In evangelical Christian circles, people have had a born-again experience where they have asked Jesus into their hearts to take over their lives. In our Gnostic terminology, we would say that this is a person’s acknowledgement of the Christ, and an invitation that invites the Third Order of Powers—the pleroma of the Christ—to come into ourselves to correct the mistakes that we have gained through the memes of the culture that surround us and clutter up our souls. Now, I know this all sounds like funny talk. It’s a little different than how we normally speak of Jesus Christ in evangelical circles, but I hope that if you’ve been following Gnostic Insights for any period of time, or if you’ve read the book, A Simple Explanation of the Gnostic Gospel, that you will understand what I’m saying. All I’m saying is exactly what is said in Christian doctrine about asking Jesus to come into your heart. It’s just a deeper explanation of how the process works.
It is not necessary to understand all of the steps in the Gnostic Gospel, because the only thing you really need to know is that we come from the Father and we will return to the Father. Christ is the mechanism by which that is accomplished. The Bible puts it this way:
11 For it is written:
“As I live, says the Lord, Every knee shall bow to Me, And every tongue shall confess to God.”
12 So then each of us shall give account of himself to God. (Romans 14:10-12)
On the one hand, Christians acknowledge that every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord. Yet, on the other hand, church doctrine says that only those people who, before death, have repented and invited Jesus into their hearts will be saved. And to them, being saved only refers to being saved from damnation, being saved from hell. I’m safe. But that is not really the goal of inviting the Christ to dwell in your heart. We Gnostics say that the purpose of asking the Christ in is to replace your flawed Second Order pleroma with your redeemed Third Order pleroma.
That is, you ask the Fullness of God to wipe away all of the misunderstandings, all of the doubts, all of the sin. Sin simply means straying from the path of virtue. When you invite the Christ in, you’re asking for the correcting algorithm of the Christ, we might say, to remove confusion from your life so that you only operate out of truth and love rather than ego. Being saved by Christ means that every moment of your waking life, until the time that you pass away and move on from this life to the next, will be for the glory of God, in order to demonstrate God’s love to the world and this cosmos. Therefore, thinking that being saved from hell is the goal and stopping there, entirely misses the point of salvation. Going to church on Sunday mornings yet acting unloving the rest of the time is not what Jesus meant by salvation.
Salvation is meant to bring you back into alignment with the glory of God. Jesus is our exemplar of a blameless life. Jesus is the first of the Second Order Powers that came fully loaded with the Third Order of Powers. That’s why he’s called Jesus the Anointed. He walked with the truth and spirit and love of the Father at all times, and through the power of the Christ we are to emulate Jesus. It’s become popular in academic circles, such as the Jesus Project, to say that there was no such human being on the planet as Jesus of Nazareth. But more and more evidence is actually arising that it’s true. There are both Jewish and non-Judaic historians of the period of time when Jesus was on the planet that testify to his presence. The presence of Jesus is not simply a fairy tale as so many people claim, plugging Jesus into history in the creation of a false religion. It’s really not even possible in my mind because there’s too much truth and beauty in the New Testament to be a fable constructed by a pack of religious liars.
There is also much truth and beauty in the Old Testament, although I have reservations about the character of God presented in Old Testament. We Gnostics think that the God of the Old Testament is not the God Above All Gods but the Demiurge. There is a definite split between Judaism and Christianity, between the Old and the New Testament and the old and new covenant between God and humankind. When Jesus was crucified, the New Testament says that the great curtain that hung in the Temple in Jerusalem that separated the Holy of Holies section of the Temple from the more public aspect of the Temple was torn in half, was rent in two from the top to the bottom when Jesus was crucified. Now that symbolically symbolizes that there is a tear, a break, between the Judaism of the Temple and Christ crucified, and a whole new way of walking with God from then on, based upon the principles that Jesus shared, based upon his example.
Last week I researched the movement called the deconstruction of Christianity. Although as a PhD in rhetoric, I certainly learned what deconstruction was, I didn’t realize that Christianity was one of the big targets of deconstruction. This was a concept invented by one of the founders of what’s called post-modernism, Jacques Derrida. Derrida said that meaning is always mediated by language, and that we need to deconstruct the meaning of the words, because what the person who originally said it meant is probably not what we interpret it to mean.
Well, I actually say that quite a bit. I always point out that we speak from our own point of view. We’re born in a particular place and time, we have particular lifestyles and lives and experiences. And therefore, when you say something, I hear it through my lens, and vice versa. So the Gnostic gospel that I am teaching is a form of the deconstruction of modern Christianity, but I don’t think it’s a deconstruction of what Jesus meant to bring into the world, or what I would call true Christianity or proto-Christianity.
