Is Gnosticism Still Alive Today?

John H. Armstrong on Gnosticism:

What made Gnosticism so powerful in the earliest era of the church? It was seductive in its appeal. Put seduction with creedless modern evangelical Christianity and you have the breeding ground of modern Gnostic errors. And you have few teachers who recognize this since the Gnostics always insist that they are Christians. Philip J. Lee concludes: "Despite the vast cultural differences between North American Protestantism and ancient Gnosticism, the parallels between the two innovations can no longer be ignored."

American churches adopted an anti-intellectual stance in the nineteenth century. Evangelicals took this to a whole new level of expression. The result has been little concern for carefully thought out orthodoxy married to little or no concern for love and for real people in community. We have majored on saving the soul of a person without making real disciples. The fruit is bittersweet, even heretical at many points. You hear it routinely when we denounce the physical world as bad when Christ came to live in this world and redeem it precisely because the God who created it as good still deeply loves it.