One thing I've always been keen on is that Christians should know what they believe and why they believe it. This requires thinking things through rather than accepting everything you are told. Heresy is one of these things which is always portrayed as bad, but I think it is one of the consequences of people thinking through their faith - occasionally someone comes to a different conclusion to everyone else. This is a brief introduction to some of those characters in the first five centuries of the church who came to some unusual conclusions as they thought about what they believed.
I've always had a fascination with heresy and heretics. There's something about people who are prepared to reject the accepted wisdom of their time and to take a different line that appeals to me. I've never been too great a fan of big organisations laying down the law and restricting freedom, so I like the idea of individuals who take a stand against overbearing bureaucracies and who go against the flow - who want to remain distinct and different, not to conform. Much as I will disagree with what some of these people believe in and stand for, I admire their decision to make their voice heard and not follow convention and tradition like sheep.
In Christian terms, those branded heretics by the establishment are often the ones displaying the life, zeal and vigour of what I believe the church should be about, rather than the rather staid and stuffy opponents who might have the correct doctrine, but their expression of it leaves much to be desired. I've often said that given a choice between a live heresy and a dead orthodoxy, I'd choose the heresy every time - though to be fair a live orthodoxy would be even better. Orthodoxy though, is just a relative term - it means right thinking, and I suppose we all think that what we believe is right - we are all orthodox in our own eyes, and so everyone who believes anything different must be a heretic. Usually you need some sort of system or organisation to determine what is orthodox teaching - this tends to be the church or a denomination. If you assent to their belief system (and follow their rituals) you count as orthodox, otherwise you are a dissenter or a heretic. Heretics tend not to be far outside the system - they usually start within it, before getting thrown out. You can disagree with the teachings of the Roman Catholic church and promulgate different doctrines, but unless you have actually been part of that church and had influence within it, you are unlikely to trouble them or be branded a heretic.
The churches have developed their belief system over a number of centuries - there was no fully formed systematic theology available from the start. Usually it needed someone to bring an issue to prominence and take a stand on it, other people then discussed it, compared the different viewpoints with scripture and eventually you'd end up with a doctrine. Quite often it was the people who raised the issue in the first place, and made people think about what they actually believed on the topic, who ended up denounced as heretics.
We have the advantage of hindsight, of well-grounded teaching from a well thought out theological system, so it's not always easy to relate to the problems the early church had in deciding just what they believed. As evangelicals we have one thing which we always claim to be the criteria by which all things must be judged - we have the Word of God, the Bible. Now surely the church has always had the Bible, so no-one should have any excuse for believing anything unbiblical, should they?
The problem is that for the first 300 years of the church no-one had a Bible like the one we have, with its 66 books containing God's only and final revelation to the world. If you read the works of Eusebius of Caesarea written in the fourth century you will find that some people were using a version of the New Testament containing to first letter of Clement to the Corinthians (how many of you have that in your Bible? - you can't miss it, it has 65 chapters!). Whilst they all used the same four gospels and the 13 letters of Paul, many were not sure about the Epistle to the Hebrews, or James, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude or the Book of Revelation. So if parts of the church didn't accept these books, you might be on dangerous ground basing any doctrine on what they taught, if it wasn't also found in other books - it would be a bit like using the Book of Mormon! So how did they get into that situation.
The trouble was there never was a single entity in the first century called the New Testament. After Jesus death, several of His followers wrote about Him, about what He had done, and what His life meant for everyone else. Four of these became what we now consider the Gospels. Jesus influenced lots of people, and there were more gospels than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Other people collected stories about Jesus and talked to people who had seen Him, and they published gospels too. Many of the things in these gospels are similar to the things we already know from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but they sometimes have other stories. Just because they are not our "official" gospels does not mean we should reject everything different we read in what are now termed the "Apocryphal" gospels. John said that Jesus did and said many things that he hadn't written, and some of those things would have been remembered by those who saw and heard them and told to those collecting stories about Jesus. Many of the early apocryphal gospels have not survived, though bits have. It is likely that the story of the woman caught in adultery in John 8 and the longer ending for Mark 16 come originally from gospels other than the canonical four - which does not make them any less true for that fact, though it perhaps raises interesting questions concerning inspiration.
