb Bush, Gerhard Schroeder,
Thabo Mbeki, Jim Garrison of the State of the World Forum, Michael Lerner of Tikkun,
Deepak Chopra. Oh this is a good one, Rajendra Pachauri, who is head of the United Nations
IPCC, the governmental panel on climate change. They are working on his getting his integral
theories into climate change. His work is being read at Davos, the World Economic Forum,
at the United Nations, and at UNICEF. They are developing institutes throughout the world
of integral business, integral medicine, integral education, integral psychology. But his goal
is staggering. Listen to this. Politically, this is what he wants to happen. “The U.S.
Constitution was the culmination of first-tier governance philosophy.” First tier means
non-mystical. “What the world now needs is the first genuinely second-tier or mystical
form of political philosophy. We are awaiting the new global founding fathers and mothers,
who will frame an integral system of governance.” You see, this is church and state totally
collapsed into one. Well, how is this stuff doing? “Transcend
and include,” I hear said by a number of evangelicals. Some of them now call themselves
ex-evangelicals. Tim King was interviewed by Spencer Burke, host of the oozeTV.com.
Believe me, lots of young people watch this stuff and are onto these websites. And neither
of them… Spencer Burke thinks he’s a progressive evangelical still, but they’ve rejected
doomsday scenarios of the Bible and they agree together to meet beyond our belief systems.
We need to transcend by the help of the Spirit and include all the religions. You know, the
more I read in this material, the more I see that there are two things identifying this
upbeat view of a new civilization. Listen to them. The first is interfaith mysticism,
and the second is social justice ideology. Those two things are driving the powerful
forces of occult spirituality in our day. Let me give you some proof of that. One example
is someone I already mentioned, the Lucis Trust of Alice Bailey. It used to be called
the Lucifer Trust, but some folks from Ligonier got in touch with them and said, “We did
well promoting Ligonier, and you’d better change your name too.” That was a joke,
folks. Loosen up. The Lucifer Trust, now known as the Lucis Trust, has been in charge of
the meditation room of the United Nations ever since its founding. It still is. Its
goal is to bring all religions and nations together, and the literature I get now tells
me it should be easy since (quote), “uniformity of beliefs is unnecessary.” What’s necessary?
“A shared spiritual experience and collective service.” You see that, “a shared spiritual
experience and collective service,” namely mysticism and social justice. So you have this Tim King, this ex-evangelical
saying let us meet beyond our belief systems. You have the Lucis Trust saying uniformity
of beliefs is unnecessary, and you have Harvey Cox in the book that Mike mentioned saying
in this age doctrines are giving way to social justice and spiritual experience. This is a massive movement, folks, and it
is driving itself through our culture under the guise of doing good. This, I believe,
is the new liberal agenda. Al Mohler, whom I respect deeply, said one thing wrong in
August of 2008. He declared that the liberal Protestant river has run dry. Actually, I
see a new stream of life now flowing in it. It’s this progressive Christianity that
is catching on to a pagan reordering of our life in a new form. And the example I give is the Rev. Dr. Lauren
Artress, a female priest in Canon for special ministry at San Francisco Grace Cathedral,
who for a number of years has been popularizing the pagan labyrinth as a spiritual technique.
Now, she was a classic secular humanist liberal, denying, you know, all the miracles of the
Bible and so on, as the old liberals did. Listen to what she says. “We mistakenly
thought that the intellect was the avenue of experiencing the sacred, to nourishing
the soul. We discounted the imagination and our other faculties of knowing mystery.”
You see the liberals now are turning to what the ancient Gnostics did, to the discovery
of the universal mystery of the perennial philosophy. And this, you see, is affecting the evangelical
church through a movement that we’ve been talking about, namely the emergent movement.
Not everybody in the emergent movement is as far left, but this is where it’s going.
Phyllis Tickle prophesies that emergent Christianity will constitute the majority of Christian
believers in the year 2050. But just how Christian will these believers be? She says emergence
is bigger than Christianity. It is a major interfaith paradigm shift that will rewrite
Christian theology. It is more mystical than anything the church has known for last seventeen
or eighteen hundred years. Tickle openly admits that some emergents regard God not as an entity,
that is a specific being, but rather that God is a relationship, God is a verb, but
this is okay. And so in this movement on the left at least we have emergent Muslims, emergent
Jews, and if we leave it to Brian McLaren, we’ll have emergent Buddhists soon. Here’s what one woman pastor of an emergent
church, the pastor of Journey Church in Dallas, Texas says, – you see where this stuff is
taking many people who once called themselves evangelicals – “I cannot say exactly what
we believe, except that experience is higher… is a higher authority than Scripture. I do
not believe the Bible is the Word of God. I believe Jesus is. Scripture has no hierarchy
over other books. It is inspired and inspiring the way a quantum physics book is.” This
is just amazing that you could read this kind of stuff and still claim to be Christian. Mike talked about Willow Creek yesterday.
