A Miscellany of Heresy (Jed Perkins)

A Miscellany of Heresy

By Jed Perkins.

This is a list of heresies condemned by the Church in the Nicene Creed. Heresy comes from the Greek word for ‘choose’. In Christendom we are not to choose but rather ‘trust and obey’.

Adoptionism – the view that Christ was a mere man upon whom God’s spirit descended at baptism.

Arianism – Arius (c.250-c.336), a priest in Alexandria, saw Jesus as created by God in His first act of creation. Jesus is ‘a god’, not ‘The God’. Arians criticised orthodox Christology for seeing Jesus as ‘the brother of God’.

Apollinarianism - Apollinaris the Younger, bishop of Laodicea in Syria during the 4th century, taught that Jesus had a human body, but being God had the divine Logos in place of a human spirit or soul.

Docetism - Derived from the Greek dokeo, ‘to seem’ or ‘to appear’. Docetists held that since Jesus is truly God (and the material world is evil or unreal), his manhood and suffering were unreal, for the sake of appearance only.

Ebionism – The Ebionites, an early Jewish/Christian sect, believed Jesus to be the messiah, but not divine.

Modalism – Broadly speaking, Modalists accepted the deity of Jesus, but saw no real distinction between Jesus and God. Father, Son and Spirit are to God, for example, as ice, water and steam are to H2O.

Nestorianism - Nestorius, who died in 451 AD, was Patriarch of Constantinople. He held that Mary was the mother of Christ only in respect to His humanity: she was not the "Mother of God." The problem here was that if Christ’s humanity and divinity could be separated in this way, it may have been Jesus the human rather than the divine Jesus who was crucified: and this wouldn’t redeem us.

Patripassianism – This is the belief that the Father and the Son are simply different aspects of God. Since Jesus is God, the Father underwent his experiences and thus the Father suffered on the cross.

Pneumatomachians – This group from the 4^th century saw the Holy Spirit as an impersonal force of God, separate to God.

Sabellianism - Named after Sabellius, a priest excommunicated by Pope Callistus I in 220, this heresy says that God is three only in relation to the world, in so many "manifestations" or "modes." The Father is the essence of God, and the Son and Spirit are forms of self-expression as light and heat are of the sun.

The early Jesus movement grew out of the conviction that this man had changed his followers’ complete way of seeing the world, and that when they were with him they were with God in a special way. In the early centuries there were many explanations of who he was and how he related to God. It wasn’t until the Nicene Creed that a common explanation was imposed upon the Empire by Constantine. After that, those who ‘chose’ to think differently were driven out of the Church and even the Empire. The history of the Church has been the history of excluding minorities who ‘choose’ to see things differently and ‘choose’ not to keep quiet. Yet in conversation I have found that most members of the Church hold one of these heresies, even though they would see themselves as orthodox.

David Miller comments:

In the Godhead (Pleroma) of the Ancient Gnostic Christian sect known as the Valentinians, there were thirty gods. (Or 29 or 28, depending on which Church Father one was reading, or on which particular disciple of Valentinus one was studying.) We have taken over their Day (Lupercalia) and called it Valentine’s Day. (Never mind about Saint Valentine. He was dumped by the Church in 1969, for the lack of evidence for his existence).

If, hypothetically, the Roman Emperors had ‘bought out’ the Valentinians and backed them with armed might, instead of one of the other factions of the Early Church, then in the place of the Trinity as the norm, it would have been a Trienta (30). We might then have had 1600 years of brainwashing into the idea that God was a thirty-in-one, instead of a three-in-one. And it would then have seemed that those claiming that God was a Trinity, and not a Trienta, who were bizarrely weird, instead of vice-versa.

In making their choice, the Roman Emperors had backed one of the Apostolic factions for good Imperial reasons. These factions were after authority, power and prestige within the Early Church. Their spin was that such authority came from the succession of Bishop to Bishop, originating with the Apostles. On the other hand, the Gnostics (the minority faction) were not power-seekers. Their participatory-democratic methods were constantly complained about by the Church Fathers.
The fourth Gospel, St John’s, is seen an early example of Apostolic power-seeking spin - No, there is no God within. Salvation is only through Jesus Christ. And guess who are Christ’s spokespeople here on earth? - It is claimed that St John’s Gospel was written to oppose the corpus of beliefs in the ‘God-Within’; beliefs which later gave rise to the Gospel of Thomas.

Most of the heresies listed by Jed Perkins were rival groupings within the Imperial Church. Prior to the formation of the Imperial Church there were umpteen varieties of Christianity. Collectively these are known as the Early Church.

