"Sacred Roots: Neo-gnosticism: Today’s Most Serious Threat to the Church" by Stephen Russell

The one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him, and a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

Hello and welcome to Strength at Strength. We're gathered here on a cold Saturday afternoon, and I think cold for a lot of people, to hear Brother Stephen Russell. Stephen Russell is coming to us from Faith Builders in Pennsylvania.

And this afternoon we have a part two for a talk that had happened already this morning on Gnosticism. And this morning he spoke about the first serious threat to the church, which was Gnosticism. And this afternoon, part two is Neo-Gnosticism, today's most serious threat to the church. So I'm looking forward to hear what you have to say about that and the present-day threat of Gnosticism. So thank you for being willing to do this part two and covering more of a pertinent threat to the Church of Christ in the society that we live in today. So before we get started, let's bow our heads for a word of prayer.

Heavenly Father, I thank You that we can look to You for all things, for our daily bread, for spiritual food, for salvation. Thank You that You have had compassion on us and sent Your only begotten Son to redeem us from darkness and sin and death and hell. And You have called us into the light of truth, into life, into life abundant. Thank You that Jesus came in the flesh and walked among men, divine yet human, and died and rose again so that we can have life. Thank You for Brother Stephen Russell. Thank You for his willingness to share with us today of the things that he has studied and learned. I pray that You would be with him, give him clarity, give him rest in his spirit as he shares.

And I hope that truth can go forth. Thank You for the promise that Your word does not return void. And we look forward to a bountiful harvest for the work that's being done. Bless each one that hears this as on the live call and in the recordings. Father, I hope their hearts are prepared to hear truth. We pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen.

Amen. Maybe before we start with the part two, could you give us just a one or two-minute summary describing Gnosticism again and then go on to your second part? Okay. Well, in the morning I spoke about what the early church faced, and the name is Gnosticism, of that threat. And Gnosticism is usually seen as a sort of a combination of some Christian ideas, but mostly woven into a Greek pagan worldview. And the Greek pagan worldview saw the spiritual as good, but saw the physical as either downright evil or at least not really good. And so Gnosticism was an attempt to use Christian terminology to show people how to escape, how to have their spirit escape from the prison of the body so that we would be just spirits free from the physical world.

And they had secret knowledge. And Gnosticism itself, Gnostic means someone who knows. So they had secret knowledge that they thought would enable a person to escape from his physical body.

And Neo-Gnosticism is the threat that we face today. So is that enough, do you think, for Gnosticism? Talking about Gnosticism? Yeah, I think that's great. Just a reminder of what does Gnosticism mean. Yes. So yeah, I think that was perfect. Thank you. Okay. Well, today I want to talk—or this afternoon I want to talk about Neo-Gnosticism. A couple of years back, I read an Italian Christian philosopher who wrote about Neo-Gnosticism. And he was writing about Marxism and some other things, all of which were materialistic.

And so at first, I was very confused because the ancient Gnostics rejected the physical world and said the only thing that matters is the spirit. Well, obviously, Marx and Freud and the other modern materialists didn't fit that kind of a mold. But as I read on, I saw that what he was saying is, in either case, Gnosticism takes one little piece of truth and then it mixes it up with Christianity. Well, maybe not always, maybe not all of the Neo-Gnostics. But it tries to force everything, all reality into fitting into one truth in the early Gnostic case, into the spiritual world. And in this sense, the Neo-Gnostics are trying to force everything to make sense in a world that is only material.

So I'm going to pick up more or less where I left off on the first talk and say a little bit more about Gnosticism. Gnosticism appealed to many in the first through the third centuries and even beyond because it did not call for the complete surrender and transformation that Orthodox Christianity demanded. Irenaeus, who was the person that I focused on as an Orthodox early Christian, his painstaking work enabled him and his successors to overthrow this potent threat to the truth of Christianity. Investigating Irenaeus's approach and his ideas can help us think about meeting those modern challenges to Orthodox Christian faith that appeal to many because of their willingness to accept modern notions that are rejected by the biblical faith while mixing it with some biblical concepts that appeal to them.

