Sound thinking
“Christianity” is gnostic
by Ken Myers
“The Bible never mentions Christianity. It does not preach Christianity. Paul did not preach Christianity, nor did any of the other apostles. During centuries in which the Church was strong and vibrant, she did not preach Christianity either. Christianity, like Judaism and ‘Yahwism,’ is an invention of biblical scholars, theologians, and politicians, and one of its chief effects is to keep Christians and the Church in their proper marginal place. The Bible speaks of Christians and the Church, but Christianity is gnostic, and the Church firmly rejected gnosticism from her earliest days. . . .
“Christianity sometimes refers to a set of doctrines or a system of ideas. It is contrasted with the teachings of Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism, or Islam. By this definition, Christianity is what Christian people believe about God, man, sin, Christ, the world, the future, and so on. The Bible, however, never speaks of such beliefs except as all-embracing, self-committing confessions of God’s people. The Bible gives no hint that a Christian ‘belief system’ might be isolated from the life of the Church, subjected to a scientific or logical analysis, and have its truth compared with competing ‘belief systems.’
“The Church is not a people united by common ideas, ideas which collectively go under the name ‘Christianity.’ When the Bible speaks of a people united by faith it does not simply mean that we have the same beliefs about reality. Though the New Testament does use ‘faith’ to refer to a set of teachings (e.g., 1 Cor. 16:13; 1 Tim. 4:1; 2 Tim. 4:7), ‘faith’ stretched out to include one’s entire ‘stance’ in life, a stance that encompasses beliefs about the world but also unarticulated or inarticulable attitudes, hopes, and habits of thought, action, or feeling. To be of ‘one mind’ (Phil. 1:27) means to share projects, aspirations, and ventures, not merely to hold to the same collection of doctrines. Besides, the Church is united not only by one faith but also by one baptism (Eph. 4:4-6), manifests her unity in common participation in one loaf (1 Cor. 10:17), and lives together in mutual deference, submission, and love. . . .
“On the other hand, ‘Christianity’ is sometimes defined more broadly to embrace not only beliefs of Christian people but also the practices of the Church, her liturgies and ways of living in community. This is more healthy than defining Christianity as a system of ideas, yet even here the concept of Christianity conflicts with what the Bible reveals, insofar as the beliefs and practices of Christianity are seen as ‘religious’ beliefs and practices over against ‘secular’ or ‘political’ or ‘social’ practices, insofar as Christianity is conceived of as a ‘religious’ layer added onto human life.
“Scripture does not urge us to embrace ‘religion’ in this sense. The Christian is not a natural man who has become religious. Already before conversion, Paul said, many early Christians were highly religious, devoting themselves earnestly to the worship of idols. Conversion, moreover, did not just involve a change of liturgical habit. According to the New Testament, the Christian participates in a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17) and is a Spiritual person in contrast to the natural person (1 Cor. 2:6-16) — a human who is, as many recent theologians have put it, human in a different way. To be a Christian means to be refashioned in all of one’s desires, aims, attitudes, actions, from the shallowest to the deepest.”
— from Peter Leithart, Against Christianity (Canon Press, 2003)
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