Damien
New member
I've seen an attempt in this age to relativize Christianity or to merge it with other religions. The headlines are full of a number of deviations from it which have resulted in the emergence of satellite religions, or “cults,” that sometimes claim to be Christian but that have denied something fundamental about the Christian faith and have therefore diverged from the core beliefs of orthodox Christianity.
Often they have substituted other beliefs of their own, and this has merely increased the gulf that separates them from the main body of the church. This pattern is known to Christians as “heresy,” and it has existed in one form or another since New Testament times. In the early church there were a number of self-appointed charismatic teachers who formally accepted the teaching of the apostles but transformed its substance into something incompatible with the gospel. One of the best known of these was Marcion , who tried to abolish the Old Testament and cut the church off from its Jewish roots, something that would have made the life and work of Christ incomprehensible.
A number of such teachers have been loosely grouped together by modern scholars, who have labeled them “gnostics” because they created a hierarchy of being and of spiritual awareness that the newly initiated believer was expected to master before he could attain to true knowledge.
These “gnostics” were imbued with a spirit of Platonism that denied the goodness of matter and postulated a world of forms and ideas as the true reality. No “gnostic” could accept the incarnation of the Son of God, a doctrine which went completely against their basic worldview, and so their way of thinking had to be expunged from the church. Today they are known mainly from the writings of their opponents or from manuscripts that have been discovered in recent times. In the fourth century the great heresy of Arianism, which denied the full divinity of Christ, created its own church that survived for a few centuries, but it seems to have died out by A.D. 600 at the latest.
Other heresies have come and gone over the centuries, but almost all of them eventually died out. The ones that exist today do not go back any further than the sixteenth century, although in some cases they have picked up ideas that are much older and have integrated them into their own systems of thought. For example, it is often said that modern Jehovah’s Witnesses are latter-day Arians because, like them, they also deny the divinity of Christ, but this resemblance is best seen as a coincidence rather than as a conscious attempt to revive fourth-century Arianism.
Today, the oldest and most lasting deviation from Christianity has been Unitarianism. It also seems the be the most disgusted here on this forum.
Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement named for its belief that the God in Christianity is one entity, as opposed to the Trinity which defines God as three persons in one being; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Unitarian Christians, therefore, believe that Jesus was inspired by God in his moral teachings, and he is a savior, but he was not a deity or God incarnate. Unitarianism does not constitute one single Christian denomination, but rather refers to a collection of both extant and extinct Christian groups, whether historically related to each other or not, which share a common theological concept of the oneness nature of God.
Often they have substituted other beliefs of their own, and this has merely increased the gulf that separates them from the main body of the church. This pattern is known to Christians as “heresy,” and it has existed in one form or another since New Testament times. In the early church there were a number of self-appointed charismatic teachers who formally accepted the teaching of the apostles but transformed its substance into something incompatible with the gospel. One of the best known of these was Marcion , who tried to abolish the Old Testament and cut the church off from its Jewish roots, something that would have made the life and work of Christ incomprehensible.
A number of such teachers have been loosely grouped together by modern scholars, who have labeled them “gnostics” because they created a hierarchy of being and of spiritual awareness that the newly initiated believer was expected to master before he could attain to true knowledge.
These “gnostics” were imbued with a spirit of Platonism that denied the goodness of matter and postulated a world of forms and ideas as the true reality. No “gnostic” could accept the incarnation of the Son of God, a doctrine which went completely against their basic worldview, and so their way of thinking had to be expunged from the church. Today they are known mainly from the writings of their opponents or from manuscripts that have been discovered in recent times. In the fourth century the great heresy of Arianism, which denied the full divinity of Christ, created its own church that survived for a few centuries, but it seems to have died out by A.D. 600 at the latest.
Other heresies have come and gone over the centuries, but almost all of them eventually died out. The ones that exist today do not go back any further than the sixteenth century, although in some cases they have picked up ideas that are much older and have integrated them into their own systems of thought. For example, it is often said that modern Jehovah’s Witnesses are latter-day Arians because, like them, they also deny the divinity of Christ, but this resemblance is best seen as a coincidence rather than as a conscious attempt to revive fourth-century Arianism.
Today, the oldest and most lasting deviation from Christianity has been Unitarianism. It also seems the be the most disgusted here on this forum.
Unitarianism is a Christian theological movement named for its belief that the God in Christianity is one entity, as opposed to the Trinity which defines God as three persons in one being; the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Unitarian Christians, therefore, believe that Jesus was inspired by God in his moral teachings, and he is a savior, but he was not a deity or God incarnate. Unitarianism does not constitute one single Christian denomination, but rather refers to a collection of both extant and extinct Christian groups, whether historically related to each other or not, which share a common theological concept of the oneness nature of God.
