From Journalist to Heresy Hunter

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 understand 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.

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 Christianity simply give us a set of rules on how to be good, or does biblical virtue 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 lordship 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 Gospel of Judas. As a journalist I had the opportunity to report on this third-century papyrus text which some people saw as offering an

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 Crucifixion 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. . . . Salvation 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 historians as Gnosticism. These ancient heresies, which had been popular 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 materiality. 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 (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2006), 84–101.

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 suggest 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.

One of the reasons the early Church developed a canon was specifically to distinguish the writings of the New Testament from the spurious 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 secular media began pointing to Gnosticism as an alternative approach to Christian origins.

Hoping to get some clarity about these issues, I attended a conference 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 attending? 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