Always Gnosticism. . .

The grave threat against Christianity has always been and still is Gnosticism.  It is that unwholesome belief that the flesh and bodily things are somehow unworthy, common, and in the way of the true wisdom of the spiritual.  It is also the pursuit of things hidden and the disdain for the things plain.  It is this that progressive and liberal Christianity has come to define as truth.  In this view, Christianity has less to do with us as mortals and everything to do with the spiritual.  The pursuit of our mortal lives lies in the understanding of unbodily things, of secret mysteries, hidden behind the obvious for those who will pass through event, fact, and truth toward something greater.  So this Christianity is not interested in the redemption of the body, in the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting as embodied people.  Instead, it looks at the body for what it is not instead of for what it is.  This is what St. Paul warns against in 1 Corinthians 15.  It ought to be the warning that arises from orthodox Christianity today.

Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to the current preoccupation with discerning and deciding for gender -- as if it had nothing to do with the body itself!  What is obvious (male or female) is set aside in favor of what is hidden in feelings and desires.  This is not simply a decision that one makes in adulthood but the burden thrust upon our children from the youngest age -- they must discern who they are and decide who that is -- not in terms of vocation or occupation but gender.  Medicine's foremost warning to do no harm is set aside in treating the body as a canvas for the self-expression of feeling and desire.  This can mean treating puberty as if it were a disease and the reproductive organs as if they were a prison.  And we have not even begun to talk about sin yet.

It is also true in many other areas of life.  The pursuit of happiness, once a freedom enshrined in rights guaranteed, has become the sole pursuit of life.  It is a happiness that is not a blessing to the happy but the burden and duty of life that offers a constantly changing target that will prevent the focus ever from being taken off self and placed on another.  Marriage gets in its way.  Children are roadblocks to this personal and solitary journey toward happiness.  Medicine is a tool for happiness (the way pain reduction has displaced healing as its purpose and even required the people who serve medicine to provide a painless exit when someone arrives at the conclusion that it is time).

The celebration of life that so quickly replaced the funeral and the focus on the past instead of any real future is another aspect of this Gnosticism.  The life is lauded for its self-centered focus upon happiness and the greatest accomplishment is such a life well lived.  In the end, the spirit is released from the body to a better place that is not defined and to an existence vague enough to be just about anything.  Think how this contrasts with the preaching of the Savior who dies to kill death and rises to bestow the life death cannot overcome.  Think how disappointing it is to the purveyors of this Gnosticism that Jesus can be touched, eats, walks, and has a real, fleshly body (though glorious).

It was, in my view, the beginning of what ended up the great Battle for the Bible -- the idea that the factual or historical reality of something is either unnecessary or even an impediment to the spiritual truth represented there.  It is not that Adam and Eve are not real people but that their existence as people is irrelevent to Genesis and the unfolding story of sin and redemption.  It is not that Jonah and the whale are not real and the event of the prophet's amazing attempt at escape historical but this does not matter and its historicity may even impede its spiritual meaning and appreciation.  So it is for Jesus' resurrection.  It does not need to be said that Jesus did not rise and His bones might still be found in a cave in Palestine but that the historical truth of that event is somehow unnecessary and even detracts from the spiritual meaning of the resurrection.  It does not need to be said that marriage is the divinely instituted order for church and society but marriage is optional and even an enemy of personal fulfillment -- a fulfillment that is spiritual and not physical in nature.  I could go on.  Once you unleash this genie from the bottle, Gnosticism is free to rob Christianity of the truth of all truths and to leave us with a hidden gem to find, a secret path to follow, and a spiritual future that looks back at flesh and blood as if it were youthful foolishness.

This can have nothing to do with the Jesus who comes in flesh and blood in the womb of the Virgin, who suffers, dies, and sheds His blood upon the cruel instrument of death on the cross, and who rises to rescue not the idea of a person but their body from its chains as well.  It does not take long then to gut the sacraments from their reality and to make the Word a code book to be broken instead of the Word of Life to be believed.  Imagine that.