I think that the Nicene Council which institutionalized and repackaged Christianity to serve the needs of the Roman Empire in the 300s AD, was the first deconstruction of Jesus and that what we have learned as the religion of Christianity presents a complete misunderstanding of the purpose and mission of Christ because the gnosis was stripped from the gospel by the Council of Nicaea, as they were tasked with putting together the Christian religion. So while I would, let’s say, advocate deconstruction of modern Christianity, I’m only trying to deconstruct it back to the original meaning that Jesus left with the disciples and with the early followers of the church.
On the other hand, atheists and academics who deconstruct Christianity have a different goal in mind. Their goal is to, in a sense, prove that there is no such thing as God or Jesus or Christ. They want to deconstruct it all the way back to atheism. They sometimes call themselves naturalist religionists, or religion without God. They worship creation, or they don’t worship at all, or they worship the good intent of humanity, and that is what humanism is. So I can understand a certain mistrust of deconstructing Christianity because it means different things to different people and their goals are quite different than our Gnostic deconstruction. Is the goal to remove belief in the higher Power and take everything back to atheism? Is it to take everything back to worshiping the creation rather than the creator? As a Gnostic, my goal is not to lessen people’s faith in God or to lessen people’s acceptance of the Christ. It’s just exactly the opposite.
I would like the people that listen to my podcast and that read my books to have a deeper, broader, wiser relationship with the Father and with Christ. If what I’m teaching leads to what is called a crisis of faith, well that’s okay, because many, many spiritual people have had a crisis of faith, particularly if they are confronted with some reality about the fallibility of the church they attend, perhaps a church split or some scandal within the church that causes them to doubt everything that they have known and believed before.
The first year of this podcast, I interviewed Adrian Smith, who has written a book called A Prison for the Mind, Reflections of a Disappointed Fundamentalist. Adrian had a crisis of faith because he was a member of a very strict church that could even possibly be considered a cult. And so when he fell away from that church, he had his crisis of faith. But he came to Gnosticism, and that’s my highest goal for all of us, because what we need to have is a personal relationship with the Father above, the God Above All Gods, and with the Christ as represented by Jesus.
Here is the beginning of the Gospel according to John, from Hart’s translation.
In the origin there was the Logos, and Logos was present with God, and the Logos was God (John 1:1).
Now, okay, let’s stop there a second. “In the origin” refers to the ethereal plane. “There was the Logos,” and that is a capital L, so it’s a person, it’s a name, and it’s the Logos that we talk about all the time here at Gnostic Insights. “And Logos was present with God,” and this is capital G-O-D, so this is the God Above All Gods. “And the Logos was god,” but that is lowercase g, so the Logos was an elohim, an Aeon. Quoting again,
This one was present with God in the origin. All things came to be through him, and without him came to be not a single thing that has come to be. In him was life, and this life was the light of men (John 1:2-4).
Normally it’s translated as the Son of God, and I would agree that the Son was present with God in the origin, and all things came through the Son, beginning with the Totalities and the Hierarchy of the Aeons of the Fullness of God. They’re the parts, the pleroma, of the Son. But remember, Logos was one of these Aeons who within himself at the fractal level also possessed all of the elements of life in this cosmos.
So Logos is not exactly the same as the Son of God, but he is the Son of the Son. He has the pleroma of the Son of God as a fractal within himself, and it was this Logos who fell out of the Hierarchy of the Aeons and created the material out of which our cosmos was fashioned. When I first read this in the Tripartite Tractate, I found it so shocking that I set the Nag Hammadi down for a few years. This didn’t cause a crisis of faith in my Christianity when I first read this, but it more likely caused a crisis of faith in my gnosis because of this equation of Logos with the Son in the Gospel of John.
So when John says “All things came to be through him,” and that’s a lowercase him, we’re not talking about the Son, and we’re not talking about the Father, we’re talking about that elohim, Logos.
“And without him came to be not a single thing that has come to be,” points to the Fall of Logos that created this cosmos. And so identifying Logos as the one who fell rather than Lucifer or Satan, well, you see, that is a very strange deconstruction of our normal Christian doctrine, but it’s only an inversion because that part was taken out by the Nicene Council. The Roman Pope wanted a clean, straight throughline that wouldn’t confuse the “simpletons” too much, and I put quotes around simpletons because faith is to be simple. So in a sense, being a simpleton is not an insult. We’re to have faith like a child—to be innocent.
