Heresy 101 (part 1)

This is human nature die on the cross. There are going to be ten questions and again just think about them, you don't need to remember the answers to them and so forth.

Was only God the Father eternal and He produced the Son out of nothing? Was God the

Father eternal and produced the Son out of nothing? The third question is, is created matter fallen and corrupt so Jesus could not have taken on a human nature?

You're going to see some contradictions in some of these questions, that's intended. Fourth question is, was

Jesus given supernatural powers and made the Son of God at His baptism?

Was Jesus given supernatural powers and made the Son of God at His baptism? The fifth question is, is a baptism, this is an individual, is a baptism invalid if performed by a minister who later renounces his faith?

Is a baptism that is performed invalid if the minister later says he was never a

Christian in the first place? Sixth question is, has Satan created all material things?

Is Satan responsible for the creation of all material things? Number six. Number seven is, do the efficacy of the sacraments, so now we're on to the sacraments, do they depend on the moral status of those administering them?

I would hope that we don't ever hold to this. Number eight.

Number eight is, can God co -exist with matter? And did

Jesus only appear to be fully human? Can God co -exist with matter, talking about physical things?

And did Jesus only appear to be fully human? Ninth of the ten questions is, do the

Father, the Son, and the Spirit each exist, but never at the same time?

Do the Father, the Son, and the Spirit each exist, but never at the same time?

And the last question I'm going to ask is, could we really have inherited original sin from Adam?

Could we, as Christians, as creatures of God, inherited original sin from Adam?

So some interesting questions, and I hope that they kind of spark your brain a little bit here. There are a total of 42 questions of this online quiz by a site or a website called quizfarm .com.

And the topic of this quiz, these 42 questions, again, I picked ten, is, are you a heretic?

So you go through this, and it's fairly interesting, fairly entertaining. You go through and you rate it in various ways, whether you strongly agree.

I think it was one to five, if I remember right. You strongly agree with the question. You strongly disagree with the question, and anything in between.

And at the end, it tells you what type of heretic you are. And sometimes you could be a multiple heretics, and sometimes it's fun just to check yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, and see what it comes up with.

But this is, you know, a quiz taken that someone had put together, just some of these questions around heresies that often are prevalent both in history and in our society today in a lot of ways.

They may be masked in different ways or processes, but this is some, it was some interesting information,

I thought. So it's really just a small sampling of some of the questions, as I talked about. There were forty -two total.

And out of those, so I'm going to give you guys a little bit of a quiz. Out of those, what were some of the topics that we were covering out of those ten questions?

What were some of the items that we were trying to call out here? What were some of the things that maybe you thought about theologically that these questions address?

Right there. Doctrine of the Trinity. Doctrine of the Trinity. Doctrine of the Trinity, yes, very good. Human and divine nature of Jesus Christ, yes.

See a hand over here? Same thing. Okay. Others? Yes, sir?

Modalism, yes, very good, very good. Again, back to the Trinity. Any others?

Any other topics that you saw through these questions? Yes, sir? Doctrine of original sin, key doctrine within the

Christian faith, of course. Charlie? Eternal sonship.

Was Jesus a created being or was he always existent? Anything else?

Total depravity of man in ways, yes, yep. Yet I didn't specifically address that, but you can easily pull it out from some of these topics here.

Let me just give you a couple of things that I did see, and some of these were ones that we already talked about. What is or who was

Christ's nature? Was he human? Was he God? Was he both? And so forth.

And we get into some theological terms there as we study even more through this topic.

Was Christ created or is he always existed eternally? Key doctrine within the Christian faith.

The creation and who or what was created along with it either being good or bad, right?

There was a question whether Satan was the one who was responsible for creating material items and we'll see that that falls into Gnosticism and some of the areas around physical being evil and spiritual being good only.

Acts of baptism. So we talked about both baptism. We talked about the Lord's Supper in areas.

How do these relate to salvation, if at all? Also it talked about the moral level or the person who was the one who was performing the act.