We noticed that some aspects of ancient Gnosticism still turn up among today's Christians, especially in the rejection of the physical as a part of God's good creation. Irenaeus, other early church fathers, and even the Jews of Jesus' day can help us combat this unfortunate holdover from the past of rejecting or at least downplaying the physical. But perhaps even more importantly, Irenaeus could help us recognize and overthrow the new major threat to Christianity, Neo-Gnosticism. The old Gnostics' mistake was to reject the goodness of part of God's creation. They rejected the goodness of the physical. They tried to force reality into their vision that only valued the spiritual and the rational. Today, we face something similar and yet different.

Neo-Gnosticism is the prevalent worldview in the West that comes predominantly from the teachings of Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche. All these men disregarded or even despised Christianity. They held that only the physical was real. Anything that claimed to exist beyond the physical was a fairy tale and to be not denied and derided.

Superficially, it may seem that the old and new Gnosticisms are completely different, but they both deny a part of reality and try to conform what is to what their ideology says is real. Many parts of the modern church have conceded to aspects of the teachings of the Neo-Gnostics.

Perhaps they've been trying to update and maintain some form of Christianity in a world that's now negative towards Christianity. This was the program of modern liberalism in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. J. Grisham Machen, he was a great opponent of liberal Christianity. And he saw that this accommodation to modernist thought was poison to the truth. He said that liberalism was emphatically anti-Christian, liberalism in the sense of liberal Christianity. In his book, Christianity and Liberalism, he wrote, "In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the things about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding. The really important things are the things about which men will fight.

In the sphere of religion, in particular, the present time is a time of conflict. The great redemptive religion, which has always been known as Christianity, is battling against a totally diverse type of religious belief, which is only the more destructive of the Christian faith because it makes use of Christian terminology."

And that's exactly what the Gnostics did. They dressed up their anti-Christian ideas or their pagan ideas with Christian terminology. Just as conceding to the old Gnosticism would have destroyed the early church and the accommodations made in mainline churches in the 19th and 20th centuries led to what Machen called another religion, any concessions made today to Neo-Gnosticism will also be a death sentence for true Christianity. Learning from Irenaeus may enable us to counter this new and yet old challenge. But first, what are the origins of Neo-Gnosticism? This is a Western phenomenon, and my focus will be on events in the West. Of course, the things we will be looking at have spread around the world and are affecting thinking everywhere.

But the origins lie in the West. Prior to what is labeled in history as the modern era, Christians saw faith and reason as two complementary aspects of human nature. Man had given both to mankind; God had given both to mankind. Faith accepted what God had given man through revelation, and reason probed the natural world and enabled man to understand his faith more deeply. Creation had both its physical and its spiritual sides. And remarkably, these two sides of creation are united in man. That's something I can never get over, that God has given us the position of bringing together the physical and the spiritual.

Two events are probably most significant in the development of the modern era: the bloody religious wars of the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. Many of the elites of Europe were disgusted by these wars, the religious wars, bought supposedly for God. And these same people were impressed by the ability of the human mind to penetrate the wonders of nature. In a very short period of time, we humans were able to understand the laws of motion, the chemical makeup of the material world, and how to harness new sources of power.

Those who had come to despise Christianity because of the horrors of the Reformation wars saw man's ability to understand and harness nature for man's use and began to reject man's need for revelation. One irony is that the vast majority of scientists who were discovering various aspects of nature were, by and large, believing Christians. And I could just mention Blaise Pascal and Sir Isaac Newton and many others. They were believers, but it was someone else who took what they were doing in science and used it against Christianity. And that someone else was, first of all, a group of philosophers called the French philosophes. And then later, the French revolutionaries who were inclined to reject Christianity also began to use these modern developments in science to turn the West towards skepticism, agnosticism, and materialism.

The hundred years after the French Revolution, so essentially the 19th century, are a time of great growth in scientific knowledge, but also a massive missionary effort, both by the Catholics and the Protestants. But most significantly for the rise of Neo-Gnosticism, it is the time when Marx, Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche challenged the old European mindset and religion.

Marx, taking a clue from the French Revolution, calls for the complete overturn of the old ways and for a violent revolution by the proletariat or the workers who were enslaved. Everything from the past must be swept away. Interestingly, Marx rejoiced when Darwin published On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life. That was in 1859. The reason Marx rejoiced was that it seemed to him to justify his rejection of the divine as a necessary source of life. He didn't actually have some way of talking about and thinking about his belief that the divine was not real. This teaching by Darwin that there wasn't a need for God, that life just arose out of time and chance, was exactly what he needed.

