What Is Gnosticism?

[R. Fiero]

http://www.trinity.edu/org/tricksters/TrixWay/current/Vol%202/Vol2_3/Duckwatch2-3.html

Duckwatch: Trickster and Crossanity
  Tricksters have generally not fared well when they have meant 
Christianity (at least of the orthodox varieties) because 
Christianity, in imitation of Zoarasteric notions and under the 
influence of extreme Gnosticism, has over-polarized the 
tensions between good and evil. Unlike the basic human and not 
so doctrinaire experience of good and evil entwined as so much
as to be difficult to separate, the geometric opposition of 
good and evil practiced by some religions sets up a priestly 
drama where good and evil never really touch except in holy 
conflict and the priest can act as mediator for an unmediated 
godhead.  Thus, the trickster figure as disrupter, deceiver, 
self-aggrandizer, and all around go-between does not fit well 
in such an extremefied moral vision.
. . .
Still, the notion of Trickster in the Christian narrative is 
too useful to let go.  Surely the narratives of Jesus are about 
appetite, and Jesus the party animal gives new meaning to 
communal purity.  Surely the revolutionary Jesus is a disrupter 
of orders Roman or Pharisaic, and it is not stretch to 
understand that to fulfill the Law means to smudge the 
boundaries of the Law and make folks to see It anew in their 
hearts. I suppose it is difficulty for some to think of the 
Christ as Wiley Coyote or Loki, or even an Irish tinker, but he 
was a wanderer between the boundaries of his culture, and he 
taught some of us to eschew the boundaries of ours. Of course, 
many orthodox Westerners are made uncomfortable by the notion 
of a trickster god, for they carry about some too serious a 
notion of what constitutes the Sacred, and those who have met 
Trickster know he/she is sacred and full of laughter – what 
else should mark the Grace of the Kingdom of God?