Your Own Personal
Jesus
Michael
S. Horton
In fact, one reason
that these forms of religion have survived modernity, against all expectations
to the contrary, is that they not only can accommodate modernity’s
privatization of faith as an inner experience but they actually thrive in this
atmosphere.
Citing examples from
TV, pop music, and best-selling books, an article in Entertainment Weekly
noted that "pop culture is going gaga for spirituality." However,
[S]eekers of the day
are apt to peel away the tough theological stuff and pluck out the most dulcet
elements of faith, coming up with a soothing sampler of Judeo-Christian
imagery, Eastern mediation, self-help lingo, a vaguely conservative craving for
'virtue,' and a loopy New Age pursuit of 'peace.' This happy free-for-all,
appealing to Baptists and stargazers alike, comes off more like Forest Gump's
ubiquitous 'boxa chocolates' than like any real system of belief. You never
know what you're going to get. (1)
The "search for
the sacred" has become a recurring cover story for national news magazines
for some time now; but is a revival of "spirituality" and interest in
the "sacred" really any more encouraging than the extravagant
idolatry that Paul witnessed in Athens (Acts 17)?
Not only historians
and sociologists but novelists are writing about the "Gnostic"
character of the soup that we call spirituality in the United States today. In
a recent article in Harper's, Curtis White describes our situation
pretty well. When we assert, "This is my belief," says White,
we are invoking our right to have our own private conviction, no matter how
ridiculous, not only tolerated politically but respected by others.
"It says, 'I've invested a lot of emotional energy in this belief, and in
a way I've staked the credibility of my life on it. So if you ridicule it, you
can expect a fight." In this kind of culture, "Yahweh and Baal-my God
and yours-stroll arm-in-arm, as if to do so were the model of virtue
itself."
What we require of
belief is not that it make sense but that it be sincere....Clearly, this is not
the spirituality of a centralized orthodoxy. It is a sort of workshop
spiritu-ality that you can get with a cereal-box top and five dollars....There
is an obvious problem with this form of spirituality: it takes place in
isolation. Each of us sits at our computer terminal tapping out our
convictions....Consequently, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that our
truest belief is the credo of heresy itself. It is heresy without an orthodoxy.
It is heresy as an orthodoxy. (2)
While European
nihilism denied only God, "American nihilism is something different. Our
nihilism is our capacity to believe in everything and anything all at once.
It's all good!" All that's left is for belief to become "a
culture-commodity."
We shop among
competing options for our belief. Once reduced to the status of a commodity,
our anything-goes, do-it-yourself spirituality cannot have very much to say
about the more directly nihilistic conviction that we should all be free to do
whatever we like as well, each of us pursuing our right to our isolated
happiness. (3)
Like Nietzsche
himself, who said that truth is made rather than discovered and was described
by Karl Barth as "the man of azure isolation," Americans just want to
be left alone to create their own private Idaho. While evangelicals talk a lot
about truth, their witness, worship, and spirituality seem in many ways more
like their Mormon, New Age, and liberal nemeses than anything like historical
Christianity.
We would prefer to be
left alone, warmed by our beliefs-that-make-no-sense, whether they are the
quotidian platitudes of ordinary Americans, the magical thinking of
evangelicals, the mystical thinking of New Age Gnostics, the teary-eyed
patriotism of social conservatives, or the perfervid loyalty of the rich to
their free-market Mammon. We are thus the congregation of the Church of the
Infinitely Fractured, splendidly alone together. And apparently that's how we
like it. Our pluralism of belief says both to ourselves and to others, 'Keep
your distance.' And yet isn't this all strangely familiar? Aren't these all the
false gods that Isaiah and Jeremiah confronted, the cults of the 'hot air
gods'? The gods that couldn't scare birds from a cucumber patch? Belief of
every kind and cult, self-indulgence and self-aggrandizement of every degree,
all flourish. And yet God is abandoned. (4)
As far back as the
early eighteenth century, the French commentator Alexis de Tocqueville observed
the distinctly American craving "to escape from imposed systems" and
"to seek by themselves and in themselves for the only reason for things,
looking to results without getting entangled in the means toward them." He
concluded, "So each man is narrowly shut up in himself and from that basis
makes the pretension to judge the world." Americans do not need books or
any other external authorities in order to find the truth, "having found
it in themselves." (5) American Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803-1882) announced that "whatever hold the public worship held
on us is gone or going," prophesying the day when Americans would
recognize that they are "part and parcel of God," requiring no
mediator or ecclesiastical means of grace. Walt Whitman's "Song of
Myself" captured the unabashed narcissism of American romanticism that plagues
our culture from talk shows to the church.
