The Deep Roots of Paganism

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

This lecture is going to be a history lesson. I am convinced that the study of history, which can be awfully detailed and unassociated from what one is doing, actually can shed a lot of light on the present time. George Santayana said, “Those who ignore or fail to know history are condemned to repeat it.” It’s a very insightful statement.

What I’d like to do in this lecture is to have a flash-back to the time around the New Testament, to try to show you that the situation in which we are presently living really is not unique. It has many novel elements to it-in that sense there is always certain uniqueness in history; we never have total repetition-and yet the givens are always the same. Deep down, all human beings are the same; but because of the world that we’ve been raised in, causing us to always think in terms of evolutionary progress, we tend to think we’re totally unique, that what is happening to us could never have happened in the past.

The Beginnings of Western Civilization

Around the time of the New Testament you have a social situation that is very similar to the situation that ours is becoming. A key figure in the structuring of the times around the birth of Christ is a well-known historical figure by the name of Alexander the Great. He was a remarkable man, trained as a youth in Greek philosophy, Greek education and Greek rationality. Alexander the Great reigned from 333 to 322 B.C. He only reigned for eleven years, and yet historians say he changed the face of the world. Alexander the Great was the son of Philip of Macedonia, who was a king of one of the Greek city-state areas around Macedonia. Greece was divided into many different city-states that all held to their independence. Alexander first of all unified Greece, which is a very small area.

In a sense this represents the beginnings of Western civilization. Thinking about it in terms of the East and the West is a valid way of looking at the world around the Mediterranean even at that time. Greece and Rome and eventually what was called the Greco-Roman Empire is to be identified with the West. In the fifth and fourth centuries you have, in Greece in particular, the development of what will be essentially Western culture-the rejection of the old Greek myths and a development of what was called the logos, or rationality. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and many other great thinkers developed a system of thinking and analysis that is at the basis of Western culture.

Aristotle was Alexander’s teacher as a young man. Wouldn’t all of you who have teenagers like to put them in the hands of Aristotle for just a few years? Maybe they’d learn to think! Well, Alexander clearly did. Alexander had a great vision of an empire. His empire was constituted by his brilliance as a military general, but also by his sense of culture. He felt a great call to take Greek culture throughout the then-known world. This is why he was so influential.

There had been lots of successful despots and military generals who had been able to crush local peoples and produce the Babylonian Empire or the Persian Empire. But in the case of Alexander, it was not simply a case of amassing territory and crushing local groups in order to expand Greek imperial power. Alexander was also a missionary for Greek culture. He managed, through many successful military operations, to indeed break down resistance and force, and he force-marched his Greek army-full of mercenaries, obviously-to what he thought was the end of the world. The Greek armies actually made it to Pakistan. He wanted to go to the Ganges, for he thought that was the end of the world, but he didn’t quite make it. But you can see how his vision was a vision to cover the entire known world with Greek culture.

Western Culture Moves East

As this Greek culture moved out further East all the time, many found Greek culture quite fascinating. For instance, in the third century B.C. we have the translation of the Old Testament into Greek, known as the Septuagint. You sometimes hear a reference to it as LXX, which is the Latin word for seventy. Another example is the Phoenicians, who have disappeared as a linguistic cultural group. So much did they adopt Greek language that we really don’t find any significant remainders of Phoenician written culture.

In other words, the ancient world found Greek culture absolutely fascinating, so they began to learn Greek, and to dress like Greeks. Often Jews took on Greek names. Even the high priests took on Greek names rather than their own Semitic names. In Jerusalem in the third century a gymnasium was built not too far from the temple, where young Jews were engaging in a sort of “24-Hour Fitness Center à la grecque” in the sight of the temple, stark naked-which is what gymnasium means; gumnos is the Greek word for naked. Of course the great culture of Greece included a culture of homosexuality as well, and this was seductive to many Jews.

You can see that there was a whole operation going on, aimed at successful acculturation to this Western way of thinking. So you have a notion of a universalism, where people are bound together by one language and one culture, a culture which claims to be universal, of course. This is the Stoic idea of the universal logos, the universal reason that really infuses the whole of the cosmos and in particular is expressed in the microcosm of each thinking individual. It’s a very fascinating and attractive notion in terms of an imperial policy, and it worked very well. Alexander’s empire, then, stretches from the West, including Spain, all the way down to Egypt in the south, which was the granary of the ancient world, and then on into India. An amazing agglomeration of cultures.

