Tomorrow’s my final exam so blogging helps me in remembering details of the lessons Ive been learning. Here is a lesson we had on “the defense of the gospel”

During the early church stage, attacks of heresy and schism forced the Christians to defend the truth of the gospel. What is heresy and schism?

Heresy is doctrine that violates a central tenet of the faith and renders the adherents outside of the historic faith.

Schism is a breach of union with th organized church over doctrine that is important but not central to salvation.

Here are some of the doctrines that our early church fathers had to defend:

Gnosticism. It is a bizarre blend of Judaism, Christianity, Greek Philosophy and Oriental mysticism.

Gnostics teachers taught that Divine sparks fell from a celestial realm into evil material human bodies. To unblock the divinity within man and free him from the prison of the flesh required secret knowledge, imparted through a series of initiation rites.

There are basically 2 kinds of Gnostics:

One are those who believe that your body doesn’t matter – your spirit is the only thing that matters. Because of this teachings, people tend to compartmentalize life. They have the spiritual life and the earthly life.

A good example would be the religious people who would go to church but then when it comes to doing business it does not matter of it legal or illegal since it doesn’t really matter.

For Christians, some of us still think this way. We ask people, how is your christian life? Does that mean they have a satanic life? ( exaggerating here but I hope you get what I mean)

Other Gnostics tend to go the other extreme. They make up rules like you cannot touch some things, you cannot eat some food and etc.

Modern day examples of Gnostic teachings are found in the novel of Dan Brown’s “Da Vinci Code” and the Gospel of Judas.