During this same
period, the message and methods of American churches also felt the impact of
this romantic narcissism. It can be recognized in a host of sermons and hymns
from the period, such as C. Austin Miles' hymn, "In the Garden":
I come to the garden
alone, while the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.
And he walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.
And he walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.
The focus of such
piety is on a personal relationship with Jesus that is individualistic, inward,
and immediate. One comes alone and experiences a joy that "none other has
ever known." How can any external orthodoxy tell me I'm wrong? My personal
relationship with Jesus is mine. I do not share it with the church.
Creeds, confessions, pastors, and teachers-not even the Bible-can shake my
confidence in the unique experiences that I have alone with Jesus.
A Perfect Storm
If moralism represents
a drift toward the Pelagian (or at least semi-Pelagian) heresy,
"enthusiasm" is an expression of the heresy known as Gnosticism. A
second-century movement that seriously threatened the ancient churches,
Gnosticism tried to blend Greek philosophy and Christianity. The result was an
eclectic spirituality that regarded the material world as the prison-house of
divine spirits and the creation of an evil god (YAHWEH). Their goal was to
return to the spiritual, heavenly, and divine unity of which their inner self
is a spark, away from the realm of earthly time, space, and bodies. With little
interest in questions of history or doctrine, the Gnostics set off on a quest
to ascend the ladder of mysticism. The institutional church, with its ordained
ministry, creeds, preaching, sacraments, and discipline, was alienating-like
the body, it was the prison-house of the individual soul.
Pelagianism and
Gnosticism are different versions of what Gerhard Forde called the "glory
story." Following Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, which was
following Romans 10 and 1 Corinthians 1, the Reformation contrasted the
theology of glory with the theology of the cross. As Forde explains,
The most common
overarching story we tell about ourselves is what we will call the glory story.
We came from glory and are bound for glory. Of course, in between we seem
somehow to have gotten derailed-whether by design or accident we don't quite
know-but that is only a temporary inconvenience to be fixed by proper religious
effort. What we need is to get back on 'the glory road.' The story is told in
countless variations. Usually the subject of the story is 'the soul'...what
Paul Ricoeur has called 'the myth of the exiled soul.' (6)
In neither version
does one need to be rescued. Assisted, directed, enlightened perhaps, but not
rescued-at least not through a bloody cross.
Both versions of the
"glory story" drive us deeper into ourselves, identifying God with
the inner self, instead of calling us outside of ourselves. The "cross
story" and the "glory story" represent not merely different
emphases, but entirely different religions, as J. Gresham Machen pointed out in
his controversial book, Christianity and Liberalism.
Pelagianism leads to
Christless Christianity because we do not need a Savior, but a good example.
Gnosticism's route to Christless Christianity is by driving us deeper inside
ourselves rather than outside to the incarnate God who rescued us from the
guilt, tyranny, and penalty of our sins. Pelagianism and Gnosticism combine to
keep us looking to ourselves and within ourselves. We're a
self-help people and we like our gods inside of us where we can manage them.
Together, these heresies have created the perfect storm: the American Religion.
Gnosticism as the American Religion?
Contemporary
descriptions in news periodicals and polling data consistently reveal that the
ever-popular "search for the sacred" in American culture shares a lot
of similarities with Gnosticism. Of course, in the most popular versions there
may be no explicit awareness of this connection or any direct dependence on
such sources.
There is an explicit
revival of Gnosticism in our day, however, in both the academy and popular
culture, from Harvard Divinity School seminars to Dan Brown's The Da Vinci
Code. The "Gnosticism" aisle in the average bookstore chain (next
to religion and spirituality) is evidence of renewed interest in pagan
spiritualities. Matthew Fox, repeating the warning of self-described Gnostic
psychologist Carl Jung, expresses this sentiment well: "One way to kill
the soul is to worship a God outside you." (7) Other writers in this issue focus on this
revival of explicit, full-strength Gnosticism, so I will focus on the
"Gnosticism Lite" that pervades the American spirituality today.
