II. Simulating Spiritual Justice

The gospel can be turned into law—even into new religious laws, especially when sweeter fruit is available to stave off the bitter taste of judicial conviction. When fallen creatures turn down contracts with part or all of the moral law, the door invariably opens to various forms of religious innovation, new orders for spiritual justice. Under the old covenant, the Israelites grew impatient with God’s will for worship, only to substitute their own by committing idolatry. In doing so, they latched onto the end for which all humanity was created—the beatific vision—and inserted the doctrines and wisdom of men to get there: from golden calves and strange fire to hypocrisy and lawlessness (Matt 15:1–9; 23:27–8; 1 Cor 10). Hardwired for heaven by nature, sinners mimic the realization of glory now through religious ingenuity—yet another form of works-righteousness to escape legal accountability (1 Cor 4:8–13).

In what follows, I briefly provide examples from Paul’s letters to the Corinthians of new spiritual laws that parade as gospel.

Mystical Ascent

The great Moses longed for a divine vision that breached the bounds of covenantal propriety when he asked to see God’s face on Mount Sinai (Exod 33:20). After Jesus fed the five thousand, the masses tried to seize him and make him king (John 6:15). Similarly, Peter, James, and John wanted to capture in perpetuity the unveiling of Christ’s future glory on the Mount of Transfiguration (Matt 17:1–13). In Corinth, the pious searched for signs after the expired Old Testament order while mirroring the Greek quest for special knowledge leading to salvation (1 Cor 1:22). Only the super-spiritual in Corinth could move on from or supplement Paul’s seeming outmoded law and gospel to taste something like pre-fall Edenic bliss. The quest for spiritual justice, championed by the pneumatics and “super-apostles,” fused sophistry, Mosaic law, the gospel, Platonism, and Greco-Roman mystery religions. The promised path to God was through esoteric rites, elaborate rituals, and ecstatic experiences (cf. 1 Cor 1:20–5; 14:1–12; 2 Cor 3:7–11; 11:1–6)¹

Herein lies a repetition of Satan’s offer to Adam of an alternate route to glory without confirmation in covenant obedience.

It is perhaps helpful at this point to frame the new spiritual measures in Corinth as a kind of proto-Gnosticism. Corinthian piety anticipated the later ancient Gnostic movement in at least five important ways. First, some in Corinth had gained access to secret knowledge (gnosis)—by practicing certain rites and rituals—that elevated them to a super-spiritual level beyond the ordinary religious and human (cf. 1 Cor 1:18–25). This created a superior “us versus them mentality,” which included Paul and his supposed inferior gospel (cf. 2 Cor 11:1–6). Second, this special wisdom liberated the soul from the mundane—if not evil—entrapments of the world: with its materiality, institutions, and ideologies (cf. 1 Cor 5:1–7:16). Third, Christian elites devalued embodiment, by becoming either libertines or ascetics, in favor of the unseen activity of the s/Spirit—to the extent of denying the bodily resurrection (11:17–34; 15:12). Fourth, those with privileged insight into the mysteries of God believed they already participated in a higher salvation order of heaven on earth (4:8–13). Fifth, evidence of participation in this higher life was the ability to speak in untranslatable tongues (14:1–25). In short, the pneumatics—but especially the false teachers—envisioned a direct ontological fusion with God without the mediation of Christ crucified: a union based on human effort ignited by the divine spark within (cf. 2 Cor 11:12–15).²

As Christianity underwent radical Hellenization, the Gnostic spirit emerged, seeking certain salvation in a fallen material world. Its lineage stretches back through the mystery religions of antiquity, Platonism, and Jewish kabbalah, to Satan’s original sleight of hand in Eden. Gnosticism itself crystallized into a discernible movement in the second and third centuries.³ Yet, its “theology of gnosis” has resurfaced throughout church history wherever the revelation of Christ crucified is eclipsed by subjective wisdom or unmediated experience that promises heaven on earth now—whether in medieval monasticism, Anabaptism, Pietism, revivalism, radical Evangelicalism, or emergent esotericism.