We talked about the Holy Trinity, as most of you pulled out right away. We talked about original sin. And again, the federal headship of Adam and where that places us as Christians.

So there are many more items. Again, there were 42 questions and many of these items and if you decide to go through the test again, quizform .com,

Heretic Quiz, Am I a Heretic? You will see that there is a lot of similarities and we'll talk about some of those as we go through this process.

But what was brought up in the quiz? What were some of the other things? What was being attacked here?

What are some of the items that were specifically being attacked, just in these questions alone? Some of these we talked about briefly, right?

We talked about the Trinity. We talked about Jesus and so forth. But in a more general sense, what are these things that are being attacked?

Yes, Steve. And I agree, those are all keys.

What generally though now would that be classified as or considered? Charlie? Biblical Christology, a little bit higher even than that I'm looking for is?

Nature of God. More generalist than that. Scripture itself is key.

I'm sorry? The Word of God. And we'll talk a little bit more about that as we go further. What I was looking for here is really the fundamentals of the

Christian faith, right? It is the foundations, what the Christian faith is all about. These heresies are attacking the specifics of what in most cases are going to be considered primary fundamentals of the faith.

There are some secondaries and we'll see some of those as we go through these in a little bit more detail throughout the couple of days.

But what I was really hoping to do here is as we study this, and I found it interesting, I was here teaching about cults and now

I'm teaching about heresy and I'm hoping people aren't getting an idea, but I don't know what's next.

But I did want to just say that what we're seeing is heresy in general, and we'll go through, we'll define it in a little bit and we'll see how much we get through today.

But heresy in general has changed and morphed throughout time and yet in some ways it stayed the same in its attack on Christianity.

And as we look at this, you'll see that heresy in and of itself is really something that is brought out in many of the cults and much of the teachings, again, mainly cults more than anything else and we'll define why that is the case compared to other religious systems.

So as I said earlier, it can be a little bit of a dry topic. I hope no one nods off. Bear with me, but I think it's important that we talk about this topic and that we cover this topic.

And I'll give you a couple of points as to why it's very important to really study and understand heresy.

So I'm going to give you a couple of these and if there's others that come up after, feel free. I'm going to give you, I believe, three just briefly here.

Make sure there are three, yes, two or three. So the first one is, what's kind of unique is what we see heresy over time, they're all the same.

Heresies may have a different form or a different appearance or look differently initially, but at the core, most of these heresies have repeated throughout time.

And it got me thinking while I was doing the study. I looked at it and I said, it reminds me of the shampoo bottle when you turn it over and you look and it says, lather, rinse, repeat, lather, rinse, repeat, lather, rinse, repeat.

And that's really what heresy is all about. Heresy is all about, you'll see that there is this lather, rinse, repeat type of thing going on.

And I found it really interesting. If the topic fascinates you, there was a very small pamphlet that Phil Johnson put together.

If you do a search, Phil Johnson heresies, he also did a great series, an audio series.

Again, if this topic fascinates you, I would suggest going and looking at that. But the booklet that he put together is essentially that if you were to take pretty much all the heresies throughout history, so the start of heresy up through modern day, they can all be boiled down to five core heresies, in most cases.

There's slight differences. But it was fascinating to see that if we understand these five core areas, we'll understand better when we see heresy and when we don't see heresy.

And there are some differences, and we'll go through these, between heresy and false teaching and errant teaching and some of the other items.

So these are areas where we just want to start focusing on. So how can it help the

Christian to study heresies? So we see that they repeat. So we know that heresies that are going on today, and we'll discuss some of those as we get into the actual details of various heresies happening as we get a little bit further in our study, because we're going to kind of take it as a historical view.

We're going to walk through some of the more historic heresies through the various centuries and get up to some modern time heresies, which, again, wrap into some of the cult teaching and so forth that we talked about.

