Dr. Nathan Busenitz · The Master's Seminary · 70 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Nathan Busenitz, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
Christ and the apostles promised false teachers would come, and this lecture watches them arrive. Busenitz surveys the great early heresies and shows how each forced the church to articulate the truth more clearly, and how nearly every one of them has been regurgitated as a modern cult. Satan, he argues, rarely invents; he relabels.
The New Testament is thick with warnings: false prophets known by their fruits, savage wolves not sparing the flock from Paul's own farewell at Miletus, doctrines of demons in the latter times, ears itching for comfortable teachers, mockers following their own lusts. Believers were told to examine everything carefully, and elders are qualified precisely by the ability to exhort in sound doctrine and refute those who contradict. Studying the history of error is part of obeying that charge.
The Ebionites, first named in the second century, carried the Judaizers' program forward: Justin Martyr reports they held the law of Moses obligatory for Christians, and Irenaeus, first to use the name, likely a wordplay on the Hebrew for poor, wrote against them. They went further than legalism: they denied Christ's deity, the Trinity, the virgin birth, and substitutionary atonement, teaching adoptionism, that Jesus became God's Son at his baptism, and used an altered Gospel according to the Hebrews. Almost everything we know of them comes from the church's replies, since their own writings perished.
Busenitz traces a nineteenth century American pattern he calls restorationism: groups spun off around the Second Great Awakening claiming to have recovered a primitive Christianity lost since the apostles, among them the Churches of Christ, Mormonism, Seventh day Adventism, the Jehovah's Witnesses, and Pentecostalism. Seventh day Adventism, reintroducing dietary law and Sabbath keeping, is in his telling an Ebionite hybrid reborn on American soil.
Before the deity of Christ was ever attacked, his humanity was. Docetism, from a word meaning appearance, taught that Jesus only seemed to have a body, since Greek dualism held matter evil and spirit good. John answered it directly: the Spirit of God confesses Jesus Christ come in the flesh, and the spirit that will not is antichrist. Deny the incarnation and the gospel collapses, for a sacrificial death must be a real death and a mediator between God and men must be a real man.
Full grown Gnosticism, second and third century, wrapped docetism inside a mythology: an unknowable supreme divinity, cascading emanations called aeons, and salvation not from sin but from the evil physical universe, attained by secret knowledge, passwords for the ascent through the spiritual realms. In the Valentinian version Irenaeus fought in his five volume Against Heresies, the aeon Sophia falls, her castoff thought bears the Demiurge, an ignorant creator identified with the God of the Old Testament, and the docetic Christ passes through Mary like water through a tube to awaken the enlightened. Paul's phrase fits: knowledge falsely so called.
Even the secular critic Harold Bloom called Mormonism a purely American gnosis. Busenitz reads from Joseph Smith's King Follett discourse: few rightly understand God's character; within man is a spark of divine intellect co-equal with God; a multitude of gods emanated one above another; God was once a man, and man may become a god. Emanated deities, divine sparks, celestial marriages peopling new worlds, and Smith's Masonic ties to secret knowledge: the parallels to ancient Gnosticism run deep.
Marcion, son of a Christian bishop, taught that the wrathful God of the Old Testament was a different and lesser being than the loving heavenly Father of the New, anticipating the modern new atheist caricature. He therefore rejected the whole Old Testament and kept only an edited Luke and edited Paul, scissoring out everything favorable to the Old Testament, which left him mostly his own ideas. Scripture itself refutes the split: the Old Testament's God is described above all by lovingkindness, and the New Testament's God judges sin and punishes evil. Same God, one Bible.
Third century Manichaeism blended Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Gnosticism into a dualism of a realm of light and a realm of darkness locked in eternal struggle, with no omnipotent good and each person a battlefield of both. Busenitz's metaphor for all such syncretism: a glass of water with poison stirred in; the truth mixed in does not purify the poison, the poison contaminates the whole.
Scripture teaches both that there is one God and that the Father is God, the Son is God, and the Spirit is God, three distinct persons. Monarchianism could not hold both and denied the second. Its adoptionist form made Jesus a man promoted to sonship; its modalist form, championed by Sabellius, made Father, Son, and Spirit successive masks of one person: Father in the Old Testament, Son in the Gospels, Spirit now. The fathers called modalism patripassianism, for it entails that the Father suffered on the cross.
At Jesus's baptism the Son stands in the water, the Spirit descends, and the Father speaks: three at once, impossible for a God of one mode at a time. To whom did Jesus pray? And baptism is into the one name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Modalism survives today in Oneness Pentecostalism, a controversy that resurfaced when T. D. Jakes, long associated with Oneness groups, was platformed at the Elephant Room. The orthodox path holds both truths and rests the harmony in the mind of God rather than denying either.
Montanus of Asia Minor, with the prophetesses Priscilla and Maximilla, announced the age of the Paraclete and delivered ecstatic prophecies he claimed were the Spirit's own binding words, prophesying in the first person as the Spirit. The church rejected the movement: its trance possession was not how the Spirit works; Christ's promise of the Spirit's guidance belonged to the apostles; its prophecies failed, Maximilla foretold nothing after her but the end, and died in 179 with history continuing; it damned non-adherents as unspiritual; and some Montanists slid into Sabellianism. Busenitz draws the parallels to modern Pentecostalism point by point.
None of these movements went to waste in God's providence. Montanus's claim of new inspiration pressed the church to recognize and circulate the apostolic canon; Marcion's scissors forced clarity about which books carried authority; the Gnostics and modalists forced precise confession of the incarnation and the Trinity. Rome's persecutors made no distinction, and Montanists sometimes died beside the orthodox; Tertullian himself, disgusted by what he saw as worldly compromise, defected to Montanist strictness, a story the course will return to. Error, answered faithfully, sharpened the church's grip on the truth.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What did Paul warn the Ephesian elders would happen after his departure?
2. The Ebionites were the theological descendants of whom?
3. What is adoptionism?
4. What does Busenitz mean by restorationism?
5. Which aspect of Christ did docetism deny?
6. In Gnosticism, what saves a person?
7. Who is the Demiurge in Gnostic myth?
8. Which teaching of Joseph Smith does the lecture set beside Gnostic emanations?
9. What did Marcion do with the Old Testament?
10. Why did the fathers call modalism patripassianism?
11. Which biblical scene makes one mode at a time impossible?
12. In which modern movement does modalism survive?
13. Why did Maximilla's prophecy discredit the New Prophecy?
14. What good did God bring out of Marcion's and Montanus's errors?
All fourteen correct. Lecture 6 is complete.
Busenitz says Satan rarely invents new errors, he relabels old ones. Which modern teaching you have encountered matches one of tonight's ancient heresies, and how would you answer it from Scripture?
The modalists denied one biblical truth to relieve the tension with another. Where are we tempted to shave down a hard doctrine to make it easier to hold, and what does it cost?
Tertullian fled worldliness in the church and landed in a heretical strictness. How does a Christian resist compromise without swinging to an opposite error?
John's test for every spirit, from his first letter: the Spirit of God confesses Jesus Christ come in the flesh.
The lecture's own commendations: Bryan Litfin's Getting to Know the Church Fathers on Irenaeus and the Gnostics, Nick Needham's 2,000 Years of Christ's Power on Montanism, and Stephen Nichols's For Us and for Our Salvation on the Christological battles.