Old Heresies, New Pulpits

What this page is asking

The author of this site set down a thesis to be tested, and he put it like this: “Explore how five ancient heresies — Gnosticism, Arianism, Modalism, Montanism, and Pelagianism — have crept into the modern church.” Asked which part of the modern church he had in mind, he answered: “I am mostly interested in the modern non-creedal churches and their heresies.”

That is a serious charge, and it is an easy one to make badly. “Heresy” is among the most misused words in religion. It is thrown at hymns people dislike, at preachers they distrust and at denominations other than their own. An earlier dossier on this site, Warmed-Over Ashes?, argued that a claim should be met with evidence and not with a label. This page has to keep that rule while using five labels of its own.

So it does not ask whether the modern church feels Gnostic or sounds Pelagian. It asks something that can be checked. Each of the five was a particular teaching, held by particular people, written down by them or by their opponents, and answered by the church in documents that still exist. For each one the page asks what the teaching said, what exactly was refused, and whether anyone now is saying the same thing.

Three tests, used on each of the five

Four verdicts, used consistently throughout

The third test can come out four ways. These four words are used in the same sense in every Part.

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it and see what comes back. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. First, reverse it: ask for the strongest case that these five labels are being misapplied to modern churches, that the historic, creedal churches harbour the same errors, and that “heresy” has been used in every century to silence renewal. Second, narrow it: ask only what the Council of Carthage decided in 418 and the Council of Orange in 529, quoted in full, and then set your own church’s statement on sin and grace beside them. Third, make it a test: paste in your church’s statement of faith, with the name removed, and ask which of the five it explicitly excludes and which it leaves open.

Write a detailed, source-first, interactive article, in British
English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote Scripture
from the Authorised Version. Date and attribute every other quotation:
give the work, the edition or translation, the section, and the page
where possible. Where an attribution or date is disputed, say so at
the point of use. Verify every quotation against a reliable published
source; where a quotation cannot be verified, cut it. Do not invent
quotes. Do not take verses out of context: where a text is being
applied beyond what it first addressed, say so.

  TITLE. Old Heresies, New Pulpits

  THESIS TO TEST. Explore how five ancient heresies - Gnosticism,
  Arianism, Modalism, Montanism, and Pelagianism - have crept into
  the modern church.

  WHICH MODERN CHURCH. I am mostly interested in the modern
  non-creedal churches and their heresies: independent,
  non-denominational and "no creed but the Bible" churches, and the
  movements they came from. Bodies that teach one of the five openly
  are to be noted. The weight falls on what is said and believed
  inside churches whose statements of faith are orthodox on paper.

  METHOD. Treat "heresy" as a definite teaching, not an insult. For
  each of the five, apply three tests in order:
   1. The sentence. What did the ancient teaching assert? Quote its
      own surviving words where they exist. Where only its opponents
      report it, say so.
   2. The refusal. What exactly did the church reject, when, by what
      body, and what did it say would be lost?
   3. The match. Does the modern statement assert the same thing, or
      does it only resemble it?
  Give each modern case one of four verdicts, used consistently:
   TAUGHT      - stated as doctrine in a body's own published
                 statement, or by a deceased teacher in a dated book.
   DRIFTED     - the statement of faith says otherwise or nothing;
                 the teaching is preached or believed by accident.
   ECHOED      - a habit of mind the old movement shared, without
                 its teaching.
   MISLABELLED - not the same thing; the label does not fit.

  THE FIVE.
   1. Gnosticism. The world as the work of a lesser power, salvation
      as knowledge, Christ without real flesh, no resurrection of the
      body, a spiritual class above ordinary believers. Sources:
      Irenaeus, Ignatius, Tertullian, 1 John, the Excerpts of
      Theodotus. Modern: heaven as escape, "revelation knowledge",
      two grades of Christian, the physical treated as unspiritual.
   2. Arianism. "There was when he was not." Sources: Arius's own
      letters, Athanasius, the Creed of 325 with its anathemas, the
      Council of Rimini. Modern: published doctrine, and survey data.
   3. Modalism. One person in three roles. Sources: Tertullian
      Against Praxeas, Hippolytus Against Noetus, Gregory of
      Nazianzus on analogies, the Athanasian Creed. Modern: Oneness
      doctrine, the usual pictures of the Trinity, prayers.
   4. Montanism. The New Prophecy. Sources: Eusebius V.16-18,
      Hippolytus, Tertullian as a defender, the Didache's tests.
      Modern: prophets who add to the apostles, money, dated
      predictions, contempt for the historic church. Do not settle
      whether the gifts continue.
   5. Pelagianism. Sources: Pelagius to Demetrias, the charges
      against Caelestius, Carthage 418, Ephesus 431, Orange 529,
      Augustine. Modern: Finney in his own words, survey data, "God
      helps those who help themselves". Distinguish Arminian and
      Wesleyan teaching carefully and fairly.

  ALSO REQUIRED.
   - A Part on what the word heresy means and when it is fair to
     use it.
   - A Part matching clauses of the creeds to the quarrel each one
     settled.
   - A Part on why a church without a creed is the exposed one,
     including the appeal to "Scripture only" made by the opponents
     of Nicaea, and an honest statement of what the evidence does
     not show.
   - A Part on why these five recur.
   - A closing table giving a verdict on the thesis for each of the
     five, and a diagnostic the reader can use on his own church.

COUNTER-CASE. No separate section. End each of the five Parts with
"Where the label does not fit", at full strength - including that
"Gnosticism" is a modern umbrella term which some scholars reject;
that the Montanists were orthodox about God and that the church did
not teach that prophecy had ceased; that Pelagius was acquitted at
Diospolis and that Arminians are not Pelagians; that survey
respondents who agree with Arius also affirm the Trinity; and that
creedal churches have fallen into every one of these errors.

NAMING. A modern denomination or organisation may be named only
when quoted verbatim from its own published doctrinal statement. No
living individual named. Deceased figures quoted only from dated
published works. Living scholars named only as authors of published
research. Every pew-level remark, sermon line, prayer and children's
talk is composed for illustration and labelled as composed.

EXCLUDED. Whether any body named is a Christian church. Whether
anyone holding these views is saved. Whether the gifts of prophecy
and healing continue. Other heresies (Marcionism, Donatism,
adoptionism) except in passing. Ground covered by earlier dossiers
(creeds, private revelation, prophecy, baptism, assurance) is kept
brief and linked.

INTERACTIVES. A priors quiz. A sort of statements by whether the
whole church refused them. A match of creed clauses to the five. For
each of the five, an exercise on the sources and a sort of modern
cases by verdict. A sort of pictures of the Trinity by where each
lands. Survey figures the reader guesses before seeing. An objection
drill the reader answers in his own words first. A guess-the-source
quiz on real, dated quotations. A diagnostic for the reader's own
church and its statement of faith.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional
and readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating the
question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, repeating the
key points in prominent boxes for readers who skim, explaining every
technical term in a box where it is used, and giving the reader
something to do in every major section. Also produce a plain-English
quick version of about fifteen minutes with three short exercises,
and a Simple English version with no exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked. Where a quotation could not be verified against a published source, it was cut. Four things qualified the brief. The five are not the same kind of thing. Arianism and Pelagianism were refused by councils whose decisions the whole church received. Modalism was named among the heresies at Constantinople in 381. Gnosticism was never condemned by a general council at all, because it was answered before there were any. Montanism was shut out by local synods in Asia Minor for how it prophesied, and its doctrine of God was the church’s own. “Modern” had to be dropped as a contrast. All five troubled the ancient church from inside, and Arianism held most of its bishops for a time. The survey evidence cuts across the thesis. The confusion it records is found among Catholics and mainline Protestants as well as in independent churches, so the page does not use it to compare them. And two of the five resist the charge. A modern Pentecostal who expects prophecy is in the company of Irenaeus, and an Arminian who preaches free will is in the company of the Council of Orange. Each Part says where the name stops applying.

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has a determinate answer, and you can check every one yourself in Part XIV. Answer them before reading and lock them in. They come back in Part XIII with the sources beside them.

What follows

What a heresy is

The Greek word is hairesis, and it first meant a choice. From there it came to mean a school of thought that a person chose to follow, and then a party. That is how the Authorised Version uses it in Acts, where it is translated “sect”: “the sect of the Sadducees” (5:17). Paul’s accusers used the word of the church itself, and he answered, “after the way which they call heresy, so worship I the God of my fathers” (24:14). So the first Christians knew what it was to be called heretics by people who had not looked into the matter.

Inside the church the word soon hardened. Paul lists “heresies” among the works of the flesh, between “seditions” and “envyings” (Galatians 5:20). He tells the Corinthians, “there must be also heresies among you, that they which are approved may be made manifest among you” (1 Corinthians 11:19). Peter warns of “false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that bought them” (2 Peter 2:1). Paul tells the elders of Ephesus where to expect them from: “Also of your own selves shall men arise, speaking perverse things, to draw away disciples after them” (Acts 20:30).

Three things stand out in those texts. Heresy comes from inside. It comes quietly: “privily” in Peter, “crept in unawares” in Jude. And it is about the centre of the faith, “the Lord that bought them.” One more text supplies the rule for dealing with a person:

A man that is an heretick after the first and second admonition reject.

Titus 3:10. The only place in the Authorised Version where the word “heretick” is used of a person.