Competition

Another dimension to the high-octane spirituality of the Corinthians was a competitive spirit reflecting the bustling ancient city.⁴ The addressees of Paul’s letters were not only churchgoers engaging in various unique acts of Christian piety but also members of broader society with vocations. Paul’s concern was that the one-upmanship and class consciousness of the public square was being sublimated into spiritual ambition at odds with the cross (cf. 1 Cor 1:26–31; 11:17–22; 12:21–31). Reminiscent of Satan’s rivalry with God, the Corinthian church featured carnal comparisons, cults of personality, and prideful boasting, attitudes Paul repeatedly rebuked (2 Cor 5–12).

For those who would quiet an uneasy conscience through sacred toil, a move beyond private devotions toward public stages of spiritual performance is enticing. Today, this may take the form of chasing worldly benchmarks of success promoted by church-growth strategists, or displaying God’s supposed favor through health, wealth, and prosperity. Yet, alongside this older shadow of the apostolic church—where cultural elites often rose to the top—modern churches and believers, especially in the West, may now claim superiority by parading solidarity with the oppressed.

Tribal Interests

The Corinthian propensity toward soul inflation through comparison and self-commendation was not a solitary endeavor but found increased potency in organized groups. Here, again, the sinful ambition for transcendence attaches to what God ordains. Human community reflects the image of God. Man was created for marriage, family, and society. Yet, attachment to one’s neighbor can prove dangerous. Repeatedly, the apostle chastised the Corinthians for splitting into factions around a particular leader (1 Cor 1:10–17; 3:1–4; 11:17–22; 12:21–31). Corrupted egos find comfort and power in numbers, especially when led by charismatic individuals. If a certain approach to salvation is popular and appears successful, then perhaps God is impressed as well?

The heirs of Old Testament tribalism and early church factionalism—each promising privileged access to God through self-righteous group identity—continue to flourish today. Their expressions range from New Age mysticism and revived schemes of theocratic Israel to ethnic nationalism and liberation theologies that exalt the marginalized.

Sophistry

Anthony Thiselton once described ancient Greco-Roman cities such as Corinth and Athens as “postmodernism underage.”⁵ In such centers, the well-cultivated often employed professional rhetoricians—sophists—to craft a persona that advanced their social, political, and even religious ambitions. Crucial to this process was the deceptive use of language. Public images were curated with no grounding in objective reality; words functioned not to reveal truth but to construct a plausible identity for pragmatic ends—health, wealth, and prosperity, and presumed divine favor.⁶ The apostle confronted such double-talk in the super-apostles, whose polished rhetoric masked their true allegiance to Satan disguised as an angel of light (2 Cor 11–12).

Since the “masters of suspicion” pierced the optimism of the Enlightenment, postmodern deconstruction has not only unraveled the relation between subject and object but has also dissolved confidence in the objective itself.⁷ Ancient sophistry has thus matured into the cutting edge of Western epistemology and ethics, now weaponized in the form of politicized critical theories.⁸ As ever, the church is tempted to mirror the world—especially when such imitation promises a spiritual payoff. Christianity’s attraction to socio-critical justice sophistry is, at one level, understandable: Activists of “enlightened” identity politics present themselves as compassionate toward the suffering, promising liberation from guilt, shame, oppression, and difference, into a utopian community of multiculturalism—all through a gospel that defies objective reason.⁹

This section prepares the ground for tracing the impulses that drive private and small-group quests for divine communion by imitating Christianity through human effort. Yet, such spiritual ambition, once kindled, rarely remains “in-house.” In the New Testament era, the expansive political dominion of national Israel still weighed heavily on the church’s collective imagination. Later, with the Christianization of the West—set in motion by Constantine’s imperial favor in the fourth century—believers inherited an extra-biblical paradigm: the lure of special wisdom for redeeming the world through political power.

