The Cruelty of Heresy

An Affirmation of Christian Orthodoxy

C. FitzSimons Allison

• Publisher: Morehouse Publishing
• Year: 1994
• ISBN:
  9780819220981
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

A scholarly review of early Christian history and its policies against heresy and lessons for today's church leaders and reformers

Ancient heresies have modern expressions that influence our churches and culture, creating cruel dilemmas for today's Christian in the form of error, sin, and various distortions on orthodox faith. In The Cruelty of Heresy, Bishop C. FitzSimons Allison captures the drama and relevance of the Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries and shows how the remarkable achievements of these early struggles provide valuable guidelines for believers today.

"Bishop Allison has combined a lifetime of scholarship and pastoral experience in this remarkable, readable work.... He vividly describes how the two human tendencies toward self-centeredness and escape from the difficulties of life—both very popular today—always distort the gospel.... Invaluable reading for any minister of the gospel, those who are preparing for Christian ministry, and all who seek a deeper understanding of authentic Christian orthodoxy."—Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Chicago (1982–1996)

1

Short Beds and Narrow Blankets

For the bed is too short to stretch oneself on it, and the covering too narrow to wrap himself in it.

Isa. 28:20

In spite of popular ideas concerning heresies, they are, in fact, narrow and limited ways of understanding Christianity. They are “short beds” and “narrow blankets,” but they are inevitable. Any group of Christians today are apt to arrive at conclusions similar to those of the early church as they puzzle over and respond to crucial texts of scripture:

“Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.” (Mark 10:18)

“The Father is greater than I.” (John 14:28) Jesus wept. (John 11:35) “I thirst” (John 19:28)

And Jesus cried again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. (Matt. 27:50)

Do these, and other texts like them, mean that Jesus was a good man but not God? Is he merely a human to whom God gave divine attributes? Or was he a remarkable man to whom divine qualities were attributed by disciples and impressionable believers?

Consider, on the other hand, these texts:

“But who do you say that I am?” And Peter answered, ‘The Christ of God.” (Luke 9:20)

“He who has seen me has seen the Father.” (John 14:9) “I and the Father are one.” (John 10:30)

In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. (John 1:1)

He is the image of the invisible God, the first born of every creature. (Col. 1:15)

Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28)

Do these, and other texts like them, mean that Jesus was indeed God and that God himself took on flesh, suffered and died? Or do they mean that God was in Christ but only appeared to be a man, appeared to suffer, and appeared to die?

Each of these inferences and many more have been made by people reading the Bible or, in the case of the early church, hearing the story of Jesus Christ before it was set down and read as scripture. Misunderstandings and distortions of the gospel message were innumerable, and many of them can be found in one form or another today.

The meaning of these texts must necessarily be asked in each generation and of each individual. “What think ye of Christ?” is a question addressed by our Lord not only to Peter, but to each of us. Christians, in the early centuries, used a three-hundred-year process of accepting and rejecting writings before finally approving certain ones as “canonical” and placing them in what we call the Bible. This process is called “canonizing,” and the result is called the “canon of scripture.” Over subsequent centuries Christians used a similar process of accepting and rejecting teachings, based on varying responses to questions such as those above, to set limits and boundaries for these teachings. We know these boundaries as our classical creeds.

Personalities, politics, and intrigue were factors in the development of creedal statements. Christianity has never promised its adherents a purely spiritual arena, with wise and selfless leaders working out pure doctrine insulated from and uncontaminated by politics, rivalry, partisanship, fear, strife, and other “works of our fallen nature” (Gal. 5:19). Then as now God has only sinners to do God's work.

After Constantine (318), emperors attempted to use Christianity to bring unity to the empire by coercion, exile, and imprisonment of “heretics.” Certainly this imposition and enforcement of the church’s teaching by law was one of the less fortunate aspects of the agonizing process of determining orthodoxy.

But the positive aspects of limits on teaching that claimed to be Christian have too often been overlooked in modern times. We fail to appreciate the necessity of preserving Christ’s teachings and his work in order to safeguard the graceful and liberating experiences of Christians. As a skull and crossbones on a bottle warns that the contents are poison to our bodies, so the label “heresy” warns us that it is poison to our souls.

One cannot give one’s own experience of redemption to another person, much less to another generation. One can only witness to it, describe it, and tell the story of that experience and live in a way that makes the witness believable and attractive. In telling the story, it was then, and is now, crucial to get the story right.

Docetism

One of the earliest versions of the story of Jesus that jeopardized what Christians had experienced was called Docetism. The Docetists found it incomprehensible that Jesus could have actually suffered. They answered the essential questions about him by insisting that he only appeared to suffer, to weep, to thirst, to hunger, to sweat in agony, and to die, and that his incarnate human state was so spiritual that he only appeared to be human. (Docetism is derived from the word dokein, which means “to seem, to appear.”) The faithful denied these teachings early on because telling the story the Docetic way would cause hearers to miss the essential aspects of Christian experience.

