Heresies: Then and Now

 

Heresy has always been present in the church. It was present in the old dispensation when, already at Sinai, Israel worshiped a golden calf, which they said was the god who had delivered them from Egypt (Ex. 32:4). God's constant warning against false prophets could only have been due to the presence in Israel of men who were corrupting the truth, for example in Deuteronomy 13:1-5.

The times of Christ and the apostles were no different. Christ repeatedly warned against the heresies of the scribes, Sadducees, and Pharisees, who took away the key of knowledge (Luke 11:52) and crucified the Christ, who is the way, the truth, and the life (John 14:6).

Paul frequently had to write his epistles to combat false doctrine; to the Colossians to ward off an incipient gnosticism; to the Galatians to defeat the Judaizers; and to the Thessalonians to correct errors in eschatology that they had learned from false teachers. Both Peter in 2 Peter 2 and Jude in his epistle warned against the evil men who were attempting to lead the church astray.

From the end of apostolic era until the present, the church has never been free from the threat of false doctrine. Fighting false doctrine is so crucial a part of the church's existence in the world that to ignore it is to run the risk of not understanding church history at all. One cannot learn anything significant about a man whose biography has been omitted the most important events in his life. One cannot understand the history of the church militant without understanding her battles against false doctrine.

A striking feature of heresy over the ages is the reappearance of false doctrines that had been taught in earlier times. Solomon tells us that there is nothing new under the sun (Eccl. 1:9). This is true of heresy as well as every other event. Heresy may appear in new clothing, but it remains the same heresy against which the church has fought many centuries earlier.

We can, therefore, learn from heresy and from the battle that the saints fought against it; the heresies are always very much the same. The church's calling today is no different from the calling of the church in past years: "Be thou faithful unto death" (Rev. 2:10).

If we live in ignorance of the church of past years, knowing nothing of its struggles, battles, temptations, and heresies it faced, we will be at a terrible disadvantage in our own time when heresy rises in our own church or denomination. False doctrine will seem to us to be only a new insight into the truth, and we will lose the benefit of the experience and struggle as well as the victory of our brethren from earlier centuries. We will be an easier prey for the enemy.

Knowledge of the past will give us knowledge to use in our own battles, give us assurance that Christ preserves His church against all the attacks of the enemy, provide us with skill in defending our faith, and make us joyful in knowing more fully its great truths as the Spirit of our ascended Christ has led the church to confess them.

May God be glorified through the story of the defense of His truth, and may the church be thereby strengthened in her calling.

Excerpted from the preface of Herman Hanko's 

Contending for the Faith, xvii-xviii

http://rfpa.org/collections/books-by-herman-hanko/products/contending-for-the-faith 

THE GREAT HERESIES that have destroyed many churches in the past, and that in in the process of destroying many other churches today

 With regard to the specific gross heresies that sweep a church away from Christ to antichrist, away from God to Satan, away from the true church to the false church, they include the following according to Scripture and the Reformed creeds.

There is the gross heresy that Jesus is not God come in the flesh (1 John 4:1-6). This is the lie of liberalism, particularly Protestant liberalism. But this lie has many aspects. And we must not suppose that this lie at once enters a church in the gross form of an outright denial of the deity of Jesus and of the Trinity. Usually, it enters a church in the form of a rejection of sovereign grace in salvation. Arminianism leads to theological liberalism. Arminianism is incipient theological liberalism. it is incipient theological liberalism by virtue of Arminianism's denial that God's (one) gracious will for the salvation of (elect) sinners is effectual. An ineffectual, dependent god is not the God of classical (biblical) Christianity.

There is the lie that salvation is earned by, or dependent on, the works of the sinner. This is the false doctrine of Rome. This error is exposed in the book of Galatians.