But it's something that we can see and start to discern ourselves. So the second area is that it really builds

Christian discernment. It helps us to, as we read something, you know, so many Christian bookstores have such solid biblical teaching books, sarcastically

I'm saying here. And it allows us to discern, instead of that they're trying to sell the most popular book because it gives them money, and I don't, you know, deny that that's something they need to do.

But at the same time, oftentimes if you just take a book off of most shelves at Christian bookstores, you can quickly find books that are heretical in their teaching.

And you need to have good discernment, it is key. Cults and other false doctrine, again, many of these hold heresies.

So the ability that when someone comes knocking at your door and they say, I'm here to teach you about the

Jesus Christ of Latter -day Saints, or I'm here to witness to you as a

Jehovah's Witness, here what you will see are, you will be able to quickly show them the areas where they err, the heretical teachings that these cultic groups actually hold to.

The third is around educating others. So as a Christian, we should be desiring, as we study

God's Word and as we dig into God's Word, we should be willing and soft in our thoughts to be able to learn from other brothers and sisters.

And if we have something and we start teaching something, excluding myself, so if you guys see me teaching error, excluding me of course, but if we see our brother and sister that are maybe struggling in an area or they might hold to some inerrant teaching, something that they don't truly understand, we should be able to come alongside them and show them why this is something that is, again, not maybe heretical, but in and of itself an error and should be corrected.

So understanding what heresy is gives us that ability to look through it and to study.

Can anyone give any other reasons why maybe we would want to study the topic of heresies? Steve?

Yes. Yes, true. True enough. Yes, Mr. Ben. Yes. Yes.

Correct. Yeah, it really does help with our own study. Any other reasons? Yes. Correct.

And we'll talk again what the difference between inerrant teaching or inerrant understanding compared to true heresy as we would call it, because heresy is a pretty bad word in most cases.

I mean, who wants to be called a heretic? It's pretty strong language in a lot of ways, especially today.

Who remembers, and as I talked on cults, I know I raise this too, but who remembers also when the

Secret Service is studying counterfeit money, and you've probably all heard this understanding, what do they study most when they are wanting to find counterfeit money?

The real thing, right? So they study it, and they learn about it, and they dig into it, and they look to see, and then they can quickly look over here and say, that's wrong.

That's not the real thing, right? That is counterfeit. And that's really what, as we study, what

I'm hoping to do is, I'm not trying to drive you away from anything. I don't want you to go and just read a bunch of stuff on heresy.

I'd rather have you dig into the Word, study the Word, understand the Word as much as you can, so that when you hear something that isn't right, you can go right to Scripture, and you can say, this is either an errant teaching or heretical teaching.

And again, we'll talk about that as you go a little bit deeper into things. So it's important that we do study, that we educate ourselves, we research the topic and so forth.

Now, it kind of flows into this. I had a difficult time researching the topic. And you may think, well, there's a ton of stuff on heresy.

Well, there really isn't. I mean, there's some great materials out there. There's some good academic materials.

There's some good source materials that way. But when you go in and you go into the search engine and you say, heresy, right, into your

Google, your Bing, your Yahoo, whatever you want to use today, there's very little good detail around heresy or heretical teaching.

And I found it very difficult to research. And as I said, when I looked at the search engines, most of them came back with some strange things that were considered heretical.

What I found most interesting is it was usually a Christian, a so -called Christian organization, I'll put in quotes, pointed at another so -called

Christian organization and calling them a heretic. And then the others saying they're a heretic. And it's one of these finger -pointing things.

And it was interesting to kind of see that, but very little detail on the meat and the subject and the history and so forth of heresy from search engines.

So I thought to myself, well, as I dig more into this and I study more on this, let me go to Amazon and let me pull up books on heresy.

And as you grab your smartphone and you start doing it while I'm talking here, there's very little in the topic itself of heresy in general in Amazon or Barnes &

Noble or whatever your favorite bookstore is, apart from some academic materials and then some very dated materials.

