360 - Against the Protestant Gnostics

Against the Protestant Gnostics

By Philip J. Lee

New York, Oxford University Press, 1987. 347 Pp. $27.95.

Although this book is described in the Foreword as "cogently argued and critically discerning, thoughtful and thought-provoking," it is, in fact, a polemic rather than a careful scholarly work. Its target is the gnosticism that, in the author's view, has come to infect all aspects of American Protestantism. The "Protestant Gnostics" of the title are not particular Protestant groups or theological positions confined to some specific historical period, but rather all U.S. Protestants. "As a Protestant, I believe I have identified the elusive modern gnostics, and they are ourselves." Indeed, Lee makes rather a fetish throughout the book of insisting that virtually every thinker and school within American Protestantism is tainted with gnosticism. Evangelicals and liberals may see themselves as theological opponents, but they are nonetheless united, he repeatedly argues, in their adherence to this heresy.

Lee (following the argument of Hans Jonas in The Gnostic Religion) sees gnosticism as a type of religion that arises from a cultural mood of despair. Profound hopelessness gives rise to a religious worldview with these characteristics: (1) metaphysical alienation, which regards this cosmos as a "colossal error" rather than a good creation; (2) affirmation of a saving gnosis that provides the key to escape from this prison-world; (3) focus on the true self or spirit within, and repudiation of the body, sexuality, and the material world; (4) elitism in the sense that only those

362 - Against the Protestant Gnostics

who have spiritual understanding can be saved; (5) syncretism, as gnostics are ready to turn all ideas, whatever their origin, to their own purposes.

True (presumably unintentionally so) to his claim that all Protestants are gnostics, Lee himself displays an uncritical syncretism throughout the book in his hasty, haphazard hunt through the Protestant tradition, looking for crypto-gnostic motifs and finding them anywhere, everywhere. In his chapter on "Gnosticism Within the Orthodox Faith," he finds "points of affinity" between Gnosticism and all of the following: the New Testament (its mistrust of the cosmos); Clement and Origen (their emphasis on the word gnosis, and on the need to withdraw from the world); Augustine (his mistrust of matter, especially sexuality); Luther (his emphasis on personal justification); Calvin (his correlation between "the knowledge of God and of ourselves," which Lee sees as a "striking parallel" with gnostic thought).

Given the ease with which Lee finds gnostic themes in the theology of Luther and Calvin, one might suppose that American Protestants simply inherited their heresy from these European Reformers. Not so, for it is in the theology of New England Puritanism that these gnostic tendencies, merely implicit and latent in the Reformers, become explicit and dominant. Two factors, he suggests, account for this gnostic flowering in New England's stony soil. First, the eighteenth-century Puritans transformed Calvin's covenant by individualizing it: "the appropriation of a corporate Old Testament image to describe what became essentially a private, psychological event." Second, American Protestants despaired over the possibility of realizing their New Israel, even before the American nation came into being. After "the Puritan apocalyptic hope ... failed ..., North American evangelicalism developed its own distinctive character, a chief ingredient of which was an abiding sense of' alienation."

Juxtaposition of these two factors serves to illustrate the fundamental weakness of Lee's central argument and of the book as a whole, namely, the polemical zeal with which the author forces data to fit a preconceived pattern and casually ignores contrary evidence clamoring for attention. The first of these two factors is sound and well-documented: the Puritans did reinterpret God's covenant in terms of individual experience, and this new emphasis was indeed central to their Christianity. The second factor, in contrast, conflicts with the historical record. Most students of American Christianity argue that mainstream Protestant evangelicalism during the nineteenth century, far from being, alienated from America's destiny, was naively optimistic about the nation's future and, moreover, identified itself all too closely with that future. America's destiny was "manifest" in evangelical eyes precisely because it was identified with God's will.

There is a good deal of truth, to be sure, in Lee's depiction of today's American Protestantism and American culture as gnostic. But there is very little truth in his argument that the gnostic spirit has dominated.

363 - Against the Protestant Gnostics

America's Protestantism from the outset. It is unhistorical, uncritical, and not at all necessary to the analysis of our contemporary situation to argue that all five components of the gnostic worldview have permeated American culture for centuries. Why not consider instead the possibility that these components, or some of them, have been Americanized only gradually, for different reasons, reflecting different historical contexts? For example, is it not possible that the "metaphysical alienation" experienced by many Americans today is a despairing response to the traumatic events of the '60s and '70s that seem to reveal America's profound self-betrayal: racism, Vietnam, Watergate. (Lee does mention the '60s as a time of heightened American self-alienation, but he does not allow this observation to question or qualify his basic historical thesis.)

"Gnosticism" is most useful as a tool for analyzing our present American situation when its characteristic features are applied separately and flexibly, rather than in wholesale fashion. For it is quite possible that we are gnostics today in ways that our Puritan forebears were not (as Robert Bellah argues in The Broken Covenant), and that biblical, this-worldly motifs continue to exist-however paradoxically-in, with, and under our modern gnosticism.

WILLIAM H. BECKER

Bucknell University
Lewisburg, Pennsylvania