IV. Gnostic Politics

The late German-American political philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) observed that history is marked by recurring attempts to divinize a fallen created order as a way of escaping the anxiety of fragile and finite existence. He identified in the early church heresy of Gnosticism a paradigm for understanding how private spiritual ambitions are transposed into public political projects—from Constantinianism and medieval Christendom to the totalitarianisms of the modern left and right.¹ If knowledge is power, then the broader the political claim, the greater the promise of dominion.

Totalitarian Utopianism

Voegelin’s hermeneutic of “critical Gnosticism” may seem most persuasive when applied to overtly God-denying and dehumanizing ideologies such as vulgar Marxism or fascist Naziism. Few Christians are inclined to embrace a revolutionary “second reality” in which God is recast as the Absolute Man within Hegel’s inverted dialectic, consummated at the end of history. Likewise, most will recoil at the naked will-to-power embedded in progressive social justice theories, where white, heterosexual capitalists are cast as the demiurge and the “elect” are the intersectionally oppressed.

Yet, the appeal may be subtler when it comes to culturally conservative awakenings that seek to purge society of liberalism, pluralism, and globalization, in order to restore a golden age of the nation—defined by ethnicity, culture, or religion.

White Gnosis

History shows that the church has often lent theological sanction to the symbols, structures, and powers of mass political movements, treating them as tokens of divine favor and signs of eschatological dominion. The Christian legacy in my native South Africa offers a sobering reminder. Following the archetypes of theocratic Israel, Constantinianism, and Christendom, sixteenth-century Dutch Reformed settlers recast the cultural mandate as a charter for colonial conquest, cloaking exploitation in the language of Christian welfare, mission, and manifest destiny.

In time, Afrikaner nationalism advanced the ideology of Apartheid as yet another attempt to fashion a “new Canaan,” where Christians of European descent presumed to rule as God’s elect, justifying segregation by a supposed sacred knowledge bound to racial identity.

Tutu’s Ubuntu

Nelson Mandela’s inauguration as the first black South Africa president in 1994 signaled the collapse of Apartheid’s civil religion and the onset of secularization. Many churches rightly bore witness against racial prejudice by embodying greater ethnic unity at the Lord’s Table. Yet, alongside this, some absorbed into their theology the Marxist-communist utopianism that undergirded Mandela’s African National Congress, expressed in the liberationist agendas of figures such as Desmond Tutu, Beyers Naudé, Alan Boesak, and in the enduring 1982 Belhar Confession.

As of 2025, more than a quarter-century into its new dispensation, South Africa remains a fractured republic, marred by thrombosed veins of injustice and political unrest. Power is contested among African tribalism, Marxist-communism, ethnic nationalism, neo-liberal capitalism, and postmodern identity politics. These rival visions are echoed within corners of the church, where politics is too often baptized as holy—as though the so-called defects of the natural order might be overcome through a dualistic economy of grace.

Progressive Christians in South Africa have been especially drawn to the material and cultural revolutions of Marxism, which continue to ascribe the evils of poverty, racial prejudice, and corruption to white, heteronormative capitalists of European descent. Advocates of so-called “critical Christianity” have embraced Marxist categories as a kind of faux gospel. If humanity is estranged and exploited through the sins of bourgeois social constructions, then God is presumed to stand with the systemically oppressed. If the pale patriarchy enforces order through fixed and universal hierarchies—grounded in merit, biological sex, heterosexuality, and the institution of marriage—then Christ is recast as the liberator from these structures, save for skin color. In this theory, critical material, racial, gender, and queer consciousness becomes the Spirit’s privileged standpoint, affording believers a premature beatific vision on the screen of public activism.

Christian Nationalism

Confessional Christians may be tempted to relegate Voegelin’s critique of Gnosticism to the religious and political left, or to the seemingly bygone era of Apartheid South Africa and the Jim Crow South. Yet, all Christians would do well to heed this warning, not least in light of the renewed allure of Christian nationalism in South Africa and across the Western world.

Since the resurgence of Republican power in Washington under Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” platform—and especially in the wake of the tragic assassination of conservative Christian activist Charlie Kirk—the stage has been set for fresh attempts at a Constantinian synthesis. In this vision, church and state, faith and politics, are collapsed into one another under the banner of a trans-racial Christian West. The danger is that spiritual justice—justification by faith alone—is once more confused with the pursuit of civil righteousness, until the two become indistinguishable.