And it's interesting that most of the material that seems to be fairly solid and biblical in what it is teaching and portraying as to what heresy is comes centuries back.

It comes from some of the great preachers and teachers of our day. So why do you think it's a difficult subject to research today?

What are some thoughts? Charlie? Yeah, correct.

Yeah, most times they're not advertising themselves as heretical. It's usually a bad thing to be considered heretical. Yes. So very secular in the society in most cases, right?

With that falls into, yes, sir. Yeah, how dare you call me a heretic, right?

How dare you? Now, yes. My reality is my reality.

Yours is yours and correct. And I would agree with that. Now, I can't turn around and say that is the sheer reason why

I had all these issues researching the topic. But I would say our society has changed quite a bit from both influence of modernism and postmodernism.

And we all need to be tolerant of one another. So I can't call anyone out as a heretic without being called a heretic myself by somebody else usually, right?

So it ends up again being that finger pointing. But we do see this in the older writings. So as I've studied some of the historical writings on people who were considered spreading heresy in the days, they were called out by name.

You know, Bob Smith, you are, you know, oftentimes they're ousted from the church. Church discipline occurred in most cases as heretical teachings came up.

And it just was interesting that, again, looking through anything modern day, I had a real hard time finding anything that specifically focused on just heresy in general.

So as I said, I can't prove it or disprove it. I would throw it out there that anyone who has a solid understanding of, you know, has the term heresy gone away for another reason other than what

I would assume that we just want to be tolerant of everyone else's teaching. And, you know, we can't call anyone out on the rug for teaching something that we would consider heretical.

Yes? Yes. Yeah, and that's mostly when you do do the search on Google and say heresy.

It's these people that are pointing to other people, right? A lot of people who we would consider very sound, right?

They're the heretics of today. And yet you go and look at some of the teaching of the people who are calling these people heretics and you say, oh, you're pretty shaky on some of the fundamentals.

And it can be scary. So a lot of finger pointing more than anything else is what I saw out there.

What would you guys recommend as the best way to study about heresy? What's some of the best means of studying the topic of heresy?

You know, I look at it and I say it's a very broad topic in some ways, but what's probably the best way of going about studying such a thing?

So being very solid in your understanding of the Bible, doctrines, theology, right? Does that mean we all have to be theologians?

We all are theologians pretty much if we're studying the Bible, right? We might not be as good as, you know, the

John MacArthur's and that guy called Mike Abendroth and some of these others that are out there. But at the same time, we should all be studying the

Bible. We should all be understanding what the Bible has to say and ensuring that, you know, we can answer to these types of things.

So we could look at this study from a pure biblical perspective. Now, as we see and as we dig into it, you'll understand there's some differences going just that direction.

We can't just go biblical because of the way the word is used over time.

And we're going to talk a little bit about that in the future. What's that? Church history. And that's the direction

I'm going here, right? Everyone's truth is everyone's truth. So I can go this way if I want and no one can deny that.

But church history, I think, is one of the easier ways because we can see fairly easily where heresy was, how it grew, what it came out of, why, you know, what it grew from.

I mean, so I'm going to look at it that way. You know, I mentioned a couple of things here, chronology throughout time, right?

Historical as we talked about. Another way you could kind of view things is a list of popularity of heresies.

What's the most popular? What's the least popular? I don't know if I'd want to be on the bottom, but, you know, which of the... you could look at it from a popularity perspective.

You could look at it on a given topic or interest. So what are the heresies that are attacking God the

Father? What are those that attack God the Son and even the Holy Spirit and, you know, doctrines and other areas?

So you could look at it from an interest perspective. And again, it's a very broad blanket of areas.

So if you're interested in the subject and you want to do some studying, I can give you some direction. I can give you some of the resources

I've been leveraging. But I found it easiest to kind of go the historical way because I think it really educates us and shows us the progression through time.