Why am I telling you all this? I find some fascinating parallels with the present time in the movement of Western culture to the East via a lingua franca, that is to say, one language that everyone uses. This is indeed what is happening in our culture. When Japanese and German businessmen meet in Paris, they speak English. English really is the lingua franca of this new imperialism, this Western culture that has exported itself to the East with its technology, with its capitalism, and with its democracy, all carried by this common language. So I see definite parallels there.

Eastern Spirituality Moves West

Now, in the case of the Greco-Roman Empire that Alexander established, the obvious movement was west to east. But another movement took place, and that was the movement from east to west. In other words, as you take Western Greek culture to the East, what happens is that Eastern culture then gets a vehicle to transport itself to the West. There followed a massive critique of the old Greek religions. Remember the gods and goddesses running around doing pretty much the same kind of silly things as humans did, though writ large in the sky? That kind of Greek mythology was sort of rejected en masse by the intellectuals. So this Western culture was opened up to a different kind of spirituality.

What the East can give to the West is spirituality, so you get from the East the exportation of classic Eastern spirituality. Apparently in India there are the remains of Greek architecture in the form of Doric pillars. The culture of Greece went as far as India and built temples with Greek architectural design. So we do know that Greek culture went as far as India. And that means, of course, that Eastern spirituality then came west. It was able to come west in particular because of this now common language. So these Eastern spiritual notions now got expressed in Greek, and the West then rediscovered spirituality. So the great religions of the East-Babylonian astrology; Indian Hinduism and Buddhism; the religions of Egypt, in particular the worship of the goddess Isis; and of the Middle East-the worship of the goddess Shibboleth or Diana or Artemis (various names for the same goddess)-now are transported to the West.

In Rome in the first century there was built on a very important piece of real estate the first temple to Diana/Artemis. I was in the south of France recently, and it is amazing to see the power of that Greco-Roman culture. The ruins of the temple to the goddess Artemis are still there. When the Romans built, they built for the long term. My wife and I walked behind the village up to the top of the hill, and stood behind the theater. Now it wasn’t the same as looking into the Grand Canyon, but it was absolutely immense. That place still holds eighty thousand people watching plays. It was built on the side of a hill, and it was enclosed by these massive constructions, ten stories high, of enormous stones. As you look down from the top, you see the statue of a Roman emperor, and the ideological power is all there as you face this imperial glory. The Romans were there for the long haul.

A temple was built to the goddess Isis in Rome in the sixties. Vespasian was the Roman emperor in the sixties, and Titus was his son. They were both on a military operation in Egypt in the late sixties, and Vespasian was called back to Rome to be made emperor. They were both on their way passing through Jerusalem when Vespasian actually went back to Rome, and so it was Titus who destroyed the temple in A.D. 70 on his march back to Rome.

If you ever go to Rome, be sure to look in the Forum for the triumphal Arch of Titus. On that arch, in bas-relief, you will find the Jewish menorah, the candlestick with seven bowls or flames, carried by prisoners marching to Rome. Now, both Titus and Vespasian were in Egypt before Titus came to Jerusalem, and Vespasian became an adept, a worshiper, of the goddess Isis, the goddess of magic. That was just before they went north and the son destroyed the Jewish temple.

You can see how monism and theism are already in a face-off between the goddess Isis and the God of the temple in Jerusalem. You can see the fascination that these rulers had, not simply for material and worldly power, but for spirituality. For example, why did Titus have to go into the Holy of Holies, which he did before it burned down?

The last little piece of evidence that this is also a spiritual confrontation, not simply “politics as usual,” is the fact that the night before the Roman procession of victory down the Forum to the temple-where the victory over Jerusalem and the Jewish forces, and no doubt the God of the Jews, was celebrated-both Titus and his father Vespasian spent the entire night in the temple of Isis in prayer and mystical experience. In other words, you have this incredible pagan monistic spirituality at the base of what’s going on in this time, in what we tend to just think of as imperial politics and raison d’etat.

Well, that’s just a few examples of the fact that Western culture opened itself up to Eastern spirituality. The Greco-Roman world really became, as one scholar says, “a unified cultural whole which also included a world religion.” In other words, behind the syncretism that finally developed because of that opening of the East and the West, where the gods are brought to Rome and their names become interchangeable, is Eastern spirituality.

What is Gnosticism?