Paul never wrote a systematic theology: he wrote letters to churches he had visited, or intended to visit, answering questions and addressing particular situations which they faced. Within a few years people started to collect together the different letters Paul had sent to churches, and copied them as a set. Paul probably wrote hundreds of letters and we only have 13, does this mean that the rest were not inspired, or that they might not have all kept copies by the time the collections were being assembled.?
We find it difficult to relate to a church without a New Testament - but the early Christians had things they considered more important - eyewitness testimonies of people who had seen and heard Jesus. Even in the second generation many churches had leaders who learnt their doctrine from the original disciples of Jesus. We might think Paul's letters are really great - as might some of the folk in Galatia and Corinth, but what of those churches who never met Paul, but who were planted by Andrew or Bartholomew. They would have heard first hand testimony about Jesus. Who would have sat down and read through a gospel when they could have actually asked John about what is was like on the mount of transfiguration, or celebrated communion with Philip saying what Jesus had said about His body and blood. In the second century Papias of Hierapolis makes just this point - when he was younger he had known the apostle John, and he knew many people who had known the original disciples. He says "I did not imagine that things out of books would help me as much as the utterances of a living and abiding voice."
Oral transmission of information, and the word of prophecy from the Holy Spirit was how the early church presented the gospel to people. It wasn't till over a century later that any of the letters came to be bound together as codices - or books; the transmission of the earliest portions of the New Testament was of a collection of papyrus scrolls being painstakingly copied by hand (printing is well over a thousand years away). The book of Acts alone took a scroll 35 feet long, written in uncial characters with no spaces between words - imagine trying to look for a specific passage. You couldn't give chapter and verse references, because the chapter divisions only date to the 13th century, while separating and numbering the verses was a product of the 16th century.
The impetus towards the New Testament as we know it came not from the Church but from one of the early heretics. Marcion was a bit of a strange character, totally devoted to Jesus and Paul, but who believed their message had been corrupted by others. He was one of the first people to really wrestle with the problem of reconciling law and grace. His solution was a novel one, he believed they could not be reconciled, so only one could be from God. Marcion presented what he believed was the true revelation in his canon of scripture - 10 letters of Paul and a version of Luke's gospel, all well edited to remove what he believed to be additions and corruptions. Marcion claimed to follow God, but believed that the God he followed was not the Jewish God, the God of the Old Testament. This God he believed was a mere minor deity, and one who was fallible, and full of hatred and revenge. Marcion believed that the God who was the father of Jesus Christ was a superior God, the unknown God who Paul preached, who through Christ was undoing the work of the demiurge, the Old Testament God who he regarded like the devil. Marcion could not reconcile the Jewish law with grace and the freedom in Christ proclaimed by Paul - so he rejected Judaism and any Jewish influences on Christianity.
Marcion's father had been a bishop in a port on what is now the Black Sea coast of Turkey. When he was about 50 he settled in Rome and was accepted as part of the church. There he began to spread his teaching, rejecting the idea that Jesus Christ was prophesied in the Old Testament - no, that was a coming Jewish Messiah, Jesus was something different. He presented his canon of scripture, shorn of references to Abraham and of any passage implying that the church was the new Israel. After about 10 years he was finally expelled from the Roman church, becoming instead a church planting apostle for his version of the gospel, following in the footsteps of his hero Paul. In this he was extremely successful, Marcionite churches sprung up all round the empire - in parts of Syria they outnumbered the Christians. His followers were zealous for their faith, indeed many died as martyrs, and they had a reputation for rigorous morality and purity of living. In some areas they continued for centuries, though in others, due to excessive zeal for celibacy they dwindled over the years.
The church's defence against Marcion was not its own canon of scripture, but an appeal to tradition. The teachings of the church came directly from the original apostles and was safeguarded and passed down from bishop to bishop. Moreover the teaching of the churches around the known world was the same as that of Rome, and this also could be traced to the original teachings of Peter, Paul and other apostles who founded the churches. The scriptures which were to be accepted were those which corresponded with the teaching of the church - not the other way round! It wasn't till about 50 years after Marcion was expelled that the Roman church put out a list of what books were to be accepted by Christians - this list excludes such works as 1 and 2 Peter, Hebrews and James, but includes the Wisdom of Solomon and the Revelation of Peter.
