Recently, I have been struck by the parallels between the ever-louder pronouncements from the LGBT lobby and the influence of Gnosticism on the early church.
From the late first century, ‘fashionable’ Greek philosophy began to infiltrate the church. Gnosticism was one such philosophy that gained an early foothold. It was characterised by a dualism in which the entirety of physical existence was believed to be inherently deceptive and evil, while the unseen spirit world was believed to be inherently full of goodness and truth.
Members of the early church who espoused Gnosticism found it impossible to reconcile such beliefs with the Christian doctrine of the incarnation. They flatly rejected the belief that Jesus the Messiah is both fully God and fully human.
The writings of Iraeneus, a 2nd-century Greek-born bishop of Lyon, were instrumental in the philosophical defeat of Gnostic heresy. His most important work, Against Heresies, was especially effective in exposing the internal contradictions of those false teachings.
In modern times, there has been a resurgence of a similar kind of dualism. In this neo-Gnosticism, identity (the modern equivalent to the earlier concept of spirit) is assumed to be inherently full of goodness and truth. As such, self-affirmed sexual identity is prioritised with the insistence that settled sexual desire should be actualised, rather than constrained by the overt complementarity of male-female sexual characteristics (the equivalent of matter). So, it’s no wonder that so many LGBT activists are at odds with the constraints and norms of sexual complementarity (also known as heteronormativity).
For neo-Gnostics, ‘freedom’ is represented by the enablement to reform and repurpose any and every aspect of our native physical human condition in accordance with settled and actualised desire. Consequently, to do otherwise is deemed to be incongruous with and harmful to the actualisation of self-affirmed identity.
For example, consider how LGBT activists have insisted that self-affirmed sexual orientation and gender identity should be prioritised as primary markers of human personhood, while the native characteristics of physical sex are dismissed as a comparatively irrelevant.
This mindset can be seen in the offence aroused by a recent Tweet (‘I’m a ‘transphobe’ for knowing that only women have a cervix … ?!’) which was posted by Rosie Duffield (Labour MP for Canterbury and Whitstable).
In contrast with this prioritisation of identity as indicative of our true and authentic nature, there are other movements that prioritise physical attributes as indicative of what’s true and authentic about us.
For example, while I’m not detracting from other better arguments in favour of veganism, one argument for it is that our human hands and teeth are ostensibly not properly adapted to tearing meat.
Another argument is based on the co-morbidities of meat eating, such as higher incidence of heart disease, cancer, diabetes, etc.
In other words, the ‘appeal to nature’ is that the natural bodily form and co-morbidities due to incongruence with that form are respectively telling us what we should or shouldn’t eat. So, form and function should trump the actualisation of our desires, however settled they are.
When it comes to sexuality, we hear a different ‘appeal to nature’ which flatly contradicts the previous one. It is that any settled desire is natural, even if the actualisation of such desires contradicts the ostensible purpose of our bodily parts and results in a higher level of co-morbidities.
As Iraeneus did, we need to expose the internal contradictions of such arguments.
So, whatever our stance on sexual identity or veganism, we cannot, in one breath, valorise the actualisation of any settled desire as natural (while dismissing any inference from our physical characteristics as comparatively irrelevant) only, in the next breath, to assert that our physical characteristics are indicative of what’s natural and should trump whatever desires we want to actualise, however settled they are.
Those two understandings of nature have completely contradictory implications. As Iraeneus insisted, it is imperative that we choose one understanding or the other and follow that through to its logical conclusion, whatever the consequences.
For 21st-century Western society to insist that both understandings of nature have validity, while contradicting each other, goes way beyond illogical. It’s downright disingenuous and, as right-thinking Christians, we should have no hesitation in calling that out.
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