III. Divinized Political Movements

As a type of heaven on earth, Old Testament Israel was a legitimate marriage of church and state in the promised land. Yet, the Mosaic covenant was repeatedly broken, not only through nihilistic pleasure and power mongering but also through the special wisdom of syncretistic pagan worship, to augment the promises of the covenant of grace with the works of foreign religion (cf. Num 25:1–3; Ps 106:34–9; Hos). The exile of the northern and southern kingdoms signaled the sidelining of the church as a political player, through second-temple Judaism, the apostolic era, and into the early persecuted church.

Emperor Constantine

This trajectory shifted dramatically with Emperor Constantine, who secured Christianity not only as a dominant world religion but also as a formidable civil power. The legacy of civil religion is evident in a millennium of Christendom, during which the church sought to govern every sphere of society under the pretense of extending Christ’s redemptive kingdom—effectively divinizing the political order.¹⁰ Whereas the Corinthians confined their “improvements” on Paul’s gospel to private spirituality, Constantine opened the door for innovation on a public scale by conflating Christ’s imputed righteousness unto salvation with natural-law justice for earthly peace and prosperity. The result was a totus Christus ladder of being, descending from glory into the structures of temporal rule.¹¹

Protestant Reformation

The sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation signaled the fracturing of the Roman Catholic around Martin Luther’s recovery of Paul’s theology of the cross. While it also saw the retrieval of a Pauline political theology through an Augustinian lens, the Constantinian impulse to sacralize politics—where possible—lived on within the Protestant church. Notable early examples of this include the seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony and Anglican Oliver Cromwell’s England. Later, the expansive aspirations of the church found expression in European colonialism, which included laying the foundation for institutionalized forms of prejudice such as Apartheid.¹²

Enlightenment Suspicion

The Constantinian and medieval theocratic vision for a unified Christian society would be dealt a mortal wound with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781), setting into motion the Enlightenment project of suspicion toward absolute certainty—about anything. By doubting everything, including God and the notion of a universal moral order grounded in the divine, the church was put on the defensive. No longer could she depend upon a transcendent objective reality giving order and meaning to created subjects in community on earth, let alone the notion that the church has the blueprint for transforming society into a colony of heaven on earth.

The Enlightenment subjected to suspicion the very notion of natural-law justice grounded in God’s righteous character and imprinted upon humanity. In so doing, it imperiled the universal moral obligation embedded in the creation mandate and reaffirmed under the Noahic covenant. By rejecting a divinely revealed moral order, the architects of modernity simultaneously undermined the gospel itself—in its Pauline articulation and its catholic creedal confession.

Along with Kant, philosophers such as G. W. F. Hegel and Friedrich Schleiermacher sought to preserve God, law, and gospel by relegating the transcendent—what Kant called the noumenal—beyond the reach of empirical reason. In effect, they enthroned the human subject as the architect of reality, enclosing the divine and the moral within the sphere of human consciousness and experience. The church’s accommodation of this project took form in efforts to harmonize the supernatural claims of the gospel with Enlightenment ideals of reason, liberty, human rights, and progress, often resulting in Christianized programs of social reform and democratic politics. Liberal Protestantism, in particular, tended to reduce Jesus to a paragon of human benevolence. Yet, in this aspiration to realize the beatitude of heaven across the whole of society, it shared common ground with ostensibly conservative reactions to the Enlightenment, such as Pietism, Methodism, and evangelical revivalism.

Postmodern Deconstruction

In due course, the Enlightenment’s pursuit of empirically verifiable theories to ground reality with absolute certainty collapsed under the strain of its own idealism. Kant’s “Copernican revolution” turned philosophy inward, thereby preparing the way for counter-Enlightenment “masters of suspicion”—Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud—who dismantled the Apostolic, catholic, and medieval inheritance of God, morality, and justice by advancing radically relativistic accounts of knowledge, being, and ethics.¹³

