Predestination and Gnosis

Image by Sten

"All the days ordained for me 

were written in your book 

before one of them came to be."

~Psalm 139:16

Predestination, the belief that some people were predestined by God to be his people while some people were predestined not to be, and that this was decided before any of them were born or had done anything good or bad. It is a very difficult belief for human beings to like. It's a very thorny and seemingly unpleasant belief. It seems to strike at our views of fairness, and our hope that all people can be brought to the light in the end.

It also strikes at our ideas of freedom and autonomy, that we are free to make of our lives what we wish. Of course any freedom we could have would be very limited by our opportunities in life and by our knowledge. But we like to believe we have such freedom and such autonomy, however limited it must be. Even according to common sense, it must be quite limited.

Such an idea also is offensive to evangelism. Evangelism is based on the idea that you can convince people of God, that God is somehow the sensible choice that they are missing out on. It is like your friend was about to buy an air filter for his car, and you knew that he could get a better air filter for the same price. You simply explain the merits of the other filter in a rational manner and of course he will see that you are right. If God chooses people directly, your evangelism is totally pointless. Also, if godly knowledge is unworldly as John says, your evangelism is futile because you are trying to sell someone on the virtues of something they cannot sense for themselves. It is like you were saying to the guy buying an air filter, "this air filter has more charm and dandiness, and less kerfluffle." They would think you had lost your mind.

However, both the Old Testament and New seem to firmly back predestination, that everything, even your personality and will, are according to the intention of God. If anything, the New Testament seems to back it more emphatically than the Old, but both lend ample support to the idea. If you want some quotes, Romans 9:19-22, John 15:16-19, John 10:3, John 6:65 and there are many more. Romans 9 contains perhaps the most hard-edged, most unsentimental statement of that position. But in many ways it is most eloquently stated in John.

"If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. 

If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. 

As it is, you do not belong to the world, 

but I have chosen you out of the world. 

That is why the world hates you."

~John 15:18-19

On at least one level though, predestination is almost certainly true, and I will explain why.

Most people in the world are worldly people. They think about matters of the world, their hearts are set on matters of the world. This is because this is what makes sense according to our physical senses. We must understand this: being worldly makes sense. Being unworldly does not make sense according to the world we can see and taste and touch. Some things give us pleasure and we want those things, other things give us pain and we avoid these things. And so we occupy ourselves with what is necessary to seek pleasure and avoid pain. Knowledge of God is not one of the things that our senses can ever give us.

In fact, consciousness of God is completely unworldly - the Gnostics called this "gnosis," knowledge that our spirit gives us instead of knowledge that our senses give us. This knowledge comes from one source and can only be received from one source, God. That means that only God can give it to us, and He decides when or if that happens. Not me, not you, nobody else. The Gnostics however believed that this knowledge is intrinsic to human beings, or at least some of us. It isn't. It is intrinsic to God, it is his knowledge, that He shares or not.

Now, many claim knowledge of God who do not have it. They claim this for reasons of the cultural background they have or social milieu or personal ambition. Jesus usually points out the pharisees as being this sort of person, someone who is outwardly religious but whose heart is not actually set on God. Religious leaders almost invariably don't have it, because religious leaders have some degree of worldly power or influence and John tells us that the world will hate us and that the world rejects knowledge that comes from God. If people like what you say, you are probably saying the wrong things. If you are saying the right things, you will either be ignored or hated depending on how forcefully and publicly you are saying them. Because, from the point of view of the world and worldly minds, you are not making sense. Worldliness makes sense. Carnality makes sense, and the only question is how to manage it, not how to resist it.

What about fairness? Is it fair that God shows some of his secrets to some people and not others? We cannot ultimately know the plans of God or why He has done things one way and not another, but generally worldly people get their recompense in this world and do not seek and would not understand other recompense. Its like how some foods humans eat are poisonous to dogs: to humans peanuts and chocolate are food, to dogs they are deadly poison. To a deer, ivy is food, but toxic to humans. Humans in their natural state don't want this holy knowledge, the world is enough for them. If the world was not enough for them, then their condition would be abnormal. Perhaps they are ill, or perhaps they are set apart by God, but abnormal either way.

Predestination also comes into play in an attitude spoken of by some mystics: the idea that whatever happens to you, however bad it may seem, was meant for you personally by God for your betterment. That in other words all the experiences in your life, good or bad, were intended by God for you. This is a radical theology and the mind rebels against it as much as it does against predestination. How could God want someone to get cancer, much less His child?! But according to this point of view, everything, EVERYTHING that happens to a child of God has been dictated to happen directly by God, for his or her betterment. This is a hard saying. What about things you do to yourself? If they are bad, then yeah, you needed to learn not to do that. What if it was a terrible cruel thing that happened to you because of things beyond your power? According to this point of view, it wouldn't be happening to you unless God willed it, because God is not going to give over his Children to random pointless events. This is a very hard saying, hard to accept. I do accept it however.

The works I do in my Father’s name testify about me,

but you do not believe because you are not my sheep.

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me.

I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish;

no one will snatch them out of my hand.

My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all ;

no one can snatch them out of my Father’s hand.

I and the Father are one.

~John 10:25-30

Now, you see me quoting the New Testament despite the fact that I am not technically a Christian. What does it mean to be a Christian in the modern understanding? To be a Christian, you have to believe in a Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and I do not believe that. I do not believe that Jesus the man was the same as God. I don't think he believed that.

The word "one" can have two meanings. It has two meanings in the Shema, the Jewish confession of faith:

"Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is One."

"Hear O Israel, the Lord your God, the Lord is Unity."

Unity, not Trinity. So I interpret what Jesus was saying as that he had no will of his own. There was no separation between his will and God's will and that because of this, whatever he said was according to what God wanted him to say. Not that a man was God or ever could be, but that the man in fact had left the stage and the One God was speaking through him.

Because of the corruptions that took place to Christianity, I had tended to want to ignore the New Testament altogether and regard Jesus himself as suspect. While I still hold that no man could be God and that there is no Trinity and that the whole Jewish idea of a messiah is a mistake, the New Testament is still a treasure trove of knowledge. I don't think what happened to Christianity was ever Jesus' will, except in that his words would not have been carried down through the ages without an outer wrapper of worldly religion. Christianity the religion was the sugar coating, the pill casing that allowed the World to propagate the unworldly to those in the future who would be able to piece together what the real message was. If Jesus died on the cross for anything, he died for that. Maybe he knew that, maybe he didn't, but either way that was the real functional purpose of it.

I believe that Christianity was the pill casing as it were to allow unworldly knowledge to be propagated in a worldly world. Christianity itself then is to some degree a worldly vehicle: the knowledge concealed within is not.

The worldly vehicle burned people at the stake and killed and invaded and repressed people and so forth, and produced crazy televangelists who enriched themselves from widows and the poor and elderly. I am saying that this is not a bug of Christianity, it is a feature. Christianity exists for one purpose: to carry the information hidden in plain sight within it to be conveyed across the world. It is a worldly chariot for unworldly information that its own practitioners may be unaware of. It is like a virus carrying its DNA across the body, a container for propagating in the world texts whose real meaning is unworldly and not the same as they believe it to be. What Jesus died for, in actual fact, is this: that his words and that the Old Testament too would be propagated throughout the world, so that those who need it would find it. The vessel is not divine, but it is the only vessel that could achieve the purpose in a worldly world.