Old Heresies Always Return in New Clothes

Throughout history, the question Jesus asked his disciples, “but who do you say that I am?” (Matt 16:15), has received many wrong answers. None of them deny him outright; all of them diminish him in some way, reducing him until he fits into a more comfortable category. The pattern repeats itself: error rarely presents itself as a declared enemy of the faith. It arrives dressed in the clothing of whatever thinking is most respected in its age: philosophy, science, social compassion, religious tolerance. And that is precisely why it manages to deceive even sincere people. The church has already faced dozens of attempts to explain Jesus in a way that seemed reasonable, but almost always the root of the error was the same: taking a real truth about him and excluding everything that did not fit the chosen explanation. Knowing some of these ancient errors and their modern echoes is not mere historical curiosity. It is an exercise in discernment, to recognize the same pattern today, even when presented with a different vocabulary.

In the second century, Gnosticism promised a secret knowledge, reserved for a few initiates and superior to the simple faith preached by the apostles. Influenced by a philosophy that regarded matter as evil and spirit as good, this system concluded that God would never truly take on a human body. According to this view, Jesus only appeared to have a body. Paul answers directly: “in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily” (Col 2:9). Bodily, and not merely in appearance. If Jesus's body had been an illusion, his death would have been one too, and our salvation would rest on nothing. The same error reappears today in spiritualist movements that promise hidden knowledge about Jesus, supposedly concealed from the ordinary church and revealed only to a select few. The clothing has changed, but the promise remains the same.

In the fourth century, a presbyter named Arius taught that the Son was not eternal, but the most exalted of God's creatures: almost divine, yet not truly God. The difference between the two positions could be expressed in a single Greek letter: was Christ of like substance with the Father, or of the same substance as him? Jesus's own answer, given centuries before that debate, remains the best reply: “before Abraham was, I am” (John 8:58), taking for himself the very name with which God had revealed himself to Moses. That ancient error reappears, almost unchanged, among Jehovah's Witnesses, who teach that Jesus was the first being created by God. If Christ were merely a creature, however exalted, the cross would be, at most, the noble sacrifice of a special being, powerless to reconcile humanity with an infinite God. It took an entire council, at Nicaea, in the year 325, along with decades of patient teaching by pastors willing to pay a high price for this conviction, for the church to state with clarity: the Son is true God from true God, begotten, not made.

Today's heresies rarely arrive with Greek names. They show up as serious historical research, a social cause, or religious tolerance. They say Jesus was merely a great moral teacher, stripped of miracles and the resurrection. They say what really matters is the social justice he championed, pushing eternal salvation into the background. They also say that every religion has its own path to God, and that Jesus would be just one option among many. None of these ideas is born of a complete lie. Jesus really did teach with incomparable moral authority, really did have compassion on the poor, and really does desire to reach every people. The error lies in taking one true fragment and turning it into the whole explanation. Against this, Jesus's own answer leaves no room for relativizing: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). Peter, before the very authorities who had condemned Jesus, declared without softening his words: “there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).

Faced with any new description of Jesus, the same test applied by the Bereans still applies: receive the message eagerly, but “examining the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Acts 17:11). We must ask what that description denies of what the Bible affirms about Christ, recognize the fragment of truth that is often present, and respond with Scripture itself, firmly and without hostility, remembering that many people repeat these ideas without even knowing where they came from. Heresies change their clothing every century, but the answer remains the same: return to the Jesus revealed by the Bible and answer, yourself, in your own words, the question he asked first: who do you say that he is? This is not a question to be answered once and then forgotten. It is a question every generation and every person must answer anew, in their own words, without settling for answers borrowed from the surrounding culture.