The Heresies That Spring from One Another

These shoots of an unnatural seed are nothing new in the churches. The harvest of the Lord’s field has always had to put up with burrs and briars, and the shoots of choking weeds have constantly sprung up in it. From this source came the Ebionites, the Sabellians and the Arians, as well as the Eunomians and Macedonians, the Photinians and the Apollinarians, and all the other weeds of the churches, the thistles that destroy the fruits of good faith. [a]

The earliest of them was Ebion. In his over-eagerness to assert our Lord’s humanity, he robbed it of its union with the Godhead. After him the schism of Sabellius burst out in reaction against that heresy. Sabellius declared that there was no distinction between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit; so in his impiety he confused the Persons as far as he could, and failed to distinguish the holy Trinity, which is beyond all words. Next after him came the blasphemy of the Arian perversion. To avoid seeming to confuse the sacred Persons, it declared that there were different and unlike substances in the Trinity. After him in time, but like him in wickedness, came Eunomius. He granted that the Persons of the Holy Trinity were divine and like each other, yet he insisted that they were separate from each other; and so, while admitting their likeness, he denied their equality. Macedonius too blasphemed against the Holy Spirit with unpardonable wickedness. He granted that the Father and the Son were of one substance, but he called the Holy Spirit a creature. So he sinned against the whole Godhead, because no injury can be done to anything in the Trinity without touching the whole Trinity. Photinus granted that Jesus, who was born of the Virgin, was God, yet he went wrong in thinking that his Godhead began when his humanity began. Apollinaris, picturing the union of God and man inaccurately, wrongly believed that he had no human soul. For it is as bad an error to add to our Lord Jesus Christ what does not belong to him as to rob him of what is his. Wherever he is spoken of otherwise than as he is, it is an offense, even when it seems to add to his glory. And so, one after another, in reaction against heresies they give rise to heresies. They all teach things different from one another, but all equally opposed to the faith.

And just lately, that is, in our own day, we saw a most poisonous heresy spring up from the greatest city of the Belgae. There was no doubt about its error, but there was doubt about its name, because it rose with a fresh head from the old stock of the Ebionites; so it is still a question whether it ought to be called old or new. It was new as far as its upholders were concerned, but old in the character of its errors. It blasphemously taught that our Lord Jesus Christ was born a mere man. It held that his later gaining the glory and power of the Godhead came from his human worth and not from his divine nature. By this it taught that he did not always have his divinity by the right of his very own divine nature, which belonged to him, but obtained it afterward as a reward for his labors and sufferings. Since, then, it blasphemously taught that our Lord and Savior was not God at his birth but was afterward taken up into the Godhead, it bordered on this heresy that has now sprung up. It is, as it were, its first cousin and akin to it. In agreement both with the Ebionites and with these new ones, it came between them in time and was linked with both of them in wickedness. There are some others like those we have mentioned, but it would take too long to describe them all. Nor have we now set out to list those that are dead and gone, but to refute those that are new.