Heresies of the Church
Arianism – Jesus was a created
being, the first and greatest creation of God
Nestorianism – denies the reality
of the incarnation. The union of two persons, the human person and the divine
person.
Docetism – Jesus did not have
physical boy but an illusion.
Eutychianism – Christ only
possesses the divine nature, it swallows up the human nature.
Apollinarianism – denied the
true humanity of Jesus. Humans have 3 parts, a physical body, A lower soul that makes us
living creatures, a higher soul or spirit equivalent to rational mind
Modalism – collapses the three
persons of the Godhead into one person. God is Father, Son and Spirit but not simultaneously
Gnosticism – salvation based on secret
knowledge revealed by heavenly revealer.
The body is bad The mind is good
Pietism – inwardly focus on
individual holiness, emphasis on experience, can lead to legalism, can Lead to Pentecostalism and
charismatic emotionalism
Arianism - Arius provoked one of the
greatest Christological crises in the early church when he questioned the full
deity of Christ in the early fourth century AD. Attempting to understand the
sonship language of the New Testament, Arius relied too much on the human
experience of sonship to illustrate the relation of the Son to the Father. Like
human fathers, said Arius, God the Father existed before God the Son. Arius
claimed that the Father begat the Son in His first act of creation: the Son was
created before all other creatures and maintains an exalted status as the agent
through whom everything else was created. Nevertheless, as worthy as He is, the
Son is, in the final analysis, just a creature, according to Arius.
A second major Trinitarian heresy in the early church was Arianism. Named for its chief proponent, Arius, this heresy said the first and greatest creation of God is the Son of God, by whom God made all other things. So, the Son has an exalted place in Arian theology over all creation. However, as exalted as the Son might be in Arianism, He is still a creature and not eternally God. Given that the full deity of Christ is clearly taught in passages such as John 1:1–18, it is not surprising that Arianism was finally rejected by biblical Christianity.
Nestorianism - envisages
the divine Word as having associated with itself at the Incarnation a complete,
independently existing man.
From the orthodox point of view, Nestorianism therefore denies the reality of
the Incarnation and represents Christ as a God-inspired man rather than as
God-made-man. According to Nestorius, Jesus is the union of two
persons—a human person and a divine person. This is not a union of essences but
rather a close moral union. In other words, Nestorius believed the union was
not such that we could say the humanity of Jesus actually belongs to the Son of
God. Instead, it belongs only to the human person. When Christ died, it was not
the incarnate Son of God suffering according to His human nature; it was the human
person who died. When Christ performed a miracle, it was not the incarnate Son
of God acting according to His divine nature to manifest His power; it was the
divine Logos acting independently of the human person in Jesus.
The errors of Nestorianism become evident when we
reflect on the atonement. If Christ is two persons, who died on the cross? It
cannot be the infinite divine person of the Son, for He has not assumed a human
nature. He possesses only a divine nature, which cannot experience suffering. So,
it must have been the human person who suffered and died because the human
person in Christ has a human nature, which can experience suffering. But then
we have the death only of a finite person, for human persons are finite. And
the merit of a finite human sacrifice could hardly be applied to anyone besides
the finite person who offers it. Thus, the Westminster Larger Catechism 38 says
that Christ had to be God—He had to be a divine person with a human nature so
as to give His human suffering sufficient worth to atone for many (Heb. 5:9). Nestorianism gives us an insufficient atonement.
Docetism -We are talking specifically about the
heresy of docetism. The term docetism is derived from the
Greek verb dokeō , which means “seem” or “appear”;
thus, the name of the heresy points to its teaching that Jesus did not have a
real physical body. Instead, He only seemed to possess physicality. His body
was an illusion, something that looked real but in fact was not a part of the
physical order at all.
The problem with Docetism is that
it denies the core truths of the gospel, namely, the death and
resurrection of Christ. If Jesus did not have a real body, then He did not
really die (Docetism teaches that His suffering on the cross was mere
illusion). And, if Jesus had no physical body, He could not have risen bodily
from the dead. Without the actual death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, we
have no salvation, we are still in our sins, and our faith is futile (1 Corinthians 15:17). Docetism also denies the ascension of Christ (since He had
no real body to make the ascent).
Eutychianism- One of these heresies was
Eutychianism, named for Eutyches, a fifth-century monk.
Eutyches taught that Christ possesses only one
nature, that the divine nature of Christ swallows up or absorbs the human nature
of Jesus, such that He is left with but one theanthropic nature (from the
Greek theos, “God,” and anthrōpos, “man”). Instead of being one person with two
natures, as orthodox Christology asserts, Christ is one person with one nature,
according to Eutychianism.
The Eutychian heresy ends up denying the true
humanity of Christ, but it also ends up denying the true deity of our Savior.