Again, quoting from the Gospel according to John, chapter 1, verse 4, “In him was life, and this life was the light of men.”
You see, as I understand the Gnostic Gospel, it’s the Pleroma of Logos along with the Fullness of God that sends down the life. The “life and the light of men” comes from the Father, through the Son, through the Fullness, and then down through Logos. Logos is our first emissary into this cosmos. Logos provides the means by which “the light of men” entered and continues to enter our cosmos. Quoting John again,
And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not conquer it (John 1:5).
So what was the darkness? That was the space of the other dimension resulting from the Fall away from the luminosity of the ethereal plane, representing an encompassing ignorance of the Father. The original cosmos was all dark. It lacked consciousness, it lacked life, and then Logos sent life, light, and consciousness into the primordial cosmos, displacing the ignorance with the gnosis of the Father. And that light is a great Power that displaces the darkness—“darkness did not conquer it.”
All of us Second Order powers bring life and consciousness into this cosmos. All of us, from the bacterium on up, from each of our cells on up, are part of the Pleroma of the redeemed Logos after his return from the Fall to the Fullness. That’s how it is that we’re alive, and we are conscious. We didn’t arise from the mud of the Demiurge who is the shaper of the bits and pieces of the Fall. We didn’t come through the Fall and we are not fallen. We come from the light of God and so the darkness cannot conquer us. We came through Logos. We came through the Fullness. We came through the Son.
So that is why whenever I speak of these things and I give praise to God, I can start with the God Above All Gods, but it always flows down through the Son, the Fullness, and Logos. Or I can start with Logos and flow up through the Aeons of the Fullness and the Son in praise and giving glory to the God Above All Gods. This gnostic glory road may appear to be just another deconstruction of Christianity, but it seems to me a very reverential approach.
I revere God. I give glory to God. I love God, and I love every part of the steps of the Gnostic Gospel, from Logos up through the Aeons of the Fullness, up through the Son, all the way to the God Above All Gods. My praise of the Father doesn’t stop at the walls of the church. It doesn’t stop at the body of Jesus hanging bloody and beaten on the cross. It permeates every cell of my Second Order being. Carrying on with this chapter 1 of John, it says,
There came a man sent by GOD whose name was John. [That’s John the Baptist, not John who wrote the book of John, and GOD written in all capital letters, indicating the God Above All Gods]. “This man came in witness that he might testify about the light so that through him all might have faith—but only that he might testify about the light; he was not that light” (John 1:6-7).
So John came to testify about the Christ and he was saying no I am NOT the Christ.
It was the true light which illuminates everyone that was coming into the cosmos. He was in the cosmos and through him the cosmos came to be and the cosmos did not recognize him. He came to those things that were his own and they who were his own did not accept him (John 1:9-10).
The Third Order Powers constitute the pleroma of the Christ. Third Order Powers have the perfection of the Christ; one for every Second Order Power, and they carry the countenance of every Aeon.
John the Baptist was saying that the Christ brought the true, ethereal light from above to illuminate “everyone that was coming into the cosmos.” Not only the church, not only the elect, not only the special few, but everyone. He says that Christ came to his own but they did not accept him. This is usually interpreted as saying that since Jesus was a Jew, his own were the Jewish people. I would broaden that definition to mean that Christ’s “own” are all of the Second Order Powers that were sent down through Logos to populate the cosmos.
But as many as did accept him, to them he gave the power to become God’s children, to those having faith in his name. Those born not from blood nor from man’s desire but of GOD [again written in all capital letters to indicate the God Above All Gods](John 1:12-13).
This part of the passage indicates that we need to have faith in the name of the Father—the God Above All Gods, not Jesus in particular: “he gave the power to become God’s children to those having faith in his name,” i.e. “GOD.” And the second part of the passage, verse 13, spiritualizes the fact that by “God’s children,” he is not speaking of merely being born through passion and sex, but born into the desire for GOD. And how is one born into the desire for GOD? By identifying with the Christ and inviting the Third Order Powers to take up residence inside your soul.