So as I state here, there's, you know, almost an endless number of ways that one can study the material on heresy. But it does really come down to a firm understanding, as you said, with doctrine and teaching and knowing your

Bible and so forth to really understand what is there. So with that, you know, one of the best ways of studying heresy is first a solid understanding of what?

We said the Bible. But in general, more academic, what would the word be? It starts with an

O. Orthodoxy, right? So who knows what orthodoxy is?

Who can give me the definition? He had a good hand on orthodoxy.

What was his definition? Do you know? Oh, all right. Who has a good definition? Anyone have a solid definition?

I've got cheat sheets here because I've got one. But I want to see what do we consider orthodoxy? Okay. That's a type of orthodoxy, right?

Yeah. Well, I'm just saying, right? Okay. Because we're going to get into a little more things where orthodoxy can be,

I'm not saying wishy -washy, but you can be non -heretical and have a different orthodoxy than just our reformed orthodoxy.

But we'll talk more about that on this subject. Charlie? Okay. Yes.

Very good. Did you have like weed cheating over there? You have somebody pulling up a little smartphone over there?

No. No. Very good. Here I have one that's defined by the dictionary as the authorized theory, doctrine, or practice of a given belief system.

So we don't have to specifically talk about Christianity is what I'm saying. It's a belief system. So you can have orthodoxy, a cult can have an orthodoxy in essence.

Oftentimes in our context we'd be looking at it from a Christian perspective. But what we want to do is we have to first understand, well, what is orthodoxy?

And orthodoxy in a lot of ways would be what is considered for us to be the norm. Anything that is not part of the norm or normative practices or beliefs or understandings would be outside of orthodoxy.

And how do we do this today? How do we do it when someone comes knocking on our door and they want a witness to us?

How do we show them error if that's the case? In most cases it is. What do we use?

Yes, sir? Most of them will deny the doctrine of hell.

So how do we show them that though? How do we show them that? You just speak it to them?

Or do we have a means of showing it to them today? So do we need to know the motives or do we just need to know one other thing?

Do we truly need to know the motives or do we just need to know the gospel itself? Do we just share the gospel with them and let

God do the work? What do you think? Well, it's impossible for man to do such, but God, working in the heart of a man, does allow that to occur, right?

That's how we all were saved. God reached down and pulled us out of the quagmire. Raised us from the dead so we could understand the greatness of the gospel, right?

Now, we're getting off topic, so we can discuss this offline, right? Because I only have another 15 minutes and I've got another 700 pages of notes.

But we can talk about that afterwards. What are we going to use when they come knocking on the door,

Bruce? So the key

I was looking for is the Scriptures, right? We want to leverage the Scriptures. And as we go through the historical perspective of heresy and the starting of heresy and we start looking through some of that, they didn't always have the

Scriptures in hand, right? This is something that we're blessed to have.

I've got, you know, 66 copies of it on my iPhone and, you know, iPad I can carry more and so forth.

But, I mean, it's amazing what we can do Scripture -wise and how we take it for granted that we have this in our hands.

And as we'll see as we go through this study, it's not always something that they had. But it's key that we understand what is normal, right?

Again, orthodoxy, as we talked about. And orthodoxy comes from an understanding of, one, as we talked, too, you know, the

Secret Service as they look at a bill, right? We want to be able to study it, understand it. So when they do come knocking on the door and you hear something, you can right away raise your little alarm there and say, that teaching is incorrect.

Now you might not tell them they're heretical to their face. That sometimes can cause other issues.

But knowing where they're coming from, and as we talked about in the study of cults as I had taught in the past, it's something that we want to show them from the

Word of God where the Bible says it is inerrant teaching. And sometimes it can be inerrant teaching.

Sometimes it can be outright heresy. And again, we'll define that in just a little bit here.

So what is normal is key, right? So orthodoxy and heresy started very early.

Started very early. Who can kind of guess where we see the start of it, at least

New Testament -wise, of heresy? Nope?

New Testament, sir. Hath God not said?

Yeah. So there was very heretical teaching there from Satan himself, right?