Two admonitions come first. A person who is mistaken, is told so, and changes his mind was never a heretic in Paul’s sense. The older writers kept this distinction carefully. Being wrong is not the offence. The offence is choosing to stay wrong about the centre of the faith after the church has shown you.

They quoted the Bible, and they meant well

It would be convenient if the five teachers on this page had been cynics who despised Scripture. None of them was. Every one of the five argued from the Bible, and several were known for the strictness of their lives. Hilary of Poitiers, who spent years in exile for opposing the Arians, said where the trouble lay:

For there have risen many who have given to the plain words of Holy Writ some arbitrary interpretation of their own, instead of its true and only sense, and this in defiance of the clear meaning of words. Heresy lies in the sense assigned, not in the word written; the guilt is that of the expositor, not of the text.

Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, Book II, section 3 (c. 360). Trans. E. W. Watson and L. Pullan, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 9 (1899).

Vincent of Lérins, a monk writing in 434, asked the obvious question. If Scripture is complete and sufficient, why does anyone need the church’s reading of it? His answer was that, “owing to the depth of Holy Scripture, all do not accept it in one and the same sense, but one understands its words in one way, another in another … For Novatian expounds it one way, Sabellius another, Donatus another, Arius, Eunomius, Macedonius, another” (Commonitory, chapter 2; trans. C. A. Heurtley, 1894).

And the motive was usually devout. When the elders of Smyrna examined a teacher called Noetus, about the year 190, for saying that the Father himself had been born and had died, his reply was not a defiance. According to Hippolytus he said: “What evil, then, am I doing in glorifying Christ?” (Against Noetus 1). He thought he was honouring Jesus by saying that Jesus simply was the Father. Arius thought he was protecting the uniqueness of God. Pelagius thought he was protecting holiness against excuses. Each was defending something true, and gave up something else to do it.

Where this corrects the brief: five different kinds of thing

The brief lists five names as if they were five of the same thing. They are not, and the differences decide how much weight each name can bear.

So when this page says that Arianism or Pelagianism has returned, it is pointing to a decision of the undivided church. When it says the same of Gnosticism or Montanism, the claim is weaker. Those two were movements more than propositions, and what is “back” has to be argued feature by feature.

The second correction is to the word “modern.” None of this began recently. Jude’s men had crept in before the New Testament was finished. Part IX shows that the largest collapse into any of the five happened in the fourth century, among bishops.

Try it: is this what the page means by heresy?

Eight statements. Each is held by some Christians today. For each, decide which kind of thing it is.

0 of 8 sorted

Five decisions, written down

Here are the five in a form that can be held in the head. Each card gives the place and date, one sentence that states the teaching, and where the church’s answer can be read. The sentence on each card is quoted in full, with its source, in the Part it links to.

What a creed is for

The creeds are often thought of as a summary of the Bible. That is not quite what they are. A summary would give equal space to everything. The creeds are lopsided: they say a great deal about some matters and nothing about others. The Nicene Creed spends twelve words on the making of the world and more than a hundred on who Jesus is. It has no clause on prayer, on the Lord’s Supper or on how to live.

The reason is that a creed records what had to be said because somebody had denied it. About the year 180 Irenaeus set down what he called the faith the church had “received from the apostles,” and already it had the shape of an answer: one God, “Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea,” one Christ “who became incarnate for our salvation,” and at the end “the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh” of Christ, who will come “to raise up anew all flesh of the whole human race” (Against Heresies I.10.1). Every phrase there contradicts something a Gnostic teacher was saying in his city.

So the creeds can be read as a record. Each clause has a date, and behind most of them is an argument that the church did not want to have twice.

Try it: which quarrel produced this clause?

Seven clauses from the creeds, as printed in the Book of Common Prayer of 1662, and one verse. For each, choose the teaching it was written or used against.

0 of 8 matched

The missing clause

Seven of those eight were clauses of a creed. The eighth had to be a verse of Scripture, because the creeds contain nothing against Montanism. That is a finding in itself. The followers of the New Prophecy could say the whole creed without hesitation. Their opponents admitted it. What was wrong, in the church’s judgement, was something a creed cannot fix: who was claiming to speak for the Spirit, with what authority, and whether anyone was allowed to test it. The church’s answer to that was the closed list of apostolic books, and the tests for prophets that Part VI sets out.

The same exercise shows what the creeds do well. On the other four, a congregation that says the creed every week has contradicted the teaching aloud before the sermon begins. Nobody has to notice. The contradiction is in the words.

Gnosticism: a world to escape

The sentence: what was taught

Irenaeus was bishop of Lyons, in what is now France. About the year 180 he wrote five books under a title borrowed from Paul’s warning to Timothy against “oppositions of science falsely so called” (1 Timothy 6:20), where “science” translates gnosis. He had read the teachers’ books and talked with their followers. Five claims run through what he reports.

First, the world was not made by the true God. The Valentinians, he says, held that the visible world was the work of a lower being, the Demiurge or craftsman, who was “Father and God of everything outside of the Pleroma,” the divine fullness. This maker did not understand his own work: “he formed the heavens, yet was ignorant of the heavens; he fashioned man, yet knew not man.” Thinking himself alone, he announced through the prophets, “I am God, and besides me there is none else” (Against Heresies I.5.2–4). On this view the God of Genesis is an ignorant subordinate, and the material world is a mistake.

Second, Christ did not have real flesh. If matter is a mistake, the Saviour cannot have been made of it. Saturninus taught that he “was without birth, without body, and without figure, but was, by supposition, a visible man” (I.24.2). Basilides, as Irenaeus reports him, said that Simon of Cyrene was crucified in Jesus’ place while Jesus, “standing by, laughed at them” (I.24.4).

Third, what saves is knowledge. Irenaeus quotes one group: “The knowledge of the unspeakable Greatness is itself perfect redemption” (I.21.4). Here the movement can be heard in its own voice. A Valentinian teacher called Theodotus, whose words were copied out by Clement of Alexandria, says of baptism:

But it is not only the washing that is liberating, but the knowledge of who we were, and what we have become, where we were or where we were placed, whither we hasten, from what we are redeemed, what birth is and what rebirth.

Theodotus, in Clement of Alexandria, Excerpts from Theodotus 78 (second century). Trans. Robert Pierce Casey (London: Christophers, 1934).

The Gospel of Thomas, found at Nag Hammadi, opens in the same key: “These are the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke,” and then, “Whoever finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death” (trans. Thomas O. Lambdin, 1977). Salvation there is the solving of a riddle, and the riddle is not open to everyone.

Fourth, people come in fixed classes. This is the feature with the longest afterlife. Irenaeus reports that the Valentinians sorted mankind into the spiritual, the “animal” and the material. Theodotus says the same in his own words: “the spiritual is saved by nature, but the psychic has free-will … but the material perishes by nature” (Excerpts 56). And who were the middle class, the ones who had to get by on faith and good behaviour?

Animal men, again, are instructed in animal things; such men, namely, as are established by their works, and by a mere faith, while they have not perfect knowledge. We of the Church, they say, are these persons.

Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.6.2 (c. 180), reporting the Valentinians. Trans. Alexander Roberts and W. H. Rambaut, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (1885).

The spiritual, Irenaeus continues, hold that they “shall be entirely and undoubtedly saved, not by means of conduct, but because they are spiritual by nature.” Their picture for it was gold dropped in mud: “gold, when submersed in filth, loses not on that account its beauty.” Nothing they did with their bodies could touch what they were.

Fifth, the body is not saved. That is the sentence on the card above. Irenaeus’s summary of the whole outlook is that they “despise the entire dispensation of God, and disallow the salvation of the flesh … maintaining that it is not capable of incorruption” (V.2.2).

The refusal: what the church said

The New Testament had begun the answer before the systems were built. John gives a test: “Every spirit that confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is of God: And every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God” (1 John 4:2–3). Paul says of Christ, “in him dwelleth all the fulness of the Godhead bodily” (Colossians 2:9), and of the people who forbade marriage and foods, “every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:4). The risen Jesus himself answers the docetist: “handle me, and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see me have” (Luke 24:39). And Paul names two men who “have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some” (2 Timothy 2:18).

Ignatius, bishop of Antioch, wrote to the church at Smyrna about 110 while being taken to Rome to be executed. A man on his way to be killed for Christ had no patience with the idea that Christ had only appeared to die:

And He suffered truly, even as also He truly raised up Himself, not, as certain unbelievers maintain, that He only seemed to suffer, as they themselves only seem to be Christians.

Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Smyrnaeans 2 (c. 110). Trans. Roberts and Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (1885).

He adds two observations about the same people which deserve to be read together. “They have no regard for love; no care for the widow, or the orphan, or the oppressed” (chapter 6). And: “They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ” (chapter 7). A faith in which bodies do not matter has no reason to feed one and no use for a sacrament that is eaten.

Irenaeus’s own reply has four parts, and the creeds follow them.

Tertullian, in North Africa a generation later, put the third point in a phrase that has been quoted ever since: “the flesh is the very condition on which salvation hinges.” His reason was the sacraments. “The flesh, indeed, is washed, in order that the soul may be cleansed; the flesh is anointed, that the soul may be consecrated” (On the Resurrection of the Flesh 8; trans. Peter Holmes, 1870). God had chosen to reach the soul through water, oil, bread and wine applied to a body.

The old Roman baptismal creed made the candidate say it in the bluntest word available. Where English versions of the Apostles’ Creed usually have “the resurrection of the body,” the Latin has carnis resurrectionem, “the resurrection of the flesh.” The Prayer Book of 1662 keeps that wording in the baptism service.

