Beware the Heresies of Today

27 December 2025  I John 1:1-4

The Feast of St. John, Apostle and Evangelist

“…for our fellowship is with the Father, and with His Son, Jesus Christ.”         (I John 1:3)

Almost immediately after the Church of Jesus Christ emerged, alternative and heretical accounts of who Jesus was began to appear. It took hardly any time at all. At the very same time that the letters of Paul and the Gospels were appearing, other Jesus stories began to circulate. Jesus got people’s attention, but some couldn’t believe that Jesus was truly human, and so some stories said that Jesus only seemed to be human, but was really not human at all. Others were fascinated by Jesus power over disease and demons, but couldn’t bring themselves to think that He was part of the material world, because everybody knew that only spiritual reality was pure enough to defeat demons of hell. Still others were excited by Jesus’ spiritual power, but couldn’t believe that He had really died on the cross, so their stories held that the Divine Person of Christ had descended upon the man Jesus at his baptism, and withdrew right before his passion and death.

Stories like this were circulating at the same time that the documents of the New Testament were being written. Indeed, the Gospel and Letters of John were written in large degree to oppose the twisted tales of the Docetists, the Gnostics, and the Cerinthians.

Heresy is not something that faded away in the olden days, but is new every morning and diabolically resilient. Serious believers and parishes should be making Bible Study their first and most important evangelical task.

People have been trying from the beginning to trim and adjust the story of Jesus to make it more fashionable, comfortable, and marketable. We got the New Testament because of the determination of the earliest Church to resist that. The community of the New Testament made it emphatically clear that Jesus Christ was, and is, entirely human, entirely divine, and entirely with us and the divine life entirely in us (I John 1:1-3).

Distortions of the life of Jesus have continued to this very day, this very hour. The distortion du jour is that the person and work of Jesus can be safely ignored, and any benefits of His person and work can be adequately obtained in other religions or spiritual traditions. The ancient world was made uneasy by the taintedness of material reality, and thought that anyone with a spiritual message like Jesus’ couldn’t participate in that – it is why they said, among other things, that He only seemed to be human. In our time people are made uneasy by the taintedness of spiritual reality. Many think that there is no authoritative spiritual reality, that it is all a pious fiction, or worse a fiendish lie told by the powerful to manipulate the weak. Freedom means liberation from such poisonous falsehoods, which has had the effect of putting all material reality up for grabs. We can be free to be anything we want – boys can be girls, women can be men, the poor can be rich, and the rich impoverished. Anarchy shall roll down like water, and irrationality like an ever-flowing stream (apologies to Amos 5:24).

The community of the New Testament still exists to resist that. Heresy is not something that faded away in the olden days, but is new every morning and diabolically resilient. Serious believers and parishes should be making Bible Study their first and most important evangelical task. We live in a world where we have enemies, and almost none of them look like bad guys from central casting. They are subtle, seductive, and persistent. We are the resistance – admittedly a military metaphor, with all the stealth, struggle and desperate cleverness the word implies.

“Our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against against principalities and powers, against the spiritual forces of darkness in heavenly places” (Ephesians 6:12). The writers of the New Testament knew what we are up against.