Critics of Christianity will sometimes point out what it has in common with other religions or argue that a later religion took its ideas in a better direction. This may be especially true of religions like Manichaeism, a worldview that has many things in common with Christianity and even mentions Jesus but offers a very different view of Jesus and salvation.
What should believers today know about Manichaeism?
What Is Manichaeism?
Manichaeism is an ancient worldview started in the third century CE (or AD, in the older dating format). It was founded by a Babylonian teacher called Mani, who spread his ideas throughout ancient Persia before dying sometime around 274 CE. Manichaeism was very popular for about three centuries, then disappeared mostly in Western countries and appeared sporadically in the Eastern hemisphere (especially China).
According to Britannica, historians in the past described Manichaeism as a Christian heresy, one of the various groups that take Christian imagery or concepts and may even claim to be Christian, but which lead to different conclusions. However, newer scholarship sees Manichaeism as its own religion, because it developed its own detailed rituals and vision of how the world worked.
Mani’s key teachings were:
- The spiritual world is in a constant battle between good and evil forces
- Good (or light) is associated with the spirit, while evil (or darkness) is associated with matter
- People suffer because they live in an age in which spirit and matter have been combined
- People achieve salvation by recovering the ancient knowledge that their souls come from God and that one day spirit will be freed from matter
- The ancient knowledge was preached by various teachers (Jesus, the Buddha, Zoroaster) within various religions
- Only Mani provides the fully revealed knowledge, the universal heart of all religions
What Does Manichaeism Have in Common with Christianity?
One of the reasons why Manichaeism has been so popular in the past is that it offers an attractive vision that seems similar to Christianity.
Like Christianity, it affirms that there is a spiritual world and that spiritual world includes evil forces. It also has a high view of Jesus, seeing him as an important teacher. It also agrees that this problem of evil involves a sinful nature that humans carry within themselves.
It correctly notes that there is something wrong with the world as we see it, something involving created matter. Our bodies are affected by disease and short lives. Nature is affected by disasters. Even religious people struggle throughout their lives against temptations that seem to be connected to their bodies, or “the flesh” as the Bible puts it.
Manichaeism also sees valuable things in various religions, a concept that Christians can somewhat agree with. Various theologians have argued for the idea that “all truth is God’s truth,” which means that anything fitting Christianity in another religion can be affirmed as good.
These parallels make it easy to see why Manichaeism seemed so attractive to ancient people, and even competed with Christianity for a while.
However, there are fundamental differences between what Manichaeism and Christianity teach.
What Separates Manichaeism from Christianity?
First, while Manichaeism agrees that humans carry sin within them, it has a very different idea about where the sin came from. According to the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Mani’s teachings include the claim that humans are naturally sinful: they didn’t become sinful after falling from grace in the Garden of Eden. They were sinful from the start, created by the dark forces of matter.
Second, Manichaeism recognizes there is good and evil but frames good and evil in a particularly problematic way. Evil is understood to be matter, while good is assumed to be spirit. This view sounds similar to Christianity, and there are offshoots of Christianity like Gnosticism that claim all flesh is evil. However, Christianity offers a more nuanced view of matter. The New Testament sometimes uses the phrase “the flesh” to mean sin (for example, Romans 8:8), but this does not mean that all fleshly things are evil. The fact that Paul talks in Romans about avoiding the “ways of the flesh” but also offers solutions that include using material things (like advising Timothy in 1 Timothy 5:23 to drink some wine if he is feeling ill) affirms that he does not see all material things as bad.
In fact, the Bible starts with the idea that God likes matter because he made it himself. God created matter and said it was good (Genesis 1-2). The matter he created became broken by the fall, and today creation itself groans (Romans 8:19). Jesus appearing as a human being affirmed that God wanted to fix the problem with matter instead of scrapping matter entirely. God in human flesh, spirit working with matter, reconciling the world back to himself.
Third, Manichaeism sees all religions as subservient to its own vision, which is not the same as saying “all truth is God’s truth.” Christianity allows people to believe there are elements of true ideas in all religions. Some have argued this even makes it easier to believe in Christianity: C.S. Lewis suggested that various mythic stories about dying gods who rise again appear in so many pagan religions because humans are hardwired to crave a resurrected God, preparing them for when Jesus came. However, Christianity maintains that only Christ offers the full truth, the truth that can offer salvation. There is a world of difference between saying that Jesus was a good teacher and saying that Jesus was (and is) the savior. Manichaeism reduces Jesus’ role to make Manichaeism the only true religion.
Why Should Christians Care about Manichaeism Today?
Some Christians may grant that Manichaeism is a deceptive religion, but wonder why it is worth learning about it if it isn’t around anymore. It may pop up occasionally in small cults, but all the historians seem to agree that Manichaeism dwindled in Western countries by the medieval period, and slowly disappeared from Eastern countries by the Enlightenment period. So, why bother learning about it?
First, the fact that Manichaeism seems similar to Christianity means that various people like to use it as an argument against Christianity. It would not be unusual in some circles to meet people who argue that Manichaeism offers a better version of the ideas that Christianity started, or that they are essentially the same religion under different labels. Knowing the real history (whether Christianity or Manichaeism came first, what makes them different) makes it easier to respond to these critiques.
Second, just because a religion stops being practiced does not mean its ideas go away. One of the things that make false religions so slippery is that their ideas tend to appear over and over again in human history under different guises. Various New Age religions and philosophies today offer the same ideas as Manichaeism, using new terms. Knowing what is wrong with Manichaeism makes it easier to spot attractive new false religions. It also gives us some assurance, by helping us see that there really isn’t anything new under the sun (Ecclesiastes 1:9).
Third, there are times when Christians come a little too close to talking about faith in Manichean ways without meaning to. For example, it is very easy for Christians writing books about angels or demon warfare to talk about “the forces of darkness and light” in language that sounds more like Manichaeism (spirit good, human bodies bad) than Christianity. Mark Noll argues in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind that this was a fundamental problem with Frank Peretti’s bestselling novel This Present Darkness. Peretti’s story imagines angels and demons fighting in the spiritual sphere while trying to influence human beings in a small town, which is meant to capture what spiritual warfare looks like. However, the way Peretti frames the story sometimes gives the impression that the real world is the place where angels and demons interact with each other, while the human characters are just puppets. Christians who don’t think carefully about how they see the spiritual world can offer messy teaching by accident.
Manichaeism may be a dead religion, but its influence and ideas are alive and well today. By considering what it says and how it differs from the truth, Christians can offer a better defense of their faith (1 Peter 3:15-17) and better understand just what makes Christianity such a hopeful religion. In Christ, we know that we are sinners but were not originally sinful, that we struggle with the flesh, but God is going to redeem our flesh in the final resurrection.
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