Following the 2003 publication of Dan Brown’s publishing phenomenon, The Da Vinci Code, there has been a renaissance of interest in the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. This ancient heresy has exerted its tentacles deep into the fabric of contemporary life, even influencing the church in many unhelpful ways. (To read about some of the ways that Gnostic ideas have infiltrated the church, see my article, ‘Eight Gnostic Myths You May Have Imbibed’.)
At the heart of the Gnostic heresy was the notion that the material world is bad. If the fundamental antithesis for Christianity was between good and evil, for the Gnostics the fundamental antithesis was between the physical and the spiritual. The material world is bad, they argued, precisely because it is physical. True spirituality involves escape from this world. Whereas the Christian tradition taught that redemption history culminates in the resurrection of the body, Gnostics believed that the goal of salvation was eternal disembodiment.
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