This passage is one of the foundational passages that encourages Christian evangelism and conversion—the “born again” experience, and it seems an airtight statement for the need to repent and ask the Christ to come in and redeem us in order to be “saved.” The conventional church has taken this to mean that everyone who doesn’t repent before their death will be condemned and tortured for eternity in hell. This is the evangelistic coercion by which many a person has converted to the Christian religion. We spent three full episodes in November of 2024 devoted to this topic. To summarize, all Second Order Powers will indeed remember the Father and repent and will gladly return to their everlasting home above, sooner or later. And later may involve numerous reincarnations or repentance after death during one’s 360 degree life review. I’ll put the links to those episodes in the transcript of this episode: Universal Salvation–an Introduction – Gnostic InsightsUniversal Salvation pt. 2 – Gnostic InsightsUniversal Salvation pt 3 – Gnostic Insights
And the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us and we saw his glory. Glory as of the Father’s only one, full of grace and truth (John 1:14).
So, “the Logos became flesh and pitched a tent among us” speaks of the ephemerality of Christ’s appearance on the world stage. We spoke of what ephemerality means last week. In this case it’s the fact that when Jesus Christ came through this cosmos and pitched his tent in Nazareth and in Jerusalem and all the lands thereabout, it was a temporary stay. He was just passing through this material cosmos, as are all of us. Christ didn’t build a Temple or a Cathedral in GOD’s name, he pitched a temporary tent.
Now to wrap this up, the point of the coming of Jesus Christ was not to die on the cross. The atheistic strain of deconstructionists like to say that Christianity is a religion based upon a cult of child sacrifice and that Jesus was the ultimate child sacrifice—that God was willing to sacrifice his only begotten Son in the most horrendous type of bloody death by crucifixion—and who wants to worship a bloodthirsty God like that? The deconstructionists like to say that Christianity is a modern cult of child sacrifice. But it’s not. That is a complete misunderstanding of the passion of Christ.
The point of the incarnation of Jesus the Christ was not so that he could become a blood sacrifice to take away our sins in the same manner that the Jews were instructed to bring a sacrifice of a dove or the sacrifice of a sheep, ox, or goat to the priests of the Temple when they came to worship and beg forgiveness of sins. Ancient Judaism, like the earlier religions of the area prior to Judaism, did practice blood sacrifice. But, unlike the neighboring tribes, the Jews substituted the doves, sheep, oxen, and goats for child sacrifice. The substitutes would be slaughtered in front of them. Gigantic gallons of blood flowed out of the Temple every day during sacrificial observances. The Temple era of animal sacrifice was a very bloody religion, as were all of the religions in the land of Canaan at the time. And so the Jews brought that element into their religion. There is, of course, a Demiurgic aspect to blood sacrifice, in that the Demiurge hates the life and light we Second Order Powers bring into this world. The Demiurge is the King of Death and we Second Order Powers all fight a lifelong, never-ending battle with death.
But Jesus came as a sharp break, ripping that curtain of the Temple where the sacrifices took place. He went into the marketplace of the Temple where the vendors were selling goats and sheep and doves to be used as sacrificial substitutes. Those were the people whose tables Jesus overturned—the money changers of the people who were selling sacrificial animals. In the New Testament we read,
And Jesus entered the Temple and threw out all those selling and buying in the Temple, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those selling doves, And he says to them, “It has been written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a robbers’ den.’” (Matthew 21:12-13).
Jesus came to take away blood sacrifice, and not in a magical way through his substitutional sacrifice on the cross, which is the event that Christians observe on Good Friday. Jesus hanging on the cross and then he dies, “to take away our sins.” Jesus is then resurrected on Easter Sunday. The sacrificial substitution of Jesus is the heart of Christianity, but it is a carryover from the old days of Temple sacrifice that Jesus clearly and physically overturned. Jesus the Christ came so that we would see his life, hear his teachings, invite him into our hearts, and ask his Pleroma to replace the Pleroma of Logos with the Pleroma of Love.
This is the meaning of the Christ. This is what Jesus came to do, and he loves us so much more than we love ourselves and way more than we love other people in the world. Christ would never send any of us to hell and punishment for eternity, for we are all the children of GOD, capital G O D. He came that we might be saved, not condemned. This is the true message of Easter and it’s all about love and forgiveness.
When Jesus was hoisted onto the cross he said, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.” Then a darkness came over the land and the Temple veil was torn in two. Jesus’s final words were “It is finished,” followed by, “Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit.” Having said this, He breathed his last (Luke 23:45 ; John 19:30).
This is the good news of the Gnostic Gospel. Christ will connect with you on a personal level, for he came with your face and he knows you intimately. He brought with him an army of Third Order Powers to lovingly walk beside you through the Demiurge’s valley of the shadow of death and He will guide you back to your heavenly home.
So, Happy Easter, onward and upward, and God bless us all.
