Seduced By Knowledge

Advertisers use the art of seduction to sell us everything from a new luxury car to liquid body wash. Typically, they appeal to lust, status, or pleasure to close the deal for their product, and all of those things are powerful tools of seduction. But I am not sure any of them are as seductive as knowledge, which has been flirting with people for centuries.
One of the earliest Christian creeds is known as the Apostles’ Creed. The creed begins with a brief statement about God the Father and concludes with a brief statement about God the Spirit. In between lies a lengthier section on Jesus Christ being conceived, born, tortured, crucified, dead, buried, brought down, resurrected, and brought up to heaven from where he will one day return. No one is sure who wrote this creed, but we do know it has stood for centuries as a baptismal creed that captures true Christian beliefs as opposed to incorrect ones that were held by a group of people known as Gnostics.
The Gnostics, whose name comes from the word “knowledge,” discounted the material world altogether. They thought the physical world, including physical human bodies, were the product of some lowly half-god, not the one they considered to be the supreme god. However, their supreme god was involved with human souls, so the Gnostics believed the supreme god would deliver their immaterial souls from their imprisonment in material human bodies in a physical world. The Gnostics believed these things through the passing down of secret knowledge revealed to them and only them in cryptic interpretations of their sacred texts. Right away, you can see how this understanding of reality would butt heads with the Christian faith that worships a God who took on human nature and promises deliverance through a bodily resurrection and a renewed physical earth.
Early Christians often disputed the claims of Gnostics, but the Gnostics would respond by appealing to their secretive interpretation of things that was off limits to anyone who wasn’t already one of them. In other words, there was no even playing field to disagree or argue with them. For a Gnostic, the world was black and white and other people were either “in the know” and agreed with them, or they disagreed and were considered stupid for doing so.
As a religion Gnositicism has few, if any, devotees that I know of in America today, but I do see a similar approach to other people creep up this side of the information age. Thanks to the Internet data is everywhere, information abounds, and with them there is a seduction that has us thinking that those who disagree with us are simply not as well informed as we are.
Symptoms of being seduced by knowledge include linking knowledge with power. Be careful if you find yourself craving all the fawning applause for being a guru and dispenser of some knowledge, leaving little credit behind for the object of that knowledge. Also beware of putting too much emotional value in your knowledge, because before long you may let animus come between those who share your knowledge and those who don’t.
The Christian faith has no place for the divisive seduction of knowledge. Paul addresses a divisive attitude within the church in Corinth by asking them, “Who makes you different from anyone else? What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?” (1 Cor 4:7)  Charles Spurgeon, commenting on a similar biblical passage in Ezekiel 15:2, says, “Great believer, you would have been a great sinner if God had not made you to differ. O you who are valiant for truth, you would have been as valiant for error if grace had not laid hold of you. Therefore, do not be proud, though you have a large influence.”
We have received much from God who has revealed himself in so many ways, but especially through the law and the prophets of old and through his Son Jesus Christ. We’ve nothing of ourselves to brag about, except that we have received God’s grace, and the best way to spread his grace to others is by loving them, not by thinking ourselves to be superior and “in the know.”