ver.: 24 March 2008
Docetism, Pelagianism, Ebionitism, Eutychianism, Arianism, Nicolaitanism, Montanism, Dominion theology, Prosperity gospel, and what these groups are not.
Arianism is the teaching that Jesus was not eternal, that he was a created being, created within the framework of earthly space and time, and thus not fully God.
Arius was a priest in Alexandria, Egypt, who died in AD 336. Mind you, Arius thought that he thought highly of Jesus : Jesus was seen as the very best creature that God created. (This was not an entirely new idea; the Ebionites and Gnostics had gone in a similar direction.) His teaching caused a stir in his day, and in some Asian cities, most church members were Arian. Arius had triggered such turmoil within the churches that it was a leading cause of the Council of Nicaea in 325 AD. The Council examined the Scriptures that spoke of who and what Jesus was, in Paul's letters and the first chapter of the Gospel of John, and declared Arianism to be a heresy. They wrote a creed that was mainly aimed at opposing Arianism. The struggle continued after Nicaea and after Arius' death, and it even took on political implications. The chief of the opposition to Arianism was Athanasius. In 381, the Council of Constantinople once again called Arianism a heresy, mostly due to the Biblical and philosophical case that Athanasius had built over the years. Arianism faded fast after that.
The specific group Athanasius fought had died, but the basic idea did not. It resurrected itself many times throughout church history. Many of today's groups that derived from Christianity have strong tendencies toward that belief, even if expressed differently : Unitarianism and Jehovah's Witnesses, among others. In mainline US and European Protestantism, it feeds into the left-Protestant openness toward other beliefs ("Christianity is one of many paths to God"). It has much appeal to those who base their beliefs on highly rational approaches. The question is, rational or not, is it true in any way? For if it is, you might as well be Unitarian, or maybe Jewish. Christianity is, before it is anything else, the trust that Jesus of Nazareth did what no other could do, what we have time and again shown we are unable to do for ourselves. By His life, death, and resurrection, our wrongs are forgiven, and our relationship with our Creator is being restored and healed. Arianisms, ancient and modern, say 'not so'.
Docetism [ < Greek dokeo (to seem, appear to be)] : The idea that Jesus Christ was a totally divine being who only appeared to be human. From that, many went further to claim that He didn't really suffer. Any idea that assigns a low worth to the material world and a high value to that which is deemed 'spiritual' will tend toward this idea. It is a form of dualism, and like other dualisms it was rejected by the early church as not being in keeping with what Christ was about.
Ebionitism [ < Heb. 'ebyônim < 'ebyôn (the poor)]: The idea that Jesus was a human being and not at all divine, but Jesus was given certain gifts by God's spirit which set him apart from other people. Because of what God gave Him, Jesus was deemed the Messiah or Christ, but that meant only that He was chosen by God, not that He was savior of all humankind. The Law of Moses was still what counts with God. The church rejected the idea behind it, possibly as early as 110 AD.
Some scholars have made the claim that the Ebionites were pretty much the lineal descendents of the Jewish Christians that were led by James the Just at the the time of Paul. (These scholars posit a stronger adversarial relationship between James himself and Paul than Acts or Paul's letters show.) However, it would be more accurate to put them in the context of other groups, both Jewish and Christian, that existed in the first two centuries of Christianity. There were many small Jewish groups with many different shades of practice, with many ideas and practices which bled into those of other groups, making a continuum. Like Judaism, Christianity also had small groups which took a different direction than the mainstream. Nearly all of these were moral rigorists in some way -- their behavior had to tightly conform to the Law of Moses, seen to varying degrees through the lens of Jesus' sermons. And only some of them were rejected by mainstream Christianity.
The Ebionites were larger than most such groups, though never reaching more than 1000 adult members as far as we can tell, and they had different shades of practice amongst themselves. They lived in small communes, where they had no personal material possessions. To them, Jesus was the messianic prophet or archangel, adopted by God, not God Himself. Jesus did not exist before creation, his death did not free humanity from the price for sin, and he did not return from the grave. They self-identified with "the poor" that Jesus spoke of in the gospel of Matthew, hence their name. They rejected animal sacrifice, as well as the Jewish Oral Law (Mishnah) that was developing at this time, and anything else outside of Jesus that added anything to the Law. They were not the only ones who held these beliefs; similar groups continued to exist in the Middle East at least to 1100 AD, if Muslim sources are correct. There is good reason to believe that Mohammed had much contact with their ideas. No group of today is descended from the Ebionites, though some "messianic Jewish" groups bear some resemblance to them. In some key ways, the Ebionites were as Jewish as they were Christian.
