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152 | How Gnosticism Contradicts Christian Teaching
7.4k Plays15 days ago
Join us as we explore the intriguing doctrine of Gnosticism, one of the early church's most significant heresies, and its impact on Christianity today.
Discover how Gnostics viewed matter as evil and sought salvation through mystical knowledge, challenging traditional beliefs about the body and spirit.
We'll also reflect on contemporary parallels that may exist within modern church practices and culture.
Mentioned in this episode: ♟️ Church History Matching Game: https://phyliciamasonheimer.com/product/hero-card-matching-game/
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:00
Speaker
This is what the early church fathers were fighting so hard against and why they started to say, hey, wait a minute. No, that's not what we believe. No, that's not who Jesus is. No, that's not the truth.
00:00:10
Speaker
we heard We're not talking about that here. Let's look back at what the gospels say. Let's look back at these epistles. Let's look back at the Old Testament as evidence.
00:00:23
Speaker
Hi, friends. A little note before this episode. I am sick and so are all of my kids. And so in this episode, I'm going to sound a little bit stuffy, maybe a little bit rough here and there.
00:00:34
Speaker
I can tell you I look a little rough, too. So thanks for your patience with the sound and with my voice on this episode. And hopefully you can still receive some great takeaways. Hi friends and welcome back to Verity Podcast. I'm Felicia Massenheimer, your host and the founder of Every Woman a Theologian, the ministry and organization that supports Verity Podcast.
00:00:54
Speaker
We have just started a new series on false teachings in the church, historical false teachings that are re-emerging and false teachings that are in operation today.
Gnostic Beliefs vs. Orthodox Christianity
00:01:04
Speaker
And today we're going to be talking about Gnosticism.
00:01:07
Speaker
Now you may have heard of Gnosticism if you've ever done any study of early church history. It's a fascinating study because it was the predominant false teaching at the time that the early church was coming together and expanding into Gentile or non-Jewish areas.
00:01:24
Speaker
And so as Christianity was expanding, there was this equal and opposite reaction or ideological shift and growth in the Gnostic direction.
00:01:38
Speaker
Now, we could talk in depth about all of the things that were debated and studied and talked about by the early church fathers, and I hope to get into that more in our next episode on Gnosticism.
00:01:51
Speaker
But just in this episode, I'm going to introduce to you what it is and was, what the main beliefs are, and allow you to think about, is there a modern Gnosticism that you have observed in church context or in our culture that lines up with some of the teachings that were being circulated in the early church.
00:02:12
Speaker
We're going to be looking at some amazing resources today, which I will put in the show notes. These are books that I refer back to time and time again that I keep in my library on church history, on theology, on the Trinity, and a compilation of documents from the early church.
00:02:29
Speaker
So all of these resources are what I'm using as I share this information with you and as we learn about what Gnosticism was and what this theology did to the early church.
00:02:42
Speaker
To start out, I'm going to be reading from The Story of Christianity, Part 1 by Justo Gonzalez. This is my favorite church history book. And if you are in Verity Book Club, my annual book club that studies fiction and theology, we have a church history track and we are reading this book right now. We actually studied Gnosticism as a group just this past month.
00:03:02
Speaker
And so we're going to be looking at a short section that Gonzalez has listed here. um to describe kind of what Gnosticism was teaching in that era of the early church.
00:03:15
Speaker
Quote, the name gnosticism is derived from the greek word nosis which means knowledge according to the gnostics they possessed a special mystical knowledge reserved for those with true understanding that knowledge was the secret key to salvation Although the writings of the heresiologists, so this would be the early church fathers who were fighting heresy, give the impression that Gnosticism was mostly a collection of idle speculations about the origins of all things, both spiritual and material, salvation and not speculation was the main concern of the Gnostics.
00:03:48
Speaker
Drawing from several sources, the Gnostics came to the conclusion that all matter is evil or at best unreal. A human being is in reality an eternal spirit or part of the eternal spirit that somehow has been imprisoned in a body.
00:04:01
Speaker
Since the body is a prison to the spirit and since it misleads us as our true nature, is it it is evil. Therefore, the Gnostics final goal is to escape from the body in this material world in which we are exiled.
