Interestingly, Jude nowhere names these men or comments on the specific content of their false teaching. His main concern here is simply to underscore the absolute necessity for faithful Christians to be truth warriors. He is writing about the principle of contending for the faith, and he is highlighting the common characteristics of all false teachers. That is the big picture we need to keep in mind, and Jude didn’t cloud the issue by being any more specific than he had to be. But he does clearly seem to have a specific group of false teachers in mind. He may have been talking about the Judaizers (the same false, pharisaical cult Paul confronted repeatedly). Or he may have been dealing with some of the very early gnostics. Both sets of false teachers fit Jude’s description perfectly. Those are the two waves of widespread heresy that stand out most clearly on the pages of the New Testament.
It is worth taking a closer look at what Jude and the apostles were up against.
THE JUDAIZERS
The Judaizers mounted one of the earliest, most widespread, and most dangerous onslaughts against the gospel. They insisted that to be truly justified, Gentiles needed to observe certain Old Testament rituals (especially the rite of circumcision). The book of Galatians is Paul’s answer to that heresy, and remember, he starts his reply to the Judaizers by summarily pronouncing a divine curse on them and their false gospel. The same false teaching is also addressed in Acts 15, in the book of Hebrews, and here and there throughout the New Testament Epistles, so this was quite a pervasive error and one of the very earliest examples of false doctrine that rose up from within the church.
Of course, the Judaizers claimed to be Christians, and they were accepted by almost everyone in the church as authentic believers. As a matter of fact, in Galatians 2:12, Paul refers to those who brought this error to Antioch as “certain men [who] came from James”—so the original Judaizers may have been men of some status in the Jerusalem church (where James, brother of Jude, was a leader). They may even have been sent by James on a legitimate mission to seek aid, to minister, or simply to establish ties of fellowship with the Gentile churches in the regions where Paul was ministering. But they seized the opportunity to undermine the clarity of the gospel and to confuse Gentile believers.
Because their teaching fatally corrupted the gospel, Paul instantly saw that the Judaizers’ doctrine needed to be refuted and firmly opposed lest the gospel be lost to error within the church. Other key leaders in the early church, however, including the apostle Peter, were not as quick to see the danger. Galatians 2 is Paul’s description of his obviously frustrating struggle to get the other apostles and key church leaders to take this heresy as seriously as he did. That is the same chapter where Paul recounts the famous incident in Antioch when he had to rebuke Peter publicly. He did so because Peter seemed to lend credibility and encouragement to the Judaizers.
The Judaizers’ doctrine grew out of an extremely subtle error, which, at first glance, hardly seemed worth much of a fight. J. Gresham Machen (a famous theologian and author who took a bold stand against liberal theology at the start of the twentieth century) observed that from a purely rational point of view, the difference between Paul and the Judaizers might seem “very slight.” The whole difference could be boiled down to a single point and stated in a simple proposition. In Machen’s words:
The difference [between Paul and the Judaizers] concerned only the logical—not even, perhaps, the temporal—order of three steps. Paul said that a man (1) first believes on Christ, (2) then is justified before God, (3) then immediately proceeds to keep God’s law. The Judaizers said that a man (1) believes on Christ and (2) keeps the law of God the best he can, and then (3) is justified. The difference would seem to modern “practical” Christians to be a highly subtle and intangible matter, hardly worthy of consideration at all in view of the large measure of agreement in the practical realm.1
Machen then envisioned how a modern thinker might wish to deal with the kind of dispute Paul had with the Judaizers. Of course, in Machen’s time, as in ours, the prevailing view was that for the sake of promoting moral reform in secular society, evangelicals should actively cooperate with anyone whose views on moral and spiritual issues so closely align with their own. Machen even envisioned what an ecumenical coalition might have meant in Paul’s context. What if Paul regarded the Judaizers as “co-belligerents” and worked alongside them to try to sweep paganism out of the Galatian region? Machen wrote:
What a splendid cleaning up of the Gentile cities it would have been if the Judaizers had succeeded in extending to those cities the observance of the Mosaic law, even including the unfortunate ceremonial observances! Surely Paul ought to have made common cause with teachers who were so nearly in agreement with him; surely he ought to have applied to them the great principle of Christian unity.2
Many Christians in Machen’s generation wanted to declare a truce like that with modernism. Today there is the same pressure from evangelicals who want to accommodate postmodernism. But, said Machen:
Paul did nothing of the kind; and only because he (and others) did nothing of the kind does the Christian Church exist today. Paul saw very clearly that the difference between the Judaizers and himself was the difference between two entirely distinct types of religion; it was the difference between a religion of merit and a religion of grace. If Christ provides only a part of our salvation, leaving us to provide the rest, then we are still hopeless under the load of sin.3
In other words, the problem with the Judaizers was not merely that they disagreed with what Paul taught—but that their disagreement involved such a vital point. The whole gospel hinged on the very proposition that the Judaizers denied: Sinners are justifiedsolely on the basis of what Christ has already done on their behalf, and not in any way because of anything they do for Him.