Eutychianism : In this way of thinking, Christ was put through a blender - that is, His being God and His being human were so totally mixed together that He was homogenized into being Something Else. When theologians say that Christ has two natures, they mean that Jesus was fully God (and thus had the full power and ability to accomplish His mission of rescue) - and fully a human, living out a material human life (which made it possible to experience life such as what we have, to be in full solidarity with us, and to redeem us out of love). Jesus is one of us, and that is what makes what He did so real, what makes it matter. No third type of being could do it for real, because it wouldn't be on either side of the relationship that was to be healed.
The New Testament is not big on naming heretical groups. Instead, it usually describes why a specific belief or attitude is not in keeping with what Christ taught. However, in Revelation chapter 2, a specific group is named twice - in the messages to Ephesus and to Pergamum. The group, the Nicolaitans, is named, and it is said that the Lord hates their deeds (Ephesus, Rev 2:6), and they have teachings which the Lord is at war with (Pergamum, Rev 2:14-16). The way the latter is phrased ties the Nicolaitans to the practices taught by others who are given the symbolic name of 'Balaam', which is a way of describing by pointing toward a Biblical figure who did things which had the same thrust behind it. (Balaam helped lead Israel into idolatry committed through cultic sexual acts, and through these acts, into a plague.) The Nicolaitans were not the Balaam group, but were having a similar effect on believers in Pergamum, which infers their beliefs were much alike. The Nicolaitans must not have lasted long (Eusebius agrees), nor grown beyond their home base in what is now northwest Turkey. Little else is known about them. Irenaeus adds only that they lived lives of "unrestrained indulgence"; most other reports copy Irenaeus. Hippolytus of Rome says that it was founded by and named after the deacon Nichola(o)s, by which he probably meant the one named in Acts 6:5. Clement of Alexandria, however, disagrees, writing that deacon Nicholas' words were twisted in order to make them seem like they supported such practices. There is the possibility (which may lie behind Clement's report) that there is no connection between the group found in Revelation and the somewhat Gnostic group these writers and Tertullian knew about. In all cases, the group(s) seem to have passed from the scene already by the time the writers wrote.
Despite the lack of direct knowledge about the Nicolaitans, there's no lack of theories. Some end-times theorists lump them together with the 'Balaamists' as well as 'Jezebel' (from Revelation's message to Thyatira, 2:20), making them a sign of what is to grow from within the church in the last days. (Against that : unlike Balaam and Jezebel, there is no Nicholas of any kind in the Hebrew Scriptures, much less a figure of evil.)
Pelagianism : The belief that human beings can, by their own effort, keep themselves from sinning and thus be able to (at least in some sense) save themselves. It's named after a fifty-century monk and teacher whom Augustine of Hippo accused of teaching this belief. Most churches have had a streak of Pelagianism running through their theologies at some point in time, as they grapple with the issue of how capable each human is to make choices and determine the course of their own lives. Pelagius himself may have been only 'semi-Pelagian', in that he appears to have taught that God gave us the ability to follow His commands in full, rather than our being able to completely do it totally on our own. The main thrust of Paul and Augustine was that we all live as sinners who even at our very best fall way short. We can't and won't do it, and never even fully want to do it. All human beings depend on Jesus to pay the bills for our mess. And we can't even accept this gift from God without God's Spirit being at work within us to tell us it is there for us.
A belief that usually goes with Pelagianism is the idea that we are all born innocent, with no sin at work in us from the start. Mainstream Christianity holds that sin is a part of our nature, and thus we all start with it. Some Christians treat young children as being 'innocent', not because they are without evil but because they are not yet responsible for what is wrong in them.
Some links on the 'classic heresies':
Do not confuse the Ebionites with Ebonite, a brand of bowling ball. Nor Docetism with Deux-ce-deux-tism, a belief in the practice of square dancing. Nor Pelagianism with Plagiarism, using other's creative works and claiming to be its author. Nor Montanism with Montanaism, fanship for a former 49ers quarterback. Nor Nicolaitanism with the worship of Santa Claus (St. Nicholas). Arianism has nothing to do with Aryanism, the idiotic racist belief in the superiority of the Indo-European peoples.
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