Old Heresies, New Pulpits

What this is about

The author of this site set a thesis to be tested: “Explore how five ancient heresies — Gnosticism, Arianism, Modalism, Montanism, and Pelagianism — have crept into the modern church.” He added that he is most interested in churches that have no creed: the independent, “no creed but the Bible” kind.

“Heresy” is a word people throw at anything they dislike. This page uses it in one narrow sense. A heresy is a teaching about who God is or how he saves, which the whole church examined long ago and refused. So for each of the five the page asks three things. What did it actually say? What did the church say back? And is anyone saying the same thing now?

The answer to the last question can come out four ways. Sometimes the old teaching is taught on purpose, in print. Sometimes people have drifted into it by accident, in a church that officially says the opposite. Sometimes only a habit of the old movement has come back. And sometimes the name is simply being misused.

The short answer

What a creed is for

The five teachers on this page were not villains. Every one of them quoted the Bible, and several were known for their strict lives. One of them, a man called Noetus, was questioned by the elders of his church about the year 190 for saying that Jesus simply was God the Father. His answer was, “What evil, then, am I doing in glorifying Christ?” He thought he was honouring Jesus.

That is why “we just believe the Bible” has never been enough to keep a heresy out. A bishop called Hilary, who was exiled for opposing one of the five, put it in a sentence about the year 360: “Heresy lies in the sense assigned, not in the word written.” The words of the Bible were not in dispute. What they meant was.

So the church wrote its answers down. A creed is a short statement of the faith that the whole congregation says together. It is not a summary of the Bible. It is a list of the things that had to be said because somebody had denied them. That is why the Nicene Creed spends twelve words on the making of the world and more than a hundred on who Jesus is.

Here are six lines from the creeds. For each, choose the teaching it was written or used against. A sentence on each of the five follows in the next sections, so guess first.

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Gnosticism: a world to escape

In the 100s a number of teachers in Egypt, Rome and France taught that the material world was a mistake. It had been made, they said, by a lower and ignorant power, and not by the true God. The human spirit was trapped in a body. What set it free was a secret knowledge. (Gnosis is the Greek word for knowledge.) Since matter was bad, Christ could not really have had a body, and our own bodies would not be raised. One of them summed it up: “Salvation belongs to the soul alone, for the body is by nature subject to corruption.”

They also ranked people. At the top were the “spiritual,” who had the knowledge. Below them were ordinary believers, who had only faith. A bishop called Irenaeus, who wrote against them about the year 180, reports who the second class were: “We of the Church, they say, are these persons.”

The church answered with three lines that are still in the creeds. God is the “Maker of heaven and earth.” The Son “was made man.” And we look for “the resurrection of the body.” Irenaeus added a fourth point. There are no secrets. The truth, he said, is “within the power of all.”

Now. No church teaches the old system. Nobody says a lower god made the world. But three of its habits are easy to find.

The first is the hope of escape. Ask many Christians what happens in the end and they will say that we go to heaven when we die. That is half of what the Bible says. The other half is that the body is raised: “It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44). In a poll of 2006, only 36 per cent of Americans said they expected their own body to be raised. Among recent churchgoers it was half.

The second is a higher knowledge: the preacher who says God has shown him what a verse really means, and that study will not find it. The third is two classes of Christian, the “carnal” and the “spiritual.” A theologian called Warfield answered that in 1919: “There are not two kinds of Christians.”

Arianism and Modalism: who is Jesus?

The first Christians believed that there is one God. They also worshipped Jesus. How can both be true? There are two easy answers, and the church refused both.

Arius was a priest in Egypt about the year 318. His answer was that the Son is not God in the full sense. He is the first and greatest thing God made. In his own words: “the Son has a beginning, but … God is without beginning.” He had verses for it. Jesus says, “my Father is greater than I” (John 14:28).

The bishops met at Nicaea in 325 and answered that the Son is “begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father.” Their reasons were simple. Christians pray to Jesus, and it is wrong to worship a creature. And only God can save. As Athanasius put it, “a creature could never be saved by a creature.” John’s Gospel says of the Son, “All things were made by him” (John 1:3). If everything that was made was made through him, he is not one of the things that were made.

The Modalists, about a century earlier, gave the opposite answer. Jesus is fully God, they said, because he simply is the Father. Father, Son and Spirit are three names for one person, like three masks on one actor. Their opponents summed up one of them as teaching that “the Father Himself was born, and suffered, and died.”

The church answered from the Gospels. When Jesus is baptised, the Father speaks from heaven and the Spirit comes down like a dove, all at once. In the garden Jesus prays, “not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39). If there is only one person, he was praying to himself. The Athanasian Creed puts the answer in a line: “Neither confounding the Persons: nor dividing the Substance.”

Now. Both are taught openly. Jehovah’s Witnesses publish that “God created Jesus and then used him to make everything else, including the angels.” The largest Oneness Pentecostal church states: “There is one God, who has revealed Himself as Father; through His Son, in redemption; and as the Holy Spirit, by emanation.” Both movements began among people who set out to follow the Bible with no creed.

Both have also drifted into ordinary churches, mostly through the pictures people use to explain the Trinity. A bishop called Gregory tried to find a good picture in the year 380 and gave up: “I have been unable to discover anything on earth with which to compare the nature of the Godhead.” Try some for yourself. Five of the six below are made up.

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Montanism: something more than the Gospels

About the year 170, in what is now Turkey, a man called Montanus and two women began to prophesy in a trance. Their followers called it the New Prophecy. They believed that the Holy Spirit was now saying more than the apostles had handed on. A writer in Rome reports that they claimed to have “learned something more through these, than from law, and prophets, and the Gospels.” Christians who would not accept the new prophets were written off as unspiritual.

