What does Christian agnostic mean?

It describes someone who orients their life around God, and usually around the teaching of Jesus, while declining to claim certain knowledge about what God is or about the metaphysical details. Belief and certainty are two different questions. "Theist" and "atheist" answer what you hold. "Gnostic" and "agnostic" answer how much you claim to know. The two combine independently, so an agnostic theist is a coherent position rather than a contradiction.

Is being a Christian agnostic the same as being a Gnostic?

No, and they are close to opposites. Gnosticism was a family of movements in the second century built on possessing secret saving knowledge. Agnosticism is the refusal to claim knowledge one does not have. The shared root word makes them look related; the stances point in opposite directions.

Where does the word agnostic come from?

The biologist Thomas Henry Huxley coined it around 1869. He built it from the Greek a-gnostos, "not known", partly as a contrast with those around him who were confident about the unseen. Huxley described it as a method rather than a creed: do not claim certainty for conclusions that are not demonstrated.

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What is a Christian agnostic?

It sounds like a contradiction, and it is not. It is a claim about certainty rather than about allegiance, and Christianity has been making it for fourteen hundred years.

TL;DR

Belief and knowledge are two different axes. Theist / atheist answers what you hold. Gnostic / agnostic answers how much you claim to know. They combine freely, so “agnostic theist” is coherent.
The word agnostic is younger than most people think: Thomas Henry Huxley coined it around 1869, and he meant a method, not a religion.
The underlying posture is very old in Christianity. It has a name, apophatic or negative theology, and a line of teachers from Gregory of Nyssa to Aquinas to Nicholas of Cusa's “learned ignorance.”
A British Methodist minister, Leslie Weatherhead, put the exact phrase in a book title in 1965. The position has a paper trail.
It is not Gnosticism, which claimed the opposite. It is not automatically eclectic, either: how much you know and how many traditions you read are separate questions.
The serious objections come from both directions, and both are worth hearing.

Two axes, not one

English lets people ask “do you believe in God?” as though it were one question. It is two, and almost every argument about this gets stuck because the two are being answered at once.

Axis one: what you hold

Theist or atheist. Do you live as though God is there? This is about orientation and commitment.

Axis two: what you claim to know

Gnostic or agnostic, in the plain sense of the words. How much certainty do you assert? This is about epistemology, not about loyalty.

Cross them and you get four honest positions, not two. The agnostic theist says: I have staked my life on this, and I am not going to pretend I can prove it or that I have the mechanism figured out. Nothing in that sentence is incoherent. It is the position of most people who have prayed for a long time and told the truth about it.

Where the word came from

Thomas Henry Huxley, the biologist who defended Darwin so vigorously that he was nicknamed Darwin's bulldog, coined agnostic around 1869. He built it from Greek: a-gnostos, not known. His own account is that he was surrounded by people who were all confident they had the answer to the unseeable, and he wanted a word for having no such confidence.

Crucially, Huxley described it as a method rather than a creed. Follow reason as far as it goes, and do not claim certainty for conclusions that are not demonstrated. Read that way, agnosticism is not a weak atheism. It is a rule about honesty that a believer can adopt without changing what they believe.

The part that is fourteen centuries older

Long before there was a word, Christianity had a whole school for this. It is called apophatic theology, from the Greek for “unsaying,” and it proceeds by denial: whatever you say God is, God is also not that, because the category is too small.

Gregory of Nyssa (fourth century) argued that God is infinite, and therefore that the soul never arrives but goes on into God without end. Not a temporary ignorance. A permanent condition of the creature.
Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (around 500 CE), whose Mystical Theology ends by denying even the denials, and who shaped the entire medieval mystical tradition.
Thomas Aquinas, opening his treatment of God in the Summa, states plainly that we cannot know what God is, only what God is not. This is the most systematic theologian the Western church produced, saying it at the top of the section.
The Cloud of Unknowing, anonymous, late fourteenth century England, which instructs the reader to put everything they know of God under a cloud of forgetting and to approach by love instead.
Nicholas of Cusa, De Docta Ignorantia (1440): learned ignorance. The educated end of the road is knowing precisely what you do not know.
Meister Eckhart, who prayed to be rid of God, meaning the God-shaped idea he had built and mistaken for the thing itself.

And under all of it, Paul, writing to Corinth, who could have claimed more and did not:

“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” 1 Corinthians 13:12, KJV

That is in the love chapter, the one read at weddings. The most quoted passage in the New Testament has an admission of partial knowledge sitting in the middle of it.

The phrase itself

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) published The Christian Agnostic in 1965. He was trained for the Wesleyan Methodist ministry and kept his standing as a Methodist minister, but spent 1936 to 1960 in the pulpit of the City Temple in London, a Congregational church, which is its own small illustration of the point. His argument was that a great many people had been driven out of the church not by the person of Jesus but by required assent to propositions they could not honestly affirm, and that the requirement was the innovation, not their doubt.

You do not have to agree with Weatherhead to find it useful that the position has a paper trail. It is not something invented last year on the internet to avoid choosing.

What it is not

Not Gnosticism. This confuses people constantly because of the shared root. The Gnostics of the second century were defined by claiming secret saving knowledge. Agnosticism is the refusal to claim knowledge you do not have. They are close to opposites.
Not automatically eclectic. Reading across traditions and declining certainty are two separate choices. Plenty of Christian agnostics read only within Christianity. Plenty of very certain believers read everything. Do not let anyone collapse the two.
Not indifference. The word for not caring about the question is apatheism, and it is a genuinely different stance. Agnosticism in this sense is usually the opposite of not caring: it is caring enough to refuse a comfortable answer.
Not a stage. It is often described, from the pulpit, as a waiting room on the way back to certainty. Some people do pass through. Others stay for fifty years and pray every morning.

The objections, both of them

Any page that tells you a position has no serious critics is selling you the position. This one has critics on both sides, and each has a real point.

From orthodox believers

The historic creeds begin credo, I believe, and they enumerate specifics. Hebrews 11:1 defines faith as assurance. James warns about the double-minded. On this view, a faith that affirms nothing particular has quietly stopped being the thing it is named after, and the label keeps the aesthetics while dropping the claims.

The sharpest form of the objection: the resurrection is a claim about an event, and Paul himself says that if it did not happen the whole structure collapses. You cannot hold that agnostically without changing what it is.

From atheists and skeptics

If you genuinely do not know, why is the God you are agnostic about always the one from your own childhood and culture? The suspicion is that this is attachment wearing the costume of humility, and that a truly open position would not keep landing on the local religion.

The second form: unfalsifiability. A belief refined until nothing could count against it has bought its safety by giving up its content.

The useful answer to both is not a rebuttal, it is a question you can only answer for yourself: is the uncertainty doing work, or is it doing cover? Uncertainty that changes how you treat people, how you hold your opinions, how you listen to someone from another tradition, is doing work. Uncertainty that conveniently removes every demand is doing cover. The word does not tell you which one you have. Only the years do.

Why the term is useful anyway

Labels are usually worth less than people think. This one earns its keep for a narrow reason: it gives someone a way to say I have not left and I cannot say that line in the same breath, without the conversation collapsing into a fight about whether they are still in.

For a lot of people that is the whole problem. Not the doubt. The fact that there is nowhere to say the doubt out loud.

This page is part of the Deeper Waters Library: cross-tradition explainers for seekers who want primary sources rather than slogans. Related: is the kingdom of God within you? and can you follow Jesus without a church? Have a follow-up? Ask the desk, or bring it to the Commons, where people are sitting with the same thing.