Special Wisdom

Each manifestation of Christianized politics described above rests upon a supposed special knowledge by which the world may be reordered after the pattern of heaven. The problem it seeks to solve is not an ethical one of sin before a holy God, but liberation from a corrupted creation—whether expressed in unenlightened religious and political authorities, in deficient bodies, or in the burdens of skin color. Redemption is cast as transcendence of the given created order, achieved through a privileged standpoint of immediate gnosis—whether drawn from private spiritual experience, ethnic identity, self-constructed gender or sexual orientation, or broader quests for social justice and equality grounded in deconstruction.

The truly “illumined” are those who claim access to a second reality in which the legitimate, provisional limits of creation, the Noahic covenant, natural law, and the cultural mandate are denied. For such awakened Christians, law and creaturely boundaries are transfigured into a utopian “gospel freedom,” redefined as the new justice of spiritualized mass politics—accessible only to those who imagine themselves wise enough to find truth beyond both natural and special revelation. In this totalizing reconstruction of reality, Christ is made to dissolve covenantal and ethical boundaries, fusing time into eternity and merging his heavenly kingdom with the kingdoms of this world. The “super-spiritual” thus advance a refined Christianity that claims to bypass weakness and suffering by realizing the New Jerusalem here and now. While ordinary believers remain unenlightened, those who “do what lies within” attain a secret knowledge that surpasses both creation and Scripture—through unmediated mystical speculation and esoteric experience morphed into political activism.

At first glance, Gnostic political movements draped in Christian garb may appear benign and even beneficial, especially when compared with the secularized extremes on the left and right. Yet Gnosticism always casts a shadow: a hidden spiritual cost that is far greater than any harm inflicted by overt anti-Christian empires or nationalist regimes. In the balance of this essay, I will now address this cost by exposing what lies behind the Gnostic impulse that distorts natural and spiritual justice—in both its individual-private and its collective, political forms—and then point toward the biblical corrective.

V. Copy and Consume

 In his first letter to the Corinthians, the apostle Paul shows remarkable patience, exhorting wayward believers with repeated calls to repentance, while seeking to believe the best of them. By the time of his second letter, however, his forbearance had worn thin. He confronts his opponents directly, exposing their false gospel based on special knowledge. In turn, he admonishes those believers being led astray to return to the good news grounded in justification by faith alone in Christ alone through grace alone.

Satanic Deception

In 1 Corinthians chapters 5 and 6, Paul berates this ancient church for boasting in their sexual deviance as a badge of spiritual superiority, which is in fact to merge Christ with a prostitute in a brothel run by Satan. Later in chapter ten, Paul admonishes believers not to follow the pattern of the Israelites who were judged for their idolatry in the wilderness amidst an impatient quest for another kingdom on earth (1 Cor 10:1–13). This warning was in part motivated by the fact that some of the Corinthians were participating in pagan worship, which is in fact a participation in the “table of demons”—where the real consumer is Satan (1 Cor 10:14–22).

In 2 Corinthians 11, Paul addresses believers who had apparently repented of their forays into pagan worship and gross violations of the seventh commandment, but were still guilty of showing hospitality to false apostles. These counterfeit preachers combined dualistic pagan mysticism with the moralistic Judaism—offering salvation as “servants of righteousness.” Paul pulls back the mask of these self-proclaimed “super-apostles” to reveal them as calculating deceivers who imitate the Devil, who parades as an angel of light.

When the curtain falls on the pious act, the real conflict is unmasked: Christ against Satan (Gen 3:15ff). The Corinthians were being enticed by counterfeit covenants and a distorted gospel. Satan impersonated the divine, blurring the lines between God and covenant, law and gospel, heaven and earth. Disguised by secret wisdom, a disdain for the body, and ecstatic rapture, he promised a kingdom fully present without the cross and resurrection—in short, salvation by works-righteousness.

Spiritual Grandstanding

After God created Adam and Eve as the first family unit, Satan enters the scene with a divine abandonment wound feeding on meaningless existence and metastasized into a vengeful quest for cosmic superiority. His rebellious drive to come out on top manifests in a consumption of everything on earth below through deception, culminating in violent predation. This ravenous ambition has been mediated through countless individual and collective acts of murder, rape, political subjugation, and psychological torment—often veiled by religion, including Christianity.