The way Paul dealt with the Judaizers is the only right way to respond to false teachers who corrupt or compromise essential elements of the gospel. They must be exposed for what they are, and their doctrines must be refuted with the clear proclamation of truth from Scripture. That is precisely what Jude is calling for when he commands us to contend earnestly for the faith.
As we have stressed already, Jude, Paul, and the apostle John all commanded Christians to fight for the truth (and even to cut off their fellowship with deliberate false teachers) whenever essential doctrines are at stake. The fact that certain serious errors may appear slight or insignificant at first glance does not diminish our duty to be discerning, cautious, and critical in our evaluations. In fact, the realization that even an apostle like Peter could be temporarily fooled by the subtlety of these false teachers ought to make us even more alert to the potential evils of seemingly “small” errors that can so easily undermine the heart of gospel truth.
This is serious business for every Christian in every era of church history, including ours. The Judaizers were by no means unique to that day and age. Similar threats to the gospel have arisen from within the church in every generation since apostolic times.
THE GNOSTICS
Before the controversy with the Judaizers was completely quelled, another battle had already broken out on a whole new front in the Truth War. Primitive forms of gnosticism began to creep into the church. Most of the later New Testament Epistles argue against ideas that were fundamentally gnostic. The doctrinal arguments John makes in his first epistle, for example, make a fine catalogue of replies to some of the favorite false doctrines of gnosticism.
Gnosticism was not a single, unified cult. Gnostic thinking offered the possibility of “designer” religions, where each false teacher could basically invent his own unique sect. That is why gnosticism as a system wasn’t easy to refute and isn’t easy to describe. The ideas of one gnostic group weren’t necessarily held by other gnostics. It took much labor and diligence to contend against this diverse set of false doctrines. And over several centuries’ time, gnostics produced hundreds of varieties of counterfeit Christianity.
THE WAY PAUL DEALT
&
nbsp; WITH THE JUDAIZERS IS
THE ONLY RIGHT WAY TO
RESPOND TO FALSE
TEACHERS WHO CORRUPT
OR COMPROMISE ESSENTIAL
ELEMENTS OF THE GOSPEL.
THEY MUST BE EXPOSED
FOR WHAT THEY ARE, AND
THEIR DOCTRINES MUST BE
REFUTED WITH THE CLEAR
PROCLAMATION OF TRUTH
FROM SCRIPTURE. THAT IS
PRECISELY WHAT JUDE IS
CALLING FOR WHEN HE
COMMANDS US TO CONTEND
EARNESTLY FOR THE FAITH.
Every form of gnosticism starts with the notion that truth is a secret known only by a select few elevated, enlightened minds. (Hence the name, from gnosis, the Greek word for knowledge.) Gnostics offered a sinister smorgasbord of ideas, myths, and superstitions, all borrowed from pagan mystery religions and human philosophy. Those beliefs were then blended with Christian imagery and terminology. When the gospel accounts of Jesus’ teaching didn’t fit gnostic doctrines, gnostics simply wrote their own fictional “gospels” and passed them off as more enlightened accounts of Christ’s life and ministry.