And so the fact that life or the belief that life could arise on its own was just exactly what Marx wanted. Marx called into question the established social fabric of Europe, while, of course, Darwin's theory of evolution attacked the special place of man as the image of God and the whole of Europe's Christian religious understanding. With the rise of Freud and his psychoanalysis, the very nature of man was called into question. The whole of civilization came to be seen as a veneer, both to hide the true natures of ourselves and to keep us from destroying ourselves because that's what would happen if we gave free rein to the inner drives that we have. And then later on in that century, Nietzsche gave full expression to the rejection of God and full allegiance to materialism that had been steadily growing in the European culture.

He prompted the idea of the death of God and maintained that we Europeans—so I'm talking about Westerners, people that typically at that time would have seen themselves as Christians. These people were formerly Christians. They were starting to fall away from the faith. And Nietzsche's statement was that it's the Christians, it's the Westerners who have killed God.

Nietzsche called on Europeans to strive for a new morality, a new nobler way of living since now God is dead. Each one of us must be the author of his own pathway in life and meaning. So modernism replaced the older pre-modern Christian way of thinking and living in the West. I would characterize modernism as emphasizing autonomy and individualism for each person. It did, however, still maintain a belief in the objective. This had its roots in the importance of science for the modernist. It was those things that could be measured, weighed, and seen that were real and that were known to be real because they were subject to investigation and testing by science. Those things that could not be measured, weighed, or seen were subjective, and their reality was questionable or simply rejected by many modernists.

In many ways, this focus on the material was fruitful and led to a massive expansion of scientific knowledge, but at the expense of the spiritual aspect of reality, which the modernists denied. Modernism is inherently unstable, if for no other reason than it rejects part of the reality of God's creation, the spiritual. But it is also unstable because it called into question everything traditional and everything from the past. The pre-moderns had attempted to live with an openness to both the physical and the spiritual, and they found a rough balance in their lives between those two things.

Over time, the newer generations—now I'm thinking about the modernists—the newer generations began to inflate their conception of autonomy and individualism until it became a sort of hyper-individualism, which today is often called expressive individualism. And that expressive individualism insists on being recognized by each individual and will yield to no one. Whatever I think about myself, that's true.

The firm commitment of modernism to objectivity, especially in science, was rejected in favor of a universal relativity. If there were truth, it was a private truth. You have your truth. I have my truth. That is really a denial of objective reality, but the appeal is obvious. I can choose my own truth. No one has any right or any standing to question it. My autonomy and individualism are unquestioned. I can do what I want with the possible caveat that I not hurt anyone. So I don't think every postmodern person would have that follow that caveat, but it's often said, "Do what you want to do as long as you don't hurt anyone."

Thus, in the last part of the 20th century and the beginning of the present century, postmodernism has displaced modernism as the prevailing worldview of the West. Postmodernism's basis is the rejection of anything except the material and of all traditional things and beliefs in the objective that present limits to anyone's freedom to express his individuality. There can be no limits on that.

This has become the one objective, or maybe it's better to say the one truth in the postmodern world that you can't deny what I see as my truth. Both modernism and postmodernism are neo-Gnostic. Both recognize only one aspect of God's created reality. In this case, unlike the earlier Gnosticism, the spiritual is rejected in favor of the material. In modernism, the physical still carried weight, and things such as human sexuality and what the physical world was like were solidly grounded in the material world as far as the modernist was concerned.

That meant that while modernism reigned, sexual dysphoria was seen as a condition that could be addressed by psychiatry in order to try to align the physical with the person's self-perception. In other words, sexual dysphoria was seen as an issue, a problem that could be dealt with. Modernism rejected two sexes, not a range of sexual expressions. And just recently, something interesting happened. Richard Dawkins, who is kind of the face of the new atheism, was part of an organization called Freedom from Religion Foundation, and they recently changed their position. They would claim to be very scientific, and they recently changed their position that there's not just two distinct sexes. And Dawkins and some others who were very modernistic have left the Freedom from Religion Foundation because Dawkins saw this caving into the postmodern view that there's a range of sexuality.

