Peter Jones Review Session

Edited transcript from a lecture given at Grace Valley Christian Center Sunday morning (9 a.m.), May 10, 1998

I would like to give an overview of my recent lectures. I began by speaking of the pagan revival in Christian America, more in terms of a description of what I have seen. The two books that I’ve written are entitled The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back and Spirit Wars. Some of you bright people may have already figured out what the third in this trilogy will be called: The Return of something. It’s very interesting, though, that George Lucas said that he produced the Star Wars series in order to introduce Buddhism into America. So while we’re being entertained to death, while we’re being satiated by this constant flow of fun and entertainment, actually underneath it all is a very serious religious and spiritual message. And as William Booth said, “Why should the devil have all the good tunes?” I say, “Why should the devil have all the good titles?”

Culture Shock

Those first two books were born from a sense of culture shock, having been away from America for eighteen years. We went to godless France to help begin a Reformed seminary to revive a dying Huguenot church. We arrived with two little babies. I can recall after a few years there my wife saying to me, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be back in the States raising our children in those strong Christian schools, in those wonderful youth groups, in those Christian colleges and universities?” Each one of our children was then in a school where they were the only Protestant, and there was an incredible sense of minority complex in godless France. It was certainly not acceptable to raise the religious question in intelligent society when we were in France. How things have changed! When I was there recently giving lectures, I learned that this once humanistic, atheistic country is now turning to spirituality, but that the most significant growing religion in France, the France of Descartes and of the French Revolution, is now Buddhism. But in our naivete, as we thought about America, as we struggled in godless France to learn that incredibly difficult but wonderfully beautiful language, my wife reminisced and said, “How wonderful it would be if we could raise our children back in America.”

We came back to America in 1991 and, to my great surprise, it struck me that perhaps America is the most difficult place to raise children. We put our daughters in the local high school. We had given them all kinds of different variations of education, from home schooling to Christian schools, and finally two of our girls, the younger ones, wanted to have an experience of American high school, so we put them in there. Three weeks after they were there my sixteen-year-old came home with two friends, both her age, both of them lesbians, one of them a witch. Now of course we were shocked, but at the same time we thanked the Lord that we would be able to have some ministry with these young ladies. Just this week one of them knocked on the door and came in and sat at our table for three hours, just to be with us. So the Lord has a way of turning evil to good. But the struggle is enormous once you make those major, deep, almost biological commitments to apostasy. Breaking that can only be the powerful work of God’s Spirit.

So the first book, The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back, was born of culture shock. The title is cute; I wish I could say it was really mine, but I think the Lord gave it to me. It was the result of someone asking me if I would give a lecture at the prospective students’ conference the next spring. This was just two months after I’d gotten to the States, and I said, “Sure. I’ll give a lecture in February. Let me just go in my room and think about it.” This was August and I’d arrived in July. After a couple of minutes in my room I went to the Dean and I said, “I’ve got the lecture, and here’s the title: The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back.” Then I began to work on the lecture. I didn’t yet have anything to say, but I sensed that there was something happening in this culture.

As I worked on that lecture in a very serious way, some of the synapses in my brain started making connections. I had been virtually obliged to study ancient Gnosticism in my Ph.D. program, and indeed was planning on writing a Ph.D. on the Gospel of Thomas, which is one of the recently found Gnostic texts. I wrote a paper on the Gospel of Thomas and sent it to one of the world’s leading experts on the Gospel of Thomas, who was teaching at that time at Princeton Theological Seminary. On the basis of that paper he wrote to me and said, “I want you to work with me.” So I was going down the road of writing on Gnosticism. But after a semester he was called away to become Archbishop of Gothenburg, and so my director was no longer there, and I sort of dropped the whole project. I then turned to another subject; I finally did a doctoral dissertation on the Apostle Paul, with the title The Apostle Paul – A Second Moses.

A Forsaken Birthright

Well, there I was in the States after eighteen years of teaching in France in a Reformed seminary in a godless country, and I said to myself: This is very strange. America is an extremely religious country. Ninety-seven percent of Americans believe in God. Ninety percent believe God loves them, and probably has a wonderful plan for their lives. In other words, America is an extremely religious country. But what seemed strange to me, and indeed is one of the most ironic twists in history since, is that this religious culture, this spiritual culture that has been so profoundly Christian for so long, has turned away from its birthright.

