In my grad class tonight I commented that I thought General Gordon, the hero of Stachey's "The End of General Gordon" in Eminent Victorians, was a gnostic.

I was greeted with blank faces. Graciously, a girl in the class asked me to "explain gnosticism to me in 30 seconds," which I did the best I could off the cuff: Gnostics hate matter, they don't believe Jesus was incarnate because flesh is bad, and they idealize the immaterial in a fanatical way.

The chapter in the book was written about a British general in the 1890s, and it got me thinking: there were gnostics so recent? What other heresies persist in pseudo- or quasi- form today?

I was talking to my brother on the phone on my way back from class and I told him I see a lot of gnostic ideas in the American church today. There is a lot of denial of the greatness of the "flesh" not in Paul's sense of the word but in a more participatory tone. God has given us so much abundance, so many great foods to try (in moderate), so many good beers to drink (in moderation), so many peaks to climb and so many teas and coffees to brew and taste with amazement and awe. God has given all of this, and we should rejoice in his almighty abundance! Yet so many (obese) pastors tell us to stay away from the joyful things of life and focus on this nebulous heaven, which is really just a Christianization of Plato's realm of ideals---it is not a true view of heaven. [1]

Heresies persist and persist. They won't go away. I think the lies of empire and power are still persisting from Constantine's meddling in religion, and I think others are reaching their tentacles toward us from the sands of time. If we read the Nicene Creed, the Church Fathers and Mothers, and really think about what they were reacting against in both Christian and secular circles we find deja vu all over again. ... more

Responsible Christian theology speaks of God on the basis of the particular acts of God attested in Scripture. The biblical basis for the tri-unity of God is found in the pattern of the revelatory acts of God throughout the biblical narrative.  Indeed the trinitarian idea emerged formally in the early centuries of the church as an explanation for the Christian belief in the one God who had also been revealed in the person of Jesus and who was experienced through the ministry of the Spirit. The basic premise of Trinitarian theology is summarized by Daniel Migliore: