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Updated: May 6, 2025
The earlier forms of this kind of teaching which represented the Logos as a spirit who came down to rescue humanity offered no real reason for maintaining the true humanity of Jesus. It seems to have been the pressure of recognised fact, which had not yet been forgotten, which made the writer of the Fourth Gospel and of the First Epistle of John protest so strongly against Docetism.
It is impossible and undesirable to expound at length this general theory; it must suffice to notice its bearings on Christology. In the first place, it seems to have overcome the tendency of Logos theology to produce Docetism.
Its Christian antecedents comprised positive and negative currents. The positive current was docetism, the negative ebionitism. Docetism, originating in apostolic times, passed through many phases, to provide, at the end of the fourth century, in its most refined form, Apollinarianism, the immediate positive cause of monophysitism.
The comment of Epiphanius on this is similar to that of Tertullian. To bid the leper 'do as Moses commanded, was practically to sanction the law of Moses. By calling Himself 'Son of Man, Epiphanius says, our Lord asserts His proper manhood and repels Docetism, and, by claiming 'power upon earth, He declares that earth not to belong to an alien creation.
In "Philippians" especially, many expressions seem to verge upon Docetism, the extreme form of Gnosticism, according to which the human body of Jesus was only a phantom. Valentinus, who was contemporary with the Pauline writers of the second century, maintained that Jesus was not born of Mary by any process of conception, but merely passed through her, as light traverses a translucent substance.
No heresy came merely as an abstract theory, but every one was a dramatic movement, an organisation, a camp, a deed and not merely a word. That made the struggle against it more difficult. Docetism, Nicolaism, Gnosticism, Chiliasm, Manichaism, Monatism, Monarchism, Monophysitism, Monotheletism, Arianism, Nestorianism every one of these terms means both a theory and a drama.
If Ephesian Christianity had never come to Rome, and met its complement in the Adoptionists, it might, in spite of the Fourth Gospel, have degenerated into thorough-going Docetism, or have been represented only by Gnostics.
An offshoot of docetism that flourished among the monophysites is the aphthartodocetic heresy. This is of considerable historical importance. Large numbers of the Syrian and Egyptian monophysites embraced it, and seceded from the parent church. It became part of the official creed of Armenian Christianity, and that church has not repudiated it to this day.
For that purpose it will be necessary to give a brief sketch of the early heresies in so far as they bear on the Christological problem. The two primitive forms of doctrinal error, to which the Church, even in apostolic days, was exposed, were docetism and ebionitism. These are the elemental heresies. All the later Christological heresies are refinements of one or other of these two.
He expressly asserted that the humanity of Christ was incomplete, contending that this very defect in the human nature made possible the unity of His person. According to Apollinaris, then, the union was a composition. The Logos superseded the human reason, and was thus united to body and animal soul. Apollinarianism was a form of docetism.
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