Answers for a Friend – Early Heresy
February 2, 2003
Dear Friends,
It was a short, quick road on the way to apostasy for the early ecclesia. The three primary heretical movements that brought this about were the Judaizers, the Gnostics and the Platonists.
The Judaizers came on the scene while the Apostles were still living. Most of the letters of the Apostle Paul are directed in some portion addressing this false doctrine. It is important to the story because it acted to weaken the ecclesia that the later heresies made a deeper and more permanent wound.
The Gnostics were a group of “Christians” who thought they had a special knowledge that the average Christian did not possess. The Greek word for knowledge is “gnosis.” A leader of this movement was a man named Valentius (you may sometimes hear of Gnosticism referred to as Valentinianism). One of the defining doctrines of Gnosticism was that Jesus was a spirit and therefore did not come in the flesh. The ultimate conclusion that they reached was that flesh was nothing. This conclusion divided the Gnostics into two opposing camps – those that practiced asceticism (denying themselves any of life’s pleasures including marriage) and those that practiced gross immorality. Surprisingly, the majority of Gnostics practised asceticism.
The Gnostics left many marks on Christianity, but no other doctrine had a greater impact than the assertion that they had secret instructions directly from Christ and through the Apostles. The mark was not left by the doctrine itself, but by the corrective measures that the early ecclesia took to combat it. To the Gnostics it did not matter what Jesus had said publically or what the Scriptures said. They had a secret knowledge which made them above reproach. This created a huge problem for anyone wishing to address this heresy. If you cannot agree to a basis for truth such as Scripture, how do you establish truth?
The first and early second century believers had two responses. One was to establish the canon of New Testament scripture and the other was to elevate the local bishops and deacons to authoritative figures. The former development, the canonization of the New Testament, is universally agreed upon by Protestant churches including Christadelphians while the latter is more controversial.
In and of itself, the initial elevation of the clergy class was somewhat benign. There was a genuine threat to the ecclesia by the Gnostics and honest men tried their best to face it in the best way they knew how. Establishing highly esteemed brethren in positions to guide the ecclesia was one of the methods used by the Apostle Paul to address the Judaizer problem (e.g.. Titus 1:5). However, when men like Clement tried to take it to higher levels, they introduced a system that would bring about the politicization and subjugation of the ecclesia. The full effect of this system would take another hundred years or more to fully develop.
Along with another man named Marcion, another Gnostic “contribution” to Christianity was the devaluation of the Old Testament. Both of these groups taught that the God of the New Testament was entirely different from the God of the Old Testament. While the Apostle’s constantly appealed to the Old Testament as proof of what is true, this new group of Christians taught that the first century Jewish believers had entirely misinterpreted the mind of Jesus. The basis assumption was that the Apostles did not possess the insight to comprehend the true meaning of Jesus in appealing to the Old Testament as proof that Jesus was the promised Messiah. Thus, with these groups, the Old Testament was seen at best as a lesser work and at worst something to be discarded as useless or misleading.
So far, then, we have identified the beginnings of the professional clergy and the devaluation of the Old Testament. We will pick up here, next week, Lord willing.
Have a great week!
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