This watered-down
Gnosticism does not require any explicit awareness of, much less attachment to,
the esoteric myth of creation and redemption-by-enlightenment. The opposition,
however, between inner divinity and enlightenment and redemption, an external
God, the external Word, an external redemption in Christ, and an institutional
church offers a striking parallel to America's search for the sacred.
In the American
Religion, as in ancient Gnosticism, there is almost no sense of God's
difference from us-in other words, his majesty, sovereignty, self-existence,
and holiness. God is my buddy or my inmost experience, or the power-source for
living my best life now. God is not strange (i.e., holy)-and is certainly not a
judge. He does not evoke fear, awe, or a sense of terrifying and disorienting
beauty. Furthermore, all the focus on making atonement through a bloody
sacrifice seems crude and unspiritual to Gnostics when, after all, the point of
salvation is to escape the physical realm. All of this is too
"Jewish," according to Gnostics from Marcion to Schleiermacher to the
"Re-Imagining Conference" of mainline Protestant leaders (especially
radical feminists) who explicitly appealed to Gnosticism in their screeds
against "men hanging on crosses with blood dripping and all that gory
stuff." The god of Gnosticism is not the one before whom Isaiah said,
"Woe to me, for I am undone!" or Peter said, "Depart from me,
for I am a sinful man." To borrow a nice phrase from William Placher, it represents
"the domestication of transcendence." God is no longer a problem for
us.
Instead of God's free
decision to make his home with us in the world that he created, for the Gnostic
we are at home with God already, in the stillness of our inner self and away
from all entanglements in space and time. As the second-century church father
Irenaeus pointed out, Gnostics simply do not care about the unfolding plan of
redemption in history because they do not care about history. Time and space
are alien to the innermost divine self. To mystics and radical Anabaptists like
Thomas Müntzer who made even the external Word of Scripture and preaching
subservient to an alleged inner word of personal revelation, Luther and Calvin
said that this was the essence of "enthusiasm" (literally,
God-within-ism). As Luther put it, this is the attempt to ascend the ladder
from matter and history to spirit and the eternal vision of "the naked
God." Yet, apart from the incarnate Word, this dazzling god we encounter
at the top of that ladder is really the devil, who "disguises himself as
an angel of light" (2 Cor. 11:14).
This
characteristically American approach to religion, in which the direct
relationship of the soul to God generates an almost romantic encounter with the
sacred, makes inner experience the measure of spiritual genuineness. We are
more concerned that our spiritual leaders exude "vulnerability,"
"authenticity," and the familiar spontaneity that tells us that they
too really do have a personal relationship with Jesus than that they faithfully
interpret Scripture and are sent by Christ through the official ordination of
his church. Everything perceived as external to the self-the church, the
gospel, Word and sacrament, the world, and even God-must either be marginalized
or, in more radical versions, rejected as that which would alienate the soul
from its immediacy to the divine.
It is therefore not
surprising that today the "search for the sacred" continues to
generate a proliferation of sects. In fact, sociologist Robert Bellah has
coined the term "Sheilaism" to describe American spirituality, based
on one interview in which a woman named Sheila said that she just follows her
own inner voice. "Your Own Personal Jesus," parodying the title of a
Depeche Mode song, seems to be the informal but intense spirituality of many
American Christians as well.
Philip Lee's Against
the Protestant Gnostics (Oxford, 1987) and Harold Bloom's The American
Religion (Simon and Schuster, 1992) point out with great insight the
connections between this popular spirituality and Gnosticism. It is especially
worth pondering Harold Bloom's learned ruminations here because, as he himself
observes, Philip Lee laments the Gnosticism of American Religion while
Bloom celebrates it. (8)
Hailed as America's
most distinguished literary critic, Bloom displays a sophisticated grasp of the
varieties of ancient Gnosticism as well as its successive eruptions in the West
to the present day. First of all, says Bloom, "freedom, in the context of
the American Religion, means being alone with God or with Jesus, the American
God or the American Christ." (9) This unwritten creed is as evident in the
history of American evangelicalism as it is in Emerson.
