False Teachers

A study on the topic of false teachers can become something very bad in a hurry. I’ve never imagined Steamtown Church being the kind of church that takes a defensive posture, nor do I imagine the church in the Bible as being defensive in nature . The wrong way to approach the topic of false teachers is to act as if the Bible is a sort of handbook for them, as if we can pull out certain types and classify them for all ages. This will probably lead to some nasty finger pointing. There should not be a chart in anyone’s church that diagrams how to find a false teacher in your midst. If anything we ought to approach the issue the way that the Bible does, and the Bible does approach the issue, and so we shall. And the truth is that you can classify 3 to 8 different false teachings in the New Testament. The purpose of this study is not to break down these three or eight false teachings, and then go on a witch hunt for their 21st century version. There may not be an exact 21st century version. What I seek to do with this study is to study what I have classified as three different groups of false teachers in the New Testament and see if there are not some strand similar to all of them. In other words, for those of you who have studied logic, this is an inductive study as opposed to a deductive. Once each false teacher class has been discovered and explained, we will then see if there is a common principle, something universal we can apply to our own culture today. Our motivation is not fear. We are not afraid of false teaching. Falsehood is by default the loser. Rather our motivation is the removal of darkness so that more light may shine in. We shall be proactive, not reactive. The truth has never asked for our protection but it does want us to make it shine, and so we shall study the likes of the legalists, the skeptics, the hedonists.
Of course there’s overlap with these categories which are also fairly broad. But in my estimation these are the three major classes of false teachers in the New Testament. We will start with the legalists.
The legalists showed up in two forms. In the form of the religious leaders of the Gospels and Acts, and in the form of the Judaizers of Galatians. The Judaizers are the more pertinent people to talk about because they came from within the church, but understanding a little about the former group will be beneficial. It’s the former of which we begin.
The first kind of legalist is the scribe and the Pharisee that Jesus dealt with and then the Apostles in Acts. Jesus had these sorts of names for them; blind guides, hypocrites, brood of vipers. They constantly opposed Jesus doing miracles on the Sabbath, as they said it was a work. Of course Jesus pointed out that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath, and that there was no law against doing good on the Sabbath. Even the Pharisees would make an exception if one of their livestock was in mortal danger. Why couldn’t Jesus heal a human being on the Sabbath?
They also were confronting Jesus for not conforming to Jewish ritual cleansings, which were by the way, extra biblical. You see, the Pharisees had made all sorts of laws that governed how one could best keep The Law, that is the Scripture. The original motivation, which was noble but awfully misguided, for writing these commentaries, if you will, was to ensure that the Law would be kept. The Pharisees “filled in the gaps” in a way, as if God’s Word was imperfect without their commentary. What ended up happening is that the laws became the Law, and man’s opinions on equal turf with God’s eternal Law. So when the Pharisees asked Jesus why he didn’t wash his hands before eating, (because Jesus would’ve been breaking a Pharisaical law) Jesus pointed out that the Bible didn’t say he had to.
Another area of conflict with Jesus and the Pharisees was over the subject of “sinners”. The Pharisees kept as far away as possible from those considered sinners. To have intimate fellowship with them in any way was out of the question. Sinners would include mostly prostitutes, adulterers, and tax collectors, but were probably not limited to Romans, and other “lowlifes” and beggars, of which the Pharisees assumed were in the state they were in because of theirs or their parents’ sin. The Pharisees believed that the Messiah would not come until the land was pure, uncontaminated by these sinners. So you can imagine the scandal when Jesus procured a reputation for eating with sinners and tax collectors, while also claiming to be the Messiah. On several occasions Jesus said, “I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” Jesus conceived the mission of the Messiah exactly opposite of the how the Pharisees conceived it. And if we ever see Jesus being antagonistic, it’s towards the scribes and Pharisees.
But the problem with the Scribes and Pharisees is deeper than this spiritual arrogance, it’s the hypocrisy. For it is not the truth or the Scriptures, or the will of God that they really care about. It is the power, prestige, and recognition. And the result of their quest is the weighing down of burdens on the people, the divisions along arbitrary and subjective lines. And Jesus knows that this is the motivation, and he calls them out. And they kill him.
