The idea that your body doesn’t define who you are isn’t new. It’s almost two thousand years old.
In the second century, a network of religious movements collectively known as the Gnostics taught that the material world was a prison, the body was a tomb, and the “real you” was a divine spark trapped inside flesh that had nothing to do with who you truly were. The only way out was gnosis — secret self-knowledge that revealed your authentic identity hidden beneath the meat suit.
The early church called it heresy. They fought it for three centuries. They wrote creeds to kill it.
It’s back. It’s wearing a lab coat and a pride flag. And most Christians don’t recognize it because they’ve never been taught what Gnosticism actually was.
The Ancient Heresy
To understand why modern gender ideology is recycled Gnosticism, you first need to understand what the Gnostics actually believed.
Gnosticism wasn’t one religion. It was a family of movements that spread across the Roman Empire in the second and third centuries — Valentinians, Sethians, Marcionites, Mandaeans, and dozens of others. They disagreed on many details, but they shared a core framework that the church fathers identified as deadly:
The material world is a mistake. The physical universe was not created by the true God. It was the work of a lesser, ignorant being — the Demiurge — who either didn’t know what he was doing or was actively malevolent. The world of flesh and bone and hunger and sex was, at best, a flawed school. At worst, a cage.
The body does not reveal who you are. Your physical existence — your sex, your appetites, your limitations — tells you nothing reliable about your true identity. The real you is a divine spark, a fragment of light from the realm above, trapped inside material flesh by accident or malice. The Sethian Gnostics described this as the difference between the “empirical self” — the bodily self you appear to be — and the “transcendent self” — the spiritual self you truly are.
Salvation is self-knowledge. You are not saved by a sacrifice. You are not redeemed by a Savior who bleeds. You are awakened by knowledge — gnosis — that reveals your true nature. As one ancient Gnostic text put it, the role of the gnostic revealer is “to awaken people who are under the spell of the demiurge — not, as in the case of the Christ of the emerging orthodox church, to die for the salvation of people, to be a sacrifice for sins, or to rise from the dead.”
External authority is oppression. Scripture, tradition, the body itself — these are tools of the Demiurge. The institutions that tell you to accept your physical reality as given are keeping you enslaved. The true God is found within, through introspection, through the discovery of your authentic inner identity.
If this sounds familiar, it should.
The Modern Version
Modern gender ideology did not arrive by reading the Gospel of Thomas. It arrived through Rousseau, Freud, Butler, and a hundred years of academic philosophy. But it arrived at the same destination.
Strip away the academic jargon and the modern framework makes the same claims the Gnostics made:
The body does not define who you are. If your chromosomes say male but your feelings say female, the feelings win. Your biological sex is not a revelation of your identity — it is raw material to be corrected. The body is not a gift to be received but a constraint to be overcome.
The “real you” is internal. Your authentic identity is found through introspection and self-discovery — not through anything as crude as anatomy. The self is psychological, not physical. What you feel is more real than what you are.
Liberation comes through self-knowledge. The moment a person “realizes” they are transgender — the moment of coming out, of self-discovery — is treated as salvation. It is the moment of gnosis: the inner truth breaks through the outer illusion. The language of “living your truth” and “being your authentic self” is the language of gnostic awakening in secular clothes.
External authorities are oppressive. Scripture, biology, tradition, parents, the church — anything that tells you to accept the body you were given is an instrument of oppression. The only acceptable authority is the self. Anyone who appeals to creation order is a Demiurge trying to keep you in your cage. Or, to use the popular phrase “Do what feels good”.
Ryan Anderson, in When Harry Became Sally, named this directly. He identified four contradictions at the heart of gender ideology, and the first one is the most telling: “It embraces the Gnostic idea that the real self is something other than the body, while also insisting that nothing but the physical exists.”
That’s the paradox. Gender ideology is materialist in its metaphysics — it denies the soul, denies God, denies anything beyond the physical. But it is Gnostic in its anthropology — it treats the body as a liar and the feelings as the oracle. It wants the Gnostic conclusion without the Gnostic cosmology. It wants to escape the body while insisting there is nothing beyond it.
The Structural Parallel
Let me lay this out plainly, because the parallels are not superficial. They are structural:
View of the body. The Gnostic said: the body is a prison for the divine spark. The gender ideologue says: the body is raw material that may not match the real you.
Source of identity. The Gnostic said: the divine spark within, discovered through gnosis. The gender ideologue says: the inner sense of gender, discovered through self-exploration.
Relationship to the Creator. The Gnostic said: the Demiurge who made your body is ignorant or evil. The gender ideologue says: the biological sex God designed is irrelevant or a mistake.
Path to liberation. The Gnostic said: awaken through secret knowledge and transcend the material. The gender ideologue says: transition through hormones, surgery, and social affirmation to align the body with the inner self.
View of external authority. The Gnostic said: Scripture and tradition are tools of the Demiurge. The gender ideologue says: Scripture, biology, and tradition are oppressive structures to be dismantled.
Classification of humans. The Gnostic divided humanity into pneumatics (those who “know”), psychics (those who might learn), and hylics (the hopelessly material). Gender ideology divides humanity into those who understand gender identity and those who are “cisgender” and unenlightened — those who have not yet had their gnosis.
The Valentinian Gnostics even had a concept called the “empirical self” — the bodily self you appear to be — and the “transcendent self” — the spiritual self you truly are. The soul’s descent into matter creates a false identity that must be stripped away to reveal the true one. That is precisely the philosophical move modern gender ideology makes: your sex is your empirical self, your gender identity is your transcendent self, and the goal of transition is to bring the outer into alignment with the inner.
