Answer me this ...

I have recently finished reading Augustine's "Confessions" and have now begun to enjoy his "City of God."

I have no doubt that he was sincere in his love for God -- who would doubt that? And I picture God, upon Augustine's arrival in heaven, embracing him in His all-loving arms and thus sweeping away in an instant all the Hellenistic philosophical baggage that encumbered this great man in his search for truth.

"Precious Augustine, I do have a face to look upon you, and for you to see, My child. I do have arms to hold you."

"Why, my child, if you understood My Son to be God, as you did, omniscient and all-powerful as I am, with a body of flesh and bone, as He did testify, and that that Son did not die twice, was it so very hard for you to accept that I, His Father, also possess a body, a perfect, omniscient, all-powerful body but a body none-the-less?"

"No matter now. You have always loved Me, and sought to serve me. Well done, thou good and faithful servant. Enter into my rest."

Done with Gnosticism!

I have finished.

I can safely say, that the Nag Hammadi Library was the most difficult canon of literature that I have ever read.

Its often fragmentary nature didn't help.

I found myself saying, over and over again as I tried to comprehend notions of Yaldabaoth and Sophia and Barbelo; of aeons and demiurges and First Thoughts and Second Thoughts -- how could anyone make sense of this stuff? Even the Apostle Paul at his most complex, does not approach these writings in obscurity.

And yet, make sense of it many people apparently did. Gnosticism was enough of a threat to the early Christian Church as to occupy some of its best minds in the battle against it.

Gnosticism approached the problem of evil in the world by deciding that the so-called God of the Old Testament was an inferior, lower being who acted out of ignorance at best, malice at worst. Some strains of Gnosticism continued this line of thought with a blacklist of a number of Biblical personages hailed as heroes by orthodox Christianity, even Jesus Christ; and to call Biblical acts of godly vengeance against evil (the Flood, the burning of Sodom and Gomorrah) attacks of evil against good.

The true Supreme Being remained esconced in an unapproachable, celestial pleroma and was utterly indescribable and beyond comprehension.

My thought on that would be, that this approach doesn't solve the problem of evil, it just pushes the question to another level: So the God we thought we knew is not really deserving of the title and it is to a higher God that we must look for perfection and to whom the question must be posed: Why did You allow evil in the world if You are perfect? But of course, that God, in the Gnostic mindset, wouldn't answer. He is, in their words, a non-being.

It will be interesting to discover, as I continue to read in Christian history, how much of his Gnostic (aka Manichaean) baggage St. Augustine carried with him into the Christian Church of his day.

The seven habits of highly unoriginal critics, number one

It is a well-worn tactic of the critics of the Church to try to use our own Book of Mormon against us, to suggest that its claims about the nature of God are different from what the Church now teaches.

They state that the Book teaches the Trinity, the uncreated status of God and His eternal, unchanging nature, things, they say, that Mormonism came to deny, along with ancient heresies such as Sabelianism, that Christ is the Father.

But this alleged discrepancy never seems to have troubled the Prophet Joseph Smith or the vast majority of Church members, then or now. Was he and are we all just blind and stupid?

The truth is, we DO teach the Trinity. The Father is God. Jesus Christ is God. The Holy Spirit is God. They are one.

We DO teach the uncreated status and eternal nature of God. More detail on that later.

We just differ in certain ways in HOW we believe these things, what they mean, where the line is drawn.

Let's take one example: In a sense, Christ certainly is our Father, as the Book of Mormon teaches. We are reborn spiritually because of His atonement and we take upon us His name. That does not mean that we confuse him with the person of our Heavenly Father, who created our spirits in the first place. The latter is Sabellianism.

Now, was that so difficult to understand?