It is no surprise, then, that Paul describes the false teachers as having “devoured” the wayward believers in the Corinthian believers (2 Cor 11:16–21; cf. 1 Pet 5:8). By controlling these Christians spiritually, emotionally, and physically, the devilish intruders could incite behavior at odds with God’s law and gospel, morality and the cross. Through divisive group interests, disdain for the poor, and a cult of personality, the “pneumatics” and “outstanding apostles” led a charge of spiritual colonization contrary to divine revelation and image-bearing. Perhaps most insidious in the church at Corinth was the pervasive sexual immorality and the leveraging of material wealth to own, control, and exploit the other.

Commentators on the Corinthian church have described it as a boundaryless swamp of immorality, where the distinctions of neither divine covenant nor human embodiment were respected.² What mattered above all was a fervent clamoring for a consummate divine encounter through all means available, and at any cost. This alchemy of Gnostic speculation, Jewish legalism, and a resurrection-less gospel resulted in a monistic-cum-pantheistic merger of time and eternity in a new-order orgy of justification by works.

The justice of being better than and exercising parasitic power over rival groups and individuals, the “super-spiritual” could avoid the gnawing sense of ethical failure with a winning performance worthy of God’s approval. Avoiding of the conscience through inherent merit takes on unrivalled potency when spiritual justice moves from pulpits to podiums, from creeds and confessions to civil constitutions, from small groups to board rooms and voting booths. The Hebrews demanded kings (1 Sam 10:17–19), the masses wanted Jesus as earthly king (John 6:15), the Corinthians wanted the wisdom of worldly rule (1 Cor 2:6ff), and post-apostolic Christianity has repeatedly experimented with a theology of glory across all of society. When sinners can feel and act big in the world, then surely God and the neighborhood must be impressed.

VI. Crucified Justice

Yet, God is not dazzled by human wisdom and power for salvation, now or later. He will not allow the proclamation of the cross to be poached by glory stalkers: those who have become “futile in their thinking,” in their defense against guilt and shame (Rom 1:21–22). He not only hides himself from theological narcissists but actively resists them and stands in judgment over them.

God Hidden

The apostle Paul rebuked the Corinthians for imagining that God’s saving work could be grasped through fallen human nature—hardwired for works under creation and the Noahic image—whether by craving signs and wonders or by chasing secret knowledge. In so doing, they sought to bend the powers of the age to come into the present. This is the posture of the theologian of glory: demanding a salvation that is bold and beautiful but stripped of unadulterated grace. Such is the grandiose fuel of the self-assured man who venerates himself as an idol (Ps 115:4–8; 2 Tim 3:2–4). Yet however impressive these works may appear—especially when clothed in religious piety—they remain filthy rags as grounds for justification (cf. Col 3:11–3).

God knows this, which is why he hides himself from the proud. Not only do God’s works of creation and providence naturally conceal his acts of redemption, but he actively thwarts the expectations of sinners by masking his saving power behind frail humanity, weakness, suffering, and death (Isa 53; Matt 26–27). In doing so, he confounds the wisdom of this world, shuts down moral activism, and consigns Satan to destruction (2 Cor 11:1–13:4).

God Revealed

While the creation and Noahic images reveal law only, those who possess Christ’s image by faith are able to discern the gospel for sinners, which is the power of God unto salvation (Rom 1:16–17). Where the proud are unwilling and unable to look, the theologian of the cross finds justification, sanctification, and glorification: in dereliction, dismemberment, and the abandonment of the God-man—that is, in God’s “backside.” Christ crucified reveals human works as the deadly behavior they are: insofar as they are human and therefore against God (Gal 3:10–14).

Those born from above are able to look at the historic, particular, incarnate, and crucified Christ by Word and Spirit—in the here and now—and not through him into God’s invisible all-consuming majesty (cf. Matt 17:9–13). Faith recognizes that in the wisdom of the cross, grace, truth, and faithfulness are masked by their opposite: helplessness and lowliness (Heb 11:1–12:2). God as redeemer is not found by peeling back the layers of creation and providence, incarnation, and the cross, but by beholding the One born of a woman under the law and raised for our justification (Gal 4:1–7).³

Justice Satisfied

In what the world deems foolish and worthy of mockery, the Christian finds satisfaction for divine justice and escape from eternal damnation. As it turns out, the law revealed in creation and on the conscience is a schoolmaster to drive the sinner to Jesus Christ for salvation (Gal 3:24–6). There is no room for human/e effort, not even in part. There is no room for special knowledge from above or below, whether from God’s creation and providence or from the old covenant order (Rom 10:5–13).