On many occasions the Gospels tell us that the Pharisees were jealous. And they were jealous because Jesus had won the heart of the crowds, stifling their power. They used religion to intimidate, and control, and for this did Jesus save his greatest displays of anger.
In the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Galatians we meet a different kind of legalist. They’ve been traditionally referred to as Judaizers. They were Jews who had “converted” to the Christian faith but were persuading the Galatian believers that they needed to be circumcised to be in, to be considered true believers. The book of Galatians is the definitive New Testament book on the primacy of grace. There is no such thing as Christ plus “something else” in order to be in. You are in upon faith in Christ. Paul says that this is the good news that he preached, and if anyone preached a different gospel “let him be accursed”!
In both the cases of the Pharisees and the legalists the false teaching was characterized by addition to God’s Word. The Pharisees by “putting their traditions above the commands of God” (namely loving their neighbors), and the Judaizers by adding circumcision to the Gospel.
The second class of false teachers are those that I will refer to as the skeptics. Their common problem seems to be an overemphasis on intellectual questions that are peripheral to what’s really important, which would be the preaching of the Gospel. Speculative people abound, no less in the Graeco-Roman culture of the New Testament. Paul warns his apprentice Timothy.
“…they devote themselves to myths and endless geneologies, which promote speculation rather than stewardship from God that is by faith”.
This is such a particular group of persons, that its not immediately applicable to our day and age, but as said before, speculation, not faith, is the prevailing characteristics of many the “Christian” throughout the ages. We may not have people who devote themselves to myths and geneologies, but we certainly have speculative folks in our midst.
We should make a careful distinction. The Apostle Paul, and Jesus can sometimes seem anti-intellectual. Recall Jesus’ prayer thanking God that He has revealed His Word to “babes” and not the learned; or when Paul exclaims, “God has used the foolishness of this world to shame the wise.” But the call to faith is not a call to stop thinking all-together. Clearly, Paul was an intellectual. The Epistle to the Romans is considered by religious and secular scholars alike one of the most brilliantly written pieces of work in all of religious history. The call to faith however is a call to stop entertaining certain intellectual questions. Christians don’t question the existence of God, the truth of a personal Creator, the reality of the Incarnation, the atoning sacrifice that is the death of Christ, the mystery of the Trinity, and the physical resurrection of Christ. We have made a decision about these matters. That’s the first decision made by a Christian, and it is that decision that is called faith, and the amount of humility, and abandon it takes to make this decision accounts for its “foolishness”. The intellectually astute cannot abide such an immoderate decision. To the world, our faith will always look juvenile and/or unenlightened. Of course those unhindered by intellectualism, who have never been accused of having an abundance of intelligence, are willing to accept any doctrine in which they are told that their sins are forgiven. This accounts for the popularity of Christianity in third world countries and it’s dropping off in nations of rationality and affluence. And this is not a bad thing. If you read I Corinthians, you will find it to be prophetic. But the content of our faith is as rich and as deep as any doctrine devised by man. Our claims may be incredible, but our faith is deep and meaningfully without end.
I think that the Apostle John’s perspective on this matter is enlightening. A common idea in his Gospel, and his epistles, especially in the epistle 1 John, is that only those who have been enlightened know the truth. Only those who have been supernaturally made to see the truth will see it, and the litmus test by which you know if someone is truly in the faith is seen in 2 things. 1)How they treat their brothers in Christ 2)Their opinion of the incarnation (which are related). They are certain things that are up for debate, but one of them is not the Incarnation. In straightforward manner John says in his first epistle, “…many false prophets have gone out into the world. By this you know the Spirit of God (the teaching of God): every spirit (teaching) that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit (teaching) of antichrist.”
Jesus Christ is God in the flesh. If you deny this with your words you are a false teacher. If you do not love your brother, you deny this with your life, and your words are useless. Intellectual debates can be fun and even edifying. But they can also be a waste of time and damaging. If the debate doesn’t promote love or edify, the debate is a “sounding gong”.