Christian Theology on Body and Spirit
00:04:12
Speaker
This image of exile is crucial for Gnosticism. The world is not our true home, but rather an obstacle to the salvation of the spirit, a view which, although officially rejected by Orthodox Christianity, has frequently been a part of it." end quote So what Gonzalez is describing here,
00:04:31
Speaker
is a thought process that was seeking to wrestle with the evil of the world, seeking to reconcile how we could be living in bodies in this world, needing salvation in a world that is so absolutely corrupt and contains so much suffering.
00:04:51
Speaker
Like most false teachings or really any religious um framework, you're looking at the problems of the world, problems of pain, problems of suffering, and trying to come to an understanding of how to reckon with that.
00:05:05
Speaker
And the Gnostics are doing the same thing. Now, the Gnostics, though, look at the world and they come away with the idea that matter, so anything visible, physical, material is evil.
00:05:17
Speaker
And the only true good thing is spiritual. So we need to be freed from that material existence and we need to reach this higher dimension or this um access to a reality that is truly spiritual, a higher level of of spiritual attunement, if you will.
00:05:43
Speaker
Now, the problem with this, when you line it up with the Judeo-Christian teachings, is that the physical body in the Bible, in the Christian Bible, Old Testament and New, is extremely important and valuable.
00:05:58
Speaker
And the conservative interpretation of Jewish law, according to the Pharisees, who, ironically, Jesus actually agreed with more theologically, even though he disagreed with them on their attitudes and their hearts,
00:06:13
Speaker
The conservative approach is that the body is deeply valued by God. In fact, the body is consecrated and seen as holy by God when it can be cleansed, when it is walking in holiness.
00:06:28
Speaker
This is why when we go all the way back from from the New Testament where Jesus talks about the resurrection of the body and he affirms the resurrection of the body, we go back to the Old Testament in Leviticus, all of the laws for the people of Israel are include their bodies.
00:06:44
Speaker
If God hated human bodies so much, why would he create a way for Israel to purify their bodies and to live in his presence? It's not because he thinks bodies are bad, but because he thinks bodies are good, that he believes they can be consecrated, that they can be cleansed, and he believes they can and should be resurrected after death.
00:07:06
Speaker
We will be in physical bodies when we are with Christ in heaven. And Christ himself is in a physical resurrected body. This difference between Christianity and Gnosticism is one of the most significant and important, and we have to get it out of the way immediately, because the Gnostics could not and would not believe that material bodies could be good.
00:07:31
Speaker
And we're going to look a little more at that in a moment. Now, one of the accusations that comes to Christianity from scholars from modern Gnostics is that Christianity was actually heavily influenced by Gnosticism and that Gnosticism predated Christianity. So it came before and Christianity was simply an updated um mode or model of Gnosticism with Jesus Christ being the Savior who saves us out of our evil material bodies.
Gnostic Influence on Christianity?
00:08:02
Speaker
Because remember, Gnosticism was its own thing, but then the threat to the church was that people were combining in the early church period, those first few centuries, they were combining Christianity and Gnosticism and saying that Jesus was going to give them access to this gnosis, to this higher knowledge, this higher access to God that would allow them to be freed from from whatever was limiting them.
00:08:27
Speaker
Now I'm going to be reading to you from a Theology of the New Testament by George Eldon Ladd. This is another favorite of mine, um a fantastic systematic that goes through the New Testament and the different theological issues we encounter. This is in his chapter on the book of John.
00:08:46
Speaker
So the book of John, the fourth gospel, is extremely unique. It's unlike the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. It's written completely differently, has a very different approach. And if you read the prologue, John 1, in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God, even the way that John begins this book is is extremely unique.
00:09:07
Speaker
And he even states that his intention is really to to bring the gospel, the story of Jesus, to people who are doubting him, basically, to to make a case for the deity of Jesus.
00:09:22
Speaker
And in this chapter on the fourth gospel, Ladd actually notes that this was the gospel of the Hellenists. It was written by a Greek thinker for the Greeks, and And, quote, it marks a decisive point in the Hellenization of the Christian faith.
00:09:40
Speaker
So what that means is Matthew, Mark, and Luke really had a Jewish context. And while, of course, they're applicable to non-Jewish readers, they really had power towards Jewish believers because they were convincing them based on Look, this is the Jewish Messiah, but John's different.
