What is the whore of Babylon? - part 1

One of the seven angels who had the seven bowls came and said to me, "Come, I will show you the punishment of the great prostitute, who sits on many waters. With her the kings of the earth committed adultery and the inhabitants of the earth were intoxicated with the wine of her adulteries."
Then the angel carried me away in the Spirit into a desert. There I saw a woman sitting on a scarlet beast that was covered with blasphemous names and had seven heads and ten horns. The woman was dressed in purple and scarlet, and was glittering with gold, precious stones and pearls. She held a golden cup in her hand, filled with abominable things and the filth of her adulteries. This title was written on her forehead:
MYSTERY
BABYLON THE GREAT
THE MOTHER OF PROSTITUTES
AND OF THE ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH.
I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints, the blood of those who bore testimony to Jesus. -- Revelation 17:1-6

The Biblical story of Babylon is a morality play told in three parts. In each of these parts the name refers to two things: one, it refers to a specific people group. But it also refers to a God-ordained punishment.

As we saw in the blog sections What does Babylon mean the first encounter with the name "Babel" involves a tribe living in the plain of Shinar (Genesis 11) and here the punishment of God confusing the people's speech is what actually gives us the name, since "babel" is taken from the utterance "ba ba" and describes baby talk. When we encounter Babylon for the second time it is now a nation whose boundaries generally occupied modern day Iran and Iraq. This time, the nation itself is a punishment for wayward Israel and we see the Biblical maxim played out where discarding the freedom found in God's direction leads to slavery in "the land of confusion" which is what the name Babylon literally means.

When we encounter it for the last time Babylon is referred to as "whore" or "adulteress". This time it isn't a tribe or a country; this time it's a religion and as we read in chapter 17 it spans the globe and heavily influences the world-dominating empire known as "the beast".

Now, normally in my post this is the point where I tell you that mainstream theology is way off base in its particular interpretation and -- nice guy that I am -- I will now attempt to sort out the mistaken beliefs. This time it's not so simple. You see, a pretty fair number of evangelicals thinkers have correctly identified the whore of Babylon as a belief system known as gnosticism. And that actually makes my job here more difficult. This is because I can normally contrast my interpretation against theirs, and use that contrast to shed light on what I'm trying to say. This time I have to do it without the crutch.

Put simply the problem is this: they understand that the all caps portion of the verse-- MYSTERY
BABYLON THE GREAT
--means that we are talking about a religion like the Babylonian mystery religions -- in other words a form of gnosticism -- but they don't understand gnosticism, and so they think that there is a future religion that is still to come, and that this religion will do its religious stuff the same way that we do ours: it will congregate in 'churches' and sing hymns, and since it has this expectation it misses the fact that this religion is already with us; that it has always been with us, and that only the degree of influence and the base of knowledge has changed in the end times. Oh, and sometimes it even meets in churches and sings those hymns (I'll have to remind myself to tell you the story of Julian Huxley).

What is gnosticism -- it comes from the Greek word gnosis which means knowledge. Now if you consult any dictionary or encyclopedia you will likely be told that gnosticism refers to several "ancient" belief systems with the inference that it no longer exists in the modern day. This could not be more false. Gnosticism is a doppelganger, a shapechanger. It is the belief system that says that the more you know, the holier you become. The trick is figuring out what the base of information is that 'needs to be known'. The simplest way I can put it is to say that gnosticism tries to earn Heaven, and Heavenly things, by the acquisition of knowledge. You take a test, the higher you score, the holier you are.

There's an Albert Brooks movie that perfectly illustrates this. In his film, Defending your Life, Mr. Brooks as the title character, Daniel Miller, finds himself in an afterlife where you are justified and considered great based on the percentage of your brain that you use. That would be a form of gnosticism.

Another example is the early Christian gnostics, who took Christian teaching and then parcelled it out into a works-based study program where one becomes more holy by learning spiritual truths.

Every major religion has a gnostic variant. Gnostics took Judaism and turned it into Kaballah. They took Islam and turned it into Bahai. They took Christianity and turned it into Presbiterian USA... kidding... sort of. For Christianity it's actually a little more complicated. Many New Agers are gnostics, but not all.

Next post: how Christianity differs from gnosticism and why the medieval church actually owned the brothels and promoted prostitution.