If the divine nature of Christ absorbs the human nature of Christ, we are left
with a composite nature that is neither truly human nor truly divine. Instead,
it is a third kind of nature, a divine-human nature.
Eutychianism gives us at least two problems. First,
it makes many descriptions of Jesus in Scripture misleading because the
Eutychian Jesus cannot be subject to the normal, nonsinful limitations of
humanity. Today’s passage, for instance, says that Jesus sometimes slept during
His earthly ministry. But God does not grow weary (Isa. 40:28), so if Christ’s
deity absorbs His humanity, the limitation of tiredness is overcome and Jesus
was only pretending to sleep on the boat. Second, if Jesus does not possess a
true human nature and a true divine nature, He cannot represent both God and
man. He cannot be the perfect Mediator between the Lord and His people. Only a
human being can pay for the sins of other human beings, and if Jesus does not
have a true human nature, as in Eutychianism, He cannot atone for our sin.
Apollinarianism- Apollinarianism also denied the
true humanity of Jesus. Apollinarianism is named after Apollinaris, the
fourth-century bishop of Laodicea. Early in his career, Apollinaris was highly
esteemed by such orthodox Christian thinkers as Athanasius of Alexandria
because of his staunch defense of the Council of Nicaea and its affirmation of
the full deity of Christ. In his later ministry, the orthodox party opposed
Apollinaris because of what he taught about the relationship between the human
and divine natures of Christ.
Apollinaris believed human beings are made up of
three constituent parts—a physical body, a “lower” soul that makes us living
creatures, and a “higher” soul or spirit that is equivalent to the rational
mind that humans possess. Immediately, we should see problems with Apollinaris’
thinking, as this three-part division of human beings has no scriptural
support. Biblical Christianity has always taught that human beings have two
constituent aspects—body and soul (dichotomy). This understanding is grounded
in passages such as Matthew 10:28, which refers to human beings as possessing only a body and a
soul.
Having adopted a erroneous view of human nature,
Apollinaris said that in the person of Jesus Christ, the Logos or divine aspect
of the Savior replaced His “higher” spirit. Jesus, then, had a human body, a
“lower” human soul, and a divine spirit. Apollinaris effectively denied that
the seat of rational thought in our Savior is truly human. He compromised Jesus’
true humanity by denying that He possesses a human mind or soul, since the
human mind or soul is an essential component that makes human beings human.
And, by compromising Jesus’ humanity, Apollinarianism gives us a Savior who
cannot save us. Animal sacrifices could not truly atone for sin because they
are not human (Heb. 10:4). If Jesus does not possess a human soul, then He is not truly
human, and thus cannot atone for the sin of other humans.
Modalism - One of the earliest heresies emphasized
God’s oneness so much that it had no room left for God’s threeness. This
heresy, which is often called modalism, collapses the three persons of the
Godhead into one person. In modalism, God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but
He is not simultaneously Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is no eternal
fellowship between Father, Son, and Spirit; rather, at one point in history God
was the Father, then He switched to being the Son, and now He is the Holy
Spirit.
The church rejected modalism because Scripture
clearly teaches that the three persons are eternal. Psalm 110, for example, has two of the persons speaking to one another,
not one setting aside His identity and picking up another. Furthermore, that
the Son can pray to the Father (John 17) indicates that the incarnation was not a matter of the Father
exchanging His identity and becoming the Son. Otherwise, how could the Son
speak to the Father during the Son’s earthly ministry?
Gnosticism- Gnosticism, derived from the Greek word for
"knowledge" (gnosis), refers to a religious movement which claimed
that salvation was based on secret knowledge conveyed to the elect by a
heavenly revealer. Gnostic teachings posed a strong challenge to the emerging
orthodoxy in the Christian church, since its teachers claimed that they, not
the orthodox bishops, possessed the secret revelations which Jesus had
transmitted to individual disciples after his resurrection. They differentiated
the evil god of the world (who is identified with the god of the Old Testament)
from a higher more abstract good revealed by Jesus Christ. Gnosticism regards
this world as the creation of powers who wish to keep the human soul trapped in
the evil physical body.+
Pietism is a movement within Christianity that attempts to be inwardly focused on individual holiness and a consistent Christian life, sometimes at the expense of focusing on what Christ has done for us.
According to Ligonier Ministries, Pietism is a movement that originated in Lutheran churches in Germany and promoted Christian love over theological knowledge. Some say that Pietism can have dangerous consequences, including:
- Spiritual dead-ends: Pietism's emphasis on experience can lead Christians to question whether their inner experience of God is enough to believe they are saved.
- Legalism and moralism: Perfectionism can lead people to substitute legalism and moralism for God's righteousness.
- Pentecostal and charismatic emotionalism: This can lead to a lack of a sound and doctrinally full faith.
- Overly utilitarian and pragmatic: Pietism can lose sight of God's Truth by seeking to accommodate culture and the ways of the world.