00:09:58
Speaker
John is a Greek thinker to the Greeks. He's writing to the Gentiles, the non-Jews. And so he uses language and verbiage that is more persuasive in that context in the book of John.
00:10:10
Speaker
But that said, it does make some people wonder, is it possible that this book of John is just copying or riffing off of these Gnostic Gospels? And we're going to talk about the Gnostic Gospels that were discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1947, because that's where some people pull this from.
00:10:30
Speaker
But I wanted to first um read this to you. This is a quote from the section on the fourth gospel chapter, The Critical Problem in LADS systematic.
00:10:43
Speaker
Quote, a vigorous debate has been carried on by scholars as to whether this Gnostic theology antedated Christianity and influenced the theology of the preexistent incarnate and ascending Christ.
00:10:55
Speaker
It must be emphasized that while this Gnostic theology can be found in 2nd century AD Gnosticism as a Christian aberration, the theory that it was a pre-Christian syncretistic movement that helped mold Christian, especially John's, Christology is a critical reconstruction based upon post-Christian texts.
00:11:16
Speaker
While tendencies toward Gnostic thinking can be found in Judaism and Hellenism, the figure of a heavenly redeemer cannot be found in any pre-Christian documents. End quote. What Ladd is saying here is that there is no evidence that Gnostic thought influenced Christianity or came up with this idea of a heavenly redeemer.
00:11:38
Speaker
This is a very... Very unique idea, specific, of course, to the idea of the Jewish Messiah. But then through Judaism to the other side, becoming Christianity, Gnostic thought adapted itself to the Christian construct, but it did not shape Christianity.
00:12:00
Speaker
It did not form Christianity. There is no evidence for this. Now, once Christianity was at large in the world, and we're looking, you know, 120 AD, 150 AD, and Gnosticism is now intertwining with it, this is where you start to see the apologists, the early apologists of the church.
00:12:20
Speaker
who are thinking Clement and Irenaeus and Ignatius later on, who are debating this issue. We're starting to see that that intertwining. Now, where did we find this Gnostic writing? Like, where did we find the the information? Well, most of the information that we have, direct sources, is from a discovery of a Gnostic library in 1947 in Egypt.
00:12:43
Speaker
And there were 13 manuscripts containing 49 different documents. So this was a massive discovery because these are primary sources on this Egyptian Gnosticism.
00:12:55
Speaker
But I want to read you this quote because this is really important. This is from Nock, who was an authority, the greatest authority in Hellenistic religion. Here's what this says.
00:13:08
Speaker
he expressed the conviction that the new texts from Nag Hammadi vindicate completely the traditional view of Gnosticism as Christian heresy with roots in speculative thought.
00:13:22
Speaker
He also reminds us that the Hermetica, which is a Gnostic document, has no personal redeemer figure. End quote. This is important. Why is it so important? It's important because the leading scholar on Hellenistic religion is saying that there is no evidence that Gnosticism shaped Christianity or that Gnosticism birthed Christianity. There is no Christ figure in Gnosticism.
00:13:50
Speaker
eventually there is Christianity that has been melded with Gnostic thought. And this is what the early church fathers were fighting so hard against and why they started to say, hey, wait a minute.
00:14:01
Speaker
No, that's not what we believe. No, that's not who Jesus is. No, that's not the truth. we heard We're not talking about that here. that Let's define our parameters because of the falsehoods that were being circulated in the early church, the early church fathers, the leaders, the bishops, the teachers started to write and say, no wait, that's not what Jesus said. Let's look back at what the gospels say.
00:14:28
Speaker
Let's look back at these epistles. Let's look go back at the Old Testament as evidence. Now, I want to read a direct ah direct um source here. Let's go back to the early church for a moment. This is written by the early church father Irenaeus.
00:14:43
Speaker
And if you have bought from our shop our little church history matching game, then you might have seen his face. He is listed in the early church set of our little matching game. We have the early church, the medieval church, and the Reformation era in this little
Gnostic Creation Story and Beliefs
00:14:59
Speaker
game. And we have different church fathers and mothers who are in it.
00:15:02
Speaker
He's in there. And in this section, this is a little bit of a wordy section. It's a direct um directly taken from the work of Irenaeus, where he's talking about this man named Basilides.