In a sense, America has become the world leader as we come out of the “cold war” and out of that antipathy between the two superpowers. There is now only one superpower. It drives the Europeans crazy. That’s why they are all uniting and producing the Euro currency and so on-it’s to try and produce a counter balance, if you like. But it is true that America is the undisputed leader of the world. Imagine the occasion that that could have provided for the promotion of the Christian faith. Imagine the challenge that could have been placed at the doorstep, into the hands of Christian America. Yet at the same moment as America becomes the leader of the world, America has turned away from its birthright. Isn’t that ironic? All in one generation-the same generation where America becomes the leader of the world, the superpower undisputed-in that same generation she turns away from her spiritual roots. What America becomes is not the promoter of Christianity, but the promoter of spiritual paganism.

America is religious and deeply spiritual, yet in one generation we have changed the object of our worship from the God who made the heavens and the earth to the worship of the self, the worship of the creation-which of course spells disaster. It is indeed a formula for cultural implosion and destruction; the evidence is all around us. Yet the ideologues continue to tell us that this is the way to go, to grit it out, because one day, just over the rainbow, as the world tips on its axis and we move into the Age of Aquarius, suddenly we’ll all become superhuman angelic beings, free to do whatever we want and yet in perfect harmony with one another.

The Gnostic Texts

That study of Gnosticism some twenty years prior suddenly started bouncing around in my head as I thought: What I’m seeing in America is what I was studying twenty years ago about these weird Christian heretics, who clearly failed in their project. The church had silenced Gnosticism-it was eliminated, gone forever, and it was being studied by myself and others of my Ph.D. colleagues. I began studying Gnosticism at Harvard, where at the time I was doing a Th.M. Copies of the recently discovered Gnostic texts were being passed around amongst the masters and doctoral students there, and I was under the impression that you studied this stuff to get a better understanding of the past. How do you understand “primitive Christianity,” as it is called, the original growth of Christianity, if you don’t know the culture? Of course, Gnosticism was part of that early Christianity, so you studied it to understand. What I didn’t realize was that some of those professors had really seen the discovery of these Gnostic texts as a way of transforming Christianity today.

The leader in this movement for the translation and dissemination of these Gnostic texts is James Robinson. He is the director of the translation project, and his name is on virtually everything that has been written about the Gnostic texts. James Robinson was raised in a Presbyterian home in the south by the leading evangelical Reformed scholar of the south, William C. Robinson. In one of his articles, How my Mind Has Changed, James Robinson says that he was raised on the Westminster Confession of Faith. He was raised as a child to learn the catechism by a profoundly orthodox father. He became a Presbyterian minister at a young age.

Several years ago I attended the annual Society of Biblical Literature Professional Guild of Biblical Scholars in Chicago. There James Robinson was giving lectures on the coming of age of American New Testament scholarship. The significant claim that he was making was that American New Testament scholarship had managed to break the monopoly of those backward-thinking Europeans who held onto these Gnostic texts that had been found, had managed to get the texts out of there, and had translated them and given them to the whole world of scholarship. But the greater achievement, having done that, was to elevate the Gospel of Thomas to the level of the four canonical gospels-Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. That is the contribution of American scholarship to the study of the Bible in our times, says James Robinson.

Transforming Christianity

I didn’t realize at the time that those texts that were being distributed and translated were, for some of our leading Bible scholars, an occasion to be able to transform Christianity into a more open, a more contemporary kind of religious confession. It has been interesting to me in my research to note to what extent indeed these Gnostic texts are now being used. When I was at the Parliament of the World’s Religions, there was an evening where people got up and read from various scriptures-from the Gita and from Buddhist texts and the Kabbalah. There was a liberal monk in his sandals and his robe who got up and read from the Bible, and he said, “Well, I’ve tried to find a text that works here. I don’t want to offend all of the other religions, so I won’t read a text that mentions Christ, and I don’t want to offend any of the women, so I won’t mention or read a text that mentions God.” So he read 1 Corinthians 13, totally out of context, obviously. You do note when you read that that neither God nor Christ is mentioned. But of course it’s the context that shows how you should understand it.

I also recall a professor of religion getting up and reading one of these Gnostic texts, the Hypostasis of the Archons, as another of the great religious text to be read. But what few people knew was that this text actually says that ultimately the goddess Sophia’s great role is to throw the God of the Bible into hell. That’s what the Gnostics ultimately desire. These texts are now being used, in particular by radical feminism, because the Gnostic movement was a very egalitarian movement. The major divine principle is the goddess Sophia, and ultimately her role is to cast Yahweh into hell. We are talking about radical apostasy. We’re talking, really, about the project of the evil one.