There is the lie of salvation by, and dependent on, the free will of the sinner. This is the false doctrine of much of evangelicalism, fundamentalism, and neo-Pentecostalism today. Paul condemns the doctrine of free will as a form of a false gospel that characterizes a false church: "[Salvation] is not of him that willeth, nor of him that runneth, but of God that sheweth mercy" (Rom. 9:16). The Synod of Dordt condemned this lie as a false gospel on behalf of all Reformed churches everywhere to the end of time.

But the doctrine of free will comes into churches subtly, usually by means of a teaching that, although there is a predestination of some to salvation (about which the churches hear less and less), there is also a universal love and grace of God in Christ that desires the salvation of all without exception and that goes out to all without exception, attempting the salvation of all.This universal grace, in the nature of the theory, is not efficacious, so that the implication is that the reception of this grace depends on the sinner's acceptance of it (about which the churches hear more and more as time goes on). The time to fight this false gospel to the death as at the point of its subtle introduction into a Reformed church). "Obsta principiis!" ("Resist the beginnings!")

In an informative book, the Presbyterian Gary North (with whom I have crossed swords over Christian Reconstruction post-millennialism) demonstrates that the apostasy of the once-great Presbyterian Church (USA), the church of the Hodges and Warfield, into deepest, darkest liberalism began in the early 1900s with the insertion into the Westminster Confession of an article teaching a universal love and grace of God and a desire of God for the salvation of all without exception. The revision of the confession, in 1903, consisted of a "missions-related affirmation that God loves humanity in general and seeks the salvation of all mankind - a denial, in other words, of God's 'double predestination' of fallen mankind to either heaven or hell."The apostasy of the Presbyterian Church (USA) went this way: "from Calvinism to Arminianism to liberalism."

I for one do not intend to be the reason that my grandchildren must fight criticism of Scripture, rejection of the deity of Christ, and denial of the resurrection of the body, because I would not fight the beginnings of liberalism in the denial of God's sovereignty in the salvation of elect sinners. Besides, I regard the false gospel of salvation by the free will of the sinner, making an inherently impotent cross effective for oneself, as being as much a denial of the gospel as is outright liberalism.

There is also the gross heresy that criticizes Scripture as a human word and a human book, full of errors, subject to the critical judgment of man's mind, whether his scientific mind, his philosophical mind, his ethical mind, or his religious mind. Invariably, it enters a church by the criticism of the opening chapters of the Bible. The battle should be fought there. If the battle with unbelief is lost in a church at Genesis 1, the end will be the criticism of the opening chapters of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

There is the gross heresy of mysticism: salvation not by faith in Christ according to the word, but by feeling, by direct, emotional contact with God. This is the horrendous error of the charismatic movement, in addition to its other errors. But this movement does not take a church over all at once with the introduction of new prophecies, holy laughter, being slain in the Spirit, and other such monstrosities. It will seek entrance by asking for the "mere" approval of the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit in our age.

There is the gross heresy of antinomianism. This appeared already in the apostolic churches, as 2 Peter, Jude, ad the Nicolaitans and Jezebel in Revelation 2 and  3 prove. This is the error of licentiousness as the lawful implication of grace. But also this evil does not appear in a church full-blown: "Let us sin that grace may abound." Rather, it comes in almost innocuously: "We must not discipline the man or woman, but in love receive him or her, even though he or she walks impenitently in sin. Is Jesus not merciful (especially to my son or my daughter)? Is not God a God of love? Doesn't God forgive sinner's?" This seemingly Christian attitude and mind are, in fact, an attack on the third mark of the church. Their sentiment is also another gospel than the gospel of Scripture. The gospel of Scripture teaches salvation from sin, not salvation only from the punishment of sin, as though the forgiven sinner can, and even may, continue impenitently in the bondage of sin, to the great dishonoring of a holy God. The evangelical churches in the United States, in addition to their other errors, are antinomian through and through.

These are the great heresies that have destroyed many churches in the past, and that are in the process of destroying many other churches today.

Every believer must be on guard against them in his or her own church and fight them if they begin to appear.

Out of a love of the truth!

Prof. David J. Engelsma 

Bound to Join, pp.143-146