A Beggar At The Table

All I have to say is, Kyrie Eleison.

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Basilides is another of the “lost in the mists” heretics who is known primarily for his own twist on Docetism. He was promenent as a teacher in Alexandria from about AD 120-140. Other than that, little is known of his life. Fragments of his teachings have been preserved in various apologetic writings against him, such as Irenaeus (see, for example, ANF 1 p.348-350). Docetism, as we have already examined, is the teaching that Christ only seemed to be human, from the Greek verb dokeo, to seem.

Basilides, from Egypt, is best known for being, as far as we can tell, the first to venture the heretical hypothesis later adopted, in modified form, by Islam and some other groups, that Jesus Himself was not crucified, but that Simon of Cyrene was crucified in the place of Christ. Again, as with most of the Gnostic heresies, this is a reading of the Gospel (in this case, and appropriately for one coming out of Egypt, the Gospel according to St. Mark) which is implausible, and, really, just plain wrong, but which has just enough historical accuracy that the unwitting could be duped.

Other than that, he appears to have adopted a more-or-less Aristotelian system of divinity in which Christ was a part of the pantheon (similar to Valentinianism) but not as developed. Like Marcion, he saw Jesus as being the representative and first-born of the unseen Father, who is much highter ranking than the Creator of this world, who, in Basilides’ system, appears to be little more than a very high-ranking angel.

Basilides’ system did kind of explain some of the language used in the psalms of the councils of the gods and such (if by way of misinterpretation), but the big con is that it is completely constructed. One doesn’t get the articulated system he presents from Hebrew Scripture, but rather from a fusion of Greek mythology and philosophy. It isn’t a big wonder, therefore, that he treats Christ as a theophany (appearance of a god) rather than an incarnation. The system he constructed was nothing, if not rigorous.

But, blessedly, as with all the major heretics, his system didn’t have much in the way of staying power, other than the aforementioned conjecture that Simon of Cyrene was crucified in the place of Jesus–an assertion which has sadly lived on and been preserved in Islamic tradition. (Note that Islam doesn’t necessarily teach that Simon, per se, died in Jesus place so much as it teaches that Jesus either lives forever (special prophet status) or died as an old man, about 120 years old, and that someone else other than Jesus died on the cross–and it’s the “someone else” which is the heart of Basilides’ argument, too.) And in a brief search on the web for additional sources on Basilides, there are conjectures that perhaps he was influenced by Zoroastrianism (possible) and Buddhism (not as possible, but within the realm of possibility).

With Basilides, I think we have covered most of the major early Docetists and Gnostics. Next time we’ll move a little further along in history, to some other Christological controversies.

Verse for the Commemoration of Basilides
—
Basilides
Really tidies
Up his Gnostic system with his philosophy.
(And birthed one long-lasting heresy!)

So Kelly insisted we should rent Time Bandits for a little bit of surrealism. I was quite impressed with the overall theme, although it certainly was an odd bit of movie.

And I say I was impressed with the theme because it reminded me that at the heart of our cultural materialism is a certain, real, and present evil… really, that materalism can be as much a heresy as anything else. Now, I’m about 100% sure that Gilliam and crew were probably intending to mock orthodox views of “right and wrong” and of the nature of good and evil, and traditional depictions of God and the devil. But along the way the movie is a brilliant bit of social commentary.

(If you don’t believe me about materialism being a heresy, go check out the ’sanctified’ breath mints at your local Christian bookstore.)

In other developments today, and tied not altogether indirectly to the first observation, I also read a good chunk of a book from 1961 called “Modern Heresies” by an American Episcopal named John Krumm.

The long and the short of it is that I really do despair, in some ways, of ever getting to the completion of this task (the anti-breviary) I set before myself. For the truth is that, as Krumm so adeptly observes, “It is heresy, oftentimes, which is too simple, too clear, too precise. Heresy takes up one single aspect of a multi-faceted truth and carries it too far. The secret of orthodoxy is to hold together statements that, superficially at least, appear inconsistent… Orthodoxy is not so much a closing of the door to further enquiry as it is a fencing-in of the area within which fruitful and representative enquiry can take place.” (pp. 22-23) It is a constant quest on my part to seek out and to know what is the right…but do I sometimes try to make things a little too neat and tidy? I think that question ties in quite nicely with a lot of the sanctified navel-gazing which tends to occur on the Lutheran blogsphere. We want the tidy, neat answers and God gives us this messy yet redeemed-in-Christ world to live in. We want precisely ordered statements of theology which cover all possible points and God gives us His Word.