There's no two sexes. Dawkins saw this as a cave caving into the new religion of gender ideology. In the last 50 years or so, postmodernism has taken over as the worldview of the West. The objectivity of science is now an open question if it's not denied out of hand. The importance of one's perception of oneself far outweighs any physical reality.

In postmodernism, sexuality has become the center of my truth. This shift in the importance of sexual nature has its roots in the modern era. While there were still only two sexes for the modernist, people were given a wider range of freedom to express their sexuality as modernism became powerful. The first change was that divorce became more available. And then artificial contraception became possible and even acceptable to almost all churches. Before 1930, no Christian church allowed artificial contraception. And then the Anglican Church during the Great Depression was the first to allow the use of artificial contraception, although they stated with regret. But in short order, almost all of the Protestant denominations followed suit.

The only clear-cut opposition was from the Catholic Church, and that remains the way it is to this day. With such changes in traditional morality in place, it was only a matter of time until attitudes towards marriage and cohabitation also changed. Finally, in this century, the reality of marriage has been destroyed by the relativity of postmodern thinking. And most recently, the question of operations and the use of hormones to change the physical expression of one's sexuality in those that experience sexual dysphoria, that has come to the forefront with many advocating for the use of hormonal blockers and the actual destruction of sexual organs, even in minors, without the knowledge or permission of the parents. And this is called gender-affirming therapy by the supporters.

And I think in California, it's actually possible for a young person at school to get hormone blockers without the knowledge of his parents. As people come to believe that the only thing that is real is the physical, but also that each person is completely autonomous and should not be restrained by anyone else in exercising his autonomy, even the physical in today's world has lost its value in deciding our maleness or our femaleness. It all depends on self-perception. We have come to the final extreme in denying the reality of God's creation. None of it, not even the physical matters in itself.

We have all become our own gods, and as our own gods, we make the decisions about how to live and how long to live. That in the past, we're deemed obviously our sexuality was deemed part of the reality of our bodies, whether we were male or female. And we believe that it was God's decision to decide the natural length of anyone's lifespan. Now, all of that is in the hands of the autonomous self.

Most of us Christians intuitively see that these changes are not right, but most of us don't know how to articulate our beliefs and our feelings. What are we to do? First, we need to recognize that none of us is completely immune from these modernistic and postmodernistic views. We live in an atmosphere where this is now the default way of seeing things, or at least it seems so.

Living in that atmosphere will obviously affect us, often without our being aware of it. I would suggest that becoming at least a bit aware historically of how things came to be in this place will help us to understand what's going on and also help us to turn away and be more like the pre-modern way of thinking since if we know the context of where these things came from and how people used to think about things.

But we need more than that. I suggested earlier that awareness of Irenaeus and how he overcame the original Gnosticism could be helpful to us. In part, he did what I suggested above, showing historically how these things came to be. And he made people aware of the genesis of Gnosticism. But then he also helped his fellow Christians to see the true Christian teaching and to evaluate Gnosticism and the outcomes that came from that by the truth of Christianity. But unfortunately, many modern Christians only desire the emotional lift that Christianity can provide and do not have interest in the other side of Christianity, either its historical side or its transformative side, how it can change us. The early church and the Anabaptists were clear on this aspect of the Christian life.

They both recognized that the commitment to Christ and membership in his body carried with it responsibilities and experiences that were not always enjoyable. Our lifestyles had to reflect that of Jesus. The early Anabaptists spoke of Jesus being born in us and growing in us as a painful but transformative and necessary experience.

And then, as our lives were changed, others would see it. Some of those others then asked to join with us in the life of Jesus. Others who saw us responded or reported us to the authorities who felt threatened by Christianity, felt threatened that their power was being denied, and so they persecuted Christians.

Although it is a long time since we have been persecuted in these ways, with the changes that have been coming fast and furious in our broader culture, it is not far-fetched to imagine a return of persecution. We'll see what happens.

It appears that the leading institutions and persons in our country have yielded to the postmodern emphasis on feelings and its attempt to create a new morality based on wokeness and cancel culture. There are recent clues that there will be pushback against these extreme examples of neo-Gnosticism, but I fear that our society in general has abandoned the real conviction that there is an objective truth.

