At the core of the serpent’s diabolical appeal to Eve was the seemingly irresistible invitation to step outside creation to evaluate the world neutrally and objectively. How? “You shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:4-5). God alone sees the world from an objective angle. Because the cosmos depends before everything else on the Creator-creation distinction, to attempt to erase that distinction is cosmic insurrection.

The devilish temptation for Eve to succumb to “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life” (1 John 2:16) appealed to an insurrectionist impulse possible within creation. By contrast, the temptation to “be as gods” invited a contra-cosmic insurrectionist impulse: “Eve, God’s creation is your big problem. What you need, and can become, is a rival creator.”

Eve was the first Gnostic initiate, and Satan the first Gnostic professor.

All religions and philosophies must face up to one obvious fact. There are great defects in the world, great evil: hatred, murder, resentment, storms, earthquakes, heartbreak, and death. The world is obviously not what it’s supposed to be, at least not what it could be. How do we account for this? The Christian answer is simple: sin.

Sometime in eternity past, God’s highly placed angel Lucifer fell, and he eventually seduced our first parents, Adam and Eve, to fall also. All of the evil that we see around us is the result of this first sin, which we ourselves also bring into the world at our birth. We call this original sin. This explains why there is evil and disappointment and anguish in the world.

The Gnostics, the earliest and most pernicious and ever-reemerging heretics in the Church, gave a much different answer. For them, the defect is in creation itself. Man is not chiefly at fault. Nor is Lucifer. The creation itself is at fault. This means that the Creator is at fault. Creation is the evil from which man needs deliverance.

The Gnostics see the human body as a cage or prison of The Authentic spiritual, non-material Self. Salvation isn’t forgiveness of and rescue from sin, as the Bible teaches, but liberation from the material created order. This includes the human body, whose creational reality wars against The Authentic Self. This Gnosticism afflicts both postmodern culture and theology.

Recent Gnostic culture

Transsexual “influencer” Dylan Mulvaney has captured the national imagination with his perverse “365 Days of Girlhood” and his partnership with brands such as Bud Light and Nike. The trans collusion with the stalwart conservative Anheuser-Busch corporation discloses the penetrating inroads of the most perverse elements of the Sexual Revolution in traditionally conservative corporate America, and Kid Rock’s shotgunning a pyramid of Bud Light cans as a textbook conservative reaction will do nothing but repulse the citizen spectators who find both transgender and redneck exhibitionism distasteful.

Dylan’s depravity runs deeper than any understandable but amateurish Kid Rock exhibition can expose. The consequence of a deep, long-standing ideological perversity won’t be overturned by a junior high boys’ shop class prank.

The Dylan Mulvaney phenomenon is sexual Gnosticism, the most blatant form of Gnosticism in postmodern culture. Creation is the operating system of reality, but it just so happens that highly sophisticated, sinful humanity refuses to be constrained by God’s reality. The objective of depraved human imagination is reengineering reality. For the Sexual Revolution, this means that men can become women, and boys can become girls, and vice versa. Gender, a postmodern multivalent substitute for binary creational sex, is fluid reality writ large. Reality isn’t something to which we conform; reality is what we say it is.

This sexual Gnosticism eventually demands violence. No, I don’t mean rape or S&M, as evil as they are, but “gender reassignment surgery,” or more explicitly, “gender affirmation surgery,” genital mutilation now inflicted even on preteens whose worldview is shaped by TikTok’s darling Mulvaney. It’s nothing less than horrific child abuse, and everybody everywhere except the Marquis de Sade and his acolytes would have believed this before the last decade. It’s also the most supreme instance to date of radical individual autonomy: “I am a law to myself and nothing may stand in my way to fulfill it. Reality prevents my autonomy. Therefore, reality must go.”

Recent Gnostic theology

But the serpent’s Gnostic hiss isn’t limited to recent secular neopagan culture outside the Church. Just as Gnosticism emerged originally within the Church, so it persists even in the most conservative and allegedly Bible-believing sectors.

A recent Gnostic surge accompanies hyper-preterism, the “transmillennial” theology launched by Church of Christ minister Max King in 1971, but now championed by supposed Calvinists. It holds that all biblical prophecy was fulfilled by the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD by the Romans. This means there is no future physical second coming of Christ or future physical resurrection of the righteous and unrighteous and their final judgment, as the Bible teaches and as all orthodox Christian have always held.

For many hyper-preterists, since there is no future resurrection, believers get “spiritual bodies” at death. For leading hyper-preterists R.C. and J.E. Leonard, citing Max King in The Promise of His Coming, resurrection isn’t bodily at all:

“The resurrection is progressive; it does not take place all at once, but is a [spiritual] process at work in the eschatological community during the last-days transition period [33 AD to 70 AD] when the age of the old covenant overlaps that of the new.”

This is nothing more than soft-core Gnosticism, the degradation of creation and the human body, which God’s redemptive plan has designed to live eternally with a resurrected Lord on a resurrected earth united with a resurrected heavens (Revelation 21:1-4). But for hyper-preterists, there is no future bodily resurrection and at death it is not clear in what form believers, or unbelievers for that matter, will exist at all, certainly not in resurrected bodies.

Hyper-preterists to a man would justifiably abhor the contra-creational Gnosticism of the perverse Dylan Mulvaney. But their own heretical anti-resurrection theology reflects a Gnostic marginalization and minimization of the human body, including Christ’s resurrection body, which is the pattern of our own (1 Corinthians 15:20–23).

Conclusion

Gnosticism is the first Christian heresy. Almost every other heresy is in some way indebted to it. Moreover, it’s the most dangerous. It was, as J.L. Neve writes, “the boldest and grandest syncretism the world had ever seen” and “the first attempt in the history of the Church to bring the world into subjection to the Church by interpreting Christianity in harmony with the world.”

Unfortunately it’s the most persistent and recurrent heresy in history. It’s not dead. In one form or another it pervades the Church today. Gnosticism pervades our culture. It’s not possible to understand the underlying assumptions of the elites in the West today, especially as champions of the Sexual Revolution, apart from this heresy. It’s an equal opportunity destroyer. Wherever this heresy goes in the Church, it dilutes or destroys the Christian faith. Wherever it goes in our society, it undermines Christian culture.

Never underestimate or trivialize it. Avoid it at all costs.

This article was originally published on P. Andrew Sandlin's CultureChange Substack.