Here is the surprise. Nobody said their teaching about God was wrong. Their critics admitted that they believed in the same Father, Son and Spirit as everyone else. And the church did not answer that prophecy had ended. One of their strongest critics wrote that the gift of prophecy must continue “until the final coming.”

What the church objected to was something else. The new prophets could not be questioned. They put their words beside the apostles’. And there were other signs. One critic wrote that Montanus “appointed collectors of money” and renamed two small towns Jerusalem. He asked: “Does not all Scripture seem to you to forbid a prophet to receive gifts and money?” Another pointed out that a prophetess had foretold wars, and that thirteen years after her death there had been none.

The tests they used were old. Paul had written, “Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge” (1 Corinthians 14:29). Moses had written that if a prophet’s word does not come true, “that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken” (Deuteronomy 18:22).

Now. The same things can be seen today: a word from God that nobody may test, an offering attached to a prophecy, a date that passes without comment, and older churches described as dead. It is fair to notice the likeness. It is not fair to call every church that expects prophecy Montanist. In 2001 the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal church, stated the old rule in its own words: “the content of prophecy itself should always be tested by and responsible to the superior authority of Scripture.”

Pelagianism: “we are but men”

Pelagius was a strict and serious teacher who came to Rome from Britain about the year 400. He was shocked by lazy Christians who sinned and then said they were only human. He wrote down their excuse in order to answer it: “It’s hard! It’s difficult! We can’t! We are but men …” His answer was that a just God would not command what we cannot do. God “has not willed to command anything impossible, for He is righteous.” So we can obey, as we are, if we choose to.

The rest followed from that. If we can obey as we are, then human nature was not damaged when Adam fell. His pupil said it bluntly: “Adam’s sin injured only himself and not the human race.” A baby is born as Adam was made. And “grace” means only the help God has put within reach: free will, the commandments, and the example of Jesus.

The church answered with the words of Jesus: “without me ye can do nothing” (John 15:5). Paul says we were “dead in trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1), and that God works in us “both to will and to do” (Philippians 2:13). A council at Carthage refused Pelagius’s teaching in 418. A later council, at Orange in 529, dealt with a milder version, which said that we need grace but that the first step is ours. Orange said that even the beginning of faith is a gift.

Now. This one has drifted furthest. Charles Finney, the most famous American revival preacher of the 1800s, wrote in a textbook that the idea of an inherited sinful nature was “anti-scriptural and nonsensical.” In 2025, 64 per cent of American evangelicals agreed that everyone is born innocent, and 53 per cent that most people are good by nature. About half of practising Christians strongly agreed that the Bible teaches “God helps those who help themselves.” It does not. The saying became popular through Benjamin Franklin.

One caution matters. A preacher who calls people to repent and believe is not a Pelagian. Nor are Methodists and others who stress free will. John Wesley, who founded Methodism, said that anyone who denies that man is “by nature filled with all manner of evil” is “but an Heathen still.” The line the church drew is narrower. It is about whether we can make the first move towards God without his help.

What do people in church believe?

Since 2014 a research firm has asked about three thousand Americans, every two or three years, whether they agree with a list of statements about the faith. It picks out the committed evangelicals among them by what they say they believe. Before you look at the answers, guess them.

Almost all of the same people also agreed that there is one God in three persons. So they are not followers of Arius or Pelagius. They are confused. They say the right words where they have been taught them, and fill in the rest with what seems reasonable. What seems reasonable turns out to be what Arius and Pelagius taught.

One thing has to be said plainly. These surveys do not show that churches without creeds are worse. The same confusion was found among Catholics and other churches that say the creed every week. Saying a creed without ever having it explained protects very little.

Why a church without a creed is exposed

If the confusion is everywhere, what difference does a creed make? Two things suggest that it makes one.

The first is history. People often think that the creed-makers stood for tradition and their opponents for the Bible. In the year 359 several hundred bishops were pressed by an emperor to sign a new statement that left out the key word of the Nicene Creed. The reason they were given has a familiar sound: “Because it is not found in the Scriptures.” They signed. A writer of the time said that the world groaned to find itself Arian. It took twenty-two years to undo.

The same thing has happened since.

The second is how a creed works. It is said aloud, so the whole congregation knows it. It is older than the pastor, so he cannot change it, and anyone can see if he departs from it. And it is worded to shut particular mistakes out. A home-made statement of faith usually does none of these. “We believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God” is true, and Arius could have signed it.

Fairness requires the other side. The bishops of 359 had a creed and fell anyway. Plenty of churches with no creed are sound, because their teachers are. A creed is not a charm. It is a standard, and a church that has one has something to be called back to.

Check it yourself

Five things. The first takes ten minutes. The last is the one that matters.

1. 1. Read Jude, and 2 Peter 2. Where does false teaching come from, and how does it arrive?
2. 2. Read John 1:1–18, Colossians 1:12–20 and Matthew 3:13–17. Who made all things? And how many are present when Jesus is baptised?
3. 3. Read Ephesians 2:1–10, John 15:1–8 and 1 Corinthians 15. What can we do without Christ? And what happens to the body?
4. 4. Read the Nicene Creed slowly. It takes two minutes. Beside each line, write which of the five it answers.
5. 5. Find your own church’s statement of faith and set it beside the creed. Do this one. Does it say the Son is eternal and not made? Does it say three persons? Does it say the body will be raised? Does it say that faith itself is God’s gift? If you hear something on this page from your own pulpit, assume it is a mistake, mention it privately, and ask one question: “Is there a line of the Nicene Creed that our church does not hold?”