- Lacks full biblical assurance: Pietism can lack full biblical assurance based on God's promises.
- Pretense of righteousness: Pietism can be used as a pretense of righteousness, as if work can earn merit before God.
Hypostatic Union-
The hypostatic union is the term
used to describe how God the Son, Jesus Christ, took on a human nature, yet
remained fully God at the same time. Jesus always had been God (John 8:58, 10:30),
but at the incarnation Jesus became a human being (John 1:14).
The addition of the human nature to the divine nature is Jesus, the God-man.
This is the hypostatic union, Jesus Christ, one Person, fully God and fully
man. The historic Christian understanding of the person
of Christ is that He is one person who possesses two natures: a divine nature
and a human nature. Each nature retains its unique properties, and the two
natures remain distinct, though inseparably united in Christ's person. Thus,
according to His divine nature, as the second person of the Trinity, the Son of
God is omniscient, omnipotent, and so forth. According to His human nature, the
incarnate Christ needs to eat food to survive, grows in knowledge, and so
forth.
Using the hypostatic union as their rationale, some
thinkers have taught that Christ could—and did—err. So, we cannot affirm
Scripture's inerrancy and infallibility, for some of the words of Jesus might
be in error, and we find His words only in the New Testament. These thinkers
reason based on a particular understanding of what it means to be human. If
"to err is human," and Jesus is truly human, the thinking goes, then
Jesus must have erred because making errors is inherent to humanity. Some have
even extended this to argue that all of Scripture may contain errors. Since the
Bible is a divine-human product, it must contain errors because human beings
necessarily err.
Open Theism - SPROUL: No, they don't. If you were to go back a few years and
see the program and development of open theism, you would see that open theism
was spurred initially by philosophical considerations of process thought where
God was seen to have a polarity of being and non-being, good and evil, within
Himself. And God Himself was undergoing an evolution and a development.
NICHOLS: He was becoming.
SPROUL: He was part of the process. And then out of that came
this movement of hyper-Arminianism called "open theism" where God is
limited in His knowledge; He doesn't have full omniscience because He doesn't
know the future decisions of human - not only does He not know, He can't know.
The Apostles’ Creed was developed first and was a useful tool for early followers of Jesus to capsulize what they knew to be true about this faith.
The Nicene Creed builds on this initial creed. It was accepted at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD and revised at the First Council of Constantinople in 381. It convened to settle a contention about how God the Father and God the Son could be equal. A priest named Arius challenged this belief, claiming that God created Jesus (this heretical line of thought became known as Arianism).
The Athanasian Creed is one of the most important early summaries of what ancient Christians believed and what orthodox Christians believe today.
What Are Creeds For?
Throughout church history, Christians developed creeds to summarize specific agreed beliefs derived from Scripture.
There are four well-known or “classic” creeds from the church’s early centuries:
- The Apostle’s Creed
- The Nicene Creed
- The Chalcedonian Creed
- The Athanasian Creed
Creeds are useful for condensing key truths or doctrines about the Christian faith based on God’s Word. They also served a practical purpose: in oral societies where few people read or had copies of Scripture, memorization and recitation were key for spreading the gospel of Jesus and remaining true to the central message. The creeds served as clear, memorizable statements about what Christians believed.
One of the earliest “creeds” is the Shema in Deuteronomy 6:4-5. “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.” This verse states a foundational truth of the Judeo-Christian faith and has been recited by children and adults for centuries.
Creeds developed in the early church to explain what Scripture teaches, settle debates, respond to heresies, and settle challenges to church doctrine. Many creeds are built on previous ones.
The Apostles’ Creed was developed first and was a useful tool for early followers of Jesus to capsulize what they knew to be true about this faith.
The Nicene Creed builds on this initial creed. It was accepted at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD and revised at the First Council of Constantinople in 381. It convened to settle a contention about how God the Father and God the Son could be equal. A priest named Arius challenged this belief, claiming that God created Jesus (this heretical line of thought became known as Arianism).
The Chalcedonian Creed, adopted at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, declares Christ’s nature as fully God and fully man.
The Athanasian Creed is one of the most important early summaries of what ancient Christians believed and what orthodox Christians believe today.
The Athanasian Creed builds on all three previous creeds. AsR.C. Sproul explains, “The content of the Athanasian Creed stresses the affirmation of the Trinity in which all members of the Godhead are considered uncreated and co-eternal and of the same substance. In the affirmation of the Trinity the dual nature of Christ is given central importance.”
The Athanasian Creed is an ancient creed that the early church used. All of the creeds were statements about what Christians believed to combat misconceptions or false ideas that cropped up. The Athanasian Creed’s main function was to combat the trinitarian heresies common throughout the early church. These include heresies claiming that Jesus was only a man or that he was only God wearing human flesh. The creed also addresses the heresy of Arianism, which says that Jesus is God’s first and greatest creation.