Try it: the body raised, or the soul released?

Eight sentences about what a Christian hopes for. Six are from Scripture, the creeds or Irenaeus’s report. Two are composed by this page in the manner of things said kindly at funerals. Sort each by which hope it expresses.

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The match: what is said now

No modern church that this page could find teaches that a lesser god made the world, or that Jesus had no body. On the first two of the five claims there is nothing to report. On the other three there is.

The hope of escape. Ask a churchgoer what happens to a Christian in the end, and the usual answer is that he goes to heaven when he dies. That is true as far as it goes. Paul says that “to depart, and to be with Christ … is far better” (Philippians 1:23). But in the New Testament and the creeds it is the first half of the hope. The second half is that the body is raised: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44); “we … groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:23). When the second half is dropped, what is left is the soul leaving the body behind for good, which is the sentence on Basilides’ card.

In 2006 the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University asked 1,007 American adults: “Do you believe that, after you die, your physical body will be resurrected someday?” Thirty-six per cent said yes and fifty-four per cent said no. Among those who had recently attended church, half said yes. The same poll found that most of those asked believed in a life after death. So a majority expected to live on, and only a minority expected their bodies to share in it.

A higher knowledge. E. W. Kenyon was an American preacher and writer who died in 1948 and whose books shaped a large part of independent charismatic teaching. He divided knowledge into two kinds, and Christians with it:

The great body of the church has Sense Knowledge Faith, rather than faith in the Revelation that God has given to us.

E. W. Kenyon, The Two Kinds of Faith (1942). His companion volume is called The Two Kinds of Knowledge (1938).

Kenyon meant by “Revelation” the Bible, which is what any Christian would say. The echo is in the structure. The mass of the church knows in a lower way, through the senses and the reason; a smaller number have passed to a higher kind of knowing; and the first group cannot judge the second. From there it is a short step to the preacher who says the Lord has shown him what a passage really means and that study will not find it. Dossier 30 follows that step in detail, and quotes Irenaeus on the people who, when “confuted from the Scriptures,” answered that the truth had been handed down by living voice.

Two classes of believer. In 1918 Lewis Sperry Chafer, an American Bible teacher, published a book that was widely read in independent Bible churches. Early in it he says:

There are two great spiritual changes which are possible to human experience, the change from the “natural” man to the saved man, and the change from the “carnal” man to the “spiritual” man.

Lewis Sperry Chafer, He That Is Spiritual (1918), p. 8, as quoted by B. B. Warfield in his review.

Chafer took his three words from Paul, as the Valentinians had. The Princeton theologian B. B. Warfield reviewed the book the next year and went straight to the point: “There are not two kinds of Christians, although there are Christians at every conceivable stage of advancement towards the one goal to which all are bound and at which all shall arrive” (The Princeton Theological Review 17, April 1919). Paul does call the Corinthians “carnal” (1 Corinthians 3:1). He says it to all of them, as a rebuke, and in the same letter he calls all of them “sanctified in Christ Jesus” (1:2). He is describing a condition to be ashamed of. He is not describing a lower rank with its own name.

Dossier 33 examines the two-tier pattern at length and reaches the same judgement this page does: the comparison with Gnosticism holds in shape and fails in substance.

None of those three lines denies a word of the creed. Each leans the way the old teachers leaned: the body is a container, the truth is for those equipped to receive it, and what happens to flesh is of no lasting interest.

Where the label does not fit

Nobody is teaching the system. Gnosticism without the lesser creator is like Arianism without the created Son. The people described above confess that God made the world and called it “very good” (Genesis 1:31), that the Word “was made flesh” (John 1:14), and that Christ rose bodily. In the 2025 State of Theology survey nearly all American evangelicals affirmed his physical resurrection. To call them Gnostics is false.

“With Christ” at death is Scripture. Paul does speak of being “absent from the body, and … present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8). A Christian who comforts the bereaved with that verse is quoting an apostle. The drift is in stopping there.

A memorial view of the sacraments is a different argument. It is sometimes said that churches which treat baptism and the Supper as symbols are Gnostic, and Ignatius’s sentence about the Eucharist is quoted against them. That is unfair. Ignatius’s opponents denied that Christ had flesh at all. The churches in question confess the incarnation and the resurrection without reserve. Their view of the sacraments began with Zwingli in the 1520s and is a dispute between churches that share the creeds. Dossier 14 and Dossier 36 argue that question on its merits. What can fairly be said is narrower: Tertullian thought it mattered that God saves through things done to bodies, and a church that finds that thought strange has moved some distance from him.

The larger versions of this charge are contested. The literary critic Harold Bloom argued in The American Religion (1992) that American Christianity is Gnostic at heart, and Philip J. Lee made a similar case in Against the Protestant Gnostics (1987). These are serious books and disputed ones, and this page does not rest on them.

Try it: same teaching, or only a resemblance?

Six cases, all composed by this page. Give each one of the four verdicts from the top of the page.

0 of 6 judged

Arianism: “there was when he was not”

The sentence: what was taught

Arius’s case can be put in his own words, which is not true of most of the people on this page. His bishop, Alexander, had been teaching, as Arius reports it, “God always, the Son always; as the Father so the Son.” Arius thought this made two unbegotten beings, which is two Gods. He wrote to a friendly bishop to complain of how he was being treated:

We are persecuted, because we say that the Son has a beginning, but that God is without beginning. This is the cause of our persecution, and likewise, because we say that He is of the non-existent.

Arius, Letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia (c. 320), preserved in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History I.4. Trans. Blomfield Jackson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 3 (1892).

“Of the non-existent” means made out of nothing, as the world was. In the same letter he says of the Son that “before He was begotten, or created, or purposed, or established, He was not.”

It is important to see how high Arius’s Christ was. He existed before the world. Through him God made everything else. He is called the Son, the Word and the Wisdom of God, and Arius was willing to call him God in an honorary sense. He was to be honoured above every other being. What Arius would not say is that he had always existed, or that he shared the Father’s own nature. Between God and the Son there was still the line that separates the Creator from everything he has made, and the Son was on our side of it.

Arius also set his teaching to verse, in a work called the Thalia. It survives only in quotations by Athanasius, who was not a friendly reporter. He quotes from it: “God was not always a Father,” “once He was not,” “He is a creature and work,” and that the Son, “as others, is God only in name” (Discourses Against the Arians I.5–6). A later historian of Arian sympathies records how the teaching travelled:

Arius, after his secession from the church, composed several songs to be sung by sailors, and by millers, and by travellers along the high road, and others of the same kind, which he adapted to certain tunes, as he thought suitable in each separate case, and thus by degrees seduced the minds of the unlearned by the attractiveness of his songs to the adoption of his own impiety.

Philostorgius, Ecclesiastical History II.2 (c. 430), as summarised by Photius. Trans. Edward Walford (1855). The disapproving last words are the summariser’s.

He had texts. In the Greek Old Testament that the church read, Wisdom says in Proverbs 8:22, “The Lord created me.” Jesus says, “my Father is greater than I” (John 14:28). Paul calls Christ “the firstborn of every creature” (Colossians 1:15). Arius had a reason too, and a good one as far as it went: there is one God. He could not see how to say “the Son is God” without saying “there are two.”

The refusal: what the church said

Between two and three hundred bishops met at Nicaea, in what is now Turkey, in the summer of 325. They agreed a creed, and they added a paragraph to make sure it could not be signed with a private reservation:

And whosoever shall say that there was a time when the Son of God was not, or that before he was begotten he was not, or that he was made of things that were not, or that he is of a different substance or essence [from the Father] or that he is a creature, or subject to change or conversion — all that so say, the Catholic and Apostolic Church anathematizes them.

The Creed of Nicaea (325), the closing anathema. Trans. Henry R. Percival, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14 (1900).

Why did it matter so much? Athanasius, who became bishop of Alexandria in 328 and was exiled five times for refusing to give way, gave two reasons. The first is about worship. Christians had prayed to Christ and sung hymns to him from the start. If he is a creature, that is idolatry.

We do not worship a creature. Far be the thought. For such an error belongs to heathens and Arians. But we worship the Lord of Creation, Incarnate, the Word of God.

Athanasius, Letter 60, to Adelphius, section 3 (c. 370). Trans. Archibald Robertson, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 4 (1892).

The second is about salvation. Only God can join us to God. “For what help can creatures derive from a creature that itself needs salvation? … a creature could never be saved by a creature, any more than the creatures were created by a creature, if the Word was not creator” (the same letter, section 8).

The Scriptures the council relied on are these. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God … All things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made” (John 1:1, 3). If nothing that was made was made without him, he is not one of the things that were made. Paul’s “firstborn of every creature” is followed at once by the reason for the title: “For by him were all things created … and he is before all things, and by him all things consist” (Colossians 1:16–17). “Firstborn” is the heir’s rank, as when God says of David, “I will make him my firstborn, higher than the kings of the earth” (Psalm 89:27). The Father says of the Son, “let all the angels of God worship him,” and, “Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever” (Hebrews 1:6, 8). And as for “my Father is greater than I,” the Athanasian Creed gives the church’s reading in a line: the Son is “equal to the Father, as touching his Godhead: and inferior to the Father, as touching his Manhood.”

The decision of 325 did not settle things. The argument ran for another fifty-six years, and for part of that time the Nicene side was losing. Part IX returns to the worst moment.

Try it: Nicaea, Arius, or a text both sides claimed?

