This did not seem to affect many that were truly committed however, to the Gnostic way of life. Osborn, E.F. The Philosophy of Clement of Alexandria (Cambridge, England: University Press, 1957) According to Osborn, the philosophy of Clement of Alexandria was that a person could not consider ration as a means to understanding God because God could only be understood through spirituality (p. 32). Clement wanted individuals to consider his work

high degree of misinformation I had received from traditional teachings about the church and the beginning of Christianity. Moreover, I was struck by the notion that most other people in the Western world receive this same degree of intentional misinformation, so much so that I have even heard people defend the idea that knowledge of the historical church is irrelevant to modern Christianity. Reading through the class material, I

For a Catholic salvation without God or Christ is unthinkable. Admittedly, this is a comparison of two outwardly very different religious structures and cultures but it serves to illustrate the fact that important differences do occur and this can also be applied to other more homogenous religious groupings. While one may add dozens of similar examples of fundamental differences between religions, at the risk of over-simplification one could also assert

The popularization of the idea, though was somewhat linguistic in that when speaking of God and the Holy Spirit, different words were used that could mean "person," "nature," "essence," or "substance," -- words that were part of a longer, and far older tradition, but not adopted by the new Church . Later, to echo this interpretation, the French Dominican Yves Conger, wrote that the Spirit of God was equal to

Gnostics believed that they belonged to the "true church" of an elect few who were worthy; the orthodox Christians would not be saved because they were blind to the truth. Part E -- Content - if we then combine the historical outline of the "reason" for John's writings with the overall message, we can conclude that there are at least five major paradigms present that are important in a contextual

Shape and Place of Doctrine in Today's World A religion is a way of life. The more religious one considers oneself, the more that one has made a commitment to become closer to God, and to declare oneself a member of a specific community. Today's churches are the result of centuries of development. Bastions of tradition, most creeds hearken back to an earlier day. Their ways and general beliefs were