Scholars now speak of a “world religion.” The Christian faith, the expression of the God who made the heavens and the earth, faces the massive pagan spirituality of this world religion. I’d like to talk about Gnosticism, but you cannot talk about Gnosticism unless you place it in that historical structure, because what is Gnosticism? It is indeed, in its non-Christian expression, this revival of pagan spirituality that is made possible in the confrontation and in the coming together of Western culture and language with Eastern spirituality. So you have a whole revival of spirituality in the West.

You have in particular the development of what are called the “mystery religions.” People who become initiates of these cults actually to go through a kind of spiritual experience. The initiate spends a period of fasting, discipline and preparation, and then is initiated into the mysteries of the sect. We have only one surviving description of those mystery religions and what happens, because everybody was committed to secrecy on pain of death. The one expression we have is that of a man called Lucius, who was initiated into the mysteries of the goddess Isis. This particular phrase I still remember: he said, “I saw the sun at midnight.” Interesting, this experience of light. Lucifer, of course, is the light-carrier, the light-bearer. And Betty Eadie these days talks about being “embraced by the light.” So light becomes this incredible notion of “illumination.”

So you have in these pagan mystery religions a rediscovery of this deep sort of spiritual experience of mysticism. Now, Gnosticism was born in that whole crucible of the rediscovery of spirituality. “Christian” Gnosticism, I believe, is the attempt of Christians to make Christianity attractive by adapting this kind of spirituality to Christianity. Now, I use the word “Christians,” but of course those particular people I think have failed to understand what Christianity really is, and for one reason or another have sold out the Christian faith. They are actually dressing up paganism with Christian terminology and Christian dress.

It is, I believe, the fundamental move of liberalism. I am convinced that the first expression of liberalism in the church is Gnosticism. Down the years, liberals have attempted to use the going philosophy of the time to reinterpret Christianity, almost always with disastrous results, by selling the essence of Christianity down the river. This of course is what happened with Gnosticism.

Hippolytus, one of the great church fathers who opposed the Gnostics, says that one particular group of Gnostics called the Naasenes, the worshipers of the serpent, attended the pagan mystery religions of the goddess in order to “understand the universal mystery.” So here we have so-called Christians, who are not content with what the Scriptures say about Christ being the true expression of God’s wisdom, attending these pagan mystery religions in order to understand the “universal mystery.”

Knowledge by Experience

What is Gnosticism, then? Gnosticism comes from the Greek term gnosis – knowledge. (Don’t pronounce this “guh-nosis.” How many of you say “kuh-nowledge”? Obviously the gn and the kn are derivative; the English kn is the expression of the gn.) I think everybody is interested in knowledge. Plato and Aristotle used the term gnosis for historical and mathematical knowledge. The New Testament uses the term for the knowledge of Christ and the revelation of the gospel. What did the Gnostics mean by gnosis, and why would that be an appropriate specific term for them? Well, their particular use of this term is in the sense of experience; it’s gnosis that comes from a deep, spiritual, religious experience.

In a recent article,Sufis to Shed Light on Mystical Faith, one of the Sufist leaders interviewed said, “You can be a Christian or Jewish and understand the principles of Sufism. It is not confined by boundaries and limitations.” And here’s what the essence of Sufism is: “It is a path of the heart. The knowledge of the heart is at a different level than the knowledge of the mind, which is what we’re most accustomed to. That is why it seems so foreign to most of us before we experience it.”

So, we’re talking about the experience of this special, supra-rational knowledge. That seems to me to be a constant in all of these religions-the attempt to break the barrier between the created and the Creator in order that the created can sense its own divinity. That is essentially what Gnosticism is. On the Internet, the Gnostic Society makes some statements about what Gnosticism is: “Gnosis derives from Greek and connotes knowledge or an act of knowing. The distinct form of knowing obtained, though, is not by reason, but by personal experience.” So it has to do with an experience of the self.

One particular expression which stands out is a statement made by Harold Bloom, who became a Gnostic when he read the famous study of Gnosticism by Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion. He doesn’t go into the details of how he got to this, but for him the great liberation was a moment of illumination when he finally realized that he was uncreated. Now, you can see how that is a total deformation of Christianity. How these original Gnostics could claim to be Christians and yet affirm that they were uncreated clearly indicates that Gnosticism really is paganism in Christian dress.

