Now, as we have stressed already, neither Paul nor any other New Testament writer ever sanctions violence, physical force, or carnal weaponry in the Truth War. On the contrary, such things are emphatically and repeatedly condemned (Matthew 26:52; 2 Corinthians 10:3–4). Titus 1:11 is by no means an exception to that principle. Paul is in no way suggesting that heretics’ mouths must be stopped by physical force. He is very clear about how Titus was to silence the “insubordinate . . . idle talkers and deceivers” (v. 10): Titus needed to confront and refute their lies thoroughly with the clear proclamation of the truth. There is a negative aspect to that: “Rebuke them sharply, that they may be sound in the faith” (v. 13). And there is a positive duty as well: “As for you, speak the things which are proper for sound doctrine” (2:1).
Even though it is clear from the context that Paul is not advocating the use of any kind of brute violence, his statement about stopping the mouths of false teachers has both a tone of authority and a settled certainty to it that make it sound less-than-politically-correct to postmodern ears. This is not a message well suited for our age.
But then again, Scripture has always been contrary to worldly culture. We need to allow Scripture to rebuke and correct the spirit of our age, and never vice versa. Unfortunately, the visible church today is filled with people who have decided that biblical discernment, doctrinal boundaries, and the authority of divinely revealed truth are worn-out relics of a bygone era. They are weary of the battle for truth, and (in effect) they have already unilaterally ceased resistance. As we’ve noted from the start, Christians today often actually seem more distressed about believers who think the Truth War is still worth fighting than about the dangers of false doctrine. Their complaint has become a familiar refrain: “Why don’t you just lighten up? Why don’t you ease off the campaign to refute doctrines you disagree with? Why must you constantly critique what other Christians are teaching? After all, we all believe in the same Jesus.”
But Scripture clearly and repeatedly warns us that not everyone who claims to believe in Jesus really does. Jesus Himself said many would claim to know Him who actually do not (Matthew 7:22–23). Satan and his ministers have always masqueraded as ministers of righteousness (2 Corinthians 11:15). We are not ignorant of his devices (2 Corinthians 2:11). After all, this has been his strategy from the very start.
So it is the very height of folly (and disobedience) for Christians in the current generation to decide all of a sudden that in the name of “love” we ought to sweep aside every aberrant idea about the gospel and unconditionally embrace everyone who claims to be a Christian. To do that would be to concede the whole battle for truth to the enemy.
We must continue the fight.
5
HERESY’S SUBTLETY: WHY WE MUST REMAIN VIGILANT
Certain men have crept in unnoticed.
—Jude 4
Jude’s command “to contend earnestly for the faith” is not J merely being neglected in the contemporary church; it is often greeted with outright scorn. These days anyone who calls for biblical discernment or speaks out plainly against a popular perversion of sound doctrine is as likely as the false teachers themselves to incur the disapproval of other Christians. That may even be an understatement. Saboteurs and truth vandals often seem to have an easier time doing their work than the conscientious believer who sincerely tries to exercise biblical discernment.
Practically anyone today can advocate the most outlandish ideas or innovations and still be invited to join the evangelical conversation. But let someone seriously question whether an idea that is gaining currency in the evangelical mainstream is really biblically sound, and the person raising the concern is likely to be shouted down by others as a “heresy hunter” or dismissed out of hand as a pesky whistle-blower. That kind of backlash has occurred with such predictable regularity that clear voices of true biblical discernment have nearly become extinct. Contemporary evangelicals have almost completely abandoned the noble practice of the Bereans, who were commended for carefully scrutinizing even the apostle Paul’s teaching. They “searched the Scriptures daily to find out whether these things were so” (Acts 17:11).
THE MORE AGGRESSIVELY
SOMETHING IS MARKETED TO
CHRISTIANS AS THE LATEST,
GREATEST NOVELTY, THE LESS
LIKELY MOST EVANGELICALS
ARE TO EXAMINE IT
CRITICALLY. AFTER ALL,
WHO WANTS TO BE
CONSTANTLY DERIDED AS
A GATEKEEPER FOR
ORTHODOXY IN A
POSTMODERN CULTURE?