By the middle of the second century the church had become a well run organization. Women, liberated by the gospel in the first century, were once again becoming second class citizens in a male-dominated hierarchical system. The prophetic voice was heard less often and spiritual gifts were less frequently exercised. A movement began in the backwoods of the empire, Phrygia in the hills of central Turkey, which emphasized some of these areas which the main body of the church was already beginning to neglect. It began as a genuine charismatic movement, placing great emphasis on personal holiness, and allowing the Lord to speak through prophecy. Inevitably it became linked to particular individuals, especially the one after whom the movement is usually known - Montanus. Montanus was supposedly a one-time pagan priest who was accompanied by two women who prophesied. As the church was beginning to settle down and no longer expecting the second coming imminently as the early church had done, prophecies of the end of the world were not taken too seriously. In the Phrygian hills however that prophecies the end was nigh, and that the new Jerusalem would descend between two local villages were seized upon eagerly, and the signs and wonders which were performed also got plenty of attention. Of course the end did not come, Montanus and his prophetesses were rejected as demon-possessed, but their movement carried on outside the main church. They had raised interesting questions, particularly the issue of whether the age of revelation was over, whether there could be any further scriptures, and how prophetic utterances should be regarded and tested. After promoting the continuing voice of prophecy in the church, Maximilla, one of the prophetesses declared that there would be no further revelation or prophecy after her death. It is interesting that the movement continued strongly for over a century in what is now Turkey and parts of North Africa, particularly in country areas outside the towns. Except for accepting the utterances of Montanus, Prisca and Maximilla as inspired, the teachings of the Montanists were in the main orthodox. They tended to be more concerned with personal holiness and with fasting, and their converts included Tertullian, one of the greatest theologians of the early church, who saw no conflict between the scriptures and the teachings of the "New Prophecy". They were an evangelistic movement, and money from offerings went towards supporting evangelists. Prophecies and visions continued among the Montanists in Tertullian's time, over 20 years after the death of Maximilla. He speaks of a woman in his own group who received visions, and defends this against the church which had rejected this, by appealing to the words of Paul in 1 Corinthians.
One thing you have to remember in anything you read about heretics, is that it is usually written by their opponents. They are inevitably portrayed as evil people out to lead God's people astray. Since the church rejected prophecy, anyone claiming to prophesy God's word is always going to be regarded as a false prophet. If they prophesied anything that didn't happen, that is what their enemies will preserve - often exaggerated and embellished. You are not likely to read of any true or accurate prophecies. According to their enemies, Maximilla had prophesied that there would be no prophets after her - but amongst the Montanists themselves we find from Tertullian that there were still prophets - this immediately casts doubts on whether Maximilla had actually prophesied what they claimed. John Wesley has an unusual view of Montanus, and it is interesting that he doesn't follow the general rejection of Montanus by the church. He says: "It seems, therefore, by the best information we can procure at this distance of time, that Montanus was not only a truly good man, but one of the best men then upon earth; and that his real crime was, the severely reproving those who professed themselves Christians, while they neither had the mind that was in Christ, nor walked as Christ walked; but were conformable both in their temper and practice to the present evil world."
The response from the church to the challenge of Montanism was to go even further down the road of standing on the tradition handed down, quenching prophetic movements, developing a clergy and restricting further the role of women.
