HERESIES CONCERNING CHRIST
ANCIENT HERESIES RECYCLED IN THE MODERN AGE
“Only in Him is there salvation; for of all the names
in the world given to men, this is the only one by which we can be saved.”
Acts 4:12
“Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth,
and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me.’”
John 14:6
The Catholic Church has always taught:
The problems for the Church came in trying to decide how to express this basic "Rule of Faith." Soon sincere men slipped into heresies when they tried to explain from their own understanding the nature of Jesus of Nazareth. The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines heresy as: "the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed with divine and catholic faith, or it is likewise an obstinate doubt concerning the same" [CCC# 2089]. Some of the errors in doctrine denounced in the early centuries of the Church continue today.
For example, there are still those who deny that Jesus is truly God. Those who fall into this heresy believe that Jesus was a great man and a godly man but that he was not God. In this heresy, they deny Christianity since the doctrine of the Incarnation—that the Second Person of the Trinity came to earth as a human without ceasing to be divine – is the very basis of Christianity. Generally, this is the belief of Deists and Adoptionists.
Other heresies stressed the oneness of God by denying the other two persons of the Trinity as ‘persons’ in the Godhead. Monarchians, Patripassinists, & Modalists believed that God the Father and Christ is “one person” This heresy maintains that God the Father became Christ.
Others fell into error, believing that although Jesus was the Son of God that He not equal to God the Father, adopting the heresy of Arianism (the heresy that the First Nicene Council addressed). Arianism believed that God the Father created God the Son. That is to say that God the Father existed before God the Son and made God the Son as he made the earth and everything else. Arianists assigned the role of creator solely to God the Father while others who fell into this heresy believed in God the Creator (Father), God the Redeemer (Jesus), and God the Sanctifier (Holy Spirit) as if there were three gods, which is the heresy of Polytheism
There are also misguided Christians who believe Mary was the mother only of Jesus the man and should not be called “Mother of God,” that is the heresy of Nestorianism. It was a heresy spread by Nestorius, a monk of Antioch, who became the influential patriarch of Constantinople in AD 428. Nestorius preached that the Man Christ was not God; God only dwelt in Him as in a temple, and that He became God by degrees. In other words, Nestorius taught that there were two persons in Christ: the one human, and the other divine. Logically, this interpretation had to deny that Mary is the Mother of God. He said she should be called Christotokos (Christ-bearer), but not Theotokos (God-bearer). The Council of Ephesus addressed doctrine of this heresy at in AD 431. The Church pronounced Christ is only one person, not two. Therefore, Mary is the mother of that person, and if that person is God, then Mary is indeed the Theotokos and deserves to be called the “Mother of God.” It was from the ruling of this council that “Holy Mary, Mother of God” was added to the “Hail Mary” prayer.
The Manichaeans taught that their founder, Manes (c. 215-276AD), received a higher form of truth than taught by Christ. This heresy is also basically the teaching of Mohammed (d. AD 639) the founder of Islam. Both heresies deny the Trinity and the divinity of Christ.
To question Jesus’ humanity is also heresy. It is the old heresy of Monophysitism. Monophysites distort St. Paul’s statement that Jesus was “a man like us in all things but sin,” but they have difficulty understanding, for example, that He was subject to fatigue, or all the humbling bodily functions, or the desires or temptations that all men have. They believe that instead to two natures, both human and divine, that Jesus was physically human, but His nature was Divine. They denied that Christ had a true human nature. The human nature, they maintained, was absorbed in the divinity like a drop of wine in an ocean. Therefore, they believed there was only one nature in Christ, and that was His divine nature, hence, ‘mono’= one and physite = nature.
Monophysites are very close to the heresy of Docetism and the Gnostic-Docets. These heresies taught that Jesus was somehow not subject to all the things that make one a human. They asserted that Christ merely assumed the appearance of a human body. Docetism denies the reality of the humanity of Christ. St. Ignatius refuted this heresy when he wrote: “For I know and believe that He was in the flesh after the Resurrection: and when He came to Peter and his company, He said, ‘Lay hold and handle Me, and see that I am not a bloodless spirit’, and straightaway they touched Him and believed, being joined to His flesh and blood. Therefore also they despised death, nay, were found superior to it; and after His Resurrection, He ate and drank with them, as one in the flesh, though spiritually He was united with the Father. [….] The Docetists abstain from the Eucharist because they allow not that It is the flesh of our Savior, which flesh suffered for our sins, and which the Father of His goodness raised up.” St. Ignatius suffered martyrdom in AD 107.
At the end of the 2nd century, St. Irenaeus completed his great work Against Heresies, which was written to refute the various forms of Gnosticism [an old heresy resurrected in the book The DiVinci Code]. The Gnostics denied the historicity of the Gospels. For the Gnostics, neither the historical Jesus, whose humanity they denied nor the events of His life meant anything for salvation. They viewed these as only signs of an eternal, invisible, and secret reality, and believed that physical matter and the world were inherently evil, the creation of an inferior god. For the Gnostics the goal of humanity was in escaping from the physical body and earthly constraints and in returning to the higher spiritual world from which humans fell. They believed the means of achieving this “spiritual reality” were in a secret truth revealed only to the Gnostics, not found in Sacred Scripture or the Traditions of the Church. These teachings were refuted by Irenaeus who established the principles for the interpretation of the Scriptures guided by the "Rule of Faith", handed down by the Apostles, and insisting the whole Bible portrays one continuous history from Creation to redemption and consummation. He affirmed the teaching of the Universal Church that Salvation takes place in time and history and the Old and New Testaments form a single vision within this historical sweep.
In 451 the Council of Chalcedon, with nearly 600 Bishops assembled, settled the issue by declaring the Catholic doctrine of the two natures in one Divine Person of Christ. All present arose and exclaimed: “That is the faith of the Fathers; that is the faith of the Apostles! So we all believe! Peter has spoken through Leo!” However, the definition of the Council of Chalcedon failed to be accepted by the whole Church. The Monophysite controversy went on for nearly a hundred years. Finally, all those parts of the Eastern Empire in which Greek was not the language of the people severed themselves from the Church and have remained in schism: the Copts in Egypt, the Jacobites in Syria, the Armenians, and the Abyssinians.
The Monophysite heresy led to the Monotheletism heresy (monon = one and thelema = will). In an effort to conciliate the Monophysites, Sergius, Patriarch of Constantinople since AD 610, thought that by declaring there was only one will in Christ, the Syrian and Egyptian Monophysites would be satisfied and give up their schism. The Church opposed this teaching in the VI Council of Constantinople. The Church maintained that Christ was one person, with two natures, both human and divine, and both natures were in perfect accord.
These are the heresies that relate directly to Christ. There are many others. Another heresy popular today is the heresy of Pelagianism, the belief that humans can obtain salvation solely through their own efforts, and the heresy of Universalism, the belief that everyone will achieve salvation.
Michal E. Hunt Copyright © 1999