Jesus’ disciples had known a person who had really been born, had lived through a real childhood, had had a real body, and had experienced real suffering, a real crucifixion, and a real resurrection. His followers in subsequent generations had a similar experience because they had been told the story of a real man and not one who only appeared to be human.

Experiencing and surviving one’s own suffering can be one of the transforming realities of a Christian’s life. Suffering would have been left untouched, in all its painful and despairing hopelessness, if Docetism, which taught that God in no way has taken on human suffering, had been accepted as authentic Christian teaching.

Too few studies have mentioned the religious and devotional experiences of Christians that led them to reject Docetism. All who had been able to rejoice in their suffering because of its role in the development of patience and hope (Rom. 5:3, Col. 1:24, James 1:2–4) insisted passionately that these treasured experiences were dependent upon, and could not be detached from, the experience of Christ’s suffering.

The “fellowship of his sufferings” (Phil. 3:10 AV) was a key to the new Christian life. We are “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ, provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him” (Rom. 8:17). The apostle Peter reflects the Christian view that turns the experience of suffering wrongly or for righteousness’ sake into an occasion to give thanks (1 Peter 2:19) and be glad (1 Peter 3:14). Such experiences in Christian lives depended upon the thorough repudiation of the Docetic lie.

The Docetic version of Christ’s death on the cross was that Simon of Cyrene, who was pressed to help carry Jesus’ cross was actually crucified in Christ’s stead and thereby saved Christ from the indignity of the crucifixion. Although this version of Christianity was repudiated early, human hope that religion will provide escape from suffering and from the offense that Christ suffered an excruciating execution, has caused it to recur repeatedly in church history, in varied and often more subtle forms.

Islam, which honors Jesus as a great prophet, has adopted and preserved the Docetic teaching about Jesus’ escape from suffering on the cross. The shame of crucifixion, which gave power and impetus to Docetism, is hard for twentieth-century minds to comprehend, with our tamed and domesticated familiarity with crucifixes in art and jewelry. The fact that several centuries had elapsed before the crucifix appeared in Christian art testifies to the horror people felt for this form of execution.

We have grown so used to the idea that the Crucifixion is the supreme symbol of Christianity, that it is a shock to realize how late in the history of Christian art its power was recognized. In the first art of Christianity it hardly appears; and the earliest example, on the doors of Santa Sabina in Rome, is stuck away in a corner, almost out of sight. The simple fact is that the Early Church needed converts, and from this point of view the Crucifixion was not an encouraging subject. So, early Christian art is concerned with miracles, healings, and with hopeful aspects of the faith like the Ascension and the Resurrection. The Santa Sabina Crucifixion is not only obscure but unmoving. The few surviving Crucifixions of the early Church make no attempt to touch our emotions. It was the tenth century, that despised and rejected epoch of European history, that made the Crucifixion into a moving symbol of the Christian faith.¹

Docetism was influenced by the Greek philosophical notion that a divine being could not suffer, by the hope in some Jewish quarters for a politically victorious Messiah, and by the persistent and understandable human tendency to avoid suffering and to resist any teaching that makes use of it. A contemporary example of Docetic approach to suffering is Christian Science. Mary Baker Eddy taught that the entire material world is unreal, and that suffering is illusory and only appears to exist due to the absence of faith. If one had true and complete faith there would be no pain or suffering (and no death).

As we recall from the introduction, each heresy has some important truth. In a society overdosed on pills, prescriptions, and drugs, and hoping that some mechanical or chemical means may quickly fix pain, the Christian Science “solution” can be attractive to some people. Many physicians are frustrated by patients who do not wish to change a pattern in their lives that is damaging their health. Instead they want the doctor to “give them something for it” that will avoid the need for change. But to the many inevitable cases of real suffering, the Docetic teaching adds an additional burden by making the victim feel guilty for “imagining” real pain.

Docetic detours are far more pervasive in the increasingly popular New Age movement and in the “prosperity gospel” (“come unto us and we shall do thee good”—the promise of fulfillment without suffering). Those following these contemporary religious options recoil as did the ancient Docetists from the “way of the cross,” which is so eloquently expressed in William Reed Huntington’s prayer:

Almighty God, whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first he suffered pain, and entered not into glory before he was crucified; Mercifully grant that we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way of life and peace; through the same thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.²

The Docetic flight from suffering, so humanly understandable, nevertheless is away of escape, not a way of the cross. The latter promises not only “life” and “peace,” but “fellowship” (Phil. 3:10 AV), “endurance,” “character,” and “hope” (Rom. 5:3–4). By it we are “heirs with Christ” (Rom. 8:17). Christ’s sufferings and ours are the means by which comes our “comfort,” the very name of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 1:3–7). The essential connection between the Holy Spirit and Christ’s and our sufferings can be seen from the fact that parakaleo (Paraclete, Comforter) occurs ten times and suffering seven times in these five verses.