They’ve been using books by Richard Rohr, a Roman Catholic mystic, who promotes non-dual
thinking, which is, of course, the classic pagan way of joining the opposites and not
making distinctions between us and God. It’s ironic. As we speak right now, there’s
a conference going on at Point Loma Nazarene University just down there in San Diego, of
which James Dobson is an alumnus, and a number of my friends at the church where I attend
in Escondido send their children to Point Loma Nazarene University. This conference
is going on right now. It is entitled “Nurturing the Prophetic Imagination.” And one of my
friends went down there yesterday and sent me an email, and I just thought it would be
interesting for you to know that in what we always thought was a profoundly evangelical
witness what is actually happening. There is in this conference the goal to deconstruct
Christian witness as social justice but even to declare that private property must be destroyed.
It’s pure Marxism. There’s a deconstruction of Biblical piety. Mysticism is being taught
at Point Loma Nazarene College University right now by a PCUS ex-woman pastor, who is
now a Benedictine nun teaching the mysticism of medieval and modern Roman Catholic mystics.
And there is a deconstruction of gender into gender confusion. Five feminist Ph.D. women
who teach at Point Loma are seeking to deconstruct the classic forms of the male female binary
and get their students, the males to act as females, and the females to act as males.
And now they’re talking about all the various orientations as being Christian. But finally
the irony is this. Madame Blavatsky who founded the theosophical society from which flowed
the Lucis Trust had her center on the very campus of Point Loma Nazarene University at
the end the 19th century. And you can go and visit some of the buildings there. But one
of the speakers said this. She praised the theosophical roots of the campus and its importance
for the history of San Diego. And nobody said a word. Friends we’re seeing a great apostasy growing
like a weed in our modern society. I have five minutes, seven minutes. There’s one
more figure I want to mention, Brian McLaren bringing Ken Wilber to the evangelical masses.
He’s called Martin Luther by Phyllis Tickle, Charles Darwin by certain liberals. But I
think he should no longer be seen as a merely provocative, controversial activist seeking
to awaken the church. I think he has adopted radical pagan, Gnostic apostasy. His view
of God is positively Gnostic. The deity of his evangelical past who (quote) “saves
sinners from the fall and punishes unbelievers in hell is an idol and damnable fool idol
(sorry)… a damnable fool and violent, ugly god.” This is just as violent as the language
in the Gnostic text I read earlier. He sees the fall just the way the Gnostics did, a
childhood lust, an adulthood gain, a journey into maturity. This is a variation of the
theme of the Gnostic view of Eve as the heroine, who thanks to this serpent of all knowledge,
becomes mature and independent. Kevin DeYoung has rightly said, “The spirit of Marcion
lives on in Brian McLaren.” Marcion was probably the first Gnostic. Where is McLaren hanging his hat these days?
He was invited to add his vision of the future. He, by the way, has rejected doom and gloom
of the book of Revelation. He doesn’t read it. He was invited by the Vision Project to
add his vision to a whole series of visions on a website including people like the radical
Riane Eisler, Jean Houston, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Michael Lerner. One interesting, Sarah McKechnie
was the president of the Lucis Trust. And all these visions are keyed to synthesis.
And McLaren says, “I agree with the New Vision group and their view based on synthesis.”
In other words, he agrees that all these different spiritual views will be brought together and
bring us indeed all together. And how does he get there? Well, he says he gets there
with the help of Ken Wilber, of whom he is an avid reader and endorses his books. And
so he comes to the position that there is nothing (quote) “really distinctive about
Christianity.” He is quite convinced that the transforming, framing story we’re imagining
could even overflow the bounds of the Christian religion and bring some benefit to other religions
and ideologies. In other words, he is in being affected by Wilber, he’s adopting the perennial
philosophy of Gnosticism. Wilber himself in his books says that his
analysis is a form of the perennial philosophy. He says the notions are the spirit exists,
that there is an experience of an enlightenment, a direct experience of the spirit within,
which, note, issues in social action of mercy and compassion. So here you have it: mysticism,
experience of the spirit within, and social justice. You know, Ken Wilber’s ascending
ladder is a scam. Eight of the nine points of transformation are actually pagan one-ist
theories of the world. The only one, number four, which he dismisses as having been transcended,
which is a… which is the Christian faith, is a theistic or two-istic view of existence.