Indeed in our own day we are seeing this kind of re-Gnosticization of the Christian faith. Christian people should be aware of this, not simply saying, “Isn’t that awful,” but knowing what’s happening and why is it happening. It is a pagan worldview that is entering into the church. I won’t take the time here to really demonstrate this from the Gnostic texts. I suggest you get hold of my book, Spirit Wars, which has some interesting chapters on ancient Gnosticism, to give you a feel for the fact that what we’re experiencing now is not at all new. It’s not even new for the church; the church itself has gone through this kind of invasion before.

Creator God has to Go

Because the Gnostic, through this mystical experience, comes to be convinced that he is uncreated, what does that logically mean? That he’s divine. Then what happens to God? You don’t need God anymore; at least you don’t need the God of the Bible anymore. You have displaced the God of the Bible with your self. Especially you do not need the God who created the heavens and the earth, because when you say that, you’ve established a Creator and have placed yourself in the category of the created. With this new insight, that God and his acts have to go, the Gnostics attempted to create a so-called “Christian” theology that finally would get rid of God the Creator.

You’ve probably heard that the Gnostics were those who wanted to get rid of the flesh. This is Gnostic dualism, that “the spirit is everything, the flesh is nothing.” But I think it’s a little more complicated than that. I think what the Gnostics wanted to get rid of was not the flesh as such, but the Creator and the creational structures that God placed in the world he made. For the Gnostic, liberation is liberation from the creational structures, and it’s a turning over on its head of everything that Christianity affirms.

I should explain that there are Gnostic texts; they were discovered in 1945, a little library of about fifty texts. They are now available and you can buy the translations of them. Of course, this is a wonderful occasion for all those folks interested in Gnosticism and the re-Gnosticization of the Christian faith, because now we have original texts that come from the second, third, and fourth centuries. We don’t simply depend now upon the church fathers and their citations of the Gnostics; we have the very first-hand documents. So look for some of these texts to be replacing texts of the New Testament in certain churches. It is happening already, as certain radical scholars are proposing the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas as of equal value to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. That book, The Five Gospels, which was published in 1993, became a bestseller on the New York best seller list. Liberals of all kinds flock to these Gnostic texts, because really they’re liberal texts. But it’s an overturning of the very essence of orthodoxy.

The Gnostic text Hypostasis of the Archons describes the struggle of the true spiritual person, and says that the real spiritual struggle is not with flesh and blood, but with “the authorities of the universe and the spirits of wickedness.” Now, where is that coming from? Ephesians 6:12-”We wrestle not with flesh and blood, but with principalities and powers and with spiritual wickedness in high places.” All Christians would agree with this citation from the apostle Paul. What is incredible, though, is that the Gnostics identify the authorities of the universe and spirits of wickedness with the Creator God revealed in the Old Testament. That’s the spiritual wickedness with which we have to deal-it’s the arrogant God who says, “It is I who am God; there is none apart from me.”

Reinterpreting Genesis

In the Gnostic movement you have a total overturning of the whole of the Genesis account of creation, and the God who created the heavens and the earth becomes the devil. You have this hierarchy in Genesis where God creates Adam first, and then from Adam he creates Eve. Those two are then tempted by Satan, the serpent. In many of these Gnostic texts that have recently been found you will find a treatment of the Genesis account of the creation. What you find is that that hierarchy is turned on its head. Guess who is the liberator and redeemer. It’s the serpent. Guess who teaches wisdom. It’s the serpent, the beast or the created thing that was wisest of them all. Scripture says that about the snake, that it was “wiser than them all.”

The serpent teaches Eve, and Eve becomes the spiritually endowed human. She really understands, and it’s in her deep understanding that she reaches for the fruit and eats it. She becomes, then, the first true Gnostic, because in eating of that apple she receives the gnosis of who she really is. She’s not under the authority of the God, the Creator of heaven and earth; she is capable of deciding on her own what her future will be. Of course, Eve then teaches Adam, and she teaches Adam to do what? To reject the God, the Creator of heaven and earth, as diabolical. You even find some texts in this collection that actually say that the fate of the God who so-called “created the heavens and the earth” is to be cast into hell. We’re talking about a radical overturning of orthodoxy, all in the name of “Christianity.”

Well, what is very interesting is that this approach of turning everything on its head is now being adopted by liberal scholars. It’s hard to believe. I collected about fourteen various biblical scholars today, and the things they say about Genesis is virtually identical with what these Gnostics said some seventeen hundred years ago.

