You Heretic!
Ancient Heresies and How You Commit Them
Posted
Friday, April 27, 2007
by
Charlie Trimm
Categories:
Theology;
Church History
The ancient church contained a fair number of heresies, and when I first learned about many of these heresies it seemed to me like they didn't matter very much. Why should we care about ancient heresies? Well, the more that I have studied them the more I have come to realize that some of these heresies are alive and well today, even within our evangelical churches. I had to learn that some of these heresies had affected my theology and that I needed to expel them. Are you a heretic? Read on to find out if you are and why it matters.
I am going to approach the ancient heresies in two posts. The first post will deal with the difference between how the west and the east viewed the Trinity and which heresy each was prone to. The East (that would be Greece and everything to the east of that, including the northern part of Africa) focused upon the threeness of God. They would begin with the threeness and then try to explain how God could be one based upon that threeness. Hence, the heresy that they were liable to was tritheism: sometimes it sure sounds like they are talking about three different gods. The East is also the area where Arianism and Ebionism grew up, heresies which highlighted the differences between the three so much that the Trinity is broken. When you begin with the threeness, these are the type of things that result. The differences between the three are the focus of attention, and soon those differences are so great that you do not have any unity at all anymore. Today, these heresies are alive and well, but not within the evangelical church of America. These heresies have as much of a future in the American evenaglical church as a snowball in hell.
The West (Italy and everything to the west), however, started with the oneness of God and then tried to explain how God could be three. The heresy of choice in the west was modalism, which viewed God as one in essense and three not in person, but three in different types of appearences, or masks. God could present himself in a variety of modes, and these modes are not distinct persons, but are simply ways to manifest God. Since they started with the oneness of God, the differences among the persons were ignored while the unity was stressed. The unity was stressed so much that the differences were virtually forgotten. Modalism is the heresy which American evangelicals slip into most easily. This is exemplified by our prayers, where we often pray to the father and then thank him for dying the cross. This is pure modalism: if there is any difference between the father and the son, it is that one became incarnate while the other did not. We have flattened God into one. But this is not simply a semantic game. We have so focused on God being one (in reaction to the liberals denail of the deity of Jesus) that we discount the differences within the Trinity. Any talk of differences within the Trinity makes people nervous. The idea of God being community within himself seems to be virtually unheard of. I think that this overly zealous focus of attention upon the unity of God hurts us as a church when we forget that God is community and that God himself is diverse. Clearly we could react too much and go too much towards the other side, but I think we need to be more careful in how we think about God and what that means for us.
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