DEFENDING THE FAITH IS
A ROLE VERY FEW SEEM
TO WANT ANYMORE.
But in our generation it sometimes seems as if the more aggressively something is marketed to Christians as the latest, greatest novelty, the less likely most evangelicals are to examine it critically. After all, who wants to be constantly derided as a gatekeeper for orthodoxy in a postmodern culture? Defending the faith is a role very few seem to want anymore.
In England, where the reigning monarch is titular head of the Anglican Church, one of the important subsidiary titles that goes with the crown is “Defender of the Faith.” (The common abbreviation appears on all British coins as FD, for fidei defensor.) In all candor, almost none of England’s monarchs have really deserved such a label or taken the duty very seriously. In fact, the formal title dates back to the time of Henry VIII, a man for whom the title was ludicrous—because his lifestyle was notoriously sinful, memorable mostly for his shoddy treatment of several successive wives.1
Prince Charles, current heir apparent, announced in 1994 that he would prefer to tweak the title so as not to elevate Christianity over Islam, Hinduism, or Wicca: “I personally would rather see it as Defender of Faith, not the Faith,” he said.2 In a verbal cascade of perfect postmodern eloquence, the prince went on to say that he views himself as a defender “of the divine in existence, the pattern of the divine which is, I think, in all of us but which, because we are human beings, can be expressed in so many different ways.”
Prince Charles’s discomfort with the kingly title is an exact parallel to what has happened in the evangelical movement. After years of neglecting to defend the faith, many evangelicals now simply refuse the duty. They have become uncomfortable with the whole idea of militancy in defense of the truth. They have in effect embraced the postmodern axiom that dialogue is morally superior to debate, a conversation is inherently more edifying than a controversy, and fellowship is always better than a fight.
As we have seen repeatedly, Scripture clearly says otherwise. If we want to be faithful, we are required to become warriors in defense of truth. If the apostles and their immediate heirs had not earnestly fought for the faith, the church might have been overwhelmed by the errors of the Judaizers and the gnostics. The work done by the apostles in the first century and the apologists of the second century was heroic. Their valiant defense of the faith and their crystallization of so much doctrine—often at the cost of their very lives—illustrates why the Truth War is serious. We must be likewise willing to pay a price to fight for truth in our generation.
The early church’s battles with error in their midst also exemplify why we must remain vigilant and not be lulled into a sense of false security. Every time the church wins a significant battle in the Truth War, another major assault breaks out somewhere, usually on a completely different front. The pattern is seen over and over again in church history. There has never been a truce in the Truth War. The enemy is relentless.
The Judaizers and the gnostics were by no means the last major incursions into the church by the enemy in his long war against truth. Other serious errors were also being incubated inside the church, even during those early centuries while gnosticism was gaining and losing adherents. Many of the “new” errors were spin-offs and imitations of various gnostic heresies about the incarnation of Christ. Because so much confusion and misunderstanding were sown by gnostic teachi
ng, the question of how to understand Jesus’ deity together with His humanity became a fertile ground for doctrinal disputes. By the end of the third century, several serious disagreements had already broken out within the church over the deity of Christ and the nature of the triune Godhead. These were not the same old debates between apostolic Christians and gnostics. A whole new wave of heresy developed within a segment of the church that had previously remained faithful to the apostles’ teaching.
Truth never changes with the times, but heresy always does. In fact, heresy’s sublety is seen most clearly in the ever-shifting tides of change. The church is threatened by some grave error until a defense is finally mounted, and the threat is defeated. But then the polar opposite of that error springs up somewhere with a totally different, but equally grave, threat. Then the trend shifts back to a variation of the first error. And thus it has been throughout the history of the church. No error can ever comfortably be counted as dead and gone, because the same old errors keep springing up in new dress.
SABELLIANISM
One of the first and most troublesome false doctrines to grow out of the disputes over the person of Christ began in Rome under the influence of one of the leading teachers in the church there—a man named Sabellius. From its inception in the mid-third century, Sabellianism spread very quickly to churches all around the Mediterranean region.
