He uses his leadership position to benefit from others’ wealth. The Charlatan is only interested in the Christian faith to the extent that it can fill his wallet. He has an unhealthy craving for controversy and for quarrels about words, which produce envy, dissension, slander, evil suspicions, and constant friction among people who are depraved in mind and deprived of the truth, imagining that godliness is a means of gain” (1 Timothy 6:3-5). “If anyone teaches a different doctrine and does not agree with the sound words of our Lord Jesus Christ and the teaching that accords with godliness, he is puffed up with conceit and understands nothing. Paul charged Timothy to be on guard against him. The Charlatan is the person who uses Christianity as a means of personal enrichment. Always, he boldly tampers with “the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3). Like Jehovah’s Witnesses, he may alter God’s finished word, or like Mormons, he may add to it.
He may, like Marcus Borg and other prominent scholars, deny the virgin birth or the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He may reframe the doctrine of the Trinity, as Arius did in the third century and as Oneness Pentecostals do today. He continues his evil work today, sometimes by contradicting the truth and sometimes by adding to it. Yet in denying the faith and celebrating what is false, he leads his followers from the safety of orthodoxy to the peril of heresy.įrom the church’s earliest days, she has been afflicted by the Heretic in his various forms. He is a gregarious figure, a natural leader teaching just enough truth to mask his deadly error. The Heretic is the person who teaches what blatantly contradicts an essential teaching of the Christian faith.
“But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction” (2 Peter 2:1). Peter warned against him in his second letter.
The Heretic is the most prominent and perhaps the most dangerous of the false teachers. Sponsor Show Your Support Become a Patron The Heretic
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