That is dismissed in number four, transcended and included, but of course you cannot join
together theism, where God is distinct from creation, and this monism or one-ism, where
God and the creation are the same. And so you cannot force round pegs into square holes. But that’s, you see, where this movement
is going, – and where I’m going is towards the end – because I see in this Gnosticism
revived a revival of actually liberalism. I believe that the first form of liberalism
was Gnosticism because liberalism is the attempt to take the pagan culture around, transform
it by certain Christian terms in order to sell the Christian faith at a cheap price.
And we’ve seen this down the centuries. Jung in the 20th century, a self-confessed
Gnostic, introduces Gnostic heresy in so many of the seminaries across the West because
he talks about spirituality. He was a Gnostic. Bultmann was in love with the Gnostics, and
his view helped turn the minds of people like James Robinson and New Testament scholars
throughout the Western world. F. C. Bauer, who in the 19th century was the great New
Testament scholar everybody followed including Bultmann, was actually under the influence
of Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, which we’ve always thought to be
the arch-rationalist, this man who was seeing the evolution of the world in these powerful
terms. And I have a book here that I showed R.C. just a moment ago entitled Hegel and
Hermetic Tradition, published by Cornell University Press, showing that actually Hegel was a deep
believer in Hermeticism, which is a form of ancient Gnosticism. What immense power he
had on the world. The medieval church – did you know this
– the medieval church was in love with Hermeticism. You had statues of Hermes on cathedrals in
the West because Hermeticism, a form of Gnosticism, fitted with the humanistic views of the Renaissance.
In other words, liberalism down the centuries has adopted some form of Gnosticism to turn
the Christian faith away from the truth. Little wonder Abraham Kuyper in the Stone Lectures
said in 1898 that the conflict has always been and will be till the end, Christianity
or paganism, the idols or the living God. Today we face a powerful form of Gnostic liberalism.
I have a significant group of modern leaders who have rejected secular humanism identify
with this ancient pagan tradition. I’ve found it promoted, for instance, by my future
king, Prince Charles, who says this, “The teaching of the perennial philosophy is the
only way of solving the environmental crisis of the 21st century.” The Jungian psychologist,
June Singer, who actually calls homosexuality the sacrament of monism, says this, that the
discovery of the Gnostic text is only the vital opening act to a drama of cosmic proportions. Well, I’ve discouraged you, I’m sure.
I’m doing it for a purpose. The time of just hanging around hoping things will get
better if we do the same old, same old, is over. We need to be positive, but we need
to be realists as the early church was. I believe that you and especially your children
are facing opposition that’s not been known in the West for hundreds and hundreds of years.
And that’s why I think the Ligonier Academy and the Master’s College and movements like
that are doing something significant to train our rising generations, whose mouths are closed
by the way because they’re so intimidated by this politically correct, all is one, Rodney
King can’t we all get along kind of thinking, that they’re scared to open their mouths.
What are we doing to teach them about the essential thinking that has built this so-called
politically correct unified one-istic kind of thinking? I think our model has to be Daniel
and his friends, who knew the pagan philosophies better than the magicians and enchanters,
ten times better. That’s what we need to be doing in our education of the rising generation
of Christians is helping them to analyze what’s happening so that they can bring the truth
of the gospel of two-ism to our world, bind the lie of one-ism. In a week, we will celebrate the resurrection.
And pagans say, of course, that there is really no such thing as real existence. That’s
illusion. But all of them one day face death. And you know the only gospel I know to meet
the human situation is the empty tomb, where God [applause]… where God, the Creator of
matter will not let it finally rot in the grave but raise it to newness of life as the
first proof of a coming new heavens and earth. Like Daniel and his friends, dens and furnaces
might well be part of our witness, but it will be worth it to hear one day the testimony
of many pagan neo-Babylonians, who like Nebuchadnezzar will say as he said, “I, Nebuchadnezzar,
praise and extol and honor the King of heaven for all His works are right and His ways are
just.” That was the emperor of the pagan Babylonian Empire that said that. Just as
the early church defeated Gnosticism, so this neo-Gnosticism will one day meet the truth
of God’s powerful gospel and be silenced. As the Psalmist says, one day all the ends
of the earth will fear Him. And the final testimony of Nebuchadnezzar will be taken
up on the lips of all pagan rulers and nations, past and present, obliged one day to recognize
that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father. And to Him be glory forever and ever.
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