The Docetic escape is seductive, indeed, but one that would leave us bereft of true life, peace, fellowship, endurance, character, hope and, most of all, of God’s Comforter.

Ebionism

The heresy opposed to Docetism is Ebionism. Its origins are obscure. “Ebion” means poor. It could have originated with someone’s name or from our Lord’s blessing of the “poor” or from the jibes its critics leveled at it by calling it “poor.”

The teaching of the Ebionites, however, has a clear and distinct thrust: they accepted Jesus as Messiah but rejected his divine sonship. He was simply the son of Joseph and Mary upon whom the Spirit of God descended on the occasion of his baptism. This divine sonship was a kind of reward and anointing for having obeyed the law. He thus became the greatest of the prophets but in no way does he release humanity from the burden of the law. On the contrary, he showed that the law can be obeyed by obeying it himself. He was adopted into divinity and became an example to his followers to do likewise.

This view could be called the “Roger Bannister doctrine of the Atonement.” Before Roger Bannister no one was able to run a mile in four minutes. Many even declared it physiologically impossible. In breaking the four-minute barrier, however, he broke the psychological impediment in the minds of athletes the world over and scores soon followed him in that accomplishment. The Ebionites taught that Jesus broke the mental and psychological barrier in the minds of people who felt that righteousness by the law was impossible to win. Jesus had now actually done it and, as a result, he was rewarded with a delegated divinity. The meaning of his life and work was, thus, reduced to an example for us to follow.

The “good news” of this Ebionitic form of Adoptionism is “to try harder.” It contains an important truth, as all heresies do, in insisting on the real and actual humanity of Jesus Christ, the necessity “to follow him as Lord,” and the inspiration of his example. However, it misses the really good news of “accepting him as Savior,” by relegating the meaning of his death to a mere stoic example of how we are to face our death, and it relies on the ability of the human will to fulfill the demands of God.

Adoptionism reduces the essential significance of Jesus Christ to an “example” for his followers to obey. Those who so do will be similarly rewarded with “sonship” and divine acceptance. Adoptionism makes of Christianity a religion of control rather than a religion of redemption and reduces morals to moralism. Christianity becomes a grim striving for a goal never to be reached and is preoccupied with symptoms of sin rather than an attempt to treat the human condition that produces sins. It is always reductionist: it reduces mystery to rationality, unity to a hope for unity, joy to striving, religion to law, and liberty to bondage.

The attraction of Adoptionism stems not only from historical teachings but also from human pride. Anything that flatters our self-sufficiency is apt to be elevated to grounds of pretension which justly evoke the judgment of humor. To illustrate their superiority men often boast about their prowess in sex and procreation. Andrew Jackson, throughout his stormy life, was the object of virulent attempts to insult him on the grounds that he had sired no children. He once replied to his attackers that it was strange indeed that some men took such pride in an endeavor in which “a jackass was their infinite superior.”

Adoptionist teaching encourages our self-centeredness. It recurs throughout history because we are self-righteous people who tend to accommodate the gospel to our own righteousness or our hopes for our own righteousness. Yet St. Paul has spoken of himself as being “found in him [Christ], not having a righteousness of my own, based on law, but that which is through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith” (Phil. 3:9).

These Adoptionist teachings, or subtle variations of them, had their particular historical focus in the early church at the see of Antioch, and in spite of early repudiation, Adoptionism continued to appear afresh. In the seventeenth century a new version of it appeared in a teaching called Socinianism, which was based on the heretical views of two sixteenth-century Italian theologians: Fausto and Lelio Socinus. They were opposed by both the Reformers and Roman Catholicism, but their subsequent influence, especially in the Netherlands and in England, has had a lasting detrimental effect, especially in Protestant denominations.

Adoptionism and its later form, Socinianism, picture Jesus as one who was “able not to sin” by the power of his will over the temptations he met. It was an early example of “Christology from below,” of a human becoming divine by will power, and it is characterized by exhortation and condemnation of those who fail. The figure of our Lord becomes a “teeth-gritting Jesus” who was able, as we should be, to be righteous. Those of us whose righteousness is inadequate are driven to despair. Those of us whose righteousness needs but some polishing up, and a new try tomorrow, are living in suspended animation. Those of us whose righteousness is sufficient are insufferable.

This Adoptionist twist of the Christian faith can often be discerned as much by the tone as by the teaching. When Jesus met this basic religious posture in the scribes and Pharisees he called them “whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful but within they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness” (Matt. 23:27). No wonder that the adherents of this heresy have been recognizable by their grimness and lack of joy. Christianity is reduced to a religion of law in which everybody fails (Matt. 5:48) and Christian hope is reduced to “I’ll quit tomorrow.” Spiritually, one either despairs in the face of the demands of God or reduces those dema...