It is very interesting that one of the Gnostic sects was called the Naassenes. Naas is the Hebrew term for serpent. Is there anything new under the sun, really? These Naassenes were the ones who, to complete their spiritual understanding, went and worshiped at the goddess mystery religion cults, in order to understand the “universal mystery.” Of course the perennial religion is paganism; the “universal mystery” is paganism.

A Revival of Ancient Gnosticism

As I reflected on this lecture that I was supposed to give, and as I recalled some of this Gnosticism that I’d studied in the past, all of a sudden lights started going on. I thought to myself: What I’m seeing in spiritual America today is really a sort of revival of this ancient Gnosticism-not that many people knew to give it that term. So I wrote that first book, The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back, because of this culture shock; it was because of a sense that while America was still extremely spiritual and religious, the object of that religious devotion had radically changed. I think we need to understand that this is happening in our day. The church did indeed fight back Gnosticism, and needs to do so again.

Now, I want you to realize that when I use the term “Gnosticism” it’s a fancy term. But at the end of the day, Gnosticism is simply another form of spiritual paganism. Just keep that in mind. It’s that experience that pagans are always after, that mystical experience of belonging to the whole, of sensing that they are one with nature. The Gnostics did it in their way. I was listening to a program recently by a Roman Catholic priest who was talking about St. Patrick, who took the gospel to the British Isles. He was describing how St. Patrick had to face the Druids. One of the things that characterized Druid spirituality was the constant praying of mantras. Of course, that approach is to work up an ecstasy. It’s an attempt to create an ecstatic experience through which one senses one’s own deification. It’s like in Sufism with the whirling dervishes. In all these various and religions there is this attempt to convince oneself of one’s own divinity.

Two Worldviews in Mortal Conflict

That is why I always come back to this fundamental distinction that I think is helpful and valid for us all to understand-that Biblical orthodoxy and this general pagan approach are in mortal conflict, one with the other. It is because they are two totally different, antithetical worldviews. We can be nice and we can be tolerant and we can be friendly in our approach to people, but at the basic level of understanding our faith we need to be very clear. We do a service to people by showing the fundamental distinction between paganism and theism.

It’s very simple. Paganism believes, ultimately, that we are all uncreated, eternal, and therefore divine, and that the solution to all our problems is our realization of that fact. Therefore, great effort is put into the solving of all the immediate world problems (and that’s very good), but via this religious program of getting us all to feel one with nature. So very subtly, in the guise of saving the planet, we’re really introducing millions of people into a false self-understanding. Paganism really tells us that we’re all divine and that we create ourselves, and that the universe in all its beauty comes from itself.

Christianity, or biblical theism, cannot take that approach. Instead of one basic principle that unifies us all, namely that everything is divine, it sees that there are in fact two fundamental principles or realities: there is the reality of the Creator and the reality of the created, and you may not confuse those two. The Bible begins, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” In one real sense, everything else is commentary.

It’s very interesting that virtually every one of those Gnostic texts about which I spoke is obsessed with Genesis 1-3, because they realize that in order to change things you’d better change Genesis 1:1. The Bible consistently tells us that God will always be God, and we will always be creatures. Because of that fundamental statement of theism becomes necessary the whole business of redemption, from a Christian point of view. Revelation also has to come from the outside if there are two realities. If there is God and the creation, and if there is truth, it must come from outside ourselves, from the God who made us. Similarly, redemption and salvation must come from outside, because we cannot save ourselves; we are creatures.

Five Points of Monism

Let’s quickly review the five points of monism. The first is: “All is one and one is all.” The second: “Humanity is one.” The third point: “Religions are one.” The fourth: “One problem.” Fifth: “One solution.” I hope those five points can help reduce this incredibly confusing mass of diverse expressions of spirituality to a clearer, more simple understanding of paganism.

Let me end with this phrase, as an encouragement to you and as a statement of the way we need to think about evangelism in the future. It’s something that Abraham Kuyper said a hundred years ago. He came to America and lectured at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1898, in The Stone Lectures. With incredible precision and an understanding of the way things were heading at the high point of Christianity in America, Abraham Kuyper said: “Remember that the fundamental conflict always has been, always is, and always will be until the end: Christianity or Paganism, the idols or the living God.”