Where We Left Off…

My goodness, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? It’s been close to two months since my last post about neo pseudo gnosticism. That’s mostly due to my recent change of life circumstances. Moving halfway across the country and starting with a new church hasn’t exactly left a lot of time to do much blogging. As a result, I had to kind of put all of my on-line author-related activity on hold until I started feeling more settled in our new home.

Well, the boxes are mostly unpacked, the rooms are starting to be put together the way they need to be, and I’ve started to feel the itch. I needed to get back to my blog. I had thoughts to share, ideas to disseminate, people to reconnect with.

But more than that. I hadn’t quite finished with this watered down version of an ancient heresy that’s infected the Church.

Over the previous eight posts, I’ve shared my thoughts on how modern Christianity has been laced through with the echoes of a false teaching that was roundly discredited and condemned in the earliest centuries of the Church’s existence. In spite of that, though, I see two beliefs that a very similar to gnositicism, which are as follows:

1. The physical world, rather than being inherently evil or corrupt, is instead viewed as inconsequential and ultimately unimportant to the eternal scheme of things, and
2. The point of life is to be set free from our bodies to some sort of ethereal, spiritual paradise.

Maybe you haven’t seen that so much in your Bible study, but I’ve seen it often enough to become concerned.

So for most of the posts in this series, I’ve focused mostly on the true hope Christian have for life after death. Neo pseudo gnosticism would teach us that Christians are destined for a spiritual, non-physical heaven, whereas the Bible teaches us that we can look forward to a renewal and restoration of God’s creation, the way it was when He first made the world in perfection.

But is that all we should worry about? Hardly.

Here’s the thing: if we believe that the point of this world is to one day be free of it, then it’s going to affect how we view the world around us. It has to. And how we view the world naturally will effect the way we live in it. That’s what I want to discuss in the next couple of weeks. If we were created to be a part of this world, if that was God’s original intentions, then what does it mean for how we live in the here and now?

So let’s get back to work, folks. It’s good to be back.