Gnostic teachers accumulated both wealth and followers by promising their disciples the secret knowledge—for a price, of course. Naturally, most gnostic cults claimed to have a monopoly on the secrets of the universe. Because various groups of gnostics did not necessarily agree among themselves about what the secret knowledge was, gnosticism was a highly competitive brand of heresy, and most of its purveyors were therefore skilled polemicists.
Every major form of gnosticism was actually pagan to the core, but because gnostics had a peculiar tendency to synthesize Christian doctrine and symbolism with their worldly philosophies, they fooled many Christians. They borrowed biblical terminology and elements of Christian teaching. But they redefined all the terms and revamped all the teaching. Then they masqueraded as Christians and advertised their religion as a more enlightened version of Christianity. Gnostic leaders often aligned with established churches to gain credibility. They aggressively recruited followers from within the church itself. Because the gnostics employed familiar Christian terminology and professed faith in Christ, many in the church were uncertain about whether to embrace them as brethren or reject them as heretics.
Major struggles between early gnosticism and the gospel dominated the second century. That is why some of the most important figures who stand out in that era of church history were apologists (defenders of the true faith). They were men who responded to the urgent necessity of distinguishing authentic Christianity from all the cultish flavors of gnosticism. The best-known apologists of the second century included Ignatius of Antioch, Irenaeus, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian. Their main focus was a defense of the incarnation (the truth that God literally became a man)—because that was one of the main doctrines the gnostics always attacked.
In fact, most of the major doctrinal controversies in the first two centuries of church history stemmed directly from the struggle between the gnostics and the Christian apologists. The efforts of gnostics to blend into the church and subvert the truth under the cover of church membership quickly became a far greater danger and a more immediate threat to the long-term health and viability of the church than all the persecutions that were ever carried out by Roman emperors.
Just as the Judaizers’ doctrine obscured the gospel by burying it under Jewish tradition, gnosticism altered every distinctive of Christian truth by overlaying it with pagan ideology. Like the Judaizers, the gnostics denied justification by faith and thereby shifted the focus of the gospel. The message they proclaimed instead was all about what people need to do to gain enlightenment (the gnostic substitute for salvation)—rather than the truth of what Christ did to save helpless sinners from divine judgment. Since gnosticism attacked truth at the very foundations, every variety of this error needed to be answered and strongly opposed. And this was no easy task.
One example of how gnostics tried to subvert the doctrine of the incarnation involved one of the very earliest gnostic sects, led by a false teacher named Cerinthus. He taught that Jesus (the human person) was actually indwelt by a divine spirit-being known as “the Christ.” Cerinthus therefore insisted that Jesus’ deity was an illusion. According to this flavor of gnosticism, Jesus’ divine nature was something extraneous to Him—an attribute that belonged to a divine spirit who possessed Him—and not anything essential to His own true nature. In other words, Jesus and “the Christ” were supposedly two distinct beings who simply shared the same body. That doctrine confused many people in the early church, and the apostle John therefore refuted it thoroughly in his epistles. He wrote, for instance, “Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ?” (1 John 2:22).
Another dominant variety of gnosticism (known as Docetism) taught that all the manifestations of Jesus’ human nature—including His physical body (and hence His crucifixion and resurrection)—were only illusions. God could not really have come to earth in the true material form of authentic human flesh, the Docetists said, because matter itself is evil. The apostle John replied to that error and all others like it when he wrote, “By this you know the Spirit of God: Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the Antichrist, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world” (1 John 4:2–3).