As a religious critic,
I remain startled by and obsessed with the revivalistic element in our
religious experience. Revivalism, in America, tends to be the perpetual shock
of the individual discovering yet again what she and he always have known,
which is that God loves her and him on an absolutely personal and indeed intimate
basis. (10)
Second, as extreme as
it at first appears, Bloom suggests that whatever the stated doctrinal
positions that evangelicalism shares with historic Christianity,
Mormons and Southern
Baptists call themselves Christians, but like most Americans they are closer to
ancient Gnostics than to early Christians....The American Religion is pervasive
and overwhelming, however, it is masked, and even our secularists, indeed even
our professed atheists, are more Gnostic than humanist in their ultimate
presuppositions. We are a religiously made culture, furiously searching for the
spirit, but each of us is subject and object of the one quest, which must be
for the original self, a spark or breath in us that we are convinced goes back
to before the Creation. (11)
"The Christ of
the twentieth century" is no longer really even a distinct historical
person, but "has become a personal experience for the American Christian,
quite clearly for the Evangelicals." (12) In this scheme, history is no longer the
sphere of Christianity. The focus of faith and practice is not so much Christ's
objective person and work for us, outside of us, as it is a "personal
relationship" that is defined chiefly in terms of inner experience.
Although he may at
times overstate his thesis, Bloom draws on numerous primary and secondary
sources from the history of particular movements to build his case. In one
chapter, Bloom explores the enthusiastic revivalism of Barton Stone, who broke
away from Presbyterianism to found what he regarded as the finally and fully
restored apostolic church: the Church of Christ (Disciples). According to his
memoirs, Stone wrote, "Calvinism is among the heaviest clogs on
Christianity in the world," even from the very beginning of its
assumptions: "Its first link is total depravity." (13)
A full generation
before Emerson came to his spiritual maturity, the frontier people experienced
their giant epiphany of Gnosis at Cane Ridge. Their ecstasy was no more
communal than the rapture at Woodstock; each barking Kentuckian or prancing
yippie barked and pranced for himself alone.... American ecstasy is solitary,
even when it requires the presence of others for the self's glory. (14)
"What was missing
in all this quite private luminosity," Bloom adds, "was simply most
of historic Christianity."
I hasten to add that I
am celebrating, not deploring, when I make that observation. So far as I can
tell, the Southern Jesus, which is to say the American Jesus, is not so much an
agent of redemption as he is an imparter of knowledge, which returns us to the
analysis of an American Gnosis in my previous chapter. Jesus is not so much an
event in history for the American Religionist as he is a knower of the secrets
of God who in return can be known by the individual. Hidden in this process is
a sense that depravity is only a lack of saving knowledge. (15)
This intuitive,
direct, and immediate knowledge is set over against the historically mediated
forms of knowledge. What an American knows in his or her heart is more certain
than the law of gravity.
"A pragmatic
exploiter of his own charisma," Charles Finney was a formative influence
in the American Religion, notes Bloom. (16) So the "deeds, not creeds"
orientation of American revivalism is driven not only by a preference for works
over faith (i.e., Pelagianism), but by the Gnostic preference for a private,
mystical, and inward "personal relationship with Jesus" in opposition
to everything public, doctrinal, and external to the individual soul. Religion
is formal, ordered, corporate, and visible; spirituality is informal,
spontaneous, individual, and invisible.
As sweeping as it may
first appear, there are clear similarities between fundamentalism and
Pentecostalism on the one hand and Protestant liberalism on the other. In fact,
one reason that these forms of religion have survived modernity, against all
expectations to the contrary, is that they not only can accommodate modernity's
privatization of faith as an inner experience but they actually thrive in this
atmosphere. Repeatedly in the past few centuries, we have seen how easily an
inner-directed pietism and revivalism turns to the vinegar of liberalism. One
example is Wilhelm Herrmann, a liberal pietist, whose statement early in the
twentieth century could be heard in many evangelical circles then as now:
"To fix doctrines...into a system is the last thing the Christian Church
should undertake....But if, on the other hand, we keep our attention fixed on
what God is producing in the Christian's inner life, then the manifoldness of
the thoughts which spring from faith will not confuse us, but give us cause for
joy." (17)
So it is not
surprising when today's fundamentalists eventually become tomorrow's liberals,
in recurring cycles that pass through stages of intense controversy. Bloom
follows a similar narrative in relation to Gnosticism. For all of their obvious
differences, fundamentalists and liberals, Quakers and Roman Catholics,
Presbyterians and Mormons, New Agers and Southern Baptists sound a lot alike
when it comes to how we in America approach religious truth.