Funny how God gives us what we need, rather than what we want.

And again, “C. S. Lewis has reminded us that the heresies which we like to belabor and condemn and from which we prefer to celebrate our freedom are the heresies of a generation other than our own.” (67) I fear that oftentimes I do find it far easier to pick on heresies a little farther from home than the ones closer… but who do you point out as the heresiarch of materialism? Such things to consider…

Lots of stuff to chew on in this book. I’m not entirely sure where I got it, but I think it was part of a box of books I got from my mom’s cousin, Pastor Jim Scholz. If so, I’m very thankful. It’s been good. I don’t mean to say I think this fellow is spot on with everything, but he’s very much a 39 Articles Anglican. So at least you know where he stands. I’ll likely be drawing points from it every now and again.

Please let me know what you think.

Lutheran Carnival, Week 2
Go see! Learn! Enjoy!

I have been holding out on researching Simon Magus, because although without doubt the earliest of the named heretics, there is yet a bit of a question as to whether he actually was a heretic.

You see, we know a little about Simon from Acts 8:9-25, and from this passage all that we really learn is that he was a magician who called himself “the Power of God”, a wonder worker, who was of great repute in Samaria. When he heard the word of Christ from the preaching of the deacon Philip, he too believed and was baptized.

Great, so far.

Simon’s first misstep, and the one which got him his own word in the English language (and no doubt in others, as well) was to desire the ability of the apostles to confer the Holy Spirit through the laying-on of hands. Well, even here it wasn’t the desire so much as where this desire went to. Simon, you see, loved his money. Simon is a poster-boy, really, for the North American name-it-and-claim-it mentality, because he thought if he made a really big donation to the church and wanted something bad enough, God had to confer it to him.

From this attempt to buy the favour of God we get our word “simony”, which refers to the buying of ecclesiastical offices.

Simon asks for the apostles to pray for him to prevent disaster from falling upon him, having been chastened and reproved by the rebuke of the apostles.

That’s the end of what we know for sure about Simon of Acts 8.

But for quite a few of our early sources, there is more to the story. Hägglund goes with the majority opinion of the early church and claims that this Simon then went out and combined his magical knowledge with his belief in Christ–a not altogether unbelievable premise–thus becoming the first Gnostic. Pelikan isn’t willing to concede that this is necessarily the same man, but certainly knows of a “Simonian heresy” which arose in Samaria and was, ultimately, the prototype for Gnosticism. There is definitely a Gnosticism which is identified uniformly as being of Simon Magus–it is simply unclear from historical records if it is necessarily the magician of Acts 8, although on page 347 of ANF, vol 1, Irenaeus makes this identification. And whoever this Simon was, Justin Martyr, his countryman, wanted nothing to do with him. Given that Justin and Irenaeus are a lot closer to the fact than Pelikan, and there is no immediate evidence against Simon Magus being Simon of Acts 8, I think we’ll go with them.

Simon Magus, then, has the dubious honour of being the patron of all heresy of the Gnostic variety. His system was a fairly simple form of Gnosticism, being early. Simon was regarded himself as the redeemer according to Justin Martyr, Jesus as the redeemer according to Irenaeus. But both agree that Simon taught that the physical world was evil, that the Redeemer only appeared to suffer (as he was truly “spirit”) and that the ultimate goal of salvation is freedom from the body and this fallen world. He appears to have had a helper named Helen who was second in his theology behind only himself.

Thinking about the ‘ultimate goal’ according to Simon and his followers, it sounds, looks, and smells a lot like the popular views of the afterlife in Western culture, that our goal is to find an eternal rest where our souls float around in some disembodied gloryland of eternal bliss. But the Christian church, in sharp distinction to that, has always taught the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting.