One of the main problems faced by the early church was persecution - it wasn't legal to be a Christian. Much of the time things were reasonably quiet and the Christians were allowed to go about their business unless they caused too many problems, but every now and again an emperor or provincial governor got upset or needed a scapegoat. Many thousands of Christians were put to death for being Christians. Of course they didn't have to be put to death - that was their choice; there was always the option to renounce Christ and acclaim the emperor as Lord. After the persecutions had died down, the church then had the problem with some of those who had cursed Christ to save their lives wanting to repent and rejoin the church. There were two positions - either they could be allowed back after a period of fasting, or having denied Christ they could only be received again by being rebaptised - in other words they were treated like non-Christians because of their actions. There were a number of different reasons behind what is known as the Donatist schism, but the main one was the reluctance of those believers who had stood firm under persecution to have anything to do with those who had compromised. Donatus was the leader of a hard line group opposing a bishop who had been accused of handing over the scriptures to the Roman authorities during the persecutions at the beginning of the fourth century. The church in North Africa split into two over the issues, and things were exacerbated when the Roman emperor Constantine who had become a supporter rather than a persecutor of the church, got involved in the matter. It is interesting that after years of persectution by different emperors, no sooner had an emperor come out as supporting the church than suddenly all ecclesiastical and theological decisions started to be referred to him. It is also interesting that few in the church questioned the new role that the secular authorities were taking in their affairs.
As well as being strongly against compromise in the face of persecution, Donatus was also against compromise with the world, particularly the empire. The question he asked "What has the emperor to do with the church?" was a significant one. Church and state had only just been united, but here was someone questioning that. Could there be such a thing as a Christian state? While the main body of the church basked in imperial support and patronage, the followers of Donatus were persecuted. Persecution however had the effect on the Donatist church which it had always had - it grew, becoming the majority group of Christians in North Africa for a number of years. It was only in the early fifth century under the leadership of Augustine that the catholic church in Africa was able to regain any momentum, but then it was too late, as both Catholic and Donatist churches were extinguished by attacking Vandals.
In the literature of the church over the centuries, one heretic is vilified above all the others - Arius of Alexandria. He was the infamous arch-heretic, the enemy of God, intent on leading the world astray. His teachings are blasphemous, madness, his heresy was a plague which infected the church, his followers were a mad-gang. He comes across as a mix of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Genghis Khan and all of the other thoroughly evil characters found in the history books. What is true is that he had a greater impact on the church than any other heretic before the 16th century. For much of the fourth century versions of his teaching were promoted as the official teaching of the Christian church, though they eventually lost the battle against what is now regarded as orthodoxy.
There were two aspects of Arius which annoyed his opponents - one was what he taught, the other was how he taught it. Whereas they put out theological theses intelligible only to a few, Arius (though himself a highly educated scholar) taught in the language of the common man, expressing his ideas in snappy, memorable verses, and setting them to catchy tunes. He was a popular communicator using easy to understand concepts and metaphors.
The particular concern of Arius was to emphasize the humanity of Jesus Christ and the uniqueness of God the Father. He knew his scriptures well and was able to argue his case effectively. He worked from the premise that if Christ was the Son, He must have been begotten, and if that was the case there must have been a time when He was not. He used passages like Acts 13:33, which quotes Psalm 2:7 as speaking of Christ - "thou art my Son, today I have begotten thee". He took Luke 2:52 which says "Jesus kept increasing in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and men" to argue that the incarnate Christ changed and developed whereas Psalm 15:4 says that God does not change. God knows all things, but Jesus said that there were things which the Son did not know (Mk 13:32). It was an interesting theory - Arius was not saying that Jesus was only a man, far from that; but he was saying that the Son was less than the Father who begot Him. The Son was begotten before the creation of the heavens and the earth, and was the means by which they were created, and He was the means by which salvation was effected. He was something special, far above any man or angel - but He was not God.
The problem the church had in responding to Arius was that they didn't really have an adequate explanation for the relationship between Son and Father, and there had been no single dominant theory accepted throughout the church. Some of those who opposed Arius were actually veering towards another heresy, that of Sabellius which held that the Father and the Son were one God, who was expressed and manifest in different ways. This way of looking at things has no room for any form of development within the incarnate Christ, and in fact verges on docetism - Christ only appeared to suffer, because as God He couldn't actually do so. It wasn't really until Arius had forced the issue and attempts had been made to excommunicate him, that the church really faced up to the issues and came up with an understanding of the incarnation that fitted the biblical evidence. It was something where they needed to look to the scriptures, because the traditions handed down from the apostles to which appeal was usually made did not adequately show why Arius was wrong.