Beyond that, we are far away from the pre-modern conviction that there are two books that God has given us revealing his world to us, Nature and Revelation, and that these two give us an objective truth if we approach them correctly.

Much of the evangelical world has bought into at least certain aspects of neo-Gnostic view of sexuality. Actual awareness of the doctrinal foundations of Orthodox Christianity is not seen by most modern Christians as important. Like the earlier Gnostics, many Christians spin out their own version of truth and try to make the world conform to that illusion. Individualism has become rampant in many churches.

The churches are places to gather, to enjoy an entertaining worship service, but they have no further or deeper effect on our lives. Discipleship in such a setting is not possible, or at least it's nearly impossible. Are there exceptions to these negative developments? Of course.

And it is those islands of light that will provide the revival of committed discipling Christianity. We need to delve deeply into the Bible and into the key doctrines of our faith and into historic Christianity. We need to learn to present these in winsome ways. God calls for faithfulness on our part. It is his part to bring the fruit.

But we must not fool ourselves. Faithfulness will be costly. My own suspicion is that our society will continue in this hyper-individualistic way of life, demanding complete autonomy on personal issues. But at some point, the damage this trajectory will do to society will be so obvious that a major reversal may occur. We Christians need to be ready to stand in the gap and do what we can by God's Spirit to bring healing and restoration to those who have damaged themselves irreparably. And I've been talking a lot about what's happening in the realm of sexuality, but people are hurting themselves in so many ways, relationally and just in so many ways.

But I do think that human sexuality, the way the world is approaching that now, is just an absolute touchstone for understanding what's happening as the world is turning away from God's way of thinking and trying to live according to each individual's way of thinking.

I hope that Christians will have eyes and hearts to see what needs to be done and the courage to follow through faithfully. The world has gone through such a cycle many times before, and God has used that to bring healing. So the world has turned away from God, and then in its desperation has come back to God. We see that in the Old Testament, in the continual cycle of falling away into disobedience and idol worship, and then crying out to God, and then God sending a judge to help the people. And it's happened in the history of the church. So we need to remember that and not lose hope or faith.

We know that God has won, and he will call into judgment those who willfully disobey him. Our task is to be ready tools to be used by him in whatever way the situation calls for, recognizing that we have the truth, we have the Spirit, we have the Bible, we have the church, which is the body of Christ. We have the great tradition, the teaching of the church throughout history. We have the lives of faithful saints who have preceded us. We have all of these things. Let us strive to remain faithful, to be obedient, even when it is difficult. Indeed, what does it mean to be obedient when it is not difficult? Let us look to God and to his church, and let us be the light to the nations that brings them the truth.

That's basically my presentation about neo-Gnosticism. It's this turn away from the reality that there is a physical and a spiritual aspect to what God has created. And in the ancient world, the Gnostics focused on the spiritual. In the present-day world, they're focusing on the material. But when you do that, either way, you actually damage; you don't really understand either the spiritual or the physical. And I just want to quote a passage from a book called The Ethics of Beauty that I think will help us think about how we have to be—how we have to see the world around us in its turn away from God.

And this is from a book by Timothy Patitzas, The Ethics of Beauty. Without a commitment to chastity, the world cannot remain enchanted for us. If we desecrate our bodies and the bodies of others, nature will hide itself from us. If we are not ashamed in the presence of purity, nature—in the absence—I'm sorry, if we are not ashamed—yes, if we are not ashamed in the presence of purity, nature becomes ashamed of us and withdraws. Sometimes this happens immediately, while other times it takes years and even generations. But a commitment to chastity is a cornerstone for the beauty-first way. It is Gnosticism that makes us think we can comprehend the world without the aid of a sanctified body.

For in the cross that comes with Eros, or with human love, we see our dependence not only upon God, but upon others and upon the whole of nature. Eros, for beauty, makes us see that we are radically implicated in the great cosmic liturgy of self-offering and poverty, of need and desire of life and of death. We see that beauty is the radiance of the good, just as the beautiful resurrection is the radiance of Christ crucified. We know for sure that if we are to gain this beauty, it will be only because we have consented to become beautiful in the same way that this is beautiful: by living out the cross. This is by an Orthodox Christian and his appeal that people start to recognize that the world has turned away from truth, has focused on things that it likes and wants to have more of, but in that, they are destroying themselves.