‘HERESIES’ IN THE EARLY CHURCH

The Adoptionist Christians were the major variety of belief within the Early Church. Unfortunately for the Adoptionists, they were amongst the losing factions of the Church when, in the 4th Century AD, the winning faction (the Paulines) joined up with the Roman Emperors to form the Empire's State Religion, the Catholic Orthodox Apostolic Church. The new Imperial Church then set about suppressing all of its rival factions within Christianity.

The numerous Adoptionist Churches believed that Jesus Christ was purely human, not a god. He was adopted at his baptism by the Biblical God, hence their name 'Adoptionists'. Some Adoptionists believed that it was a different person who was crucified. Other Adoptionists believed that the Holy Spirit had departed from Jesus at his crucifixion. A third alternative had it that the human Jesus was not dead when taken from the Cross; after he was placed in the tomb he was helped to escape by his followers.

The Gnostics were another losing faction and the exact opposite, Christologically, of the Adoptionists. The Church Fathers (the apologists for the faction that later became victorious) included the Church of Marcion within their denunciation of the Gnostic Christians. (The Church of Marcion became the Imperial Church’s major rival.) The Marcionites were the first of all Christians to develop a theology, to delineate a canon of sacred texts and to utilise buildings as churches. Indeed, one of the oldest datable Christian Churches is of Marcionite variety, 318 AD, Syria. It was Marcion who coined the terms ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Testaments. The Marcionites were the main target in the anti-heretical writings of the Church Fathers. In 207 AD Tertullian wrote his book, "Adversus Marcionem". (Ironically, Tertullian became a ‘heretic’ himself when he joined the Montanists, one of the Adoptionist Churches.)

The Marcionites were ‘Docetists’. They believed that Jesus Christ was purely divine, that he was not human at all. His apparent humanity was an illusion. A Phantasm, they called it. His Father was an alien god, the ‘Good God’. This god of pure love had had no contact with the material world. This World had been created by the Biblical God, Jehovah, as detailed in the Old Testament. The Biblical God had created humans, body and soul. The Good God was so horrified and disgusted by Jehovah's behaviour in torturing in eternal hell-fire the souls of all the humans, that the Good God sent a part of himself (his son Jesus Christ) to purchase these souls from their creator, Jehovah, at the price of Christ's degradation, the apparent crucifixion of his Phantasm.

Marcion did not view the Creator God, Jehovah, as an evil god, but as the God of Righteousness and Retributive Justice, as well as the God of the Law. Marcion rejected the Old Testament as a means to Salvation but, nevertheless, defended it as the Truth about the creation of this World and its Law. He excluded it from his canon of sacred texts. His New Testament included only the latter half of Luke’s Gospel and ten of Paul’s Epistles. Marcion believed that the very first appearance of Jesus on Earth was in the year 29 AD, aged 29, at Capernaum.

In the 1920’s a Christian theologian, Adolf von Harnak, claimed that Marcion was not a Gnostic. According to Marcion there was no ‘spark’ of the Good God within the souls of the humans. Therefore there was nothing which could receive or be illuminated by Gnosis. To Marcion salvation was dependent on Faith alone. Harnak’s viewpoint is now accepted as the consensus position.

The Christology of the Early Church’s winning faction can be seen as the perfect compromise. It was the ‘Pauline’ position, derived originally from St. Paul. Jesus Christ was human as well as divine! Anyone who thought differently was not a Christian and would reap the consequences. The Emperor Constantine in 325 AD, wielding the might of the Roman Empire, backed this position. Thus finally, in the 380’s AD, the Emperor Theodosius established the Catholic Orthodox Apostolic Church as the Religion of the Roman Empire. The Church of Marcion and the various Gnostic sects were suppressed within the Empire. Their sacred texts met the same fate. The victor's sacred texts became the New Testament of the Bible. However, the numerous Adoptionist Churches were by then mainly outside of the Roman Empire, to the East. So they survived the suppression.

 
Do not get ‘conned’ by the winning faction of the Church when they attempt to smear the Arians (Arius’ followers at Nicea) with Adoptionism. The Arians believed that God the Son was subordinate to God the Father. But, for the Adoptionists, Jesus Christ was not a god. One of the reasons that it took so long to eradicate the Arian heresy was that the warriors who invaded the Western Roman Empire had converted to the Arian version of Christianity.

The three synoptic Gospels are seen as Adoptionist. One of the puzzles is – Why did the winning faction leave them in the Sacred Canon? Perhaps they were already too widely disseminated.

Some historians claim that it was these ‘heretical’ Adoptionist Christians who influenced Muhammad. The Biblical God had adopted (selected) the human Jesus. Muhammad believed it was his turn next.

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