The Cyclical Nature of Heresies

While reading today I came across a statement that I thought is really important but a lot of Christians might not know about. This post's title gives you an idea what I mean, but to explain with an example, let's talk the "Universal Christ" heresy. Basically the idea behind this is the notion that the ancients realized the spiritual truth that there is a "Christ" in each of us, basically the idea that all of us have an aspect of God in us if we embrace it. It goes on to claim the writers of the New Testament knew about this truth and that Jesus actually taught it. Furthermore it's claimed that the authorities a few centuries later, who wanted another form of control, hid all these truths and manipulated writings into what is now our modern day idea of the Bible. These ideas are all taught in the saddeningly popular and frighteningly inaccurate online "documentary" (I use that in the loosest possible way) Zeitgeist.

Thing is, the universal Christ concept and all the accompanying claims were refuted hundreds of years ago when they first started getting spread around.

With all of that in mind, this paragraph I read seemed to capture things nicely:

"Too often the ramparts of Christian truth are left undefended against ancient heresies. It is actually an odd symptom of success. It is not because the saints of old could not answer their opponent and accuser; in fact, it is because the answers they gave were eventually regarded as so evidently true that their opponents no longer opposed them, and they and their slanders temporarily vanished beneath the waves of time, until subsequent generations of Christians forgot the magnitude of the battle. This explains the recurrence of ancient heresies throughout Christian history, as well as the perception that the heresies are new and incontrovertible."

-Dr Scott Masson, "Emerging from a University in Ruins", Jubilee magazine Spring 2011.

So next time we encounter a "new" heresy, maybe we need to check for responses in ancient books.

God bless.