The final class of false teachers we see in the New Testament is the hedonist. Hedonism is defined in Webster’s dictionary as “the doctrine that pleasure or happiness is the sole or chief good in life”. This is a working definition for our purposes, but I wish to broaden this category of hedonist to “those preoccupied with pleasure“. Allow me to give a brief summary of the philosophical atmosphere of 1st century Mediterranean culture. Most of the philosophies shooting around were offshoots of Platonic philosophy which makes a fine distinction between soul and body. Working from this distinction, you have the Stoics and Epicureans; two groups of people mentioned by name in the New Testament in Acts. The Stoics taught a kind of “mind over matter” philosophy. They believed essentially that happiness was not attained through the fulfillment of desire, but from the removal of it. Epicureanism taught that matter was everything, that there was no afterlife, and death was simply a loss of consciousness, and that meant that the chief goal of life was the pursuit of pleasure. To be fair, hedonism is a sort of crude form of Epicureanism, as Epicurus himself taught that immorality could bring temporary pleasure but pain in the long run. However you can see how hedonism could be a logical distortion of Epicureanism. Many who saw the distinction between soul and body accepted the Gospel, at least in their minds, on terms with their souls only, and saw the idea of Jesus being physical and fleshly as abhorrent. Their religion was ethereal and given the vast grace of the Christian God who required no sacrifices or penance, it was convenient for them to live the party life. The problem is of course that the Christian doctrine teaches that the Holy Spirit lives in our physical bodies, and changes us from the inside out, that were saved in order to do good works, that the grace of God doesn’t excuse us from doing good works but frees us to do them, that drinking and carousing and promiscuous sexual exploits are not pleasing but binding and makes us slaves, that choosing to seek bodily pleasure defames the purpose of the cross and insults Jesus’ sacrifice and God’s will. Naturally these hedonists also mocked the subsequent return and judgment of Christ, and were irreverent in their attitudes towards spiritual things and spiritual beings. (2 Peter and Jude)
Today I am not sure that these types show up so blatantly denying the need for good works, but we can certainly see those who make a mockery of the cross with their complacency, constantly saying that they are a “work in progress” without ever progressing.
At this point it’s important to maintain a balance between the hedonist and the legalist. For it is true that we are a work in progress, and that its God’s work in us, not our own that effects change, and that God is infinitely merciful, compellingly gracious. We don’t do good works in order to be followers of Christ, or even to give ourselves assurance that we are saved, but if we are in doubt by chance our works can serve as a self-test for us. If we constantly rely on the boundless grace of God, living in constant realization that we are helpless without his decision to love us, then the results will show up in us doing good works, loving the brothers and sisters.
In a sense the three classes of false teachers have something in common. In all three situations the focus is on themselves instead of God’s Word. The legalist is focused on his own good works. The skeptic is focused on his own mind. The hedonist is focused on his own immediate pleasure.
Like I said, I don’t want the result of this little essay to be a witch hunt in which we all start looking for the three classes of false teachers and then “torch” them. We are not looking for legalists, hedonists, and skeptics, but we are first checking ourselves for legalistic, hedonistic, or skeptical tendencies, and then examining those who are in the position of teaching us to see whether or not they are preaching the Gospel, that Jesus came in the flesh, and died, and rose again and saved us from our sin. There is not an exact science for finding false teaching and I don’t mean for this essay to create one. But this essay has succeeded if it helps us to see the kind of false teaching that Jesus and the apostles were dealing with, examine their attitudes to it, reactions against it, and reasons for declaring it false teaching. The ultimate measure of falsehood is truth, and the truth is that Jesus came in the flesh, and is God, died, and rose again. He alone gives us eternal life. Every so called Gospel which preaches otherwise is a false teaching, whether it tells us we can earn our salvation, rethink our salvation, or mock our salvation. When it comes to the Gospel, we must only humble ourselves and believe.