Sabellius stressed the oneness of the Godhead to the extent of denying any meaningful distinctions between the members of the Trinity. He did not question the essential deity of Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. But he pointed to passages like Deuteronomy 6:4 (“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one!”) and insisted that the unity of the Godhead rules out any possibility of three distinct persons. Instead, Sabellius claimed, the three names all belong to one divine person, who simply manifests Himself at different times as different characters.
Sabellius’s system is sometimes referred to as modalism, because he was essentially claiming that God has three different “modes” of expression. Sabellians believed God transforms Himself from one of these manifestations to another consecutively, as if changing costumes. So in Sabellius’s system, the Father and the Son (or the Son and the Holy Spirit) could never actually exist simultaneously as distinguishable yet coeternal divine persons.
That view, of course, entails a denial of the true nature of God as He is revealed in the New Testament. It contradicts the opening statement of John’s gospel, for example: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God ” (John 1:1, emphasis added). It mixes up the person and work of Christ with that of the Father and the Holy Spirit. Of course, even a simple statement like the familiar gospel summary of John 3:16 (“God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son”) makes no good sense in the Sabellian scheme of things. Sabellianism therefore seriously clouded the doctrine of the atonement, and it likewise undermined practically every other major doctrine of the Christian faith. What the Sabellians had devised was nothing less than an alternative christ and a fundamentally different version of Christianity. Their system wasn’t really Christian at all.
Obviously, consistent Sabellianism would have required a complete overhaul of apostolic doctrine, changing the essential character of the faith once for all delivered to the saints. That fact stirred a number of key church leaders to rise up in opposition. The most important and most effective adversary of Sabellianism was Tertullian (who as we noted earlier was also a skilled apologist against gnosticism). Tertullian demonstrated from the New Testament that Sabellianism is seriously at odds with what God has revealed. Most of Tertullian’s works were rediscovered during the Renaissance era, and they endure today as fine examples of the early church fathers’ best biblical scholarship. Tertullian made a careful, systematic, scriptural case to show that the triune nature of the Godhead is one of the central doctrines of authentic apostolic Christianity—and that those who deny it have in effect rejected the faith delivered once for all to the saints. The work done by Tertullian and others was so definitive that Sabellianism has been universally rejected as a serious heresy by every major branch of Christendom since the end of the third century.3
THE ARIANS
But hard on the heels of Sabellianism came an even more significant threat to the very essence of gospel truth. A new heresy known as Arianism was introduced (also by a popular teacher within the church) at the start of the fourth century. Arianism was a frontal assault on the deity of Christ. This deadly false doctrine quickly became one of the most blatant yet most aggressive of all the heresies that have ever threatened the Christian faith. The Arians flatly denied that Jesus is eternal God incarnate. They also fought obstinately for recognition as authentic Christians. So the conflict over Arianism literally became a fierce battle for the identity of the true church—and ultimately a war for the survival of Christianity itself.
Arius, the man most responsible for fabricating this belief system, began his career as a bright young presbyter and assistant to the bishop of Alexandria (a major city on the coast of North Africa). Arius had studied theology in Antioch and was ordained in Alexandria in 311 AD. He quickly gained a reputation as someone who was serious and articulate, with a keen mind and striking good looks. He came on the scene disguised as an angel of light, and he soon gained a loyal following.
Arius was wary of Sabellian influences but lacked the maturity to make wise and careful distinctions. His answer to Sabellianism was if anything worse than the original error. He claimed that the Father and the Son are two separate beings with completely different natures. So when Arius heard his bishop teaching that God the Father and God the Son share the same divine nature and substance (i.e., they are equal in their deity and eternality), Arius accused the bishop of teaching a subtle form of Sabellianism. Arius would not budge from that charge no matter how carefully the bishop explained his position.
