- Nov 26, 2019
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One of the hydra-like offshoots of the “Worldwide Church of God,” which is a non-Christian cult whose beliefs are Arian, Binitarian and Pneumatomacchian, has been advertising on a major Christian website ridiculous book about how to find “the true Church of God,” which I will not link to, lest people who are not well catechized find it and fall for its deceptions, a work which contains absurdities like this:
This is the most pathetic attempt at propaganda disguised as Patristic scholarship I have ever seen. Consider Nestorius, for example: he was not opposed to the Trinity, but was rather an avid Trinitarian; his error is that he objected to the Virgin Mary being venerated as Theotokos and to the principle of Communicatio Idiomatum; Nestorian hymns composed by Mar Narsai make a point of differentiating between the divine and human aspects of Jesus Christ, and not in the unitive manner we see in the writings of Ambrose of Milan, but in a manner intended to divide, for it was the consequence of Nestorianism that the Chalcedonian doctrine of hypostatic union be discarded in favor of two hypostases, one human and one divine, united in one human prosopon, so that one could assert that the humanity of our Lord was separate from His divinity. This is in contrast to Chalcedonian and Miaphysite Christology, and the Christology of the Church of the East after the reforms of Mar Babai the Great, in which the humanity and divinity of our Lord are united without change, confusion, separation or division.
But one would not expect members of a cult whose leader sought to deceive Christians, and is thus a Wolf in Sheep’s clothing, to understand such nuances; these people fail even to realize that Nestorius was not Syrian nor a leader of the Syrian church, but rather a Greek, who became the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.
There was more laughable silliness in the form of claims that we sometimes see on CF.com from the uneducated that Simon Magus founded the Roman Catholic Church, that the Roman Catholic Church was Gnostic, and that the Gnostic Paulicians, Bogomils and Cathars were actually remnants of the true church, despite the fact those sects preserved the doctrines of Gnostic sects like the Marcionites, which this book claims the RCC was descended from. The work also falsely accused Justin Martyr of anti-Semitism, while ludicrously hailing Luther as a Sabbatarian. And the source for much of the anti-Gnostic criticism was obviously Irenaeus of Lyons, as quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea, the former a bishop of the pre-schism Roman Catholic Church!
While in general I wish the early church had not burned heretical books, reading literary dumpster fires such as this polemical travesty makes me understand why they did it. Although I myself would not have done it, although the more moderate precaution of sealing such books away in libraries, which eventually was extended to include works like the Shepherd of Hermas, seems reasonable particularly in the case of polemics issued by cults which are financially abusive; the Armstrongist churches take a whopping 30% of the income of their followers.
This is the most pathetic attempt at propaganda disguised as Patristic scholarship I have ever seen. Consider Nestorius, for example: he was not opposed to the Trinity, but was rather an avid Trinitarian; his error is that he objected to the Virgin Mary being venerated as Theotokos and to the principle of Communicatio Idiomatum; Nestorian hymns composed by Mar Narsai make a point of differentiating between the divine and human aspects of Jesus Christ, and not in the unitive manner we see in the writings of Ambrose of Milan, but in a manner intended to divide, for it was the consequence of Nestorianism that the Chalcedonian doctrine of hypostatic union be discarded in favor of two hypostases, one human and one divine, united in one human prosopon, so that one could assert that the humanity of our Lord was separate from His divinity. This is in contrast to Chalcedonian and Miaphysite Christology, and the Christology of the Church of the East after the reforms of Mar Babai the Great, in which the humanity and divinity of our Lord are united without change, confusion, separation or division.
But one would not expect members of a cult whose leader sought to deceive Christians, and is thus a Wolf in Sheep’s clothing, to understand such nuances; these people fail even to realize that Nestorius was not Syrian nor a leader of the Syrian church, but rather a Greek, who became the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.
There was more laughable silliness in the form of claims that we sometimes see on CF.com from the uneducated that Simon Magus founded the Roman Catholic Church, that the Roman Catholic Church was Gnostic, and that the Gnostic Paulicians, Bogomils and Cathars were actually remnants of the true church, despite the fact those sects preserved the doctrines of Gnostic sects like the Marcionites, which this book claims the RCC was descended from. The work also falsely accused Justin Martyr of anti-Semitism, while ludicrously hailing Luther as a Sabbatarian. And the source for much of the anti-Gnostic criticism was obviously Irenaeus of Lyons, as quoted by Eusebius of Caesarea, the former a bishop of the pre-schism Roman Catholic Church!
While in general I wish the early church had not burned heretical books, reading literary dumpster fires such as this polemical travesty makes me understand why they did it. Although I myself would not have done it, although the more moderate precaution of sealing such books away in libraries, which eventually was extended to include works like the Shepherd of Hermas, seems reasonable particularly in the case of polemics issued by cults which are financially abusive; the Armstrongist churches take a whopping 30% of the income of their followers.