So, whoever Simon the Gnostic leader was–and there is good evidence it was the fellow in Acts 8, going from the “power of God” reference and the citations of Justin Martyr and Irenaeus–he earns a special place in our antibreviary for being the first in the long line of “Christian” Gnostic leaders, and, if the consensus of the early church is right, the only major heretic named definitively in the Scriptures.

Verse for the Commemoration of Simon Magus, the First Gnostic
—
Simon Magus
He wants to black-flag us
With his Gnostical ways
(Too bad his history’s such a haze.)

Let’s go back. Go way back. Back to the earliest days of the church, back when years only had two digits, back when the original Twelve still had a living representative or two. Today, let’s look a little at one of the figures lost in the myst and shadows of the traces of time, a man named Cerinthus.

And I say “lost” because although Cerinthus most certainly deserves his spot in our anti-breviary, yet his own life and teachings have been but scantily preserved, primarily in that greatest of early church sources, Irenaeus’ Adversus Haereses.

In keeping with the general timeperiod and the heresies of greatest impact in his day, Cerinthus was a Gnostic, who, as Irenaeus says, seems to have been trained in the Egyptian way. What this means is that he was trained in philosophy and used that as a theological basis.

Anyway, the scoop on Cerinthus, according to Irenaeus (ANF, I, 351-2), is that he taught the following:

• The world was made by a lesser god
• Jesus was born “in the natural way” from Mary and Joseph
• Jesus was a really good, wise, and righteous man
• Jesus assumed the Christ at His baptism, when the Christ came upon Him as a dove
• As the combined Jesus Christ, He performed miracles and proclaimed the hitherto unknown Father
• The Christ departed from Jesus at the cross because only the man Jesus could die–the Christ is totally impassible (that is, unable to suffer).

That’s about all we know of his teachings. And as far as that goes, it’s not too far removed from what is circulating amongst some more “higher-critical” teachers within the pale of the organized church on Earth (although, one suspects, likely not the Church on Earth), on all except the first point (the lesser god thing seems to not have much currency these days–we seem to have done away with all sense of pantheon in our day in favour of some universal, George-Lucas-like Force). His teachings are mostly logical, in the sense that if Jesus were a man, he must have been born like other men, and the God-like character can’t have died. So his system simply does away with the stuff that didn’t fit his philosophy. We get a lot of this in Gnosticism.

But better than just pointing out how Cerinthus paves the way for much of what follows in the Gnostic realm is the note that many in the church have long believed that the Gospel of John was written partly to combat the heresy of Cerinthus. If indeed this was the reason for this Gospel’s writing and transmission, then God has indeed caused good to come out of this particular evil.

And the other good thing about Cerinthus is the following story, most likely apocryphal, yet still a lot of fun, courtesy of our man Irenaeus, which he claims Polycarp liked to tell:
“John, the disciple of the Lord, going to bathe at Ephesus, and perceiving Cerinthus within, rushed out of the bath-house without bathing, exclaiming, ‘Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within.’” (ANF, I, 421)

They just don’t make leaders like that anymore–so steadfast for the truth that they refuse to be in the same bath-house as heretics. And, for the most part, they don’t make heretics like Cerinthus anymore, who has, quite thankfully, become more or less a footnote of church history. Still, he seems to have been, along with the “Simonians,” one of the first to try to synthesize Greek philosophy with Christianity, thus one of the first of the Gnostics. And, to be honest, a lot of the theological problems the Church still faces today have to do with the great love of many of the church fathers for either Plato or Aristotle; that is, we like to have completely derived and categorized systems of thought. If you can get it right, it’s workable. But if you get it wrong, it’s Cerinthian.

Verse for the Commemoration of Cerinthus
—
Our man Cerinthus
His trick was to synthes-
Ize philosophy with truth yet made
A lie of Christ–this, him betrayed.

Presented for your enjoyment, because this week is shaping up in such a way that I may not have time to do another anti-breviary post tomorrow, is a loving rendition of O Canada courtesy of my American friend, Matthew Prins.

Are you ready?

One… two… three…
—
O Canada! Our home and native land!
Coats, scarves and hats your wintry air commands.
The snow is seventeen feet deep
From sea to frozen sea.
As ice surrounds on every side,
We freeze our butts for thee.
God keep our land above minus three!
O Canada, we freeze our butts for thee.
O Canada, we freeze our butts for thee.
—
Lovingly pilfered from the comments for this post.