So that is essentially what I wanted to share with you all. I also do want to mention a few books that would be things to consider. Could I do that now, or should I wait for the questions? No, go ahead and do that now. That'd be great. Okay. Okay. One of the things that the early Gnosticism did and neo-Gnosticism does is they took Christian words and they used them in a way that was against their original meaning. And I see so much of that happening in the world today, even in non-religious ways. There is a book by a German philosopher named Joseph Pieper, and it's called The Abuse of Language, The Abuse of Power. And I'll put it up here.

And it's a very short book, but it's a terribly important warning that as we allow words to be abused and used in very different ways and they become fuzzy, we lose the ability to talk to each other. We communicate through words, and if we allow this to happen, we won't understand each other. It's really important in the religious area, and that's why Gnosticism and neo-Gnosticism are so bad. But we see it all over the place. And I tell my students, one of the words that bothers me is how we use the word awesome, or how many people use the word awesome. Awesome should mean you tremble in the presence of something much greater than yourself.

And there used to be an ad for Nike shoes, and it called them awesome. I don't like that. And then another one, I talked about the great tradition, which is how the church through history has tried to see what reality is and to make that clear. And a really nice book that's just come out relatively recently is Interpreting Scripture with the Great Tradition. This is by Craig A. Carter.

It's a very good book. He is a reformed theologian. So there will be some things in here that I don't agree with, but I think he does a good job of helping us see how the pre-moderns thought. I am trying desperately to think like a pre-modern, but I live in a society where the modernistic and post-modernistic way of thinking is just sort of the default, and I'm working hard against that.

My hero there is C.S. Lewis, and I'll say a little bit about him in just a bit. I mentioned Pascal, who was one of the great Christian scientists at the beginning of the scientific revolution. And he wrote a—he was getting ready to write a defense of Christianity, and he had a lot of notes, and he died before he could do it. Those notes got published as the Pensées.

And that can be a stretch for a lot of us modern people to just jump into. A modern Christian philosopher named James Houston organized them—well, he got rid of most of them and organized them according to various topics, and he put them together in the Mind on Fire.

And this was written in the 1600s, but he foresaw exactly what's happening. The brilliance of the human mind unfolding the reality of nature has made a lot of us think that's all there is, and that's all we need. And he saw that, and he tried desperately to help people see why that's not true. And it just speaks to the modern mind. Peter Craft, a Catholic author, has a book called Christianity for the Modern Pagans, and it's his take on Pascal's Pensées. I would say one of these two is a better place to start than just get the book, Pensées, and dive in.

It's just easier, I think. Real quick, C.S. Lewis for the Third Millennium. This is also by Peter Craft. And he deals with the kinds of problems that are coming up and how Lewis had a totally different approach than the modernistic approach. Lewis was very modernistic as a young man, and then around the time he turned 30, he became convinced of Christianity, and he turned decisively away from the modernistic way of thinking to the pre-modern way of thinking. A really good book of his that shows that is Mere Christianity.

Excuse me. Another one by him. This is really short. It's called The Abolition of Man. And back in the '50s—I forget, it was the '50s, I think—he already said ahead of time, "This is where we're going, exactly where we are today." He laid it out. He said, "We're killing the reality of what it means to be a human, and we're becoming less than human." And that's what post-modernism is doing to us.

The Abolition of Man is kind of a theoretical approach. He did write a novel called That Hideous Strength, which is an attempt to put the Abolition of Man into story form. And so for some people, this would be the easier way to go.

I have two more books and one—sorry for all this. I have two more books and one article in a magazine. The person who got me aware of neo-Gnosticism is an Italian philosopher who died, I think, in the '80s. And his first book I read was The Crisis of Modernity. And once again, he had such crystal-clear vision about what is happening as Westerners become more Marxist, more Darwinist, more Freudian, and more Nietzschean.

And a second book that he wrote is The Age of Secularization. They're both a little bit heavy, but if you've got the time and the energy, they're really worth reading. And then finally, I read an article in Touchstone, which is a wonderful magazine. It's about getting back to pre-modern thinking. I read an article called AI Demonic.

