Reformed Gnosticism

When he wrote in 1987, Phillip J. Lee was reluctant to identify what we might now call "reformational" churches as Gnostic. In 2008, however, our elitism and fascination with secret knowledge betray us as being as thoroughly Gnostic as any other heretical movement in church history.

... In Reformed circles, a pilgrimage narrative such as this one is extremely common: "Once I was an unbeliever, then I got saved through an evangelical ministry, and then I read some books and went to some conferences, and now I am Reformed." To be Reformed, then, is not a matter of church membership, but to have attained to a higher level of knowledge and insight than have the commoners in evangelical and fundamentalist circles. While those people may be saved from their sins, they have not yet ascended to the elite heights that we possessors of greater knowledge have reached.

- Matthew W. Kingsbury, "Setting up the sheep for heresy: how the sufficiency of scripture is undermined by learned preaching", Modern Reformation (Nov/Dec 2008), p. 16, 15 (yes... I've flipped the two cited chunks around)