Eight sentences. Some are ancient, two are from modern published sources, and one is composed by this page. Sort each.

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The match: what is said now

Taught, in a body’s own words. Jehovah’s Witnesses, who grew out of an independent Bible-study movement in the United States in the 1870s, publish their teaching about Christ plainly. Their magazine put it like this: “God created Jesus and then used him to make everything else, including the angels” (The Watchtower, 1 March 2013, “When Was Jesus Created, and Why Is He Called God’s Son?”). Their website answers the question “Is Jesus Almighty God?” with: “Jesus never claimed to be on the same level as Almighty God.” Set the first of those beside Arius’s letter. A Son who has a beginning, who is the first thing God made, and through whom God made the rest: it is the same teaching, and it is argued from the same verses.

Reached by the founder of a slogan. Barton W. Stone was the leading signatory of the document of 1804 that told Christians to “take the Bible as the only sure guide to heaven,” from which the tradition of “no creed but the Bible” descends. Reading the Bible on that principle he concluded, and published in 1821, that the Son “did not begin to exist 1820 years ago; nor was he eternally begotten; but that he was the first begotten of the Father.” A Son who is older than the world and is not eternal is very close to what Nicaea shut out. Stone’s own movement did not follow him, and its churches today are Trinitarian. Dossier 24 gives the texts, and the earlier case of the English Presbyterians, whose chapels moved from “Scripture words only” in 1719 to Arian and then Unitarian teaching within a few generations.

Drifted, in the pews. Since 2014 Ligonier Ministries has commissioned Lifeway Research to survey American adults on basic doctrine. In the 2022 survey, among those classed as evangelical by what they believe, 73 per cent agreed with the statement “Jesus is the first and greatest being created by God.” Nearly all of the same people agreed that there is one God in three persons. Part VIII looks at those figures and what they can and cannot show.

Both speakers think they are saying what their church teaches. The first has told the children the story of Arius. The second has given his argument.

Where the label does not fit

The people in the survey are not Arians. They affirm the Trinity when asked in the Trinity’s words and affirm Arius when asked in his. That is confusion. Some may have heard “created” as a loose word for “begotten,” and “first and greatest” as praise. A heretic in Paul’s sense has been corrected twice and has refused. Most of these people have never been corrected once.

The Gospels do show the Son obeying the Father. A preacher who says that Jesus prayed, obeyed and was sent is repeating the New Testament. “Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience by the things which he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8). The creed’s answer is that he did these things as man, having “made himself of no reputation” (Philippians 2:7). To say he obeyed is orthodox. To say he was made is Arius.

Praying to the Father through the Son is the church’s own practice. “For through him we both have access by one Spirit unto the Father” (Ephesians 2:18). The old prayers of the liturgy end “through Jesus Christ our Lord.” That is the shape of Christian prayer, and it makes nobody an Arian.

A body that openly teaches this does not claim otherwise. Jehovah’s Witnesses do not say they hold the Nicene faith, and the page does not accuse them of hiding anything. They are on this page because their teaching shows that Arius’s reading of the Bible is still being reached by people who set out to read the Bible alone.

Try it: same teaching, or only a resemblance?

Six cases, all composed by this page. Give each a verdict.

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Modalism: one God in three masks

The sentence: what was taught

The first Christians were Jews, and they had learned from childhood that “the LORD our God is one LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4). They also worshipped Jesus. How both could be true was the church’s first great intellectual problem, and Arianism and Modalism are the two obvious solutions. Arius kept God one by putting the Son among the creatures. The Modalists kept God one by saying the Son simply was the Father, appearing in another form.

Hippolytus, a learned priest in Rome, describes the teaching of Noetus and the hearing before the elders of Smyrna. Noetus “alleged that Christ was the Father Himself, and that the Father Himself was born, and suffered, and died.” Called to account, he answered, “What evil, then, am I doing in glorifying Christ?” (Against Noetus 1; trans. S. D. F. Salmond, 1886).

He had texts. Hippolytus lists them: “I am the God of your fathers: you shall have no other gods beside me,” and “I am the first, and the last; and beside me there is none other.” To these the school added the sayings of Jesus, “I and my Father are one” (John 10:30) and “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (14:9). Hippolytus’s complaint was about method: “they make use only of one class of passages” (Against Noetus 3).

The detail that matters most for this page comes from Tertullian. He was writing against Praxeas, who had brought the teaching to Rome, and he stopped to admit who found it persuasive:

The simple, indeed, (I will not call them unwise and unlearned,) who always constitute the majority of believers, are startled at the dispensation (of the Three in One).

Tertullian, Against Praxeas, chapter 3 (c. 213). Trans. Peter Holmes, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3 (1885).

Tertullian is saying that modalism was the instinct of ordinary churchgoers in the year 213. They had been converted from many gods to one, and three persons sounded to them like a step backwards. Nobody had to teach it to them. It is what a sincere believer arrives at if the doctrine of God is never explained.

The refusal: what the church said

Tertullian’s opening charge is the best-known sentence in the book. Praxeas had done two things at Rome: he had turned the bishop against the New Prophecy, which Tertullian supported, and he had taught that the Father was crucified. Tertullian’s verdict on him: “he drove away prophecy, and he brought in heresy; he put to flight the Paraclete, and he crucified the Father” (chapter 1).

His argument is simple. The words “Father” and “Son” describe a relation, and a relation needs two. “A father makes a Son, and a Son makes a Father; and they who thus become reciprocally related out of each other to each other cannot in any way by themselves simply become so related to themselves” (chapter 10). Nobody is his own father. Then he gives the formula that Western Christianity has used ever since. There are three, he says, “not in condition, but in degree; not in substance, but in form; not in power, but in aspect; yet of one substance, and of one condition, and of one power” (chapter 2). This is the earliest book in which the Latin word trinitas is known to be used of God.

It is worth pausing on who wrote it. Tertullian was by this time a follower of Montanus. The first full defence of the Trinity in Latin was written by a man the church regards as having fallen into the fourth of the five teachings on this page. The five are not a single slope, and a person can be firmly right about one of them and wrong about another.

The Scriptures on the church’s side are the scenes in which the three are plainly distinct at the same moment. At the Jordan the Son is in the water, the Spirit descends “like a dove,” and a voice from heaven says, “This is my beloved Son” (Matthew 3:16–17). In the garden Jesus prays, “not as I will, but as thou wilt” (26:39). He promises, “I will pray the Father, and he shall give you another Comforter” (John 14:16). He asks the Father to glorify him “with the glory which I had with thee before the world was” (17:5). If there is only one person, Jesus was praying to himself.

What is lost if Modalism stands? The Gospel becomes a kind of performance, with one actor playing three parts. The Son’s obedience and the Father’s sending of him are no longer real. Nobody is left to plead for us: “we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous” (1 John 2:1). And God is no longer love in himself. Jesus says to the Father, “thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world” (John 17:24). On the Modalist account there was nobody there to be loved.

Hilary of Poitiers summed it up in the next century: Sabellius “makes one and the same Person, Son to Himself and also Father” (On the Trinity II.4). The Council of Constantinople in 381 anathematised “the Sabellians” by name in its first canon.

The trouble with pictures

Most Christians have been taught the Trinity by a comparison: water, an egg, a clover leaf, the sun. The practice is as old as the doctrine, and so is the warning against it. Gregory of Nazianzus, the bishop who presided for part of the council of 381, tried the best comparisons of his day and reported the result:

I have very carefully considered this matter in my own mind, and have looked at it in every point of view, in order to find some illustration of this most important subject, but I have been unable to discover anything on earth with which to compare the nature of the Godhead.

Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31 (the Fifth Theological Oration), section 31 (380). Trans. C. G. Browne and J. E. Swallow, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 7 (1894).

He had thought of “the sun and a ray and light,” and gave it up for fear that it would deny “Personality to the Others, and make Them only Powers of God, existing in Him and not Personal” (section 32). His conclusion: “It seems best to me to let the images and the shadows go, as being deceitful and very far short of the truth” (section 33).

The reason is not that Gregory lacked imagination. Every created thing is either one thing with several states, or one thing with several parts, or several things. A picture of the first kind teaches Modalism. A picture of the second kind teaches that each person is a third of God. A picture of the third kind teaches three gods. There is no fourth kind of object.

Try it: where does each picture land?

Eight ways of explaining or addressing God, as heard in churches. Seven are composed by this page. For each, decide what it actually teaches.

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The match: what is said now

Taught, in a denomination’s own words. In 1913, at a Pentecostal camp meeting near Los Angeles, a preacher observed that the apostles in Acts baptised “in the name of Jesus Christ” (Acts 2:38). Within a year this had grown into a teaching that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are titles of the one person Jesus, and that those baptised in the threefold name should be baptised again. It was called the New Issue. The churches that hold it are known as Oneness Pentecostal. The largest of them states its doctrine like this:

There is one God, who has revealed Himself as Father; through His Son, in redemption; and as the Holy Spirit, by emanation. Jesus Christ is God manifested in flesh. He is both God and man.

United Pentecostal Church International, “Our Beliefs,” upci.org.

One God who has revealed himself in three ways, with no mention of persons, is the position the elders of Smyrna examined in Noetus. It is held today by sincere and fervent Christians who came to it, as he did, out of a desire to honour Jesus.