The efforts to stop Arius involved people in the highest echelons of the Roman Empire and the church. The emperor Constantine was involved in a conference at Nicea in 325 which proclaimed a formula which was drafted to exclude Arian beliefs, and to which the bishops were required to assent. That would have been that, except some of the bishops felt that they had been forced to agree to the Nicene formula, and they were unhappy with some of the terminology it used which was certainly unbiblical and itself had heretical connotations. For a number of years the pendulum swung in the other way. Just before he died the excommunication of Arius was revoked and he was about to be accepted back as part of the church. It wasn't that his beliefs had completely won the church over, rather it was the bishops were more concerned with the threat of the Sabellian view of the Son and Holy Spirit being mere modes of existence of the Father, which they believe some of the followers of the Nicene formula held. Various forms of compromise were attempted, and for nearly 40 years, these semi-Arian views were the official position of the church and were supported by the Roman state, before eventually what we now know as Orthodoxy finally gained the upper hand.
It is very difficult in a situation where we have all been taught to interpret the Bible from a Trinitarian viewpoint, to grasp the fact that for a couple of generations, many of the leaders of the church did not see the truth and pursued a heresy. It is often hard to accept that so many of the things which we believe to be self evident and obvious are not that at all, and that there are other ways of looking at the evidence which can give very different answers. In saying that, I still believe Arius was wrong and that his theories and interpretations had major flaws - but the church needed him. If it hadn't been Arius, someone else would have had to raise the issue and force the church to lay down clearly and concisely what it believed in a way which excluded other interpretations.
The Arian controversy was about much more than doctrine - it was about power and politics. The fourth century church was facing up to a different environment where it was supported rather than persecuted by the state, where bishops became major civic figures rather than renegades hiding from the authorities. Arianism had an interesting life after the time it was sidelined in the Roman empire. The followers of Arius were evangelistically zealous, particularly when it came to reaching those outside the empire, the Germanic tribes of Goths, Visigoths and Vandals. So it was that in the next century as the Roman empire in the west began to fall apart, that large areas, including France, Spain and North Africa found themselves under Arian rulers.
The dangers of this new environment that the church was facing became especially clear in the following years. The churches of Rome, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem were proud of the fact that they could trace an unbroken line back to the Apostles who founded them. Their bishops were the great fathers of the church, the popes to whom all the other bishops looked. Rome especially regarded itself as the elder brother of these churches, because it was the capital city of the empire. In the fourth century however the emperor and his administration moved to the new city of Constantinople in the east, and a bishop was appointed there also. Over the years the power of the church of Constantinople grew supported by imperial patronage, and this made the other Patriarchates uneasy - especially the bishops of Alexandria.
At end of the fourth century a new archbishop of Constantinople was appointed. His name was John, but he is mostly known by his nickname - Chrysostom - the man with the golden tongue. As archbishop of Constantinople, you often had the Imperial family in your services. The emperor was used to people giving deference to him, but Chrysostom didn't, and where he saw sin he was not afraid to say so. Comparing the empress with Herodias was not really a good move, especially when he had already upset the archbishop of Alexandria by receiving people who he had denounced as heretics. Chrysostom was sent into exile and died on the journey. The verdict of history has been good to him - though his opponents tried to have him condemned as a heretic, they failed to do so - and he has gone down in church history as Saint John Chrysostom.
One of his successors has not been viewed in the same way by posterity. Nestorius was a man with a similar temperament to John Chrysostom - he also felt he had to denounce sin at the highest levels, and displayed a great lack of tact in doing so - in fact he was something of a bull in a china shop. His approach to heresy was pretty ruthless - he told the Emperor Theodosius that he would rid the country of heretics. There was an Arian church in Constantinople, but Nestorius decided it would not do to have these heretical ideas proclaimed, so he got the church burnt down.
