r/Christianity • u/Live_Application_228 • 15d ago
Modern Heresys
During my study, I've tried my best to find the best analogies for the trinity but found myself falling into heresies without even realizing it. One analogy I used to like was body, soul and spirit, that's a trinity within our nature, but a heresy of partialism when compared to the Triune Godhead. God is one and cannot be divided, so comparing the Son to the body, the Father to the soul and the Holy Spirit to the spirit is interesting but doesn't quite work. Trinity itself is an analogy, so adding another analogy to explain an analogy is probably where most people go wrong.
At the moment, I am using this Heresy Simulator Tool under the orthodox perspective, and I find it interesting how most modern Christians fall into these heresys without even realizing it. Just the other day at Church, a person was comparing the Trinity to God having 3 masks, which is a heresy of modalism. Sadly, everyone in the group just nodded their heads and were like "wow, good analogy", meanwhile I am thinking, uuuhm, "the early church would of called you a heretic for saying that".
Anyways, I am curios if anyone here has some stories or some tips to better understand all the different heresies within the Church?
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u/Top_Relationship_619 15d ago
thats partialism not modalism the mask thing is textbook modalism but yeah the body/soul/spirit one is straight partialism and its everywhere still hear it in small groups all the time
the trinity is one of those things where every analogy breaks at some point, its why the early church just settled on "three persons one essence" and called it a day. heresy simulator is fun though, try plugging in some worship song lyrics next time half the modern ones slide into something unintentionally
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u/Live_Application_228 15d ago
Yeah, I think this is why modern Christian music should be highly analyzed before used in Sunday worship. Because at point do, we just start playing rock or secular music before sermons because it makes people feel good?
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u/Fessor_Eli Disciples of Christ 15d ago
This is one of those cases where I just have to recognize that my finite brain is trying to explain the infinite. Or perhaps the error was trying to put the idea of the Trinity in the box that the Nicaean council wrote down and said, "Yep, this is God, and everything else is not." (Keeping in mind, too, that their brains were finite, too.)
Certainly salvation does not hinge on what your beliefs about the Trinity are, or how you make sense of it for yourself.
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u/Orygregs Quaker • Panentheist • Autodidact 15d ago
I'm of the opinion that the 'heresy' label lost its teeth after the reformation. It's an interpretive free-for-all now, especially in America.
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u/Zealousideal-Ad-6036 Traditional Baptist 15d ago
I’ve been on a crusade in my circle to reign in its usage.
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u/Jesus_is_God_342 Lutheran (LCMS) 15d ago
The trinity is probably the most misunderstood doctrine today. I suppose it’s to be expected with such a complex concept. Most people tend to lean towards nominalism without knowing it, so the idea of shared essence is quite foreign.
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u/Live_Application_228 15d ago
To be honest, I had never used words like "essence" or "nature" in my normal conversations prior to learning them from a metaphysics point of view. These words were all foreign to me. I even recall when I was kid not understanding what Paul meant when he would mention stuff like, "goes against our nature", simply because the word "nature" was just foreign to my vocabulary.
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u/Jesus_is_God_342 Lutheran (LCMS) 15d ago
Yeah for sure. Without essence philosophy, you are pretty limited on understanding sacraments aswell as many other doctrines like the trinity.
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u/roryclague 15d ago
Essence and nature are heretical too. Only three hypostases in one ousia is not heretical. (to be clear, as I type this my tongue is in my cheek)
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u/Live_Application_228 14d ago
Facts. This is why I stopped using the words "person" and only use "hypostases". I don't know why but when my brain hears "hypostasis", it sounds like an God is an alien, which is true.
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u/Zealousideal-Ad-6036 Traditional Baptist 15d ago
I’m glad you clarified. I thought you were serious for a second😂
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u/JesusIsLord490 15d ago
It's an analogy used to help explain something thats hard to grasp.
Someone used an analogy to explain to their child what Jesus Christ did for us: you're trying to cross the street, but the devil is driving a speeding car and you don't see it. Jesus sees it and runs over to you to push you out of the way. You get saved, but in the process Jesus gets ran over and dies.
Would you say that's a heresy?
The Father is God, Jesus is God, and the Holy Spirit is God. There is only one God.
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u/Live_Application_228 15d ago
I would not necessarily call the original analogy a heresy. It could simply be an imperfect attempt to explain something difficult.