But New Testament, so we're looking at it from a history perspective, right? What do we see? So we have the

Pharisees and the Sadducees, right? And we'll talk a little bit about the differences between what they are in comparison to a true heretic because there is some definition between what a

Pharisee, a Sadducee, and some of the other groups are, and we'll go into that detail. But I'm thinking about it from a book perspective.

What book would you say right away we start to see heresy creeping in to?

We have Galatians, Colossians. Book of Acts is what I was looking for initially, right?

So we have the Book of Acts, and we right away start to see that heresy is moving in.

So right after the death of Jesus on the cross, what occurred in the very early stages in the

Book of Acts? What event occurred? What main event started to happen?

Pentecost, what happened right after Pentecost? Persecution, and what usually comes with persecution?

Dispersion, right? For those of us who don't know, what's dispersion? Scattered abroad, and where do we see that in the

Book of Acts, this scattering abroad? It's a very common verse. It's usually used for evangelism.

I'm using it here somewhat not out of context, but Acts 1 .8. What do we see in Acts 1 .8? Who wants to read

Acts 1 .8 loudly for me? Or if you've got it by memory, Acts 1 .8. This is the great evangelism verse.

You'll be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and until the outer ends of the earth, right?

So this is part of the focus of the dispersion. So you have the new Christian church that is growing.

We have Christ crucified, we have Pentecost occurring, and we have persecution happening, and we start to see dispersion.

Now what happens with these disparate groups? What happens? Do they just go to other churches right away?

What were churches in the day? Historically, if you look back, what were churches back then? Were they buildings like this?

Home groups, right? Home churches in most cases. And why were they meeting in homes?

Was it easy? Convenient? Fear. Fear of death in most cases.

Persecution that would incur death in most cases. So it wasn't just a mere convenience that they met this way.

And if you really take a look and you picture back and you say, here we have home churches, how were they normally taught in these churches?

What usually occurred? Don't think too deep. I'm not looking for a real deep question and a real answer here.

What's that? Fairly informal teaching. Why would that be though? So as we progress a little bit, right, so I'm kind of jumping a little bit time -wise here, but let's say the apostles now have died.

We're moving in to the first century. Similar things are going on.

And they what? They really didn't have much of anything written down, right?

They may have had a chapter of a book. They may have had a letter passed around. But there wasn't the formal as we think about, right?

Did they just pull out the Bible and say, all right, turn to, you know, Book of Acts and, oh, wait, that's not written yet and so forth.

No, that wasn't how it was. So in most cases, teaching came from what back then? How were people taught?

Word of mouth. Yeah, and where would they have learned? Somebody else?

And where may they have learned? Somebody else? And Charlie, were you going to say something?

And who would have been the key qualified men? Right, it would have fed back to the apostles, right, and teaching would have spread and grown.

But as we see in Pentecost, what happened in Pentecost? The Holy Spirit was given, a large number of people saved, right?

We had a large number of the population, even more as it grew, and then we've got this disparate group, right?

So there was some teaching by the apostles, but once the groups kind of broke out, they didn't have the scriptures as we have them today.

They couldn't study them in as much detail. And in most cases, they would teach the same subject that they knew or had been taught or had been handed down by other teachers of the day.

So it involved this constant move, right? No Facebook, no Internet, no cell phones.

How would we survive today? I mean, back in those days, it would have been almost impossible because we depend on some of these other technologies.

But in essence, you have these fracturing of groups, most of them hiding from the officials to flee persecution.

And yet you have men and women and children who are hungry for God's Word, right?

They did have the Septuagint, yes, they did. So they had Old Testament teaching. But if they were hungry for Jesus and now they could pull that out of the

Old Testament in areas, but some of them were probably hungry for even just what is this Christianity, right?

Because Christianity as we knew it was just seen early days as a sect of Judaism, just a branch off of Judaism is what the

Jews believed. They thought it was kind of a strange branching off and eventually broke away. But that's how they initially viewed it.