The movement it came from had no creed, and had to write one. The Assemblies of God was formed in 1914 as a loose fellowship with no statement of faith. The New Issue spread through it at once. In 1916 its General Council met in St Louis and adopted a Statement of Fundamental Truths with a long section on the Godhead, and a large part of its ministers left. That section still stands. Two of its sentences could have been written at Nicaea. The first concedes that words from outside the Bible are needed: “The terms ‘Trinity’ and ‘persons’ as related to the Godhead, while not found in the Scriptures, are words in harmony with Scripture.” The second shuts a particular door: “It is a transgression of the Doctrine of Christ to say that Jesus Christ derived the title, Son of God, solely from the fact of the incarnation.” A fellowship that began by declining to write a creed found within two years that it could not stay Trinitarian without one. Dossier 24 tells the story at more length.

Drifted, in the pews. The commoner case is the one Tertullian described. The doctrine is on the church’s website, nobody has explained it, and the congregation fills the gap with whatever makes sense.

The prayer thanks the Father for what the Son did. Tertullian’s phrase for that was that it crucified the Father. The website describes three appearances of one person. The youth talk is Sabellius exactly. All three speakers would be astonished to be told so, and all three belong to churches whose statements of faith say “three persons.”

Where the label does not fit

Oneness believers are not Arians, and the page is not judging them. Their teaching makes Jesus fully God, which is the reverse of Arius’s error. The page quotes their statement because it shows the second-century teaching restated by people who began with the Bible and no creed. Whether a body is a Christian church is outside this page.

“God has revealed himself as Father, Son and Spirit” is true. The church says it constantly. The modalist adds one word: he has only revealed himself so, and behind the three names there is one person. A sentence about how God is known becomes Modalism when it is made to deny how God is.

The proof-texts are Scripture, and the church has always read them. “I and my Father are one” means one in being; the Greek for “one” there is neuter, one thing, and is not the word for one person. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father” says that the Son shows us the Father perfectly, which only someone who is not the Father can do. Isaiah’s child is called “The everlasting Father” (9:6) as a title of his care for his people.

A bad illustration is not a heresy. A Sunday-school teacher with an ice cube is trying to help. The fault lies with the church that gave her nothing better and never told her that the ice cube has a history.

Try it: same teaching, or only a resemblance?

Six cases, all composed by this page. Give each a verdict.

0 of 6 judged

Montanism: something more than the Gospels

The sentence: what was claimed

In a village in Phrygia, some time around the year 170, a recent convert called Montanus began to speak in a trance. Two women joined him. The three were understood by their followers to be the instruments of the Paraclete, the Comforter whom Jesus had promised: “when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth” (John 16:13). The movement spread quickly through Asia Minor and reached Rome, Gaul and North Africa within a generation.

A few of their sayings survive, copied down by a hostile writer two hundred years afterwards. Montanus is reported as saying, in the voice of the Spirit, “I am the Lord God Almighty dwelling in man.” Maximilla is reported as saying, “After me there will be no more prophecy, but the consummation” (both as given by Epiphanius, Panarion 48, c. 375). In fairness, the first of these need not mean that Montanus thought he was God. Old Testament prophets also spoke in the first person for God, and this is probably the same form of speech.

What the movement added to ordinary church life can be listed. There were new fasts. Second marriages were forbidden. Christians were not to run from persecution. The heavenly Jerusalem was expected to come down at a town called Pepuza. And those who would not accept the prophets were given a name. Tertullian wrote a book in the movement’s defence and called it On Fasting: In Opposition to the Psychics. The “psychics” are the psychikoi of Part III: Paul’s “natural man” who “receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God” (1 Corinthians 2:14). The New Prophecy used the word for the rest of the church.

Hippolytus, at Rome, gives the claim that caused the trouble. Some of them, he says, “magnify these wretched women above the Apostles and every gift of Grace,” and “they allege that they have learned something more through these, than from law, and prophets, and the Gospels” (Refutation VIII.12; trans. J. H. MacMahon, 1886).

That box is why Montanism is the odd one out on this page. Nobody on either side said that its doctrine of God was wrong. Tertullian’s words are from the first chapter of On Fasting (trans. S. Thelwall, 1885). He is putting the best face on it, but the critics do not contradict him.

The refusal: what the church objected to

Eusebius, the church’s first historian, preserves two critics who wrote within living memory. The first is anonymous and wrote about 192. The second, Apollonius, wrote some years later. Their objections fall under three heads.

The manner. Montanus, says the anonymous writer, “became beside himself, and being suddenly in a sort of frenzy and ecstasy, he raved, and began to babble and utter strange things, prophesying in a manner contrary to the constant custom of the Church” (Church History V.16.7). Eusebius mentions another book, by Miltiades, which showed “that a prophet ought not to speak in ecstasy” (V.17.1). The point is not that feeling is suspect. The point is control. Paul’s rule was that “the spirits of the prophets are subject to the prophets” (1 Corinthians 14:32), and that what a prophet says is to be weighed: “Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge” (14:29). A speaker who is out of his senses cannot be asked what he meant.

The authority. The new prophets did not submit to that weighing. The anonymous writer says that “the arrogant spirit taught them to revile the entire universal Church under heaven,” because it would not receive them (V.16.9). Add Hippolytus’s report that they claimed to have learned “something more” than the Gospels, and the shape is clear. A message was being placed beside the apostles’ teaching, and those who questioned it were told they lacked the Spirit.

The fruit. Apollonius is the most concrete, and he reads as though he were writing now.

His actions and his teaching show who this new teacher is. This is he who taught the dissolution of marriage; who made laws for fasting; who named Pepuza and Tymion, small towns in Phrygia, Jerusalem, wishing to gather people to them from all directions; who appointed collectors of money; who contrived the receiving of gifts under the name of offerings; who provided salaries for those who preached his doctrine, that its teaching might prevail through gluttony.

Apollonius, quoted in Eusebius, Church History V.18.2 (early third century). Trans. Arthur Cushman McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 1 (1890).

He goes on: “Does not all Scripture seem to you to forbid a prophet to receive gifts and money? When therefore I see the prophetess receiving gold and silver and costly garments, how can I avoid reproving her?” (V.18.4). And the anonymous writer applies the oldest test of all. Maximilla had foretold wars and upheaval. He counts the years: “it is today more than thirteen years since the woman died, and there has been neither a partial nor general war in the world” (V.16.19). The rule he has in mind is Moses’: “if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken” (Deuteronomy 18:22).

None of these tests was invented for the occasion. A church manual called the Didache, written about the year 100, had already told congregations how to deal with travelling prophets. It says that “from their ways shall the false prophet and the prophet be known.” It says that “whoever says in the Spirit, Give me money, or something else, you shall not listen to him.” And it says that “every prophet who teaches the truth, if he do not what he teaches, is a false prophet” (Didache 11; trans. M. B. Riddle, 1886).

What the church did not say

It did not say that prophecy was over. This is the most commonly misreported fact about the whole affair. The anonymous critic himself, in the middle of his attack, grants that “the apostle thought it necessary that the prophetic gift should continue in all the Church until the final coming” (V.17.4). Irenaeus, writing in the same years, criticises people who were so anxious to shut out false prophets that they “set aside at once both the Gospel and the prophetic Spirit” (Against Heresies III.11.9). And Tertullian records that a bishop of Rome had at first “acknowledged the prophetic gifts of Montanus, Prisca, and Maximilla,” before being persuaded otherwise (Against Praxeas 1). It was a close decision.

The decision was made by what Eusebius calls “the faithful in Asia,” who “met often in many places throughout Asia to consider this matter” (V.16.10). What they refused was a particular claim: that a new voice could add to what the apostles handed on, could not be weighed, and could pronounce the rest of the church unspiritual. Jude’s phrase for what they were defending is “the faith which was once delivered unto the saints” (Jude 3). The letter to the Hebrews gives the reason it cannot be added to: God, who spoke in many ways by the prophets, “hath in these last days spoken unto us by his Son” (1:2). The Spirit whom the Montanists invoked is promised for a different work: “He shall glorify me: for he shall receive of mine, and shall shew it unto you” (John 16:14).

Try it: the year 200, or last week?

Eight lines about prophets and prophecy. Four are recorded of the New Prophecy by writers of the second, third and fourth centuries. Four are composed by this page in a modern style and are quoted from no one. Which is which?

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The match: what is said now

Several earlier dossiers have covered parts of this ground, and the page will not repeat them. Dossier 03 sets out what Scripture says a prophet is. Dossier 30 follows the claim to private revelation from Phrygia to the present. Dossier 41 looks at dated promises from the pulpit, and Dossier 45 at where one such ministry ended. What this Part adds is the comparison itself, point by point.

The clearest modern judgement on this pattern was made by Pentecostals. In 1948 a revival began at a Bible school in North Battleford, Saskatchewan, and became known as the Latter Rain. It taught, among other things, that spiritual gifts could be passed on by the laying on of hands with prophecy, and that apostles and prophets were being restored to lead the church. In September 1949 the General Council of the Assemblies of God, meeting in Seattle, adopted a resolution disapproving it. By the denomination’s own account, the teachings it rejected included the idea that the church is built on present-day apostles and prophets, and the practice of imposing personal guidance on people through prophetic utterance. In 2001 the same body’s General Presbytery put the principle in a sentence: “the content of prophecy itself should always be tested by and responsible to the superior authority of Scripture” (Apostles and Prophets, 6 August 2001).

That is the second-century decision, made again by a church that expects prophecy every Sunday. It shows where the old line ran: between prophecy that submits to being weighed and prophecy that does not. Whether there is prophecy at all was never the question.

