The Forgotten Trinity: Recovering the Heart of Christian Belief

by James R. White

We begin with the good, pure, spiritual God at the top of the diagram. From this one true God flows a long series of “emanations” known to the Gnostics as “aeons.” These aeons are godlike creatures, often identified as angels when Gnosticism encountered Jewish or Christian beliefs (possibly alluded to in Colossians 2:18). All of the aeons, taken as a group, comprised the “pleroma,” the Greek word for “fullness.”[3] Each of these aeons along the line of emanation from God is a little less “pure,” a little further away from the one true God. Eventually, the line extends far enough that you encounter the “Demiurge,” a divine being who has the capacity to create and is sufficiently “less pure” than the true God so as to create, and come in contact with, matter. In the second century of the church’s history, some Gnostic teachers identified this evil Demiurge with the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh.