GNOSTICISM

GNOSTICISM by Elder Joe Holder

God often uses life experiences to illustrate what He revealed to us in Scripture. However, we must never allow experience to supercede Scripture as our authority. We see this error with increasing frequency among many leading Christian teachers in our time, “God revealed to me...” Ask the speaker where in Scripture he found this knowledge. You will readily see that Scripture holds little or no authority to the person. Esoteric experience, privately interpreted as a divine revelation, rules his life and thinking. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, exposed this mindset as altogether gnostic in its character. He strongly defended accepted, written Scripture as the faithful believer’s only reliable and acceptable rule of life and faith. The ancient gnostic error held to a body of secret verbal knowledge that only the initiated into its inner circle knew. The gnostic god was altogether unknowable and uninvolved in human life, so any true knowledge of him came through the leaders of this movement. How could anyone question the knowledge or “revelations”of these leaders? Conveniently, they couldn’t. Old error often reappears with a new wardrobe. In this case the modern New Age movement is little more than a mixture of ancient gnosticism mixed with Hinduism. With the number of professing Christian leaders and teachers embracing their own private “revelations”as having more authority than Scripture, is it any wonder that contemporary Christianity seems so ineffective in its rejection of the New Age philosophy?