Without meaning to get too personal, how do you feel about your body?

I ask this question because many of us go to extremes where the body is concerned.

On the one extreme, there are those who effectively worship it.

We celebrate physical beauty as if it were a moral virtue, and the gym becomes our church.

On the other extreme, there are those who think of the body as

an obstacle to true spirituality. That view of the body is what we might call Gnostic. Nosticism was a

prominent movement that grew up around the church in the second century, although it was partly of pre-Christian

origin. It was a cocktail of Persian, Egyptian, Jewish and Christian ideas with some Greek

philosophy thrown in. The word Nosis itself is Greek and means knowing or having knowledge.

Having knowledge is a significant part of Gnosticism.

To say you were a Gnostic was to say, I know something you don't. I'm in on the secret.

I've been enlightened. I've woken up. I'm spiritually on a higher level. You get a hint of that

in the way Simon Majus is described in the

book of Acts. He's been called the first Gnostic, and according to Acts chapter 8, he amazed the people

of Samaria, saying that he himself was somebody great. As well as thinking you're kind of a big deal

spiritually, Gnostics also have a thing about

the body. Gnostics say that spirit is good and matter, including the physical body, is evil.

Gnostics believe that we need to be delivered from the physical world in order to go to the

spiritual world. So many of them

believe that in Jesus, God was taking the form of man in order to give people the

gnosis, the knowledge they needed in order to be rescued from this physical world.

Of course, Gnostics can't believe that the Son of God actually took on human flesh forever

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