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  • Name: Creation, Power and Truth
  • Author: Tom Wright
  • Type: #literature/book
  • Source: #source/book
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Notes

Chapter 1 - God the creator in a world of neo-Gnosticism

  1. Glimpses of Gnosis in Western Modernity

    • Wright begins by diagnosing a cultural craving for hidden knowledge, using The Da Vinci Code as a prime example.
    • He outlines four key traits of ancient Gnosticism:
      1. Cosmological dualism – matter is bad or illusory.
      2. A corrupt or incompetent creator – not the true god.
      3. Salvation through escape – from this world into a higher realm.
      4. Salvation through gnosis – secret knowledge of the true self.
    • He claims that modernity (and postmodernity) echo these themes: e.g., elitism, the privatization of religion, and a “true self” hidden within.

  2. Contemporary Christian Gnosticism

    • Wright critiques both liberal and conservative Christianity:
      • Liberals often discard the resurrection and judgment, turning Christianity into personal therapy.
      • Conservatives often affirm the resurrection but use it to support escapist theology (e.g. “Left Behind”) that disconnects salvation from the renewal of creation.
      • He accuses both sides of flattening “resurrection” into going to heaven instead of affirming bodily renewal.

  3. Creation and New Creation in Scripture

    • Wright does a deep dive into Scripture to recover a non-Gnostic worldview:
      • John’s Gospel: grounded in creation and incarnation, not escapism.
      • Paul’s Letters: particularly 1 Corinthians 8 and Romans 8, present salvation as new creation, not rescue from it.
      • Colossians, Ephesians, Revelation: affirm creation as good, and salvation as renewal of creation, not its destruction.
    • He positions the resurrection as the hinge between creation and judgment — the definitive rebuttal of Gnosticism.

  4. Against Contemporary Gnosticism

    • Wright gets practical and prophetic here:
      • Right-wing Gnosticism: rejects the world, seeks heaven, supports judgmental fundamentalism.
      • Left-wing Gnosticism: spiritualized, privatized, and morally unanchored.
    • Both fail to engage with justice, ecology, embodiment, politics — because they are trying to escape the world, not renew it.
    • He connects this to:
      • Sexual ethics: Gnostic splits between body and soul distort both purity culture and progressive identity politics.
      • Ecological care: is meaningless if the earth is just a disposable stage.
      • Justice: becomes either punitive (Right) or shallow (Left) without resurrection and judgment.