It's called—the second title is A Spiritual Exploration of AI. And it's by a man named Paul Kings North. And I was terribly fascinated by this. This man was not a Christian. He was all into the ecological movement. And at some point, he recognized the emptiness of his life. And God loves to take those kinds of times. And this man has gone from absolute skepticism, agnosticism. The only thing that matters is the physical world, so I'm all about ecology. That's it.

And he has become—he is trying to be a post—I'm sorry, a pre-modern Christian thinker. He did join the Romanian—he lives in Ireland. He did join the Romanian Orthodox Church. And in this article, he is claiming that what is happening with the internet and the social media and this AI stuff, he thinks it has some kind of background influence, perhaps from the demonic. He at least suggests that and asks us to think about it. Well, I was fascinated with this. And so I saw that he was giving the Erasmus lecture in October of last year, 2024, in New York City, so I went to hear it. And it is fascinating. It's called—oh my.

The Defeat. I think it's The Defeat of Christianity. I think that's what it is. The Defeat of Christianity. That doesn't sound quite right. Let me see if I can—well, anyway, you can look this up. It's the Erasmus lecture in New York City, October 2024. And the title was ambiguous. I wasn't sure if he's going to defend Christianity or what he was going to do. And what he did was he said—and it might be Christendom rather than Christianity—what he did was say, "The West really never has been totally Christian, but it's been very influenced by Christianity, and that's deeply influenced us or deeply shaped us even when we weren't Christians. But we've taken a deep turn away from that, and that's exactly what his early life was like.

It was affected totally by that." And he said that we have basically thrown all of that aside. Now, there's a good side to that. That means that people that are truly trying to follow Jesus have an opening. That was a little bit harder, maybe, when everybody thought they were Christians. But anyway, I was deeply moved by his talk. I think it was an hour and a half.

I would really—and you can find it online. You can find the written form online, or you can find the video. And I would really encourage you to do that. What I thought I heard was a person who came from no Christian background, saw Christ, is trying to—he's trying to do what the scriptures say and trying to learn from the great tradition. And one thing he hasn't had contact with was non-resistance. And it sounded to me like he's a person who is looking for that because that's part of what is real in Christianity. And I actually emailed him and asked him if I could send him a book on non-resistance. And he said I could. So he gave me his address, and I sent him Overcoming Evil God's Way.

I haven't heard from him, but I hope it gives him insight into what the early church saw and what the Anabaptists saw. And I hope we still see what it means to truly follow Christ. Sorry, I took that long, but. No, that's great. These are some really important books and ideas.

Yes, thank you so much. I love a good stack of homework.

In true professor fashion, we receive that. And I've read some of them, very few of them, and they have been impactful. And I would like to read more of those. So thank you for sharing that list of resources with us. So we're going to open it up for discussion now. So if you have any questions or comments for Brother Stephen, now is the time to share them. To me, this is a very sobering thing to consider, neo-Gnosticism. And when you talk about sexuality and things like that, it always seems out there. And I would say that that's probably the case in most of our situations. These are things that are happening in our communities.

But what it is, isn't it the logical end to the way of thinking that we're seeing lived out in our societies? So if we don't see that logical end in our midst, then we should be watching for the signs of that type of thinking because we don't want that kind of fruit. And so I feel like the talk this morning would have been very useful for us to look for those signs in ourselves and do a self-evaluation. Are there ways of thinking that we've adapted? Because we're in a society, and we can't escape that. And it's almost like the air that we breathe. These things are around us. And I hope that today's talk can be a little bit of an eye-opener that way.

Just remind us again. Sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead. What do you want the reminding? The question. Just remind us again. So you've mentioned numerous times pre-modernist thinking. And I made some notes around that. But if you could remind us again, what was a pre-modernist way of thinking? Okay. Up until the Reformation, everyone in Europe—well, almost everyone was Christian. And everyone, even if they hadn't really dedicated themselves to the Lord, they all accepted that God had made this and that there was a spiritual and Christian aspect and that certain things are the things you do. You get married, and you never divorce. And so there was a—once again, there was an atmosphere. And whether you were truly a Christian or not, you were in that atmosphere, and you'd live that way.