But now the righteousness of God has been manifested apart from the law, although the Law and the Prophets bear witness to it—the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe. For there is no distinction: for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. (Rom 3:21–26)

The cross closes every loophole of self-justifying human speculation, innovation, and success. The unilateral grace of God in saving sinners through the circumcision of his Son is signed and sealed in the baptism of the believer, setting into motion a life of sanctification in the shadow of the cross (Rom 6:1–11).

In short, to be a theologian of the cross is not an abstract intellectual exercise, but something that happens to the sinner—a definitive judicial announcement (justification) and a becoming (sanctification)—by virtue of the deadly grace of God that gives life. Having been baptized and nourished in Christ, pilgrims fulfil their earthly vocations under the shadow of the cross, albeit veiled by a common humanity and seemingly pointless suffering (1 Cor 7:17–24).

Kingdom Coming

Confessional Protestants conceive of the church at worship as that place where God promises to dispense with the powers of the age to come through the ordinary, embodied, and understated ministry of the Word and sacraments in the spiritual polity that is the church (Acts 2:42; Rom 10:5–31; Belgic Confession [BC] 30). Preaching and the Lord’s Supper strengthen and fortify Christians in their crucified confession for another week of pilgrimage to glory (Heb 10:19–25; 11:13–16).

In this Monday through Saturday sojourn, believers are scattered into vocations in common with unbelievers under the administration of the Noahic covenant, a way of life in stark contrast to the covenant of grace (Gen 9:1–7; Matt 5:1–11, 38–42). By faith, they resist the temptation to conflate the Great Commandment with the Great Commission. By faith, they carry their cross in their civil callings: being crucified with Christ as they provide for their families and love their neighbors. (Matt 22:37–40; 28:16–20). Like Christ’s earthly ministry as a carpenter heralding from the nobody town of Nazareth, and like Christ’s life of suffering culminating in a horrific death on a cruel Roman cross, Christian sanctification is hidden behind the everyday messiness of parents, accountants, plumbers, and refugees. In the crucible of the law and the trials of vocation, God acts against the sinner, crushes pride in works, and drives him anew to Christ for salvation (cf. 2 Cor 4:7–18).

Suffering, law, and judgment drive the guilty and shamed to look for salvation beyond earthly empires and politicians, beyond natural law and forbearance.

In this Pauline outlook—more reminiscent of St. Augustine than Constantine—Christians recognize their identity as wayfarers exercising their dual citizenship in the tension of an already-not-yet existence—under Christ’s two-fold rule—where suffering comes first, then glory. In this covenantal and confessional Reformed outlook on political life, Christ’s kingdom is distinct from the kingdoms of this world. Only the church is enduring and eternal. All other communities and institutions are legitimate, yet provisional. To think otherwise is to claim wisdom at odds with special and natural revelation, to risk the gospel of justification by faith alone with an imitation that is plausible and attractive, but that ultimately fails.⁴

 

[1] See Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics, and Gnosticism: Two Essays (Henry Regnery, 1968).

[2] See, e.g., See J. H. Neyrey, “Body Language in 1 Corinthians: The Use of Anthropological Models for Understanding Paul and his Opponents”, Semeia 35(1986):129–70, 135–8, 151–6; and Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians, New International Greek Testament Commentary (Eerdmans, 2000), 799–848.

[3] On the Apostolic themes of theology of the cross and glory, God hidden and revealed, see Luther’s 1518 Heidelberg Disputation – especially theses 19-24 – in Luther’s Works, vol. 31: Career of the Reformer I, ed. Harold J. Grimm (Fortress Press, 1957), 39–70.

[4] For further reading on this covenantal Reformed two kingdoms and natural law perspective, see especially David VanDrunen, Politics after Christendom: Political Theology in a Fractured World (Zondervan, 2020). See also, Simon Jooste, Pilgrim Politics: Crucified Creedalism Under Christ’s Two-Fold Rule (Mentor, 2026).

©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 ›