Gnostic Worship by Michael S. Horton

Americans are often accused by foreigners of expressing a "greasy familiarity," even with people they have met for the first time. Similarly, there is a greasy familiarity inherent to Gnosticism, based on the belief that we have direct and immediate access to God whenever and however we want. Whenever the children in the public school pray to whomever and however, God has to hear, and whenever sincere people gather in a building to worship according to their own personal tastes and opinions, God is impressed that we took the time and cared enough to worship from our hearts. It was real, and we were vulnerable, honest before God. Greasy familiarity.

Calvinism is the fundamental enemy of the American Religion. This is argued in nearly every recent work on the subject. Harold Bloom cites Swiss theologian Karl Barth and Presbyterian scholar J. Gresham Machen as two major antagonists of American Gnosticism. Similarly, Anne Douglas, Philip Lee, and Wade Clark Roof, flanked by a host of historians, all argue that the repudiation of Calvinism led to the feminization of religion and culture.

Ann Douglas, professor of English at Harvard and Columbia University, in her latest book, on New York City in the 1920's, writes,

"Calvinism...had suffered 'the most spectacular defeat in the history of American religious life.'...The Calvinists' liberal nineteenth-century descendants insisted that God was less a father than a mother,...an 'indulgent Parent' (the term is that of the clergyman Noah Worcester), offering love, forgiveness, and nurture to all who seek Him. The Connecticut theologian Horace Bushnell, known as the 'American Schleiermacher,' explained that true religious experience meant falling back 'into God's arms,' pressed to the divine breast, 'even as a child in the bosom of its mother.'"

God, she says, became "well behaved, even domestic." (1) In her provocative book, The Feminization of American Culture, Douglas demonstrates that Calvinism was unseated by an Arminian and Gnostic tidal-wave that refused to believe any longer in the value of matter, the depravity of the self, helplessness in salvation, total dependence on divine sovereignty, freedom, or mercy. Just as the mainline evangelicals failed to stand by J. Gresham Machen in his struggle for the Presbyterian Church during the 20's, and only rose up in defiance when theological error finally created moral compromises, many of today's evangelicals are ready to attack the blatant Gnosticism of "Sophia" worship in the mainline churches, while less obvious but equally disastrous forms of Gnosticism plague the evangelical world itself. (2)

It would seem that the critics of modern American religion are basically on target in describing the entire religious landscape, from New Age or liberal, to evangelical and Pentecostal, as essentially Gnostic. Regardless of the denomination, the American Religion is inward, deeply distrustful of institutions, mediated grace, the intellect, theology, creeds, and the demand to look outside of oneself for salvation. This, of course, has enormous implications for the Christian life and worship, as well as theology.

In this article we will first pursue the major Gnostic trends in Christian worship, then analyze these trends in the light of Scripture, concluding with suggestions for disentangling ourselves. (Continue reading here.)

HT: Cal.vini.st