Andrew Meredith’s Reviews > The Failure of the American Baptist Culture > Status Update

The first two essays hardly even mention Baptists or Baptist-lites (i.e., Non-Denominationals). They are aimed more at the social and political ills brought upon by American Christians fleeing the public square en masse over the last century due to Dispensationalism, Pietism, Arminianism, Fundamentalism, and Ontological Individualism. These ideologies are more prominent in Baptist-y circles, yes, but are by no means exclusive to them.

"Gnosticism sees good and evil dualistically. For the gnostic, there is a realm of evil, with an evil god (Satan) ruling over it. This evil realm invaded God’s once good domain, seduced humanity, and presently rules the world. God has sent Christ to defeat Satan and to rescue men from his domain.

The world is still controlled by these evil powers, and “Christians” are to forsake this world and contemplate the next world (Pietism). Salvation is rapture out of this fallen world. Individualistic Gnosticism focuses only on the souls of believers and looks only to salvation in the next world.

This may sound like popular evangelical Christianity. It should, for most of popular evangelical Christianity is highly infected with Gnosticism."

"Since gnostic Christians have resigned the “world” to Satan, they oppose any attempt to Christianize the civil order. Gnosticism pits inward conversion (which is entirely experiential) against external order, as if the two were somehow incompatible.

There is, to be sure, an experiential aspect to historic, orthodox Christianity found in the individual and in the worship of the church, but this is not and has never been the defining mark of Christianity. When we look at things from the standpoint of government and submission either to God’s law or to man’s anti-law, then we can understand how a civil government can be Christian. A Christian individual obeys God’s law; a truly Christian church obeys God’s law; and a Christian state obeys and enforces God’s law. Gnosticism, though, will have nothing to do with this “legalistic” viewpoint but insists on using only the language of experience."