While Luther, Calvin,
and their heirs sought to reform the church, the more radical Protestant
movements have often seen the church as an obstacle to the individual's
personal relationship with God. (Evangelical George Barna, a guru of the church
growth movement, has recently written three books arguing that the era of the
local church is over, soon to be replaced by Internet resources for personal
piety.) Where the Reformers pointed to the external ministry of the church,
centering on Word and sacrament, as the place where God promised to meet his
people, "enthusiasm" was suspicious of everything external. Similarly,
Quakers gave up the formal ministry, including preaching and sacrament, in
favor of group sharing of personal revelations. Even when evangelicals retain
these public means appointed by Christ, they often become assim-ilated to
self-expression and techniques for self-trans-formation: means of our
experience and activity more than God's means of grace. Ultimately, it's what I
do alone with God that matters, not what God does for me together with his
covenant people through public, earthly, material means that he has appointed.
In the history of
American (and to some extent British) evangelicalism, the fear of sacraments
(as opposed to ordinances) has often been defended as a defense against the
perpetual threat of Romanism. In all likelihood, however, a deeper (perhaps
unwitting) source of such unease is that evangelicalism has listed toward
Gnosticism: Nothing can be allowed to get in the way of my personal and utterly
unique relationship with Jesus. Southern Baptist theologian E. Y. Mullins was not
saying anything that was not already elaborated by American Transcen-dentalists
when he wrote, "That which we know most indubitably are the facts of inner
experience." (18) The individual believer, alone with his or
her Bible, was all that was necessary for a vital Christian experience. Bloom
quotes Mullins' axiom, "Religion is a personal matter between the soul and
God." (19) However heterodox this assumption may be
by the standards of historic Christianity, it is surely the orthodoxy of
American Religion.
Furthermore, Bloom
observes, triumphalism-the inability to face the depravity of the inner self
even at its best-marks the Gnostic spirit. "Triumphalism is the only
mode," says Bloom, in which Mullins and American religionists generally
"read Romans," moving quickly through the body of Paul's epistle to
chapter 8: "In all these things we are more than conquerors through him
that loved us." (20)
Indeed, Gnostics are
allergic to any talk about the reality of sin and death. It was in
nineteenth-century America that Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science,
whose explicitly Gnostic enthusiasms introduced into the vocabulary of
Christians the euphemism "passing away" for death and resurrection.
For Bloom, two
outstanding exceptions to this Gnostic trajectory are Swiss theologian Karl
Barth and Princeton scholar (and founder of Westminster Seminary) J. Gresham
Machen. "Barth knows the difference between the Reformed faith and
Gnosis," says Bloom, pointing out the critical divergence: the subjective
experience of the self over God's objective word and work. (21)
What we call
fundamentalists, says Bloom, are really Gnostics of an anti-intellectual
variety. If there were a possibility of an anti-Gnostic version of
fundamentalism, says Bloom, such proponents "would find their archetype in
the formidable J. Gresham Machen, a remarkable Presbyterian New Testament
scholar at Princeton, who published a vehement defense of traditional
Christianity in 1923, with the aggressive title Christianity and Liberalism."
Bloom adds, "I have just read my way through this, with distaste and
discomfort but with reluctant and growing admiration for Machen's mind. I have
never seen a stronger case made for the argument that institutional
Christianity must regard cultural liberalism as an enemy to faith." (22) In contrast to this defense of traditional
Christianity, those who came to be called fundamentalists are more like
"the Spanish Fascism of Franco...heirs of Franco's crusade against the
mind, and not the legatees of Machen." (23)
In short, "the
Calvinist deity, first brought to America by the Puritans, has remarkably
little in common with the versions of God now apprehended by what calls itself
Protestantism in the United States." Again, as Bloom himself points out,
Philip Lee's Against the Protestant Gnostics makes almost the same
arguments, with many of the same historical examples. What makes Bloom's
account a little more interesting is that he champions the American Religion
and hopes for even greater gains for Gnosticism in the future. According to
Bloom, a "revival of Continental Reformed Protestantism is precisely what
we do not need." (24) Like ancient Gnosticism, contemporary
American approaches to spirituality-however different conservative and liberal
versions may appear on the surface-typically underscore the inner spirit as the
locus of a personal relationship. As conservative Calvary Chapel founder Chuck
Smith expresses it, "We meet God in the realm of our spirit." (25) This view is so commonplace that it seems
odd to hear it challenged. Nevertheless, the church fathers, Protestant
Reformers, and orthodox theologians have always directed us with the
Scriptures, outside of ourselves, where God has chosen to meet with and to
reconcile strangers.
