1 John. L. Daniel Cantey

What if heresy had grown within the church, maturing secretly over more than a millennium, working ill under the cover of right belief and worship? This startling and provocative book argues that the ancient heresy of Docetism, reappearing in a form resonant with its original denial of Christ's body, has brought the Western church to its current state of disrepair. Docetism has irreparably fractured Western Christendom, reducing the church to a tangled mass of denominations and sects, while also infecting the course of Western society beyond the ecclesia. Progressing from an ontological foundation oriented toward the dissolution of form, Docetism has led peoples convinced of their march toward unity into ever deepening alienation. Although it has repercussions for theological anthropology, this ontological foundation has its profoundest implications for the doctrine of God. The solution to Docetism, as proposed by the author, begins with a theory of the Trinity grounded in the tenets of biblical Wisdom and explicated in terms of the relations of origin between the divine persons.