special sauces don’t make you christian

gnostics, big macs, and brains on sticks

A Big Mac contains two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun. Most of these ingredients are par for the course when it comes to your typical hamburger. The primary difference, the main differentiator in that list (apart from the clever marketing), is the second item: special sauce.

Imagine a Big Mac with no special sauce. Sure, there’s meat and cheese and lettuce and a delicious bun. But without the special sauce, it’s dry. Bland. Kind of gross. In fact, the case could be made that special sauce makes the Big Mac. No sauce, no special. Just a plain old sub-par sandwich.

One of the greatest rivals to the Christian faith from its earliest days was a teaching called Gnosticism. It’s hard to speak of “Gnostics” as if they were one organized group with a shared system of beliefs. But what they tended to share in common was a belief that Christianity was a dry, dull burger—and that they had the special sauce.

Gnostics believed there was a “secret knowledge” that a person needed in order to be really saved. No secret knowledge, no spiritual insight; no spiritual insight, nothing special about Christianity. Just a plain old, sub-par religion. If salvation were like a Big Mac, the Gnostics thought they had the special sauce that made it.

Gnostics also had a very 80s metal vibe. So there’s that.

The trick is that, in Christianity, salvation isn’t like a Big Mac and “secret knowledge” is not its special sauce.  Salvation isn’t a particular bit of knowledge, enlightenment or special insight that the rest of the world lacks. Salvation is liberation from death and union with God in Christ. It is a fully-embodied, whole life vision of ever-increasing intimacy with God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit as we are drawn ever more deeply into communion with the God who is love.

In other words, salvation is not about what you know. It’s about having life in Christ, and having it abundantly (John 10:10).

That’s why Gnosticism’s Big Mac version of the faith was so dangerous in the early days of the Church. It used the same language (salvation, Christ, forgiveness, redemption) but applied it to something completely different—not all of life, but mere knowledge; not the whole self, but only the mind.

it’s (probably) all in the mind

In his book, You Are What You Love, Jamie Smith identifies this tendency to locate our Christian faith exclusively in the mind in unfortunately Gnostic fashion. He writes,

we have been taught to assume that human beings are fundamentally thinking things.… [W]e view our bodies as (at best!) extraneous, temporary vehicles for trucking around our souls or “minds,” which are where all the real action takes place. [This approach] reduces human beings to brains-on-a-stick. Ironically, such thinking-thingism assumes that the “heart” of the person is the mind. “I think, therefore I am,” Descartes said, and most of our approaches to discipleship end up parroting his idea.

In my upbringing in the Church, in much of my theological training, and in the last fourteen years of pastoral ministry, I have seen a lot of “thinking-thingism”. If I can just get the right doctrine, the right theology, and become part of a group of people who think the same way I do about all these things, then everything else in my life will fall into place. It becomes the job of ministers to transfer the right information into their congregations to build a community of like-minded individuals, all thinking in the same direction. 

But, according to Smith, it doesn’t work. Because belief doesn’t automatically produce behavior. In fact, broken people that we are, we quite regularly live contrary to our most deeply held convictions.

This is because, as Dr. Ashley Null explains, “what the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies.… The mind is actually captive to what the will wants, and the will itself, in turn, is captive to what the heart wants.” In other words, in the automobile of the human psyche, the mind is in the backseat trying to give directions, while the heart and will are conspiring in the front seat to drive wherever they darn well please.

the mind is in the backseat of the human psyche

Many people I’ve pastored have been discipled into this (rather Gnostic) way of being Christian. We are saved by what we know, by finding the right secret sauce and spreading it on our spirituality. What we do, how we live, the kind of people we are becoming is all secondary to knowing the right bit of information. In this (Gnostic) framework, knowing is life. But within a truly biblical framework, it is love that gives life.

I’m writing this newsletter to encourage the opposite. A sacramental orientation to life in this world comes with the conviction that everything in creation is meant to draw us deeper into fellowship with God. Salvation isn’t a secret to be discovered but communion with the Burning Community of Love at the center of all existence—the Holy Trinity.

Christianity isn’t a set of information to be learned or argued over. It’s a deepening participation in the life of God through faith in Jesus Christ. That’s what the Sacramental Substack is all about. Thanks for coming along on the ride with me!

What do you think? Do you agree that thinking-thingism is a big problem in your experience? What should be our response to it?