00:15:14
Speaker
And Basilides was a Gnostic teacher. And then his work was then reproduced by Valentinus, who lived around 140 AD. He was one of the most influential Gnostic teachers, and some of his writings were found at in the Egyptian discovery in 1947 of the Gnostic documents.
00:15:33
Speaker
So basically what Irenaeus is talking about here, he's describing Gnostic thought in this section and he's refuting it. But what he's refuting is by someone whose work was built on by Valentinus. So all of this is kind of just giving you some historical context to what was going on in the first and second centuries AD.
00:15:57
Speaker
So here's what our early church father says about ba facilities. He says this, quote, "'Bacilities, that he may seem to have found out something higher and more plausible, vastly extends the range of his teaching, declaring that the mind was first born of the unborn father, then reason from mind, and from reason prudence, and from prudence wisdom and power, and from wisdom and power the virtues, princes and angels, whom he also calls the first.'" By them, the first heaven was made, and afterwards others were made, derived from these.
00:16:32
Speaker
And they made another heaven, like to the former, and in like manners others, in all 365 heavens. a lot of heavens. He goes on to say later on that the unborn and unnamed father sent his first begotten mind. So the first creation that he made. Does this remind you of Arianism from our past episode?
00:16:58
Speaker
This they call Christ for the freeing of them that believe in him from those who made the world. So to free the people of the world from those who made the world. Because remember, world, matter is evil.
00:17:14
Speaker
So God, the original God, the first mind, has to free us from this other entity that is material and evil. And he's sending Christ to do it.
00:17:27
Speaker
He appeared to the nations of them as a man on earth. Note that it said he appeared, not that he was a man, but that he appeared as a man, and performed deeds of virtue.
00:17:37
Speaker
Wherefore, he suffered not, but a certain Simon, a Cyrene, was impressed to bear his cross for him. And Simon was crucified in ignorance and error, having been transfigured by Jesus, that men should suppose him to be Christ, while Christ himself took on the appearance of Simon and stood by and mocked them.
00:17:56
Speaker
If any therefore acknowledge the crucified, he is still a slave and subject to the power of them that made our bodies. But he that denies the one that made their bodies is freed from them and recognizes the ordering of the unborn father.
00:18:10
Speaker
End quote. Again, this is from the early church. This is probably right around 130, 140 AD written by Irenaeus. What's he saying here? Okay, he's describing the ideology before he refutes it.
00:18:23
Speaker
So what he described here is that there's this original unborn mind, so eternally existing. And he then creates the first mind, which is Christ.
00:18:34
Speaker
But remember, it's all mind, reason, wisdom. okay And this entity is all spiritual. But then there's this other evil entity that creates the material world. Here's what he says about that.
00:18:51
Speaker
So those angels who hold sway over the later heaven, which is seen by us, ordered all things that are in the world and divided among them the earth and the nations upon the earth. So like demonic angels that divided the material world.
00:19:04
Speaker
Their chief is he who is held to be the God of the Jews. Do you know what this is saying? The chief of the demonic angels is Yahweh. The chief of the demonic angels is the God of the Old Testament.
00:19:20
Speaker
And that's who we need to be set free from.
Modern Gnostic Influences
00:19:22
Speaker
He wished to subdue the other nations beneath his own people, the Jews, and therefore all the other princes resisted him and took measures against him. Then the unborn and unnamed father, so the true God, sent his first begotten mind, Christ, to free all those who believe in the true God from the God of the Jews.
00:19:41
Speaker
know where you've seen this before? You saw this on Instagram. Many of you reached out to me asking about this exact ideology on Instagram from a very well-known wellness influencer who's talking about this exact ideology, how Yahweh was actually Satan, actually the evil one, and how we needed to be truly freed from the God of the Jews, the God of the Old Testament, by encountering the true Christ.
00:20:10
Speaker
And this was written, what I just read you, in 130 AD. There is nothing new under the sun, my friends. There is no new ideology. It's just repackaged and made more marketable now via social media.
00:20:25
Speaker
And what Irenaeus is describing here is this idea that is creating a division of the Trinity. First of all, there is no Trinity in this concept because Christ is created by God. He's not equal with God. He's not God. He's the begotten of God.