Where the label does not fit

Expecting the gifts is not Montanism. Whether prophecy and healing continue is argued among Christians who share the creeds, and this page does not settle it. On that question the anonymous critic and Irenaeus are on the side of those who expect them. A Pentecostal church that weighs every prophecy against Scripture is doing what the critics of Montanus asked for.

Fervour is not Montanism. The objection to “ecstasy” was to speech that could not be controlled or questioned. It was not to loud singing, tears or raised hands.

Women who prophesy are not the point. Philip “had four daughters, virgins, which did prophesy” (Acts 21:9), and the anonymous critic cites them with approval. The complaint against Prisca and Maximilla was about what was claimed for their words.

The Montanists may have been better than their critics said. Almost everything we know comes from people who opposed them. Modern historians, among them Christine Trevett (Montanism, 1996) and William Tabbernee (Fake Prophecy and Polluted Sacraments, 2007), read the evidence more sympathetically, and Tertullian was nobody’s fool. The movement was morally strict and produced martyrs. That makes it a better test case. A movement can be sincere, orthodox about God and serious about holiness, and still be refused for claiming an authority nobody may check.

Try it: same teaching, or only a resemblance?

Six cases, all composed by this page. Give each a verdict.

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Pelagianism: “we are but men”

The sentence: what was taught

Pelagius came to Rome from Britain late in the fourth century and made his name as a spiritual director to serious Christians. What he found there shocked him. The empire was now officially Christian, the churches were full, and standards had fallen. People sinned and shrugged. When they were challenged, they said that they were only human.

The story of how the quarrel began is told by Augustine. In his Confessions he had prayed a prayer that became famous, and thirty years later he recalled what happened when it was read out in Rome:

“Give what Thou commandest, and command what Thou willest.” Which words of mine, Pelagius at Rome, when they were mentioned in his presence by a certain brother and fellow bishop of mine, could not bear; and contradicting somewhat too excitedly, nearly came to a quarrel with him who had mentioned them.

Augustine, On the Gift of Perseverance, chapter 53 (428–29). Trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, rev. Benjamin B. Warfield, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vol. 5 (1887).

It is easy to see why. To Pelagius the prayer sounded like an excuse dressed as devotion: I will obey when God makes me. In 413 he wrote a long letter of advice to Demetrias, a young woman of a great Roman family who had taken a vow of virginity. It is his own statement of his method, and it begins with human nature: “Whenever I have to speak on the subject of moral instruction and the conduct of a holy life, it is my practice first to demonstrate the power and quality of human nature” (Letter to Demetrias 2; trans. B. R. Rees, 1991). He goes on: “The best incentive for the mind consists in teaching it that it is possible to do anything which one really wants to do.” In chapter 16 he turns on the people who plead weakness:

It’s hard! It’s difficult! We can’t! We are but men, encompassed by the frailty of the flesh! … We make the God of knowledge guilty of twofold ignorance: of not knowing what He has made, and of not knowing what He has commanded. … He has not willed to command anything impossible, for He is righteous; and He will not condemn a man for what he could not help, for He is Holy.

Pelagius, Letter to Demetrias, chapter 16 (413). Trans. in B. J. Kidd, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church, vol. 2 (1923). The first sentences are the excuse he is mocking.

The argument is tight, and it is worth feeling its force. God is just. A just God does not command what cannot be done. God commands holiness. Therefore holiness can be done, by us, as we are. The rest follows from that. If we can obey as we are, then our nature was not damaged by Adam. If our nature was not damaged, then children are born as Adam was made. And if all that is so, then “grace” can only mean the good things God has put within our reach: the free will he created us with, the law that tells us what to do, the example of Christ, and forgiveness for the past.

Caelestius said these things without his teacher’s caution. When he applied to be ordained at Carthage in 411 he was charged with holding six propositions. Augustine preserves the list:

The refusal: what the church said

The first verdict went Pelagius’s way. In December 415 a synod of fourteen bishops at Diospolis in Palestine examined him, and, as Augustine himself reports, “they pronounced him to be a Catholic.” He was acquitted because he disowned the propositions charged against Caelestius. That fact belongs on the record, and this Part returns to it below.

The African bishops were not satisfied. On 1 May 418 more than two hundred of them met at Carthage and passed a series of canons. Two of them are as follows.

That whosoever says that Adam, the first man, was created mortal, so that whether he had sinned or not, he would have died in body — that is, he would have gone forth of the body, not because his sin merited this, but by natural necessity, let him be anathema.

Likewise it seemed good that whosoever denies that infants newly from their mother’s wombs should be baptized, or says that baptism is for remission of sins, but that they derive from Adam no original sin, which needs to be removed by the laver of regeneration, from whence the conclusion follows, that in them the form of baptism for the remission of sins, is to be understood as false and not true, let him be anathema.

The Council of Carthage (418), as preserved in the Code of Canons of the African Church, canons 109 and 110. Trans. Henry R. Percival, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14 (1900).

The second canon argues from what the church already did. Infants were being baptised everywhere, with the words of the creed, “for the remission of sins.” If a newborn has nothing to be forgiven, the church has been saying something untrue over every child. The canons that follow deal with grace. They insist that it is more than pardon for past sins, more than knowing what to do, and more than a help that makes obedience easier. It is the gift of loving and being able to do what God commands.

In 431 the Council of Ephesus, a general council of the whole church, named the teaching in its own canons: “If any of the clergy should fall away, and publicly or privately presume to maintain the doctrines of Nestorius or Celestius, it is declared just by the holy Synod that these also should be deposed” (canon 4).

The texts of Scripture on which all this rests are among the best known in the New Testament. “You hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). “By grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God” (2:8). “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him” (John 6:44). “By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men” (Romans 5:12). “What hast thou that thou didst not receive?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). And the text that holds command and gift together: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling. For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12–13).

The milder form, and the Council of Orange

Almost nobody after 418 defended Pelagius outright. A quieter position took his place among monks in the south of France. They agreed that we are fallen and need grace. But they thought that the first small movement towards God, the wish to be healed, had to be our own, and that grace then came to meet it. Otherwise, they asked, how is anyone to blame for not believing?

In 529 a small council met at Orange under Caesarius, bishop of Arles. Its fifth and seventh canons address the first step directly.

If anyone says that not only the increase of faith but also its beginning and the very desire for faith, by which we believe in Him who justifies the ungodly and comes to the regeneration of holy baptism — if anyone says that this belongs to us by nature and not by a gift of grace … it is proof that he is opposed to the teaching of the Apostles.

If anyone affirms that we can form any right opinion or make any right choice which relates to the salvation of eternal life, as is expedient for us, or that we can be saved, that is, assent to the preaching of the gospel through our natural powers without the illumination and inspiration of the Holy Spirit … he is led astray by a heretical spirit, and does not understand the voice of God who says in the Gospel, “For apart from me you can do nothing.”

The Council of Orange (529), canons 5 and 7, abridged. English text as published by EWTN.

Orange is careful in the other direction as well, and the two sentences that show it should always be quoted with the canons. It says that the baptised “have the ability and responsibility, if they desire to labor faithfully, to perform with the aid and cooperation of Christ what is of essential importance in regard to the salvation of their soul.” And it says: “We not only do not believe that any are foreordained to evil by the power of God, but even state with utter abhorrence that if there are those who want to believe so evil a thing, they are anathema.” The council that said faith begins with grace also said that people really co-operate and that God destines nobody to sin.

The Reformation confessions took all this over by name. The Augsburg Confession of 1530: “They condemn the Pelagians and others who deny that original depravity is sin, and who, to obscure the glory of Christ’s merit and benefits, argue that man can be justified before God by his own strength and reason” (Article II). The Thirty-nine Articles: “Original Sin standeth not in the following of Adam, (as the Pelagians do vainly talk;) but it is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man” (Article IX). The Council of Trent’s first canon on justification says the same from the Roman Catholic side. On this point the sixteenth century, which agreed about little, was united.

Try it: who takes the first step?

Eight sentences. Three are from Scripture, one is from Pelagius, one is from the Council of Orange, and three are composed by this page. Sort each.

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The match: what is said now

Taught, in a textbook. Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875) was the most influential American evangelist of his century. He was a lawyer before he was a preacher, he taught theology at Oberlin College in Ohio, and his methods shaped the revival meeting as it is still known: the direct appeal, the call to come forward, the expectation of a decision tonight. In his Lectures on Systematic Theology he turned to the verse the church had always quoted for inherited sin, “in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5), and said that David wrote it to express “not the anti-scriptural and nonsensical dogma of a sinful constitution” but his sense of having sinned from his earliest years. Moral depravity, he wrote, “cannot be an attribute of human nature, considered simply as such.” Of the traditional doctrine: “It is a branch of a grossly false and heathenish philosophy.”

What, then, did Adam do to us? Finney’s answer is worth setting beside the second proposition charged against Caelestius.

Finney is more careful than Caelestius. He grants that Adam’s sin made things worse for everyone. But the way it made them worse is by temptation and bad surroundings, which is the way Pelagius said sin spreads. The will itself arrives intact. The same book says of the older view, “Original or constitutional sinfulness, physical regeneration, and all their kindred and resulting dogmas, are alike subversive of the gospel” (Lecture XLIII). And his best-known sentence about revival follows from it: “A revival is not a miracle, nor dependent on a miracle, in any sense. It is a purely philosophical result of the right use of the constituted means” (Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 1835, Lecture I). If the will is able, conversion is a matter of persuading it, and persuasion is a technique.

