Editor's Note: The following is a transcript of the Core episode Nine of the Most Notorious Ancient Heretics. Listen to the full episode here. This transcript has been edited for length and ease of reading.
The word heresy is closely associated with the idea of schism, breaking off from the church, and theologians have made a distinction between formal and material heresy. Formal heresy is a stubborn denial of vital Christian doctrine—those who have heard the truth and then rejected it. Material heresy is what happens when a person embraces a false doctrine out of ignorance. One of the ways we combat material heresy is through education, knowing the Scriptures and the history of Christian doctrine.
Let's examine nine of the most notorious heretics in Christian history.
1. Simon Magus
In Acts chapter 8, Simon the Magician was the guy who wanted to purchase the power of the Holy Spirit from the apostles. He saw them performing miracles and essentially wanted to buy the ability to impart the Holy Spirit to whoever he laid his hands on. The early Christian apologist Irenaeus says that after Simon was rebuked by the apostles, he grew more and more full of himself and taught others that he was the loftiest of all powers. Irenaeus didn't just see Simon as a heretic but as the father of heretics. Many saw him also as the originator of Gnosticism, from the Greek word gnosis, which was a second- and third-century aberration of Christian doctrine. Gnosticism was often characterized by a spirit-matter dualism—spirit is good, matter is bad—together with a focus on secret knowledge imparted only to a select few, the “spiritual ones.”
Many of the heretics in this list have Gnostic tendencies, and you can't talk about early Christian heresy without bringing up Gnosticism.
2. Marcion of Pontus
Marcion had been excommunicated by the church in Rome, and he founded his own sect around 144 AD, setting the law (i.e., the Old Testament) in full opposition to the gospel (i.e., the New Testament). Marcion subsequently rejected the Old Testament and was thus deemed a heretic. He is another one of those fountainheads of Gnosticism, adopting a radical duality between flesh and spirit. Marcion didn't like the physical body or sex or childbirth even, and these were all a part of the “lower” and “less spiritual” world that we're trying to break free from.
3. The Phrygian prophet Montanus
In the middle of the second century between 135 and 175 AD, Montanism was a charismatic, moralistic, and apocalyptic sect that broke from the Christian church, in part because its adherents didn't think the Christian church was rigorous or holy enough. Montanus claimed that Jesus's promise about the coming helper or the Paraclete referred to him. He had signs and wonders and visions. As time progressed, Montanism got more and more strange. There were reports of people being baptized in the name of the Father and of the Son and Lord Montanus, making it clear that as time went on, Montanism fell into Trinitarian heresy.
4. Sabellius
Sabellius is a heretic out of Rome in the early third century. He was excommunicated by Callixtus, the Bishop of Rome, for the heresy of modalism, which teaches that the terms “Father” and “Son” don't refer to real distinctions in the godhead—the Father and the Son are really the same person. It emphasizes the oneness of God while undermining the clear and biblical differentiation between the persons of the Holy Trinity.
This kind of thinking often led to another heresy called patripassianism, the belief that the Father underwent the same suffering that the Son experienced throughout his life and especially on the cross.
5. Arius
Arius, an Alexandrian priest, died sometime around 336 AD. He taught that the Son, Jesus, was divine with a lowercase d. Appealing to various passages in the Bible like Proverbs 8, which speaks of the creation of wisdom, and texts in the Gospels where Jesus said that the Father was greater than he was, Arius argued that the Son was the first created being of the Father through which the Father fashioned the universe. This meant that the Son wasn't eternal but that he had a beginning.
But the Arians couldn't escape the fact that the entire church worshiped Jesus. They were left with a theology that subordinated Jesus to the Father even while having to affirm the universal practice of the church to worship Jesus as equal with God. The modern-day Jehovah's Witness cult has basically tried to revive Arius's teaching, but it stands condemned definitively by the teaching of Scripture and also explicitly at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 AD.
6. Donatus
Donatus was the fourth-century founder of a North African sect that, like the Montanists, was concerned with the ethical purity of the church. Donatism was the belief that the grace that God gave the church through the sacraments was jeopardized by the holiness, or rather the lack of holiness, of the person administering those sacred ordinances.
This resulted in the Donatists separating themselves from the church and claiming that they were the true church because they were holier than everyone else. At the heart of the problem with the Donatist belief was that it made the grace of God dependent upon man rather than upon God's word and promise. They put too much of an emphasis on man and not enough of an emphasis on God's objective promises in the sacraments.
7. Apollinaris
Apollinaris of Laodicea lived from 310 to 390 AD. He was actually an opponent of Arius, but in seeking to defend the deity of Christ, he swung too far in the other direction. He taught that in the incarnation, the Word took a human body, but not a human soul or mind. Rather, the Word or Logos replaced the human spirit animating the flesh of Christ.
If in one sense Arius rejected the full divinity of Christ, Apollinaris rejected the full humanity of Christ, which is what made his error so serious. Remember, the author to the Hebrews said regarding Jesus, "Therefore, he had to be made like his brothers in every respect so that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God to make propitiation for the sins of the people." Apollinaris' teaching was condemned at the First Council of Chalcedon in 381.
8. Nestorius
Like Apollinaris, Nestorius had problems with how he articulated the doctrine of Christ, especially with regard to the incarnation. For him, Mary gave birth to a man who was sort of a vehicle for divinity. Nestorius' critics argued that he verged on splitting the God-Man, Jesus, into two separate persons, as opposed to one person with two distinct and inseparable natures, divine and human.
Nestorius also didn't want to attribute human suffering to the Word. But in the incarnation, God the Son truly took humanity to himself, so it's proper to say that God the Son suffers and dies in that humanity for our redemption. Nestorius' teaching was condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD.
9. Pelagius
Condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 431, Pelagius was a British monk who believed it was possible to achieve a kind of sinless perfection without the need of divine grace, and he also rejected the doctrine of original sin. Rather than inheriting Adam's guilt by imputation, Pelagius argued that we fall into Adam's sin by imitating him of our own free will.
St. Augustine was the primary defender of the orthodox view on this point, and he appealed chiefly to Romans 5:12–14. Focusing on the broader context, Augustine argued that all mankind sinned in Adam, resulting in the corruption of our whole nature. This doesn't mean that we're as bad as we could be, but it does mean we can't save ourselves. The gospel isn't “pull yourself up by your bootstraps.” It's the grace of God meeting dead men and women in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Pelagius's theology minimized our need for grace and our need for the gospel, and that's what made it so devastating.
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You may think some of this feels like splitting hairs, but it really isn’t. Understanding God and the gospel are important, because if he took the time to reveal himself to us in Scripture, we should pay careful attention to what he said. Often heretics had great intentions, but they failed to carefully follow the words of Scripture and the wisdom of the broader church. Learning their history can guard us from repeating their errors.