00:20:46
Speaker
Same thing as in Arianism in our last week's episode. But then secondly, you now have the consistency, the continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament completely eradicated. There is no consistency because Jesus is no longer fulfilling everything God said from the Old Testament.
00:21:06
Speaker
He is now a completely different spiritual reality entity. Eon is what they're called in Gnosticism, ancient Gnosticism. And the Old Testament God is this evil, you know, spiritual um demonic entity that is controlling us and keeping us from true freedom.
00:21:31
Speaker
Let's move on to a couple of the other effects of Gnosticism. Some fascinating effects. I want to share this book with you. Any of you who are really wrestling with the concept of the Trinity, you're really wondering why it matters, what it means, how to understand it.
00:21:46
Speaker
This book, Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves. He has a PhD. He's at King's College. Amazing man. this book is exactly what you need to read because it's approachable. It's not too scholarly, has a sense of humor to it. It's not super thick, and it is an excellent resource if you want to understand why the Trinity matters.
00:22:06
Speaker
So he has a section in here on Gnosticism. I'm not going to read the whole thing, even though it's so good and would be so helpful. But one thing he points out is that Gnosticism in its modern ideation actually began to receive more notoriety through the Da Vinci Code.
00:22:21
Speaker
Here's what he says. A stark example can be seen in a rather odd collection of second and third century beliefs we call Gnosticism. If you've ever read Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code or seen the film, you will have come across Gnosticism.
00:22:34
Speaker
In the world of Dan Brown, Orthodox Christianity is an authoritarian, chauvinist, intolerant religion. That, apparently, is what the god of Christianity is like, and so that is how his servants are. But on the sidelines of history, persecuted and chased into hiding, are the Gnostics.
00:22:48
Speaker
And in Dan Brown's mind, the Gnostics were the open-minded, tolerant, proto-feminist goodies. Well now, let's see. In Gnosticism, everything started with the One. That is, there was a spiritual realm and nothing more.
00:23:01
Speaker
Everything was fine and divine. Imagine the room you are in being that realm. In the room there is peace and a really good book you'd recommend to your friends. Outside the room, absolutely nothing exists.
00:23:12
Speaker
But then something goes wrong. A disturbance. The dog starts throwing up on the carpet. Of course, you want to keep reading the really good books, so the disturbance and its mess must be thrown out. But now, as soon as a disturbance is thrown out of the room, something troublesome and obnoxious exists outside the room.
00:23:28
Speaker
And that is Gnosticism account of creation. Once there was only the spiritual realm, something went wrong. The problem got thrown outside. And now something exists outside the spiritual realm. And that became the physical universe.
00:23:41
Speaker
End quote. This is from his chapter on creation. So again, affirming this idea that matter and material is is lesser than um the spiritual. The spiritual is more important.
00:23:54
Speaker
It's more pure. It's what we need to focus on. Whereas the Bible teaches that the body and the soul are equally important to God and that what we do in the body affects the soul and what we do in the soul affects the body.
00:24:05
Speaker
God sees bodies as a beautiful thing and that they are an echo of his image. We are made in his image, body and soul. And so because of this, totally different,
00:24:16
Speaker
outlook on creation and on the goodness of the human body. But Michael Reeves notes something fascinating, an impact of Gnosticism that I wasn't aware of until I read this book.
00:24:27
Speaker
And I want to read this section to you. It has to do with how Gnosticism impacted the view of women and how different this was from Christianity. It is not good for the man to be alone.
00:24:41
Speaker
If that was how the Gnostics rearranged Genesis 1, inserting a knot into every God saw it was good, just imagine how they read Genesis 2 and the story of the creation of Eve. For them, the chapter starts quite positively. The man is alone.
00:24:54
Speaker
There is only one. That must be good. but then horribly and just as the physical realm was excreted from the spiritual eve comes out of adam now there are two and just as the existence of two realms spiritual and physical is bad so the existence of two sexes is bad more specifically the existence of women is bad thus the final verse in the gnostic gospel of thomas reads simon peter said to them let mary leave us for women are not worthy of life Jesus said, I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males.
00:25:28
Speaker
For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven. That verse does not come across as jarring or awkward at the end of the Gospel of Thomas. It is the natural child of Gnostic thought.