In fairness to Finney, he insisted that no one ever does repent without the Holy Spirit. What he meant by the Spirit’s work was persuasion of a will that can respond. The church at Orange meant the healing of a will that cannot.

Drifted, in the pews. In the State of Theology survey for 2025, 64 per cent of American evangelicals agreed that “everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God,” and 53 per cent agreed that “everyone sins a little, but most people are good by nature.” In a study reported in 2017 the Barna Group found that 52 per cent of practising Christians in the United States strongly agreed that the Bible teaches “God helps those who help themselves.” The Bible does not contain the sentence. It reached English readers through Benjamin Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack for 1736, and is older than that as a proverb.

The last of these is Pelagius’s letter to Demetrias in a sentence, and it shows why the church thought the matter was pastoral and not only theoretical. Pelagius was writing for people of unusual discipline. Said to a struggling person, his teaching has no gospel in it. It tells the drowning man that he could swim if he tried.

Where the label does not fit

Arminians and Wesleyans are not Pelagians. This is the commonest misuse of the word. The tradition that descends from Jacobus Arminius and John Wesley teaches that fallen people cannot turn to God at all unless grace first frees them to do so. Wesley’s sermon on original sin makes it the test of whether a person is a Christian in his thinking:

But here is the shibboleth: Is man by nature filled with all manner of evil? Is he void of all good? Is he wholly fallen? Is his soul totally corrupted? … Allow this, and you are so far a Christian. Deny it, and you are but an Heathen still.

John Wesley, Sermon 44, Original Sin (1759), III.2. Text of the 1872 edition, as published by the Wesley Center Online.

Calling people to repent and believe is apostolic. “Repent, and be baptized every one of you” (Acts 2:38). A preacher who urges a decision is doing what Peter did. The question Orange asks is what he tells people about where the ability to respond comes from.

The Eastern churches are not Pelagian either. They speak of the sin inherited from Adam in somewhat different terms from the Latin West and lay stress on human co-operation with grace. They were also present at Ephesus, which condemned Caelestius.

One real difference should be stated exactly. The Southern Baptist Convention, which calls its statement a confession and not a creed, says that Adam’s “posterity inherit a nature and an environment inclined toward sin. Therefore, as soon as they are capable of moral action, they become transgressors and are under condemnation. Only the grace of God can bring man into His holy fellowship …” (The Baptist Faith and Message, 2000, Article III). That is not Pelagian. It teaches an inherited bent towards sin and says that grace alone saves. It does differ from the canon of 418 on one point: it dates a person’s condemnation from his own first sin, where Carthage held that there is something in an infant to be remitted. That difference is the reason the two traditions disagree about baptising infants, which Dossier 04 and Dossier 21 take up.

Pelagius may have been better than “Pelagianism.” He was acquitted at Diospolis. He cared about holiness in a lax church, which is not a fault. The historian Ali Bonner has argued in The Myth of Pelagianism (2018) that the system condemned under his name was largely assembled by his opponents. What the councils refused was a set of propositions, and they are the ones listed above, whoever held them.

Try it: same teaching, or only a resemblance?

Six cases. The first describes a real book quoted above, and the rest are composed by this page. Give each a verdict.

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What the pews say

The five Parts above quoted documents: what a body publishes, what a teacher printed. This Part asks a different question. What do the people in the seats believe, whatever their church’s statement says?

Three sets of figures bear on it. The largest is the State of Theology survey, which Ligonier Ministries has commissioned from Lifeway Research every two or three years since 2014. About three thousand American adults are asked whether they agree with a list of statements. The 2022 round questioned 3,011 people online in January of that year. The researchers pick out a group they call evangelical by belief: those who strongly agree that the Bible is the highest authority for what they believe, that it is important to encourage non-Christians to trust Jesus, that his death is the only sacrifice that removes the penalty of sin, and that only those who trust in him receive salvation. They are the committed core, and they are defined by what they believe. Their denomination is not asked for this purpose.

Before you see any figures, guess them. Move each slider to the percentage you expect, and then reveal the answer.

What the figures show

The first four statements were written by the researchers to state an old error in plain words. A committed evangelical who has been taught the faith ought to disagree with every one of them. Majorities agreed. And nearly all of the same people also agreed that there is “one true God in three persons” and that Jesus rose bodily from the dead.

That combination is the finding. These are not people who have weighed the Nicene Creed and rejected it. They hold the right words where they have been given them and fill the spaces with what seems reasonable. What seems reasonable turns out to be Arius on the Son, the opponents of the council of 381 on the Spirit, and Caelestius on human nature. Nobody taught it to them, and nobody had to. Part X asks why.

What the figures cannot show

Four cautions, and the fourth matters most for this page’s thesis.

Agreeing with a sentence in a survey is not the same as holding a doctrine. People tend to agree with statements that sound positive. “First and greatest” sounds like praise. Some respondents will have heard “created” as a loose word for “begotten.”

The figures move. Among evangelicals, agreement that Jesus “was a great teacher, but he was not God” stood at more than four in ten in 2022 and was reported as markedly lower in 2025. Single numbers should be held loosely. The general picture has held across six rounds of the survey.

The older polls are of the general public. The 2006 figure on the resurrection of the body is for all American adults. Among those who had recently been to church it was fifty per cent.

None of this compares churches that have creeds with churches that do not. The surveys do not ask whether a respondent’s church recites the creed. And where Lifeway’s 2022 report breaks its results down by tradition, majorities of Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants also agreed that Jesus is the first and greatest created being. Hearing the creed every week has evidently not stopped people in those churches from agreeing with Arius when a pollster reads his sentence to them.

The church without a memory

If the confusion is general, is there anything left of the claim that churches without creeds are the exposed ones? There is, and it rests on two things: what has happened when the experiment was tried, and how a creed actually works.

The experiment was first tried in 359

The usual picture is that the creed-makers were the party of tradition and their opponents the party of the Bible. The opponents said so themselves. Thirty-four years after Nicaea the emperor Constantius, who favoured the Arian side, called some four hundred Western bishops to Rimini in Italy. They were kept there for months and pressed to sign a new formula. It said that the Son was “like the Father” and left out the word the council of 325 had chosen, ousia, being or substance. Jerome, writing about twenty years later, records the reason that was given:

As regards the term Usia, it was not rejected without a show of reason for so doing. “Because it is not found in the Scriptures,” they said, “and its novelty is a stumbling-block to many, we have thought it best to dispense with it.”

Jerome, Dialogue Against the Luciferians, section 18 (c. 379). Trans. W. H. Fremantle, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 6 (1893).

The bishops signed. Most of them meant no harm by it. They had been told that they were only removing an unscriptural word. In the next section Jerome describes the result: the world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian.

Two lessons come out of Rimini, and they pull in different directions. The first is that “let us use only the Bible’s words” was the argument by which the Nicene faith was set aside. It is not a new discovery of the nineteenth century, and its first recorded result was the one the creed had been written to prevent. The second lesson is the fair one. These were bishops of the historic church, with a creed. They fell anyway. A creed did not make them safe. What it gave the church was something to recover: twenty-two years later the council of Constantinople restored the word and the faith it guarded.

It has been tried since

Dossier 24 sets out the later cases with their documents. In brief:

Every case in which this page found one of the five taught, and not merely drifted into, arose where no creed was in force or where the creed had been set aside. That is the strongest support for the author’s thesis. It is not a law. Creedless churches are not bound to end this way, and Stone’s own movement is the proof. But in each case what saved the situation was either a creed written in a hurry or the accident of sound teachers.

How a creed works, and what a home-made statement lacks

Nearly every non-creedal church has a statement of faith. It is fair to ask why that is not just as good. The answer is in three things a creed does that such a statement usually does not.

The third point can be tested. Take a typical line from a modern statement of faith and ask whether one of the five teachers could have signed it.

Try it: would this sentence have stopped him?

Eight sentences. Four are from the creeds and the Articles of Religion. Four are composed by this page in the style of a modern statement of faith; every one of the four is true. Each is set against one of the five teachings. Decide whether the sentence shuts that teaching out or lets it through.

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What this Part does not claim

It does not claim that churches with creeds are sound. Rimini is the first counter-example and there have been many since: in the last three centuries there has been no shortage of clergy in creedal churches who privately or publicly doubted the Trinity or the resurrection. It does not claim that churches without creeds are unsound. A great many are orthodox on every point in this dossier, because their teachers are. Dossier 25 argues that this is exactly the weakness: the church’s doctrine is as sound as the present pastor and no sounder. And, as Dossier 24 admits, nobody seems to have measured whether congregations that recite the creed are less confused than those that do not. The case made here is from history and from mechanism, and a reader is entitled to want more.

Why these five keep coming back

If these teachings had to be handed down from teacher to pupil, they would have died out. Arius has had no school since the seventh century. Yet his sentence is agreed to by most of the people asked. The explanation must be that each of the five can be reached by anyone, starting from nothing, and that it will seem like good sense when he gets there.

Look at what each one does. In every case the church was holding two things together, and the teaching kept one and let the other go.

Every entry in the last column is something a Christian ought to care about. That is why the men who taught these things were respected, and why their followers were sincere. Each of them saw one truth clearly. The church’s answer in each case was not to deny that truth. It was to refuse to buy it at the price of another one.

