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Thank you for a great issue! You don't talk down to your readers, while still providing surprisingly in-detail coverage. Please give us more on the various heresies, including some more modern. I noticed several ideas of the Gnostics are still around.

Lois Newton
Columbia, Missouri

Your last issue on heresy in the early church was very thought provoking. I do wonder how it is that Constantine is still cast in such a good light.

When he officially inaugurated the city of Constantinople On May l1, 330, he erected a statue of Apollo—minus the pagan deity's head but replaced with a likeness of his own. Does this not symbolize the mixture of paganism and Christianity that has compromised much of the church, especially since Constantine? Constantine secured for Constantinople the Roman Palladium, a wooden statue of Athena that was purported to have dropped from the sky originally. Also, "The Sunday Law of Constantine" (A.D. 321) dictated that "All … shall rest upon the venerable Day of the Sun," which was reverenced by pagans. Constantine's actions speak loudly, casting doubt on the veracity of his conversion despite the words of a possibly biased biographer.

Carolyn Anne Venable
Houston, Texas

I appreciate the help you are uniquely qualified to provide via clear and concise synthesis Thank you also for the Internet web site references and the annotated bibliography by David Wright.

Rich Poll
on AOL

Ecole Initiative web site (where you can find early church documents), mentioned in the last issue, is now: http://cedar.evansville.edu/~ecolweb/ -mg

The triumph of the orthodox canon and creed was truly a marvelous event in history. These definitions are shared by Christians of many types: Southern Baptists, Dutch Reformed, Pentecostals, and Romanian Orthodox all share the same concept of the Trinity, as noted by Thomas Oden in his interviews.

A. A. Skemp
Minneapolis, Minnesota

In your recent issue, there is a picture of a medieval Hungarian painting that the caption says is "picturing Polytheism." I think the better term would be tritheism, which is something different. What strikes me is the similarity between the painting and the description of Jesus' baptism in the Gospels. There you have the voice of God speaking from heaven, the Son standing in the river, and the Spirit descending in the form of a dove-tritheism?

Don Madvig
Ellison Bay, Wisconsin

The issue on heresy in the early church was excellent. Two minor comments: first, referring to followers of the Novatian and Donatist schisms as "puritans" is misleading. There are major differences in issues between these schismatics and the 17th- and 18th-century Puritans as you have described in prior issues. Also, the church through history and even today has seen various forms of Gnosticism, Monarchianism, Arianism, Pelagianism, etc. It would be helpful to have information on how these heresies existed through the history of the church. A history of the Nestorians and Monophysites to the present day would also be interesting.

Billy Bock
Oswego, New York

Corrections:
	"Fine-Tuning the Incarnation" (p. 24): the reference to "Emperor" Flavian should be "Patriarch" Flavian. The emperor mentioned, but not names, would be Marcian. The Timeline: The reign of Valentinian I began in 364, not 361. Six(!) Latin scholars wrote to say that, contrary to one letter on the American Revolution issue, our translation of two Latin phrases on the dollar bill was, in fact, correct! Annuit Coeptis means "He has favored our undertakings" and Novus ordo seclorum means "A new age now begins." —mg

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