Philip Lee's contrast
between Gnosticism and Calvin can be just as accurately documented from a wide
variety of Christians through the ages:
Whereas classical
Calvinism had held that the Christian's assurance of salvation was guaranteed
only through Christ and his Church, with his means of grace, now assurance
could be found only in the personal experience of having been born again. This
was a radical shift, for Calvin had considered any attempt to put 'conversion
in the power of man himself' to be gross popery. (26)
In fact, for the
Reformers, adds Lee, the new birth was the opposite of "rebirth into a new
and more acceptable self," but the death of the old self and its rebirth
in Christ. (27)
Like ancient
Gnosticism, American spirituality uses God or the divine as something akin to
an energy source. Through various formulae, steps, procedures, or techniques,
one may "access" this source on one's own. Such spiritual technology
could be employed without any need for the office of preaching, administering
baptism or the Supper, or membership in a visible church, submitting to its
communal admonitions, encouragements, teaching, and practices.
According to the
studies of sociologist Wade Clark Roof, "The distinction between 'spirit'
and 'institution' is of major importance" to spiritual seekers today. (28) "Spirit is the inner, experiential
aspect of religion; institution is the outer, established form of
religion." (29) He adds, "Direct experience is always
more trustworthy, if for no other reason than because of its 'inwardness' and
'withinness'-two qualities that have come to be much appreciated in a highly
expressive, narcissistic culture." (30)
The way many
evangelicals today speak of "accessing" and "connecting"
with God underscores this point, in sharp contrast with the biblical emphasis
on God's descent to us in the incarnation. Profoundly aware of our difference
from God not only as creatures but as sinners as well, biblical faith
underscores the need for mediation. God finds us by using his own creation as
his "mask" behind which he hides so that he can serve us. The
Gnostic, by contrast, needs no mediation. God is not external to the self; in
fact, the human spirit and the divine Spirit are already a unity. We cannot be
judged-but, then, this also means that we cannot be justified.
To the extent that
churches in America today feel compelled to accommodate their message and
methods to these dominant forms of spirituality (dominant also in-perhaps even
first in-American evangelicalism itself), they will lend evidence to the thesis
that Christianity is not news based on historical events but just another
therapeutic illusion.
The Flight of the Lonely Soul vs. the Journey
of the Pilgrim
Longing for Christ's
return, the Christian is world-weary because "this age" lies under
the power of sin and death. As the firstfruits of the new creation, Jesus
Christ has conquered these powers. It is only a matter of time before the
restoration of redeemed creation at the end of history. In the meantime, the
believer groans along with the rest of creation for this liberation (Rom.
8:18-25). So the Christian is longing for the final liberation of creation, not
from creation. Precisely because the believer is rooted in the age to
come, of which the Spirit's indwelling presence is the down payment, there is a
simultaneous groaning in the face of the status quo and confidence in God's
promise to make all things new.
By contrast, the
Gnostic self is rootless, restless, weary of the world not because of its
bondage to sin but because it is worldly, longing not for its sharing in
the liberation of the children of God but in its freedom at last from
creation's company; not the transformation of our times and places, but the
transcendence of all times and places. "Taking no root," wrote
nineteenth-century American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, "I soon weary of
any soil in which I may be temporarily deposited. The same impatience I feel,
or conceive of, as regards this earthly life." (31) Add to this philosophical orientation the
practical transience of contemporary life that keeps us blowing like tumbleweed
across the desert, and Gnosticism can be easily seen to jive with our everyday
experience. Uprooted, we rarely live anywhere long enough even to be
transplanted. Flitting like a bumble bee from flower to flower of religious,
spiritual, moral, psychic, and even familial and sexual identities, our
generation actually finds it plausible that there can be genuine communities
(including "churches") on the Internet.