The orthodox positions are harder to say and harder to picture. “One God in three persons” has no illustration that works, as Gregory found. “Work out your own salvation … for it is God which worketh in you” does not resolve into a diagram. G. K. Chesterton, writing in 1908 about this very feature of Christian doctrine, put it in a paragraph that is hard to improve on:

It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one’s own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps of error and exaggeration which fashion after fashion and sect after sect set along the historic path of Christendom — that would indeed have been simple. It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1908), chapter 6, “The Paradoxes of Christianity.”

How they travel now

Arius set his teaching to tunes for sailors and millers. The modern carriers are of the same kind. None of them is an argument, and that is why they work.

None of these would survive five minutes’ questioning by someone who knew the creed and its reasons. In a church where nobody does, there is no one to ask the questions.

Try it: who said it, and when?

Ten quotations, all real, all dated, and all used on this page. Place each.

The thesis, scored

The thesis was that five ancient heresies have crept into the modern church, and that non-creedal churches are where to look. Here is how each of the five came out under the three tests.

What would change this verdict

A conclusion ought to say what would overturn it. Four findings would weaken this one.

Listen for it

A reader cannot examine “the modern church.” He can examine one congregation and one statement of faith, and he should begin with his own head. Most of us, if we are honest, will find that we have said at least one of the composed lines on this page, and meant well by it.

Five questions for a statement of faith

Find your church’s statement of faith. Read it slowly, with these five questions beside you. In each case the first wording shuts the old teaching out, and the second is true but would have been signed by the teacher in question.

A statement made entirely of sentences from the right-hand column is not heretical. Every line of it is true. It is simply open on all five sides, and what fills the openings will be whatever the present teachers happen to think.

Ten statements about your own church

Answer honestly. Nothing is stored or sent anywhere, and the result is a prompt for thought and nothing more.

If you find something

Suppose you hear one of these things from your own pulpit, or find it in your own church’s statement. Three things follow from this page’s argument about what to do.

Assume confusion before anything else. In nearly every case on this page the speaker did not know that what he said had a history. Tell him, privately, and bring the text with you. “If thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone” (Matthew 18:15). Most people who have told a children’s talk that God made Jesus will be mortified and grateful.

Ask a question, and let the creed do the work. “Does our church hold the Nicene Creed? If there is a line of it we do not hold, which one?” is a fair question to put to any pastor. It accuses nobody, and it cannot be answered without a decision.

Keep the word “heresy” for what has earned it. A teaching that the church refused, held on to after that has been pointed out. Until then you are dealing with a mistake, and the Bereans’ method is the right one: they “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so” (Acts 17:11).

Your answers, revisited

Here are the ten questions you answered before reading, with what the sources say. If you skipped them, go back to the quiz, lock in your answers, and return.

Check it yourself

Twenty-four items. Nearly everything here is free and online. If you read only three, read the first three. If you do only one thing, do the last.

1. 1. Jude; 2 Peter 2; Acts 20:17–32; Titus 3:9–11; 1 Corinthians 11:18–19. Read this first. Fifteen minutes. Where the New Testament says false teaching comes from and how it arrives.
2. 2. John 1:1–18; Colossians 1:12–20; Hebrews 1; Matthew 3:13–17; John 14–17. Read this first. Thirty minutes. The texts behind Parts IV and V. Note every place where the Son speaks to the Father.
3. 3. Ephesians 2:1–10; Romans 5:12–21; John 15:1–8; Philippians 2:12–13; 1 Corinthians 15. Read this first. Thirty minutes. Grace, and the resurrection of the body.
4. 4. 1 John 4:1–6; 2 John; 1 Corinthians 2:6–3:4 and 14:26–33; 1 Thessalonians 5:19–22; Deuteronomy 18:20–22; Hebrews 1:1–2. Twenty minutes. The tests for spirits and prophets, and Paul’s “spiritual” and “carnal.”
5. 5. The Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed and the Athanasian Creed. As printed in the Book of Common Prayer (1662); free at churchofengland.org. Ten minutes. Read the Athanasian Creed aloud once.
6. 6. Ignatius, Letter to the Smyrnaeans; Irenaeus, Against Heresies I.5–6, I.10, I.21, I.24, III.2–3, III.11.9 and V.2. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1 (1885); free at New Advent. Forty minutes.
7. 7. Tertullian, On the Resurrection of the Flesh 8; Against Praxeas 1–3 and 10; On Fasting 1. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vols 3 and 4; free at New Advent. Twenty minutes.
8. 8. Hippolytus, Against Noetus 1–3; Refutation of All Heresies VIII.12. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 5 (1886); free at New Advent. Ten minutes.
9. 9. Clement of Alexandria, Excerpts from Theodotus 56 and 78 (trans. R. P. Casey, 1934); the Gospel of Thomas (trans. T. O. Lambdin, in The Nag Hammadi Library in English, 1977). The movement in its own words. Twenty minutes.
10. 10. Arius, Letter to Eusebius of Nicomedia (in Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History I.4); Athanasius, Discourses Against the Arians I.5–6 and Letter 60, to Adelphius; Philostorgius, Ecclesiastical History II.2 (trans. Edward Walford, 1855). Free at New Advent and tertullian.org. Thirty minutes.
11. 11. The Creed of Nicaea (325) with its anathema; the Council of Constantinople (381), canons 1 and 7; the Council of Ephesus (431), canons 1 and 4. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14 (1900); free at New Advent. Fifteen minutes. Canon 7 of Constantinople is generally thought to be a later addition.
12. 12. Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity II.2–4; Gregory of Nazianzus, Oration 31.31–33; Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory 2; Jerome, Dialogue Against the Luciferians 17–19. Free at New Advent. Thirty minutes. The last is the account of Rimini.
13. 13. Eusebius, Church History V.16–18 (trans. A. C. McGiffert, 1890); the Didache, chapters 11–13. Free at New Advent. Twenty minutes. Everything the second century recorded against the New Prophecy, and the tests it used.
14. 14. Epiphanius, Panarion 48. The standard translation, by Frank Williams, is not free; the oracles are quoted in many surveys. Treat all of it as the report of an opponent writing two centuries later.
15. 15. Pelagius, Letter to Demetrias (trans. B. R. Rees, The Letters of Pelagius and His Followers, 1991; chapter 16 in B. J. Kidd, Documents Illustrative of the History of the Church, vol. 2, 1923, free at earlychurchtexts.com); Augustine, On the Proceedings of Pelagius 23, On the Gift of Perseverance 53 and Confessions X.29. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, vols 1 and 5. Forty minutes. Read Pelagius before you read about him.
16. 16. The Council of Carthage (418), in the Code of Canons of the African Church, canons 109–116 (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, vol. 14); the Council of Orange (529), the twenty-five canons and the conclusion. Both free online. Twenty minutes. Read Orange to the end.
17. 17. The Augsburg Confession, Articles I, II, V and XVIII; the Thirty-nine Articles, I, VIII, IX and X; John Wesley, Sermon 44, Original Sin. All free online. Twenty minutes.
18. 18. Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Systematic Theology: the lectures on moral depravity and regeneration (among them Lectures XLI and XLIII in the edition of 1851, free at gospeltruth.net, and Lecture XXIII in the abridged edition of 1878, free at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library); Lectures on Revivals of Religion (1835), Lecture I. Forty minutes. Read him in his own words before accepting this page’s account.
19. 19. Lewis Sperry Chafer, He That Is Spiritual (1918), chapter 1; B. B. Warfield’s review, The Princeton Theological Review 17 (April 1919); E. W. Kenyon, The Two Kinds of Faith (1942). The first two are free online. Thirty minutes.
20. 20. The Last Will and Testament of the Springfield Presbytery (1804); Barton W. Stone, An Address to the Christian Churches (2nd edn, 1821). See Dossier 24, Part V, for the texts and the history.
21. 21. United Pentecostal Church International, “Our Beliefs” (upci.org); the Assemblies of God, Statement of Fundamental Truths, section 2, and Apostles and Prophets (2001), both at ag.org; The Watchtower, 1 March 2013, and “Is Jesus Almighty God?” (jw.org); The Baptist Faith and Message (2000), Article III (bfm.sbc.net). Read each body in its own words. Thirty minutes.
22. 22. The State of Theology survey (thestateoftheology.com), 2022 and 2025, with Lifeway Research’s full report for 2022; the Scripps Survey Research Center poll on the resurrection of the body, reported April 2006; Barna Group, “Competing Worldviews Influence Today’s Christians” (9 May 2017). Look at the question wording before the headline.
23. 23. For the other side of each label: Michael A. Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism” (1996); Karen L. King, What Is Gnosticism? (2003); Christine Trevett, Montanism: Gender, Authority and the New Prophecy (1996); Ali Bonner, The Myth of Pelagianism (2018). And for the larger claim this page did not rely on: Philip J. Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics (1987); Harold Bloom, The American Religion (1992). Library books.
24. 24. Your own church’s statement of faith, and the Nicene Creed, side by side. Do this one. Put the five questions from Part XII to the statement. Then read the creed and mark any line your church would not say. If there is none, ask why it is not said.

Modern denominations and organisations are named on this page only where they are quoted word for word from their own published doctrinal statements; nothing is asserted of them beyond what they say of themselves. Apart from the authors of published research and translations, every individual quoted is deceased, or biblical, and is quoted from a dated, published source. No living preacher, teacher or congregation is identified or described. Every pew-level remark, sermon line, prayer, children’s talk and case study is composed by this page for illustration and does not describe any real person or church.