Denying Christ’s Body: The Dangers of Ecclesial Gnosticism
May 23, 2014 By Ragan Sutterfield 0 Comments The oldest heresies in Christianity have been those that have denied the body—Christ’s body, our bodies. Gnosticism is a name that applies to a good many of them, Docetism another. The idea is that God is too great to have taken on a human body and that the material realities of our body are too lowly to be welcomed into the eternal kingdom of God. The Docetists said that Christ appeared to be human but that he didn’t have real flesh and bones—he was human image without human substance. The Gnostics believed that the body was the source of evil, a trap that we would move beyond in order to move into the highest emanations of a pure and disembodied Wisdom. These heresies were and are popular and attractive because resonate—we often experience our bodies as a trap. Who hasn’t wished that they could be free of their body at some point? We have all had illnesses that have ...