And many of the pagan religions also just looked at it as it's a different form of Judaism, just kind of grew and they took this new teaching and so forth.

And with that really arose this rise of controversy. What kind of things would be controversial, do you think, in these teaching of home churches?

What type of controversy would arise? One God, I'm saying, you said, who is this

Jesus person, right? So the Shema, only one God, who is this Jesus? What other controversies would come up?

Yeah, keeping of the law, very key. Any others? Resurrection, because there were groups that did not believe in the resurrection, did not hold to the resurrection.

Yeah? Yeah, how, why, right? I was just born into it as a Jew, right?

And then I had to do my works, of course, but this was a whole new religion in and of itself, right?

So what were some of maybe the other controversies? Again, more generally, what were some of the controversies that may arise? So as a teacher that's up there, we're huddled in a very large home church right now, imagine, and I have one piece of Isaiah or one piece of, let's say, even

New Testament writing or something that was handed down by one of the apostles, and I start teaching it. What might be some of the questions you as the audience here might have about me?

And again, I won't take it personal. Yeah, what's the credibility, not only of the source, but of me myself, right?

You might know me because I sold you a chicken the other day, but apart from that, right, what type of credibility is there?

What do I have? Can I trace back to the teachings of the apostles or someone else who may have been taught by the apostles?

So authoritative nature was key. What writings were authoritative, right?

You may say this book is great, and someone else might say another book is great. Who knows that there were a bunch of other books written?

Everyone understands that, right? We'll talk a little bit about that later. There were a bunch of books, a lot of them written by heretical groups.

The Gnostics, as we dig into the Gnostics, you'll find the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary and some of these other books that, as you read through them,

I hope you don't have to, are non -authoritative. You can see that in the writings themselves.

What happens when two teachers have a conflict or a difference of opinion, per se? You're in there and someone's teaching, and the next teacher gets up and says something that's contradictory.

Who's right? Who's correct? These are all things people struggled with, and we still struggle with today.

What about people who teach from something different? What about things with non -primary beliefs or traditions or some of the other areas?

We talked a little bit about that earlier. What am I doing? I'm out. Wow, that clock is off a little bit.

So let me do this. We're not going to get anywhere near that, so let me just make a note here.

Let me ask, are there any questions? Again, I know it's fairly dry, and I apologize up front, but at the same time,

I think it's important to understand these items. Are there any questions people have?

I know I haven't even defined heresy for you yet. I understand that. And if you go home and you study that and you understand it, great.

I was kind of leaving it as I wanted to get some of the historical items out of the way, and then my plan was to define heresy, what's a heretic, what's heretical, what's not, what's just false teaching and so forth.

I have those a little bit later in my notes, so if you want to take the surprise away from me, then go home and study it.

But if you want to be surprised and you come back next week, you'll understand what heresy truly is, what's the definition of it.

And it's a very fine line on how we define it, and it's fairly interesting. Any other questions?

Yes? Sure. Heretical actually has intention.

And as we see, as we go in and we look at the definition, heresy has an intended purpose. Heresy is there to destroy, and we'll see that as we go through.

Inerrant teaching is just that. I may have read a book about some subject, and I might not have studied it fully myself, and I may come to you and say, this is what

I now understand, and you may come back to me and say, well, that's inerrant because, look, the Bible says this. So it's my understanding based on something, but it's not intentional.

I'm not here to sway you in any direction or anything else. I'm giving you what I think is truth based on what

I've read or what I've studied, and you may come back and say, no, look, here it isn't. And I would say, sister, thank you for that, and that must have been materials that were false.

And maybe even that author was inerrant in the teaching. Maybe they didn't fully understand it either when they wrote the materials or based on the predominant world view.

Yes. Correct.

And we're seeing that today with modernism and postmodernism in a lot of ways, it's just the influence of those who are being taught that, again, believe whatever you want, and no one can be called a heresy or denounced for anything they teach because it's right to them.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yeah, some of the great martyrs of the time. Any other questions on heresy? Other questions, comments?