I’ll just give you one example. The Journal for the Study of the New Testament is the journal produced by Sheffield University Bible Department in Britain, which for many years was known as one of the few really conservative evangelical Bible departments in the British university system. It so happened that there were brought together a number of fine evangelical scholars in Sheffield. This Journal for the Study of the New Testament was created to give expression to that kind of thought. Well, this whole Biblical Studies Department has been moving to the left.

In a recent article, Francis Watson deals with the whole subject of feminism. This is where many people bite into the apple, it seems to me. This is the beginning of a whole change of worldview that often takes place. He argues in this article that indeed Genesis 1-3 is hopelessly hierarchical and patriarchal. He does not agree with the evangelical egalitarians who want to argue that prior to the fall everything was egalitarian. This man is a radical scholar, it turns out, and he is saying to the moderate evangelical egalitarians, “Your exegesis doesn’t work. You cannot say that prior to the fall Adam and Eve were equal and that it’s because of the fall that there is any kind of hierarchy.” He won’t accept that.

He secondly goes on to say, “I believe that the apostle Paul thoroughly and well understood Genesis in his application of Genesis in the Pauline texts.” So Paul has understood Genesis. But his third move is to say, “But I can neither accept Genesis nor Paul.” He says we need a different kind of reading of the Genesis text, and indeed of Paul, that we need “a more appropriate strategy.” Some of you won’t understand what these intellectuals are capable of doing, all in this wonderful academic prose. We need “a more appropriate strategy,” he says, “a strategy of resistance.” In other words, as you read the text you resist what it says, you do a form of “counter reading” of the text, one that is “defiantly ‘against the grain'” of the text. This would involve, in reading Genesis, seeing “the serpent as liberator, Eve as heroine in her courageous quest for wisdom, and the Lord God as a jealous tyrant concerned only with the preservation of his own prerogatives. Such a reading was, of course, adopted within Gnosticism.” Here is a man who is adopting this radical overturning of the whole of Genesis as the only possible reading for an intelligent person at the end of the 20th century. My first little book was entitled The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back. Here it is, the Gnostic empire, being proposed now in Christian journals as the only way of reading the Bible.

Learning From History

Recently I was in Lyons, the second largest city in France. As you can tell, I’m fascinated with the Roman remains of that great culture. I have a friend in Lyons who is a French pastor, and he organized for me a visit to a crypt in the middle of a hospital in the center of Lyons. I’m sure nobody even knows it’s there. This little old nun came out with a key and said, “Follow me.” We went through an open courtyard, and then down some steps. She opened this door, and we walked into what was a Roman prison, virtually untouched, with the iron rings still in the ceiling where they would chain prisoners, and places where they would put prisoners. It was there that the first martyrs of Lyons were kept-fifty of them were put to death by the Roman authorities.

Saint Irenaeus, one of the great defenders of the Christian faith and someone who denounced Gnosticism, was the second bishop of Lyons. The first bishop was in this crypt in this prison and died there. His name was St. Pothinus. Irenaeus is one of our great sources of knowledge of Gnosticism. He spent much of his time researching Gnosticism. He was from Asia Minor, and he was sent to plant churches in Gaul, where all this paganism was so ripe, and where the so-called “Christian” Gnostics were having a field day.

Irenaeus probably was also martyred in 202 A.D. by the same people that martyred those fifty. It struck me as very interesting that the church that was so solid but so small was being attacked both from the outside and the inside. Fifty martyrs were put to death by the pagan authorities at the same time Irenaeus was fighting for orthodoxy against these Gnostics within the church. Can you imagine a more difficult time? But that’s the way the church was.

It struck me that that also may be the situation for us one day. We need to know history. We need to know what’s happened in the past. We need to learn. And what I want us to learn from that story is that Irenaeus won. He was martyred, but orthodoxy was preserved, and the church was saved from Gnosticism. Because of the work of Irenaeus, people like Augustine finally came to the Christian faith. Augustine was a Gnostic in a Manichaean sect. Augustine was the greatest theologian of the Middle Ages. Calvin cites Augustine 4,000 times; Luther cited Augustine thousands of times, which means that Augustine is, in a sense, one of the great thinkers that produced the Reformation. So the church was able to fight back that invasion of Gnosticism.

We need to know these things. We need to realize that the church wasn’t founded twenty years ago when some flashy pastor had a good idea. We are in the history of God’s work in the world, calling out people to confess him as Creator and Redeemer. We must fight against paganism, that has always wanted to close our mouths, and will continue to try to do so. May these examples of the past call us to courage and fortitude and clear thinking for the sake of Christ. Amen.