The post-1960s Western surge of social-justice identity politics, indebted to Frankfurt School critical theory, is the offspring of the Kantian turn refracted through Marx’s reworking of Hegel’s negative dialectic under Feuerbach’s atheistic lens. Neo-Marxism in the new millennium has shifted its focus from the redistribution of material wealth—Rousseau’s master-slave struggle transposed into class conflict—to the pursuit of equality along gender, sexual, and ethnic lines. At its vanguard, postmodern critical activism fuses critical-race and queer theory, reconstructing reality “in the moment” through the sophistry of fluid linguistic constructions. This is a reprise of Corinthian casuistry, with the decisive twist that those cast as “oppressed” now occupy the position of moral authority, often reinforced by their cultural elites.¹⁴

Though the postmodern turn—initiated by Kant, radicalized by Nietzsche, and refracted through successive Marxisms—severed the appeal to a transcendent, objective One, the human quest for meaning, order, and utopia persisted in the divinization of politics. History became the stage for realizing the “Absolute Man,” often draped in Christian symbolism. Even with this exchange of object for subject, the progressive church has managed to absorb such deconstruction and linguistic constructivism into her doctrine and practice, most notably in political form through liberation theology and spiritualized social-justice activism.¹⁵

What unites these various forms of divinized politics is the outward projection of an essentially Gnostic impulse. Each ideology promises a privileged knowledge by which to unveil and inaugurate a new order of justice—an esoteric key that furnishes existential power and legitimates the zeal of self-righteousness.

In the next installment we will see how the Gnostic impulse manifests itself in utopia-seeking political movements, how Satan twists God’s gospel into a means of human self-exaltation, and how only justification by faith in Christ alone is the corrective.

Notes

1. See Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity, 251–318; and Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Harvard University Press, 1987).
2. See Henry Chadwick, The Early Church, rev. ed. (Penguin Books, 1993), 32–41; and Dale B. Martin, The Corinthian Body (Yale University Press, 1999).
3. J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, rev. ed. (Harper & Row, 1978), 22–28.
4. Donald Engels, Roman Corinth: An Alternative Model for the Classical City (University of Chicago Press, 1990), 43–65.
5. Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Eerdmans, 2000), 12–17.
6. Ben Witherington III, Conflict and Community in Corinth: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary on 1 and 2 Corinthians (Eerdmans, 1995), 5–19, 50–3.
7. Stephen R. C. Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault, expanded ed. (Ockham’s Razor Publishing, 2011).
8. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (Durham, NC: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020).
9. As a striking example, Jürgen Moltmann leveraged Hegel’s dialectic and Frankfurt School sociology in a critical political theology that embraced an ongoing process of openness. “At the center of these [cultural] conflicts… stands in different ways the fundamental question of human identity of men and women. For every particularist and narrow-minded identification (the human being as white man, the human being as a man, the human being as non-handicapped, healthy person) leads in the form of racialism, sexism and the idol of health to the suppression, disparagement and pushing aside of other people, so that is impossible for us to talk about ‘human identity’ at all.” (Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit, 186.)
10. Eric Voegelin, History of Political Ideas, Vol. 1: Hellenism, Rome, and Early Christianity, ed. Athanasios Moulakis, Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 19 (University of Missouri Press, 1997), 207–8.
11. Douglas B. Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999), 114–7.
12. See, generally, D. G. Hart, Calvinism: A History (Yale University Press, 2013), and Simon Jooste, “Recovering the Calvin of ‘Two Kingdoms’: A Historical-Theological Inquiry in the Light of Church-State Discourse in South Africa” (PhD diss., Stellenbosch University, 2013).
13. See Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, chapters 2–3.
14. See Hicks, Explaining Postmodernism, especially chapters 1, 6; and Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories.
15. See Douglas Farrow, Ascension and Ecclesia: On the Significance of the Doctrine of the Ascension for Ecclesiology and Christian Cosmology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999).

©Simon Jooste. All Rights Reserved.

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Post authored by:

• Simon Jooste

  

  Rev. Simon Jooste (PhD, Stellenbosch University) is a former USA Division I tennis player and CPA now living in his native South Africa serving the Reformed Church Southern Suburbs. He has authored Embodiment and Power: the Essential Nature of the Women in Office Debate (2022) and Pilgrim Politics: Crucified Creedalism Under Christ’s Two-Fold Rule (Mentor, 2026).

  More by Simon Jooste ›