In fact, Arius’s response was to run headlong to the opposite extreme from Sabellianism. He simply denied the deity of Christ altogether and declared that Christ is a created being. “Before the Son was begotten, he was not,” was Arius’s way of expressing his view. When it became clear that Arius would not recant or rethink his position, he was excommunicated by his bishop.
But Arius already had a number of influential friends in positions of leadership in various churches scattered all around the empire. Even in Alexandria he had a large number of followers who continued to support him. Far from ending Arius’s campaign, his excommunication only fueled it.
Arius devised crafty ways to popularize and spread his teaching. For example, he reduced his views to short lines of simple doggerel. He published the stanzas in a book known as Thalia (named for the muse of comedy and pastoral poetry in Greek mythology). Each of Arius’s verses hammered the same consistent theme, but always in slightly different expressions: the Son is not eternal; He cannot perfectly comprehend the Father; He did not exist until God began creation; there was a time when the Father was alone; and so on. Virtually every line contained a similar denial of Jesus’ deity or eternality. The words were simple and straightforward, and the meaning was bold and plain. Arius then set those lyrics to catchy tunes, and his songs quickly became the popular music of the time. Arian ideas were thus disseminated by sailors and travelers throughout the empire. In a very short time, Arius’s blasphemous ditties even began to replace the hymnody of the church.
IN ARIUS’S SYSTEM,
JESUS WAS NEARLY
GOD BUT NOT QUITE.
CAREFUL NUANCING
OF ARIUS’S SYSTEM
ALLOWED HIM TO
MASK THE SERIOUSNESS
OF HIS ERROR WITH
ORTHODOX-SOUNDING
WORDS, AND HE BECAME
VERY SKILLED AT IT.
Arius acknowledged, by the way, that Jesus was something more than a mere man; but he insisted that He was something less than fully God—an archangel. He thus downgraded Christ’s full deity to a kind of quasi perfe
ction. So he still spoke of the “divinity” of Christ, affirmed Christ as “Lord,” and acknowledged that Christ is a worthy object of worship. In Arius’s system, Jesus was nearly God but not quite. Careful nuancing of Arius’s system allowed him to mask the seriousness of his error with orthodox-sounding words, and he became very skilled at it. For example, Arius answered the charge that he was a heretic by insisting that he could honestly affirm, without reservation, every word of the Apostles’ Creed. Although the Apostles’ Creed implicitly affirms the deity of Christ by referring to the Savior as “Jesus Christ, [God’s] only Son, our Lord,” the idea of lordship was no problem for Arius. He affirmed “lordship,” just not deity. He even affirmed that Jesus was God’s “only-begotten Son.” Arius simply redefined that expression in a way that divested Christ of both deity and eternality.
In fact, Arius turned the language of the creed on its head. The very idea of “sonship,” he said, proves that Christ derived His being from the Father. Jesus could not possibly be both eternal and a “son.” Furthermore, according to Arius, the expression “onlybegotten Son” proves that Christ had a beginning point somewhere in time.
So Arius could wholeheartedly affirm the words of the Apostles’ Creed, but not the intended meaning. Lots of Christians in that era were completely stymied by Arius’s claim, unsure of what to do with someone who affirmed the basic expressions of Christian belief but interpreted the words differently. The Truth War has often hinged on precisely those kinds of fine distinctions.
WHY ARIANISM TOOK HOLD SO EASILY
Unfortunately, a mood of ease and comfort had lulled many Christians in that generation into a state of blithe passivity about doctrine. Emperor Constantine had only recently converted to Christianity and issued the Edict of Milan (313), formally outlawing every form of persecution against the church throughout the vast empire. Constantine had also vanquished his last remaining military foe, so Rome virtually ceased from warfare after several long years of strife. Material prosperity, together with a spirit of tranquility and tolerance, swept across the whole empire. It was generally supposed that the peace and reunification of the empire were tokens of God’s favor and blessing prompted directly by the emperor’s conversion to Christianity. For the first time ever, an atmosphere of goodwill toward the church prevailed—even in secular Roman society. Throughout the Roman world, the church began to gain converts (not to mention cultural influence) at an unprecedented rate.
The Truth War Page 12