Gnosticism in its ancient form has passed away, but it is interesting to observe how its spirit reappears from time to time in modern days. Gnosticism, as already seen, is not one aspect of thought alone, but many. And in one form or another it is seen again and again. For example, the modern denial of the virgin birth of our Lord is that form of Gnosticism which taught that the man Jesus became Christ only at His baptism, when the Holy Spirit descended upon Him from heaven.
Phases of Gnostic teaching are reproduced in modern pantheistic philosophies and other forms of religious doctrine, which hold that there has been no objective atonement and no resurrection of Christ from the dead. "Basilides with his powerful speculative grasp and all-embracing evolutionary process might be termed the Hegel of the movement; Valentinus with his robe of fantasy and triple fall and redemption was its Schelling; Marcion with his severe practical bent, his doctrine of faith, and his antitheses of the just God and the good, might without straining be termed its Ritschl" (Orr, The Progress of Dogma, 59).
"Fichte said, `There were no external realities at all, they were the mere objectivity of the subject or creations of the inward eye'; after Fichte came Schelling, and Schelling said, `Then this creating eye is God's own eye'; and after Schelling came Hegel, and Hegel said that `God and man are one, and God all men, and all men God, and the whole universe God eternally thinking in the process of development,' and that or something like it is Hegelianism. I feel in studying this philosophy, as Baron Humboldt says he felt, when he experienced the first shock of an earthquake. I feel a dreadful sense of restlessness and insecurity. The ground seems to give way beneath, and the earth and the heaven to dissolve, the universe becomes a dream, a myth" (W.B. Robertson, D.D., Martin Luther, German Student Life, etc., 138).
"Philosophy," says Mansel, "striving after a first principle which shall be one and simple and unconditioned and incapable of all further analysis in thought, is naturally tempted to soar above that complex combination of attributes which is implied in our conception of personality, and in endeavoring to simplify and purify our representation of the Divine nature, ends by depriving it of every attribute which can make God the object of any religious feeling or the source of any moral obligation" (The Gnostic Heresies, 11). God is no longer the author and source of goodness and truth and moral law, but the mind is occupied with the metaphysical relation between God and the world, as absolute and relative, cause and effect, principle and consequence, and God becomes identical with the world.
It is easily seen how teaching of this sort strikes at the root of all religion and morality. The personality of God, the personality and free will of man, the existence of moral evil, the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, the redemption which He accomplished for the world, His resurrection, the whole significance of His person and His work--all is denied. This is the spirit and the meaning of Gnosticism.
Dr. Gwatkin sums up the matter thus: "Gnosticism undermined Christian monotheism by its distinction of the Creator from the Supreme, Christian morals by its opposition of the philosopher to the unlearned, Christian practice by its separation of knowledge from action; and it cut away the very basis of the gospel whenever it explained away its history. In every case it had got hold of truth on one side--the reality of evil in the world, the function of knowledge in religion, the difference between the letter and the spirit; but fragments of truth are not enough for a gospel, which is false if all truth is not summed up in Christ. Therefore, there could be no peace between the Gnostic illuminati and the Christian churches" (Early Church History, II, 68).
LITERATURE.
Uhlhorn, The Conflict of Christianity with Heathenism; Neander, Church History, Antignostikus; Reuss, History of Christian Theology in the Apostolic Age; Lightfoot, Notes on Epistles of Paul, Colossians, Philippians; Gwatkin, Early Church History to 313 AD, II; W. Bousset, article "Gnosticism," Encyclopedia Brit, 11th edition; Harnack, History of Dogma, I (English translation); Orr, Neglected Factors in the Study of the Early Progress of Christianity, Sin as a Problem of Today, The Progress of Dogma, The Early Church; Mansel, The Gnostic Heresies; Robert Law, B.D., The Tests of Life.
John Rutherfurd