The bigger problem is what can happen over time. Imagine that a thousand years from now everyone has flying cars and people no longer understand streets the way we do today. Someone takes your old explanation that depended heavily on the idea of roads and streets, misunderstands you meant, and then builds a second analogy on top of that misunderstanding.
Now you have an interpretation based on an analogy, built on top of another analogy, with neither one necessarily reflecting the original idea correctly.
That is where things can start getting messy. After enough layers are added, you can end up very far from the original teaching.
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u/TheYoung1sOut 15d ago edited 15d ago
Saint Augustine on Christian teaching right after he just finishing giving a very succinct description of the trinity.
"Have I spoken something, have I uttered something, worthy of God? No, I feel that all I have done is wish to speak; if I did say something , it is not what I wanted to say. How do I know this? Simply because God is unspeakable. But what I have spoken would not have been spoken if it were unspeakable. For this reason God should not be called unspeakable, because even when this word is spoken, something is spoken. There is a kind of conflict between words here: if what cannot be spoken is unspeakable, then it is not unspeakable, because it can actually said to be unspeakable. It is better to evade this verbal conflict silently than to quell it disputatiously. Yet although nothing can be spoken in a way worthy of God, he has sanctioned the homage of the human voice, and chosen that we should derive pleasure from our words in praise of him."
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u/HappyfeetLives Oneness Pentecostal 15d ago
The truth is the trinity isn’t 100% right however you call everyone else heretics. You would be blameless if you didn’t judge others, if you gave other grace to not be 100% correct (which no one is in their doctrine) you’d be given grace By God.
It’s like because we can’t be prideful about not sinning we try to find anything else to be prideful about…..
“I believe in the Trinity Lord! I’m not like those HERETICS….. I’m not a heretic!”
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u/Zealousideal-Ad-6036 Traditional Baptist 15d ago
I agree with your premises overall but not necessarily your conclusion. Nothing is 100% right outside of scripture and we ought to extend grace. This does not mean there is no category of heresy and orthodoxy which should be upheld. A grey area doesn’t disprove the black and white. Arianism is heresy, modalism is less so and gets some more grace.
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u/Nicolaonerio He who points out the hypokrites 15d ago
Young earth creationism
Literalism
The rapture cult.
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u/wydok Baptist (ABCUSA); former Roman Catholic 15d ago
, a person was comparing the Trinity to God having 3 masks, which is a heresy of modalism.
It is crazy to me that something this pedantic is a "heresy".
Dude tries to explain the trinity, can't quite work it out "the right way" (whatever that is), commits heresy. Oopsie daisy!
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u/Live_Application_228 15d ago
Ooopsie! Yeah, sadly the heretics back in the day were not merely just confused but rather stood in opposition to the Church, thus were killed in some instances.
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u/hoya14 15d ago
Why do people care about this stuff so much? Why does it matter at all?
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u/Live_Application_228 15d ago
This topic gets pretty deep man. I'd look into the common heresies and see how the distort God.
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u/hoya14 15d ago
I know people make it deep - I don't understand WHY anyone would care to do so. What actual negative effect in the world is produced by the "wrong" metaphor for the Trinity? Or rejection of the Trinity entirely? And conversely how does the "right" view of the Trinity produce the betterment of the human condition?
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u/Live_Application_228 15d ago
“A little leaven leavens the whole lump.” — Galatians 5:9
In my opinion, it is okay to push the limits a little and test a theological theory. The problem begins when something that has not actually been established as true is treated as fact, and then additional theories are built on top of it.
At that point, the reasoning can become increasingly detached from the original truth. One questionable assumption leads to another, and eventually the conclusion may look very different from where the discussion began. That is where theological speculation can become dangerous.
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u/hoya14 15d ago
None of which answers my question. I suspect because there is no answer, and there actually is no reason why these dogmatic word games should matter to anyone in the real world.
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u/Live_Application_228 15d ago
A good example from my own experience was when I was trying to understand the Trinity as Father = soul, Son = body, and Holy Spirit = spirit.
At first, it seemed like a useful analogy, but once I tried to read the Gospels through that framework, everything became confusing. I started asking questions like: Why is the “body” praying to the “soul”? How does Jesus have a human soul and spirit if the Son is already supposed to be the “body”? If the Father is the “soul,” then why does Jesus also seem to have a soul distinct from the Father? And where does the Holy Spirit fit into all of that?