But the "glory
story" is not all it's cracked up to be. Bearing the weight of
self-salvation or self-deification on our shoulders is as foolish as it is
cruel. The search for the sacred leads to hell rather than heaven, to death
rather than life, to ourselves (or Satan) rather than to the God who has
descended to us in Jesus Christ, veiling his blinding majesty in our frail
flesh. In this foolishness God outsmarts us, and in this weakness he conquered
the powers of death and hell. The truth that Jesus proclaims-and the truth that
Jesus is-remains for all ages, even for Americans, "the power of God unto
salvation for everyone who believes" (Rom. 1:16).
1 [ Back ] Jeff Gordinier, Entertainment Weekly
(7 October 1994).
2 [ Back ] Curtis White, "Hot Air Gods," Harper's vol. 315/no. 1891 (December 2007), p. 13.
3 [ Back ] White, pp. 13-14.
4 [ Back ] White, p. 14.
5 [ Back ] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: 1898), vol. 1, p. 66.
6 [ Back ] Gerhard O. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, 1518 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 5.
7 [ Back ] Cited in Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 75.
8 [ Back ] Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 26-27.
9 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 15.
10 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 17.
11 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 22.
12 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 25.
13 [ Back ] Quoted by Bloom, p. 60.
14 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 264.
15 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 65.
16 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 73.
17 [ Back ] Wilhelm Herrmann, Communion with God (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1913), p. 16.
18 [ Back ] Cited by Bloom, p. 204, from E. Y. Mullins, The Christian Religion (1910), p. 73.
19 [ Back ] Cited by Bloom, p. 213, from E. Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion (1908), pp. 53-54.
20 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 213.
21 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 213.
22 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 228.
23 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 229.
24 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 259.
25 [ Back ] Chuck Smith, New Testament Study Guide (Costa Mesa: The Word for Today, 1982), p. 113.
26 [ Back ] Philip Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 144.
27 [ Back ] Lee, p. 255.
28 [ Back ] Roof, p. 23.
29 [ Back ] Roof, p. 30.
30 [ Back ] Roof, p. 67.
31 [ Back ] Cited in Vernon L. Parrington, "The Romantic Revolution in America," vol. 2 of Main Currents in American Thought (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959), pp. 441-442.
2 [ Back ] Curtis White, "Hot Air Gods," Harper's vol. 315/no. 1891 (December 2007), p. 13.
3 [ Back ] White, pp. 13-14.
4 [ Back ] White, p. 14.
5 [ Back ] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: 1898), vol. 1, p. 66.
6 [ Back ] Gerhard O. Forde, On Being a Theologian of the Cross: Reflections on Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, 1518 (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), p. 5.
7 [ Back ] Cited in Wade Clark Roof, A Generation of Seekers: The Spiritual Journeys of the Baby Boom Generation (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1993), p. 75.
8 [ Back ] Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992), pp. 26-27.
9 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 15.
10 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 17.
11 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 22.
12 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 25.
13 [ Back ] Quoted by Bloom, p. 60.
14 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 264.
15 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 65.
16 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 73.
17 [ Back ] Wilhelm Herrmann, Communion with God (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1913), p. 16.
18 [ Back ] Cited by Bloom, p. 204, from E. Y. Mullins, The Christian Religion (1910), p. 73.
19 [ Back ] Cited by Bloom, p. 213, from E. Y. Mullins, The Axioms of Religion (1908), pp. 53-54.
20 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 213.
21 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 213.
22 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 228.
23 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 229.
24 [ Back ] Bloom, p. 259.
25 [ Back ] Chuck Smith, New Testament Study Guide (Costa Mesa: The Word for Today, 1982), p. 113.
26 [ Back ] Philip Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 144.
27 [ Back ] Lee, p. 255.
28 [ Back ] Roof, p. 23.
29 [ Back ] Roof, p. 30.
30 [ Back ] Roof, p. 67.
31 [ Back ] Cited in Vernon L. Parrington, "The Romantic Revolution in America," vol. 2 of Main Currents in American Thought (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1959), pp. 441-442.
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Michael Horton is the
J. Gresham Machen professor of apologetics and systematic theology at
Westminster Seminary California (Escondido, California), host of the White
Horse Inn, national radio broadcast, and editor-in-chief of Modern
Reformation magazine. He is author of many books, including The
Gospel-Driven Life, Christless Christianity, People and Place,
Putting Amazing Back Into Grace, The Christian Faith, and For
Calvinism.
Issue: "The New
Spiritualities" May/June 2008 Vol. 17 No. 3 Page number(s): 14-20
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