00:25:39
Speaker
The existence of two realms, two sexes, of the physical and the feminine, is a tragedy. But such must be the case with a lonely and solitary supreme being. Intolerant of the existence of anything else, it is only natural that he should prefer to hide both the physical and the feminine a away, or use them if he can only for his own self-gratification.
00:25:59
Speaker
And so for women at least, Gnostic salvation would mean gender bending. Dan Brown's insinuation that the Gnostics were the tolerant proto-feminists sounds very hollow indeed. And those chauvinist Christians?
00:26:09
Speaker
Believing that God is not lonely, it made perfect sense to say that it is not good to have men alone. As God is not alone, so a human in his image should not be alone. They therefore upheld creation and the physical, femininity, relationship, and marriage all as being intrinsically good, created reflections of a God who is not lonely.
Role of Women in Gnosticism and Christianity
00:26:27
Speaker
Without the Trinity, it is hard to see how such things could be ultimately affirmed. Of course, one could simply argue that men and women are equal because they're both human, but that is an entirely loveless affirmation and gives no grounds for seeing those things as absolute goods to be reveled in.
00:26:42
Speaker
The Apostle Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 11, 3,
00:26:46
Speaker
so the head of a wife is her husband but if the son is less of god than his father is a wife less human than her husband without belief in god the father and the son one in the spirit why should a husband not treat his wife as a lesser being yet if a husband's headship of his wife is somehow akin to the father's headship of the son then what a loving relationship must ensue the father's very identity is about giving life love and being to his son and doing all out of love for him End quote.
00:27:13
Speaker
So this got into a little bit more about like headship and that's a whole other different conversation. But notice his angle on that is saying that the only way that the the headship or authority of a husband, as would have been understood in that early Christian context, that early church culture context, the only way that could be good is if there's absolute equality between the son and the father who are the basis of what is said about men and women.
00:27:42
Speaker
That's the only way it can be good is if there's absolute equality and not domination, which is what he's arguing for here. And that does not exist in Gnosticism.
Contemporary Reflections and Conclusion
00:27:51
Speaker
In Gnosticism, it is not good to have this these two.
00:27:57
Speaker
It was good to have one. There has to be this authority structure. Now, one thing we do know is that there were these eons that were operating in um in this ideology, and these eons could be male or female in Gnosticism. And we do know that Gnostic women could take these kind of prophetic roles in their kind of church structure. And this was actually a huge um danger in the early church.
00:28:22
Speaker
that you had these women who were infiltrating into the early church, potentially, um teaching and prophesying, which we know women did.
00:28:34
Speaker
We know that Philip's daughters did and Anna did. And and there's instructions for women to prophesy in 1 Corinthians, prophesy, preach, extrapolate the scriptures. So you have women coming in who deceive others with Gnostic theology. Right?
00:28:49
Speaker
Women who are abusing the gift of prophecy. And Gonzalez actually says in the story of Christianity that there's a good possibility that one of the reasons that women's roles began to be restricted in the second and third century in the church, no longer seeing them in maybe more elder, deacon, um bishop, apostle type roles is because of this, because of the abuse of the prophetic role by Gnostic women.
00:29:19
Speaker
which is fascinating. Now, could we have fixed that earlier in church history? Probably. um But humans make human decisions and things, um you know, continue down the line and need to be remedied. But one of the things I think we can take away from this is that this Gnostic teaching is now, today, being perpetuated by women.
00:29:45
Speaker
women who claim to be Christian or claim to formerly be Christian and who are now taking this Gnostic teaching or this Gnostic adjacent teaching into their circles and parading it as Christianity or true Christianity.
00:30:00
Speaker
Same pattern as the first and second centuries. All right, I hope this was interesting to you all. We will do a second half of this that talks more about modern Gnosticism and how we can discern and navigate this and talk about it more clearly.
00:30:15
Speaker
I will put a list of these books in the show notes. And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave a review on iTunes or comment on our YouTube channel. It helps other people to find us. And we so appreciate every one of our listeners.
00:30:29
Speaker
You can also email me and my team at felicia at felicia masonheimer.com. We try to go through our emails once a week and get back to you as soon as we can. We appreciate all of you for listening, and we hope that this is helpful to you on your own journey to learning and discerning the faith of our fathers.