Ancient Heresies in Modern Dress

​Two recent articles in the American journal of opinion First Things remind us that the Church’s struggle against heresy, begun with the councils, is never ending. In both cases the heresy arises not from a conscious wish to resurrect an ancient error but from woeful and all too widespread ignorance of the Christian tradition, and from the understandable desire to find something that fits our earthly sense of what is right.

​The first concerns the error associated with the name of Marcion, a preacher active in Rome in the middle of the second century, who found the Old Testament to be unacceptable because of its harsh and rigid rules. It was to be rejected, replaced by the New Testament message of love and salvation through faith alone.

Wesley Hill published a First Things Web Exclusive on 11 May 2018 entitled ‘Andy Stanley’s Modern Marcionism.’ Andy Stanley is the pastor of North Point Community Church, a ‘non-denominational’ Evangelical megachurch in Alpharetta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta. He recently preached a sermon to his church’s congregation of thousands on the passage in Acts 15 where the assembly of the apostles and elders in Jerusalem, meeting to decide what observances should be required of gentile converts, declared, ‘that we trouble not them, which from among the Gentiles are turned to God: but that we write unto them, that they abstain from pollutions of idols, and from fornication, and from things strangled, and from blood’ (verses 19–20).

​The conclusion the pastor drew from this, as quoted by Wesley Hill, was that the ‘Church leaders unhitched the church from the worldview, value system, and regulations of Jewish scriptures.’ The gospel ‘is completely detached … from everything that came before.’ With the Incarnation, ‘God’s arrangement with Israel should now be eliminated from the equation.’

​‘Jesus’s new covenant … can stand on its own two nail-scarred resurrection feet. It does not need propping up by the Jewish scriptures.
‘It’s liberating for men and woman who are drawn to the simple message that God loves you so much He sent His Son to pave the way to a relationship with you.
‘And it’s liberating for people who find it virtually impossible to embrace the dynamic, the worldview, and the values system depicted in the story of Ancient Israel.’

​This may be comforting to some but the problem with it is the same as with Marcion’s rejection of the ‘Jewish scriptures’—it is a rejection of the Christian faith, because that faith is that the New Testament is not the abolition of the Old Testament but its fulfilment. Contrary to the teaching of Marcion, the God of the New Testament is the same as the God of the Old, declaring the same message to mankind in both. To reject the Old Testament must inevitably lead to misinterpretation of the New, in Pastor Stanley’s case to the teaching that the worldview and value system of the New Testament are not the same as those of the Old.
(Some of the quotations above appear in an article by Michael Gryboski in the Christian Post of 9 May 2018, accessed on line.)

​The second article concerns the gnostic heresy, the radical dualism that holds matter to be inherently evil and spirit alone to be good. As Hans Urs von Balthasar said, gnosticism remains Christianity’s most insidious enemy, as the writings of Elaine Pagels, Bart D. Ehrman, Karen L. King and Tom Harpur show.

Abigail Rine Favale published ‘Evangelical Gnosticism,’ in the May 2018 issue of First Things. She teaches in a great books program at an Evangelical university, most of her students being ‘born-and-bred Christians of the nondenominational variety.’ (p. 13) In the course of her teaching, she discovered that, when it came to the resurrection of the dead, barely a quarter of her students held the orthodox belief that we will ‘have a body in our glorified, heavenly form.’ (p. 14) The majority associated the body with sin, a fetter on the soul, and saw it as only natural that we would be disembodied souls in heaven.

​As Favale points out, the resurrection of the body is not a peripheral doctrinal issue, it is at the very centre of the Christian conception of salvation. For the Christian, the body is not an accidental appendage of the soul, we as human beings in the image and likeness of God are an indissoluble union of body and soul. This is why the Word was made flesh (John 1:13), so that we might be saved, body and soul as one.

​She refers us to Book XIV of St Augustine’s City of God, where this issue is dealt with in detail. I am grateful to her for this reference, as I was culpably ignorant of the fundamental point that St Augustine makes there.

​St Augustine provides an exegesis of St Paul’s well-known passage in Galatians 5:19-21:

​‘Now the works of the flesh are manifest, which are these; Adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.’

​St Augustine says in Chapter 2 of Book XIV:

​‘… in the works of the flesh, which he said were plain to see and which he enumerated and condemned, we find not only those that involve carnal pleasure, like fornication, impurity, licentiousness or carousing, but also those that display mental defects which have nothing to do with carnal pleasure. In the case of idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, dissension, party spirit and envy, surely no one doubts that we have here defects of the mind rather than of the body. For it may happen that a person abstains from bodily pleasures because he worships idols or follows the mistaken doctrine of some sect; and yet even so, though such a person appears to check and curb his carnal desires, he stands convicted, on this same authority of the apostle, of living according to the flesh. In this case, his very abstention from pleasures of the flesh proves that he is engaged in the damnable works of the flesh.’

​In other words, St Paul is contrasting, not the sinful body with the stainless soul, but a way of life separated from God, the life of the flesh, with a way of life united to God, the life of the spirit. Further, as St Augustine points out in Chapter 3 of the book, contrary to the doctrines of Plato and Manichæus, the body is not a fetter on the soul, but rather the corruption of the body is due to the sinfulness of the soul.

​St Augustine sums up in Chapter 5: 

​‘In the case of our sins and vices then we should not do an injustice to our creator by blaming the nature of the flesh, which is good in its own kind and order. But if a person abandons the good creator to live according to some created good, it is not good, whether he chooses to live according to the flesh or according to the soul or according to the whole man … For when anyone approves the substance of the soul as the highest good and denounces the substance of the flesh as an evil, surely he is carnal both in his pursuit of the soul and in his avoidance of the flesh inasmuch as it is through human vanity and not divine truth that he holds this view.’
(Loeb Classical Library, trans. Philip Levine, IV, pp. 265–283.)