So the pre-modern way of thinking recognized that we are brilliant, but we need revelation. That's a huge thing. So up until the Reformation, it was that way. Everybody knew they—medieval science, there's another really good book about the Genesis. It's called The Genesis of Science. And it shows that the medieval Christians were brilliant scientists, but they didn't have the kind of tools that were developed later. They were brilliant.

So the medieval Christian theologian, or just plain old Christian, recognized our brilliance. But he also recognized it only goes so far. And so he also looked to revelation. Everyone did. That starts to get questioned. And the scientific revolution, which was almost completely begun by Christian scientists, doesn't itself call into question. But there were French philosophers that despised the church, whether Protestant or Catholic, but especially the Catholic Church. They despised the church. And when they saw what science was doing, they said, "We don't need revelation anymore. We can figure it all out." And that is the beginning of modernistic thinking. So modernism relies very much on the scientific objective approach to the physical world. And we have learned so much because of that.

But it also denies the reality of the spiritual. And so that's the modernistic. And the modernists were pretty individualistic, but they also believed in objectivity. The post-modernist is super individualistic and rejects—he's a relativist. He rejects objectivity, which means you can go anywhere. You can do anything. Right. Yeah. Thank you for that. So we need to hold in balance faith and reason. Absolutely.

But faith is over. The revelation. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Faith trumps reason for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. But I wanted to say something about—you said something that I said in class once, that we don't have this in our own setting.

And so one of my students came to me and said, "Yes, we do." And we do. And I think that means a couple of things. One is, if there is a person struggling with his sexuality, we need to learn how to talk to that person and love that person. We haven't always done a good job with that. The other thing is, a lot of the young people that I get to know here have friends who are not Christian. Or maybe they're in another Christian group who have decided that this new view of sexuality is perfectly all right, and they live in it.

Those are people I love. And they're either my friends or my family. What do I do? That's what I hear my students. We've got to be careful because it's so easy to think love is that warm, fuzzy thing. And so I need to warmly and fuzzily love them. Whereas love really includes reality and truth. And that's a big challenge for us, for the young people right now, I think. Yeah. Yeah. That calls to mind 1 Corinthians 13, "Love is patient and kind, and often we stop right there."

Instead of saying, "Love rejoices in truth." Yes. Yes. That needs to be held together. The patient and kind, obviously, but also rejoicing in truth, which often brings out things that we are harder to do and embrace. Yeah. Yeah. Another thing that you said that I thought was remarkable was—and I see this in my own life—you're attracted to the fuzzy side of Christianity, but maybe that's the faith or the spiritual side of it. But then it comes with a very hard physical reality sometimes that we need to embrace as well. And we see a lot of shying away from that. You would see that as being part of this neo-Gnosticism or doing what feels good or feels right for me.

It's at least an influence that it's bringing on to some Christians. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I can see that. Yeah. Anyone else? Just unmute yourself and feel free to ask a question or make comments.

You mentioned that there have been times in history before this where people were far from the truth, and then there was sort of a turning back to the truth. What do you see as being the main thing that we as Christians can do today? What is the role that we have in bringing about revival and in bringing about a return to the truth? Well, of course, whenever that happened, it's because of the Spirit.

And so we recognize that. But I had mentioned that we have to recognize that Christianity isn't just those warm, fuzzy feelings. It's not just the emotional high that I can get. But it's also—I mentioned how the early Anabaptists—this was fascinating to me when I first read it—how they said that Christ has to be born in you, and then he has to grow in you. And just like a child growing, there's going to be growing pains. And so they faced the fact that as you are gradually transformed from the non-Christian to more and more into the image of Christ, it can be really painful, both internally, but also even what the society around us does and thinks about us.

And so I think we need to make sure that we don't forget the transformative. And go to a church, and especially—and when I say evangelical right now, I'm just going to include us too—those churches that are not so much a high church. And often, people are very unconcerned either about history or doctrine. And if you don't know your own history, you don't know why you are what you are. If you don't know the recent history about how our understanding of sexuality has been deeply changed, it just seems normal to a young person. But so I would really advocate—I mean, obviously, I think it's the Spirit—but I would advocate trying to get people interested into understanding the history of the church, their own history, and also doctrine.