Although there are lots of Gnostics to point out, I thought I’d look at something and someone completely different this week, so as to shake things up a little.

The only heresiarch to get a state named after him (OK, so it isn’t…), Montanus foreshadowed the spirit of the Radical Reformers of Luther’s day. One pattern which recurs throughout church history, and one which our own age would do well to note, is that the influence of orthodoxy tends to ebb and flow, to wax and wane with the ages. Montanus got his start in a low period, when the morality of Christians was a little more lax than it should have been; an age, that is, which is much like our own.

Montanus appears to have been a pagan priest who received the word of Christ with gladness. But he was a recent convert who became a little puffed up with himself and wound up declaring himself the Paraclete, the voice of the Holy Spirit on earth. He would fall into ecstatic trances and declare all sorts of things.

And his message, as best as can be determined, was one of doomsday legalism (funny, isn’t it, that all these heretics wander down the legalistic path in one way or another?) based on the revelations accorded to him and his two co-prophetesses, Priscilla and Maximilla (of whom I have not been able to find much more, except some very negative press in Eusebius). His legal code was put in place because he believed the end was to come very soon, and the thousand-year reign of Christ was to begin any time, centred in Phyrgia. He and his prophetesses would foretell impending doom of various kinds–much of which never came to pass, according to their critics.

Now, the legalism was not the worst of it. The catholic church reacted and gave him the heave-ho in AD 177 not because of his visions–people had those–but because of his claim to be the Paraclete, the promised Holy Spirit which proceeded from the Son. He claimed to have inaugurated a new age of the church. Even if everything he had taught had been more-or-less within the pale of established Christendom (and it wasn’t, make no doubt about it) yet the church would have had to throw him out.

For the church had taught, since the earliest of days, that the eschatological 8th day had begun in the Easter events, and that the Holy Spirit was the Paraclete, teaching and guiding the church. But if Montanus was the Paraclete, and therefore the Holy Spirit, that meant all that happened between Christ and Montanus had been at the best misguided, and at the worst, demonic. For the Holy Spirit which was promised was understood to have come at Pentecost. What then of Peter and Paul and the Evangelists? What of James and Jude and John?

What Montanus had done, really, was to add a requirement to salvation. Now, instead of just trusting in Christ through the testimony of the apostles (what we would call the New Testament today), you had to trust in Christ through the testimony of the apostles and believe the prophecies of Montanus and his henchwomen. In so doing, he lessened the importance of Scripture.

The part of this whole affair which most saddens the evangelical catholic student of church history is that the great teacher of the Church, Tertullian, disgusted with the moral laxity of the church of his day, saw in Montanism a structure, an urgency, and an ethical rigour beyond that of the orthodox church. This appealed to him in his later middle-aged years. The result of this mid-life crisis is that orthodox Christendom lost one of its most capable defenders, one of its most notable heresy-fighters to, ironically, a heretical group, sometime around AD 207. Yet, even as a Montanist, Tertullian still had enough orthodoxy in him to write some important notes on the Trinity in his book Contra Praxaeas.

Although Montanism as such seems to have disappeared after the edict of the emperor Justinian in 600, the Montanist spirit is very much alive and well today. Perhaps the biggest thing to note is that Montanism lives on today in every ‘church’ which is led by a ‘Spirit-filled’ preacher who claims direct revelation from the Spirit, which simply heaps on the requirements on the followers, apart from (and often against!) Scripture. Montanus is the father of “progressive revelation.” Like Marcion, he also played an important role in the church’s determination as to how to define what is God’s Word and what is not.

Verse for the Commemoration of Montanus
—
There once was a man named Montanus, who
Ecstatically claimed Paraclete as his title true.
But the content of his message showed he was at fault–
It’s a pity his excommunication didn’t cause him to halt.

Belgian beer is amazing, Will Millar formerly of the Irish Rovers still has his wit and charm after all these years, and watch out for white chocolate liqueur. I’m sure Kelly will write more about our anniversary outing, so I’ll let her.