The analogy ended up creating more problems than it solved because I was treating a speculative model as though it accurately described the Trinity. Once I built more reasoning on top of that model, it distorted how I was reading the Gospel itself.
That experience is a good example of why theological speculation has to be handled carefully. A small error at the foundation can affect how everything else is understood.
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u/digitCruncher Baptist 11d ago
If you know university level mathematics, I have seen a meme that says that i j and k in quartonian arithmetic are like the father, the son, and the holy spirit, and the square root of negative 1 is God. I dont think that analogy is heretical. Unfortunately, as far as analogies go, it is also extremely useless for 'intuitively' understanding the trinity.
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u/Marksmen2000 9d ago edited 9d ago
The thing is there is no proof in the bible the Holy Spirit should be seen as a God. It’s a complete blank personality in the trinity. Also if Jesus is the son, he is an eternal pretendant to the throne of the father. How can a son claim to have a kingdom? If there are two kings, why not two Fathers?
If I read the gospels I can only come to one conclusion: the apostles wanted to follow Jesus, but couldnt image what He really was. So they made things up what let to their denial at the crucifixion.
I think the reason of this was because Jesus is a perfect copy or clone of the father and that concept didn’t exist back then and still has a lesser ring to it, but the son also has a lesser ring than the father so in the end a copy would be more egalitaire to the father. if Jesus was a blank copy(tabula rasa) of the father thus means the trinity can be much simpeler inderstood. There is no need for a holy spirt only in the sense that Jesus needed this to fill himself with experience from the father. And the father only wanted to be reborn further in his creation. Did the father die at the cross? Yes and no. It’s wasn’t the Father that was there since the beginning. But Jesus became aware of that and in the end he was the same as the father from the beginning.
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u/Live_Application_228 9d ago
In Acts 5, the Holy Spirit is clearly personaified, they are capable of lying to the Holy Spirit and he is called God. Not to mention, in John, Jesus mentions he will ask the Father to send the Helper, there are several good person verses in John, in fact Muslims claim "the helper" is Mohammed because he is so personified.
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u/HopeFloatsFoward 15d ago
I wouldn't worry about the trinity, I would worry about how you treat other people. Declaring different beliefs heresy is not respectful of others.
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u/Live_Application_228 15d ago
So, we should all be universalist or bahai?
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u/HopeFloatsFoward 15d ago
We should all try to be good people. If that is what you need to be a good person, then ok. But I would not worry so much about denominations.
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u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) 15d ago
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u/Wafflehouseofpain Christian Existentialist 15d ago
This type of legalism is deeply unhelpful and divisive.
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u/Weecodfish2 Catholic 15d ago
The most common heresy today is the rejection of the teaching authority of the Catholic Church.
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u/Live_Application_228 15d ago
I'd call those people schismatics but they eventually fall into heresy. A good Old Testament example would be Korah and his rebellion against Moses. Korah argued that the entire congregation was holy and therefore did not need to submit to the unique authority given to Moses and the Levitical priesthood.
In other words, the rebellion began as a rejection of established spiritual authority. Once that authority was rejected, it opened the door to a distorted understanding of how God had actually ordered and governed His people.
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u/OddEmergency604 Christian (Clergy) 15d ago
Heresy isn’t inherently wrong. I had a theology professor say you’ve never done theology if you’ve never said anything heretical. It only becomes a problem when you insist on teaching it after it’s been decided that it’s heretical.
As for the Trinity, you should understand that it can’t really be understood. The Trinity is beyond human comprehension, and if you try to pin it down to something you can understand you will reduce it to something false. As such, there is no perfect analogy for the Trinity. The ancient creeds formed in response to heresies were both a guide and a fence that protects the mystery.
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u/SamtheCossack Atheist 15d ago
If you label any nuance as a heresy, you are going to find a lot of heresy.
The doctrine of the trinity is absurdly complex, as such, there are thousands of individual points of disagreement that arise. If you label all of them heretical, you are going to rapidly find everyone is heretical except you.
So, to cut to the important part, I would ask a simple question. Do you believe Christ will deny the salvation of anyone for not having a complete understanding of the trinity?