Old Heresies Never Die
Old
Christian heresies never die. Nor do they quite fade away. They
linger on in an underground way. They continue to be believed by
otherwise good Christians who don’t realize they are holding on to an old
heresy.
Monophysites believed that Jesus had a divine nature, but
they were not at all convinced that he had a human nature. He was God, but
he was not man. He was only pretending to be human.
They
were also Pelagians. They believed that we could be good if only we tried
hard enough. They didn’t honestly believe in the Augustinian idea – the
Catholic idea – that we are unable to perform a single good deed without the
grace of God.
Or
take the ancient Manichean heresy, which Saint Augustine was attached to for a
number of years. The Manicheans believed that there are two fundamental
powers (or gods) locked in an everlasting struggle, a good God (purely
spiritual) versus a bad God (purely material). If you were a good person
you tried to help the good God, and if you were a bad person you tried to help
the bad God. And, of course, you expected that the God of your choice
would, in turn, help you.
My guess is that the witches who
abounded in the late middle ages were latter-day Manicheans who had decided to
serve on the side of the bad God, hoping that their God (the Devil) would help
them in their many earthly concerns. Of course, they didn’t realize they
were de facto Manicheans. How could they, being poor and
uneducated? Jesus, as they saw things, was on the side of respectable
people. So they had little choice but to turn to the Devil.
Today,
in the Catholic world (or at least in the American Catholic world), the old
heresy that flourishes underground and unwittingly is that of Marcion. He
was born in the Greek city of Sinope (in Asia Minor, on the Black Sea) about AD
85 and died about AD 160 in Rome, where he had been excommunicated from the
Church.
Marcion taught that the God of the Old Testament
and the God of the New Testament were two quite different Gods. The God
of the OT wasn’t exactly an evil God. Instead, he was a God of
justice, and therefore it was his duty to punish the many sins of humanity
with the pain and suffering we deserve. This was the God of the
Jews. He was a material God. It was this OT God who created the
world, this world of sin and misery.
In the Marcionite view, the God of the
NT, by contrast, is a God of mercy. In keeping with his
loving, merciful nature, this higher and better God does not punish
sin. He forgives sin. He is the father of Jesus Christ. He is
a purely spiritual (nonmaterial) being. And so is Jesus, who only appears to
have a human body. This NT God saves us from the miseries of this lower
world; he brings us to heaven.
Marcion
denied that there is any continuity between Christianity and the religion of
the Jews. He rejected the Old Testament, for he thought it a book about
the inferior, material God of justice. He even rejected portions of the
New Testament. He accepted (with a few redactions) the Gospel of Luke and
ten of the Pauline epistles. Everything else, bearing traces of the Jewish
OT God, he tossed out.
I’m not saying that there are Catholics
today who embrace the whole of Marcion’s theology. No,
but there are many who embrace his central point, namely that the true God is a
God of pure mercy, not a God of justice. The true God forgives sins, he
doesn’t punish them.
It’s
not only Catholics who embrace this heresy. Modern persons generally
embrace it. Those of us with a modern mind find it hard to bear the
thought that anybody goes to Hell. Well, maybe Hitler and Stalin.
And even they should not be kept there for eternity. After – say – ten
thousand years, they should be set free.
And
among Catholics, it is not only rank-and-file Catholics who think God is a God
of mercy-but-not-justice. A few years back Pope Francis established a
Year of Mercy. Will he soon declare a Year of Justice – a year in which
to remind ourselves of the ancient teaching of the Church and the Bible, that
the God of Christianity is a God who punishes sin?
Pope Francis, as he demonstrated
in Amoris Laetitia, wants mercy to be shown to
divorced-and-remarried Catholics. And as he demonstrated in his recent
amendment to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, he wants mercy to be shown
to those who commit horrible murders.
And
as he demonstrated in his revocation of the restrictions imposed by Pope
Benedict on Cardinal McCarrick, he wants mercy to be shown to homosexual
prelates who have inflicted immeasurable harm on the Church.
Old
heresies, as I say, never quite die.
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