Gairney Bridge

“Me and Jesus” is the name of an old song written and sung by Tom T. Hall. The refrain goes like this:

Me and Jesus got our own thing goin’

Me and Jesus got it all worked out

Me and Jesus got our own thing goin’

We don’t need anybody to tell us what it’s all about

That sort of captures the mentality of much of popular American Christianity. In a recent article in Modern Reformation magazine, Michael Horton dissects this unbiblical notion and labels it as Gnosticism. In “Your Own Personal Jesus,” he references the popularity of the old hymn “In the Garden” as an example of the kind of piety indicative of this descent:

I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.
And he walks with me, and He talks with me, and He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there, none other has ever known.

Horton observes:

The focus of such piety is on a personal relationship with Jesus that is individualistic, inward, and immediate. One comes alone and experiences a joy that “none other has ever known.” How can any external orthodoxy tell me I’m wrong? My personal relationship with Jesus is mine. I do not share it with the church. Creeds, confessions, pastors, and teachers-not even the Bible-can shake my confidence in the unique experiences that I have alone with Jesus.

How is this related to ancient Gnosticism? It has to do with the over-personalization of God in our lives, the pagan idea that God is in all of us, or what Gerhard Forde (quoted in the article) calls the “glory story.” Certainly, God is both sovereign and personal, and anyone doubting this need only look to Jesus Christ. But there is an overriding internal personalization that trumps all other things (including God’s own revelation) that seems to rise to the surface far too often. This is exemplified not only in Gnosticism, but in the corrupt heresy of Pelagianism. Forde explains:

The most common overarching story we tell about ourselves is what we will call the glory story. We came from glory and are bound for glory. Of course, in between we seem somehow to have gotten derailed-whether by design or accident we don’t quite know-but that is only a temporary inconvenience to be fixed by proper religious effort. What we need is to get back on ‘the glory road.’ The story is told in countless variations. Usually the subject of the story is ‘the soul’…what Paul Ricoeur has called ‘the myth of the exiled soul.’

Horton comments:

In neither version does one need to be rescued. Assisted, directed, enlightened perhaps, but not rescued-at least not through a bloody cross. Both versions of the “glory story” drive us deeper into ourselves, identifying God with the inner self, instead of calling us outside of ourselves. … Pelagianism leads to Christless Christianity because we do not need a Savior, but a good example. Gnosticism’s route to Christless Christianity is by driving us deeper inside ourselves rather than outside to the incarnate God who rescued us from the guilt, tyranny, and penalty of our sins. Pelagianism and Gnosticism combine to keep us looking to ourselves and within ourselves. We’re a self-help people and we like our gods inside of us where we can manage them. Together, these heresies have created the perfect storm: the American Religion.

It would sad enough if these were merely exceptions or anomalies within Christianity. The problem is that they are pervasive, and not simply within liberal quarters. Gnosticism (as well as Pelagianism, or at the very least its half-cousin Arminianism) has invaded the American church and left a defiled Bride as a result. Horton states:

In the American Religion, as in ancient Gnosticism, there is almost no sense of God’s difference from us-in other words, his majesty, sovereignty, self-existence, and holiness. God is my buddy or my inmost experience, or the power-source for living my best life now. God is not strange (i.e., holy)-and is certainly not a judge. He does not evoke fear, awe, or a sense of terrifying and disorienting beauty. Furthermore, all the focus on making atonement through a bloody sacrifice seems crude and unspiritual to Gnostics when, after all, the point of salvation is to escape the physical realm. … The god of Gnosticism is not the one before whom Isaiah said, “Woe to me, for I am undone!” or Peter said, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man.” To borrow a nice phrase from William Placher, it represents “the domestication of transcendence.” God is no longer a problem for us. … This characteristically American approach to religion, in which the direct relationship of the soul to God generates an almost romantic encounter with the sacred, makes inner experience the measure of spiritual genuineness. We are more concerned that our spiritual leaders exude “vulnerability,” “authenticity,” and the familiar spontaneity that tells us that they too really do have a personal relationship with Jesus than that they faithfully interpret Scripture and are sent by Christ through the official ordination of his church. Everything perceived as external to the self-the church, the gospel, Word and sacrament, the world, and even God-must either be marginalized or, in more radical versions, rejected as that which would alienate the soul from its immediacy to the divine. … The way many evangelicals today speak of “accessing” and “connecting” with God underscores this point, in sharp contrast with the biblical emphasis on God’s descent to us in the incarnation. Profoundly aware of our difference from God not only as creatures but as sinners as well, biblical faith underscores the need for mediation. God finds us by using his own creation as his “mask” behind which he hides so that he can serve us. The Gnostic, by contrast, needs no mediation. God is not external to the self; in fact, the human spirit and the divine Spirit are already a unity. We cannot be judged-but, then, this also means that we cannot be justified. … To the extent that churches in America today feel compelled to accommodate their message and methods to these dominant forms of spirituality … , they will lend evidence to the thesis that Christianity is not news based on historical events but just another therapeutic illusion.

Horton says much more in the article, but the small portion cited here should serve the reader with a warning. Anytime we value our own subjective experiences over God’s authentic revelation, we will inevitably seek to corrupt it. It might be expressed as an ecclesiastical statement (we must depend on “the Church” or “sacred tradition”, a la Roman Catholicism), it might find a home in rationalism (the human mind/intellect becomes the penultimate arbitrator of truth), it might take a shine to liberal/pagan notions (Horton references the rise of feminism and “re-imagining God” in the article), or it might masquerade as conservative Protestant orthodoxy that prefers to find its expression by “letting go and letting God” resulting in an pro-emotion/anti-intellectual form of Christianity (e.g., the present day results of the Revivalism of the 19th century). But in each case, it is ultimately a rejection of sola Scriptura, and it must be rejected if the church is to be reformed and revived.