This is not a coincidence. It is a recurring pattern in human rebellion against creation.
Why the Early Church Fought It
The church fathers didn’t treat Gnosticism as a minor disagreement. They treated it as an existential threat. Irenaeus wrote five books against it. Tertullian dismantled it piece by piece. The creeds of the church were forged in the fire of this battle.
Why? Because Gnosticism attacks the Incarnation — and the Incarnation is everything.
John 1:14: “The Word became flesh.”
Not “the Word appeared as flesh.” Not “the Word inhabited flesh temporarily.” The Word became flesh — sarx, the most physical, most visceral word available. Meat. Tissue. Blood. Nerve.
John chose that word on purpose. The early Gnostics, who despised the material world as evil, found this verse intolerable. John wrote it precisely to be intolerable to them.
If the eternal God took on a human body — permanently, irrevocably, and gloriously — then the body is not a prison. It is not raw material. It is not a mistake. It is the dwelling place of God Himself.
The Docetists — a subset of the Gnostics — tried to solve this problem by claiming that Jesus only appeared to have a physical body. It was an illusion, they said. The real Christ was pure spirit. First John 4:2-3 condemns this explicitly: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.”
The test of orthodoxy is the Incarnation. Do you believe the body matters? Then you are closer to Christ. Do you believe the body is irrelevant to identity? Then you are closer to the Gnostics — whether you’ve heard of them or not.
The Christian Answer: Redemption Of the Body
Here is where Christianity departs from every other system — ancient and modern.
The Gnostics promised escape from the body. Gender ideology promises transformation of the body by human hands. Christianity promises something neither can offer: the resurrection and glorification of the body by the power of God.
“For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies.” (Romans 8:22-23)
Notice: the redemption of our bodies. Not rescue from our bodies. R.C. Sproul said it plainly: “For Christians, redemption is of the body, not from the body.”
Jesus rose bodily. He rose male. His resurrection body was recognizable, touchable, physical — and glorified. Augustine argued that both sexes will be preserved in the resurrection, because gender “is not a defect” but a feature of our eternal, embodied existence.
The body you have is not a cage. It is not raw material. It is a temple:
“Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.” (1 Corinthians 6:19-20)
The Gnostic says: your body is a prison. Escape it.
The gender ideologue says: your body is a mistake. Fix it.
The Bible says: your body is a temple. Honor it.
What This Means for the Church
If modern gender ideology is structurally Gnostic, then the church already has the theological tools to respond to it — because the church has been fighting Gnosticism since the apostle John.
Preach the Incarnation. The Word became flesh. This is the most anti-Gnostic sentence ever written, and it needs to be preached from every pulpit in every season. If God Himself took on a body, permanently and gloriously, then the body is not a problem to be solved. It is a gift to be received.
Teach a theology of the body. Most Christians have never been taught that the body matters theologically. They default to a vague Platonism — the soul is the “real me,” and the body is just a vehicle. That is closer to Gnosticism than to Christianity. Pastors need to teach what Scripture actually says: you are not a soul trapped in a body. You are an embodied soul — or an ensouled body. You are both, inseparable until death and reunited at resurrection.
Name the heresy. It is pastoral malpractice to let people absorb a philosophical framework that the church identified as heretical in the second century without telling them what it is. Gender ideology is Gnosticism with a new vocabulary. Christians need to know that, because once you see it, you cannot unsee it — and it changes how you respond to every argument the culture makes.
Distinguish between the heresy and the people caught in it. The Gnostics were not monsters. They were people looking for answers to real questions: Why does the world feel wrong? Why does my body feel like it doesn’t fit? Why is there suffering? The modern person experiencing gender dysphoria is asking the same questions. The Gnostic answer — escape the body — is wrong. But the questions are real, and the church must answer them with something better than silence.
The something better is the Gospel: your body was made by a God who doesn’t make mistakes. Your confusion is real — it is a consequence of the Fall, not a sign that God got your body wrong. And there is a day coming when every groan will be answered, every confusion resolved, and every body made whole — not by a surgeon, but by the Resurrection.
The Old Enemy, the Old Answer
Gnosticism keeps coming back because the temptation it offers is primal: you are more than your body. The real you is hidden inside. Discover it, and you will be free.
It was a lie in the second century. It is a lie now.
The truth is harder and more glorious: you are your body and your soul, knitted together by a Creator who calls His work very good. The path to wholeness is not escape from the flesh but redemption of it — not by your own hands, but by the hands that were nailed to a cross and raised on the third day.
The Gnostics couldn’t accept a God who became flesh. The gender ideologues can’t accept a body that defines who you are. But the Word became flesh and dwelt among us. And that changes everything.
“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14)
The nails couldn’t hold Him. The tomb couldn’t keep Him. And the oldest heresy in the world cannot undo what He accomplished when He took on a body and called it home.
This article is a companion to “Tumbler Ridge: Where Is God When Children Die?”, “How Gender Ideology Conquered the West”, “Male and Female He Created Them”, and “What Does the Bible Say About Gender Identity?”
Sources and Recommended Reading:
- Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self (Crossway, 2020)
- Ryan Anderson, When Harry Became Sally (Encounter Books, 2018)
- Einar Thomassen, The Spiritual Seed: The Church of the Valentinians (Brill, 2006)
- John Douglas Turner, Sethian Gnosticism and the Platonic Tradition (Presses Université Laval, 2001)
- John MacArthur, The Truth War (Thomas Nelson, 2007)
- Rosaria Butterfield, Five Lies of Our Anti-Christian Age (Crossway, 2023)
- Irenaeus of Lyon, Against Heresies
- The Nashville Statement — CBMW
