Unfortunately, spiritual elitism still thrives in the church, as a sampling of E.W. Kenyon's writings indicates. Taking Paul's statements in 1 Corinthians and elsewhere wildly out of context, Kenyon uplifts his own personal insight into the "Pauline revelation" as evidence of knowledge superior to that of Wesley, Calvin, and even the twelve disciples. Speaking of John 1:1-3, he comments: "This is sense knowledge. That was all right in the early church....They [the earliest believers] knew nothing of the finished work of Christ. None of them believed or knew about his substitutionary work. That was to come later through the Pauline revelation" [2]. (It bears mentioning in this context that the greatest advocate of the superiority of Paul's writings was Marcion, the second-century Gnostic heretic who rejected all non-Pauline literature from his personal canon.) Again, ironically inverting the evident meaning of Paul's reference to the Corinthians as "babes in Christ," Kenyon promotes the concept of believers as "supermen" in order to encourage his own version of spiritual maturity: "We will be in that prized inner-circle with Him, one of the trusted ones. When He has a difficult mission, He will call on us..." [3] (These words call to mind the self-assessment of my own former church group and its leadership as spiritually elite "special forces" - the "Navy SEALs" of Christianity.) While Paul denotes a presumption of higher knowledge and superiority as marks of immaturity and carnality, Kenyon uses those same terms to define maturity and spirituality: "When you know that you are tied up in Him and that He is back of you, it gives you a sense of superiority" [4].
Another distinguishing mark of Gnosticism was the assumption of dualism. Taking the philosophy of the Greeks - especially Plato - a step further, the Gnostics not only recognized a metaphysical dualism of sensory data and ideals, but a moral dichotomy of flesh and spirit, in which the material was deemed evil and the spiritual good. This emphasis in turn affected the Gnostic view of theology, particularly in disparaging God in the OT (the "Demiurge") as a bumbling creator of evil, i.e, the physical universe, and in a denial of NT doctrinal essentials such as the incarnation of Christ. Moreover, dualism almost invariably led to to two practical consequences: denying the body altogether, or asceticism; and freeing the body and its desires to run their course, or what is termed "licentiousness" in the NT. Because the theological ramifications of dualism are as profound as they are deceptive, the apostles countered it forcefully. In the context of correcting the Gnostic tendency toward license, Paul reminded the super-spiritual Corinthians of the reality of the body as inseparable from the spiritual man. The body is not fundamentally aspiritual, but a part of the whole man redeemed by God. Sexual immorality is therefore a sin against the body, against the Holy Spirit who dwells in the body, and against Christ who literally purchased the bodies of redeemed men through the cross (1 Cor. 6:13-20). Gnostic dualism seems to have been endemic in Corinth, as Paul encourages on one hand a disciplined respect for the body as the temple of the Holy Spirit (3:16; 6:16-20), and on the other, an appreciation for the body in the form of enjoying its God-ordained functions, such as sexual intercourse in marriage (7:1-6). To the same audience he addresses the twin dangers of dualism, asceticism and license. In 1 Thess. 5:23 Paul again affirms the essential unity of man: "May God Himself sanctify you through and through. And may your whole spirit, soul and body be preserved blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ."
As against the unity of man implicit in Hebrew thought and revealed in Scripture, E.W. Kenyon's dualism is pronounced. Despite whatever claims he makes upon the "Pauline revelation," Kenyon's own revelation is strikingly Platonic rather than Pauline. Kenyon's is a false dichotomy, in which all of reality is either spiritual or sensory. There is no middle ground. He states this clearly in The Bible in Light of Our Redemption: "There exists, according to the Scriptures, a spiritual realm as well as a physical....Our physical senses do not contact this spiritual realm" [5]. Of course, this is dualism in the sense that there are allegedly two fundamental realities; in another the physical is said to be inherently, vastly inferior to ultimately subject to the spiritual: "We know that spiritual things are superior to physical things, for God, a spirit, created physical things." Such a doctrine is undeniably "spiritual" in emphasis, but it's far from accurate. Scripture indicates that good deeds may be accomplished with the body (Heb. 10:10; Rom. 12:1) while sins may be committed in the mind and spirit as well as the body (Eph. 2:3; Rom. 8:5-6). Moreover, Kenyon equivocates by isolating the meanings of biblical words from their various NT contexts to accommodate presupposed ontological categories, as when reducing the definition of "flesh" to nothing more than the material or the sensory. By such methods Kenyon makes Paul out to be a Gnostic when he happens to be one of Gnosticism's greatest critics. The Bible is not an obscure system of metaphysics reserved for an enlightened few, but a clear and practically relevant communication of God to all men. False doctrine is the natural result of blurring this distinction.
Gnostic dualism may seem little more than a broad-ranging philosophical notion, but it involves specific and serious heresies. Foremost among these is Docetism, the belief that Jesus "appeared" in the flesh in a purely idealistic sense, i.e., that he was never actually incarnated or crucified. The incarnation and crucifixion were held to be false because otherwise they implicated God of evil by manifesting in the "flesh." According to Irenaeus, the early Gnostic Cerinthus maintained a theory of temporary union, in drawing a clear demarcation between "Jesus" (a man born of the flesh) and the "Christ" (the spirit who dwelt in Jesus from the time of his baptism to just before his crucifixion). Paul the apostle specifically countered such