BECAUSE GNOSTICISM
CONSTANTLY MUTATED
AND METAMORPHOSED
AND SPAWNED NEW ERRORS,
GNOSTIC THOUGHT WAS LIKE
A PERSISTENT VIRUS
ATTACKING BIBLICAL
CHRISTIANITY FOR MANY
CENTURIES. AS A MATTER OF
FACT, GNOSTICISM WAS
NEVER TOTALLY AND
THOROUGHLY
EXTERMINATED. SOME OF
THE MOST ANCIENT
EXPRESSIONS OF GNOSTIC
ERROR ARE EXPERIENCING A
POWERFUL COMEBACK IN THE
CURRENT GENERATION.
Gnosticism (and every error of a similar magnitude) is exactly what John had in mind in 2 John 10–11, where he gave clear instructions about how to respond to a pseudo-Christian teacher who denies the core truths of Christian doctrine: “Do not receive him into your house nor greet him; for he who greets him shares in his evil deeds.” John evidently applied that principle in his own practice too. Irenaeus (who was born shortly after John died and was personally acquainted with people who had sat under John’s teaching) records that John once refused to enter a public bathhouse in Ephesus when he learned Cerinthus was inside. So much did John love the truth and hate falsehood that he refused any kind of fellowship (or even casual association) with the peddlers of gnostic notions.
Because gnosticism constantly mutated and metamorphosed and spawned new errors, gnostic thought was like a persistent virus attacking biblical Christianity for many centuries. As a matter of fact, gnosticism was never totally and thoroughly exterminated. Some of the most ancient expressions of gnostic error are experiencing a powerful comeback in the current generation.
You may have noticed quite a lot of publicity lately about early pseudo-Christian documents such as The Gospel of Thomas and The Gospel of Judas. In 2006 even National Geographic released a television special heralding The Gospel of Judas as if it were a monumental new discovery hitherto unknown to Bible scholars. Actually, the “gospels” of Thomas and Judas are both well-documented gnostic works. They are pure fiction masquerading as history—full of demonstrably false claims and fanciful mythology. Scholars of every kind (Christian and secular scholars alike) all agree that although these works are authentic relics of early gnostic teaching, they cannot possibly be what the gnostics claimed they were. Like virtually all other gnostic writings, they are anonymous frauds, full of gnostic lies.
Furthermore, these books do not really contain any newly uncovered or long-forg
otten truths. The existence of these works and many others like them has always been well-known to scholars. The Gospel of Judas, for example, was first mentioned at the end of the second century by Irenaeus, who connected it with an especially evil cult of gnostics who had made heroes of Cain, Esau, the men of Sodom, Korah, and all the other villains of Scripture.4 They produced The Gospel of Judas in order to portray Judas as a hero. The work turns the biblical account of Jesus’ life and ministry on its head, borrowing truth from Scripture here and there—but then poisoning it with out-and-out lies. That is the kind of satanic truth twisting that gnostics have always been best known for.
In a very similar way, the popular best-selling novel and motion picture The Da Vinci Code is based on a handful of revived gnostic myths blended with more recent conspiracy theories and held together with some rather inventive gnostic-style historical revisionism. The book is sold as fiction, but author Dan Brown often claims the story is based on historical facts. The premise that “facts” are involved has proved sufficient to create the illusion in some people’s minds that the entire Da Vinci conspiracy is not fiction at all, but some deep, secret, long-guarded knowledge that is finally being revealed. That sort of attack on biblical Christianity is classically gnostic.
A CAUTION FOR THE PRESENT TIME
What was happening in Jude’s day is still happening today. The enemy’s strategy in the Truth War hasn’t changed. Therefore Jude’s admonition applies to us as much as it applied to the original recipients of the epistle. False teachers still assault the church with quasiChristian ideas. Heretics also still arise from within the church itself, and they still demand recognition and tolerance from Christians, even while they are laboring hard to undermine the very foundations of true faith. They are even repeating all the same lies. Their teaching must be opposed and clearly refuted with the plain truth of God’s Word. The apostle Paul said something similar, but in even stronger terms: “[their] mouths must be stopped” (Titus 1:11).
The Truth War Page 11