Yes. A lot of that comes down to motive again.

So motivation is intended destruction, pulling away from standard fundamentals of the faith and so forth, where, again, it can just be ignorance in the teacher who is up there preaching and teaching because they've never been educated.

They may only have a portion of the Scripture. And I take an example where we have parts of the world that still don't have a full

Bible in hand, and that teacher can only teach based on what they already understand of just that little bit of Bible knowledge they have.

And it's, again, an understanding of the core fundamentals, and that's what we'll see the heresies are all wrapped around.

There are some that are really focused on the secondary types of things, but really it's to tear down Christianity.

Heresy is specifically to destroy Christianity as it stands today. And that's how it's always been throughout time.

As we look through the history part of things, it was to rid it off the planet. Other questions?

Charlie. Yes. Yes.

I've got the new and improved. Yes. That kind of fits with the shampoo theme.

New and improved, rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, new and improved. Yeah, and anyone who's come to you and said, I found something,

I know you've heard it from the pulpit many times, you know, I've discovered something new in the Bible, run. Run.

Yeah. What's that? I'm sorry. Oh, okay. Yeah, flee, run from it. So what we'll do is we'll start off next week.

I've got a mark here, kind of standards need to be defined, and we'll talk about some of those standards.

We'll get into some Scripture next week in a little more detail, so I'm hoping I've got some readers of some scriptural passages.

We're going to look at can Christianity have multiple orthodoxies? Can Christianity have multiple orthodoxies?

And we briefly talked a little bit about that, and we'll go into more detail on that. We're going to talk about councils, creeds, and doctrines.

And I put in parentheses, oh my, for those who like the Wizard of Oz. Is Christianity only a set of doctrines and creeds?

And then from there I get into what is heresy, and we'll start getting into the differences between other religious systems, denominations, and sects, schisms, and such and so forth.

So those are some of the areas we're going next week. So if you enjoyed it or it was something that was, you know, you learned something from it and you're coming back next week, those are some of the topics we're going to kind of look at.

And then we're going to dig in probably after that into first century, second century type of heresies.

We're going to look at formal heresies. We're going to look at Judaism, Judaizers.

We're going to look at legalism, Gnosticism. A lot of isms you'll find as we go forward.

Arianism, Pelagianism, Sicilianism are the key five that James White points out.

If you're interested, you can go and study those materials. But apart from that, we've got people waiting out the door, so I'm going to pray.

And if you have any questions or anything else, feel free. I want to make it as interactive as possible. And if you have questions that I didn't answer or address throughout the teaching point, you know, come up and talk to me or send me an e -mail or something else.

And if I don't have the answers here, I'll, you know, get them for you by next week. And they may help to build some of this curricula out as I work through it.

Any other quick questions? Okay. Time flies when you're having fun.

Let me go ahead and I'll pray. Lord, we want to thank you. We want to praise you for this opportunity that we now have to look into your word.

And, Lord, as we look into what heresy is, what inerrant teaching is, Lord, as we look next week into some of the more defined terms and as we start to wrap our minds around what they are,

Lord, most of all, help us to focus and study on your word so that we would know, without a doubt, we would be able to discern when these heresies come up,

Lord, or when these teachings come up, that we could help to guide brothers and sisters in Christ in right understanding.

And, Lord, at the same way, we would be able to denounce those who are openly preaching or teaching heresies to others and, as Charlie had mentioned, leading them astray into the pit of destruction.

Lord, we understand you are sovereign. You are in control. And as we look through this, Lord, we know that your hand and your work has been in all aspects throughout the centuries,

Lord, from the persecution up until today. And, Lord, as we look at this from a man's perspective and as we study it, and that means that we would be able to just learn from it and educate ourselves and better know what great

God that we serve. And we ask all of this now in your holy and precious name. Amen.