Nestorius was not a great theologian, though he had been taught in the school of Antioch by the great Theodore of Mopsuestia. His ways of expressing things was not always clear and could be open to misinterpretation, particularly when he spoke of the ways in which divine and human interacted in the incarnate Christ, and his view of the virgin Mary did not match popular piety. He objected to Mary being addressed as the Mother of God, he was far happier describing her as the Mother of Christ. What he was teaching came to the ears of the Archbishop of Alexandria, a brilliant theologian called Cyril, who was looking for an opportunity to put down this upstart church which was starting to claim rights and privileges to which it was not entitled (as a young man Cyril was one of those involved in the deposition of John Chrysostom). Cyril wrote a devastating attack on the teachings of Nestorius branding them heretical, claiming that Nestorius divided the human and divine natures in the incarnate Christ, regarding them as two separate persons. Nestorius himself was not capable of a response, but the church of Antioch which had been supportive of Constantinople and had taught John Chrysostom as well as Nestorius, saw this as an attack on their own theology. Their leading theologian Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus in Northern Syria drafted an anonymous response to Cyril accusing him in turn of heresy, claiming he taught God in a human body - not a Christ who was fully man as well as fully God. This is not altogether surprising, the schools of Antioch and Alexandria had developed a very different approach to theology over the years, with the same terminology having quite different meaning depending on where you had studied.
In the usual church fashion a council was called and delegates were summoned to Ephesus from all over the empire. Cyril and the delegates from Alexandria arrived early, and following the sort of practice which has since been favoured by trade unions, moved the date of the council forward, voted and in the absence of the opposing parties found Nestorius guilty of heresy, anathematizing him. When the delegates from Antioch arrived they were not pleased. They decided that the meeting held without them was invalid, held their own meeting and anathematized Cyril. Eventually, after a couple of years, they decided that Nestorius was a bit of a liability and agreed to let him be anathematized and exiled for the sake of peace. However, a few years later, after Cyril's death they managed to get another council held at a place called Chalcedon, which found one of Cyril's more extreme followers Eutyches guilty of heresy - a case of tit-for-tat. A few hardliners objected to both of these decisions and set up their own churches, mainly on the fringes of the Empire. They were remarkably successful in their evangelistic efforts, the Nestorians (the followers of Nestorius) reaching China by the 7th century, while the Monophysites (the followers of Eutyches) took the gospel to Sudan and Ethiopia. It is interesting that earlier this century some writings of Nestorius were discovered, and the general opinion of scholars now is that it is unlikely that he was guilty of the heresy of which he was accused - so Nestorius wasn't actually a Nestorian!
I've only really been able to touch on a few people and movements in this talk, but I hope it's been enough to get you thinking. My studies in church history have shown me that there is a tendency for the church to become institutionalised and controlling. In each generation there need to be men and women who will shake it up and try and return it to the way it started and will try and emphasize concepts and teachings which have been lost or ignored. Inevitably some people will tend to take particular emphases to extremes, thus starting heresies. As church we should always be open to God to use others to show us where we are falling short of His intentions for the Body of Christ. It has been the tendency of the church over the years to reject these people which has often led them to drift to extremes and split off as separate groups.
Most heresies start with people emphasizing what the church has neglected, and the church, rather than considering that it could be in the wrong, rejecting and excommunicating the "heretic". After all, remember that to the Catholics, Luther was a heretic - going on incessantly about justification by faith. He had rediscovered something biblical which had been lost, or certainly neglected, and he was rejected. Though he tried to change the church from within, he was excommunicated and cast out. We need to always be open to the fact we are fallible, we can get things wrong, and that just because we've done something all our lives, we could still be building on wood, hay and stubble. Sometimes God brings awkward and challenging people along to point us back to the gold, silver and precious stones. Let's not be in a hurry to reject them without first carefully weighing what they bring, examining the spirit in which they bring it, and looking at our own hearts to see if our own position and motives are wrong.
We should always be wary of accepting the stories we hear about wrong teaching from those who oppose them. History has shown there is a tendency to exaggerate and even make up things to discredit people with unpopular views. If we are going to condemn someone for wrong teaching, let it at least be based on what they are actually teaching, not on what others say they do. This century has seen the birth of the Pentecostal movement. For hundreds of years people read the scriptures and did not see that it taught that the gifts of the Spirit were for the church - yet we are pretty sure that is what the Bible teaches. Are there other things in the Bible which we have missed and which God is going to reveal to parts of the church? If He does will we search the scriptures, or follow the usual knee-jerk reaction and denounce anything unfamiliar as heresy?