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An up–ramp to heaven: Docetism
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| You know the formulae: ‘True God of
true God”; “Both human and divine.” We’ve all heard them. It seems that
everything has been spelled out. Yet, the more you probe those
definitions, the more complex they seem. In fact, if you look at it, many of these great doctrinal statements are not about what we believe, but about what we do not believe. We do not believe in three gods. We do not believe that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit are the same. Jesus shares a substance or essence with the Father, but he is not the same person. It’s like when a butcher takes a steak. It is a good steak, but there are useless bits of fat and gristle around the outside. He takes a sharp knife and trims all the rubbish away until all that is left is the good meat. People say many things about Jesus. Prophet, teacher, son of God, son of Man, Saviour, Lord... many truths are spoken, and many falsehoods: illegitimate son of a centurion, visitor from another planet, psychotic visionary. We have to trim off the rubbish until all we have left is the good meat. But that is still a long way from tasting and seeing that it is good. There is still plenty of territory to explore in that one steak. The problem is that it is easy to trim off some rubbish and cut away the good as well. That’s pretty well what the Docetists did. Many Christians have heard of the heretic Arians, some have heard of Pelagians, but very few have heard of Docetists. Yet they are still active to this day. The name comes from the Greek word, dokein, meaning to seem or to appear. You can pronounce it dok'etist or dos'etist. Docetists had complex beliefs. For example, they believed that Jesus was human, but that the Christ came upon Jesus when he was baptised. They said that the Christ was fully God, and only seemed to be human. So they believed that he only seemed to be tempted, only seemed to suffer, only seemed to die on the cross. After all, how could God himself die in so cruel a fashion? Docetism is the earliest heresy after the Judaising heresy to be clearly identified in the New Testament. We find Paul tackling what looks like early Gnosticism in Colossians, but many scholars say that Gnosticism didn’t really appear until the mid second Century. But there is little doubt that a large part of I John is devoted to fighting off the encroachment of Docetism. Cerinthus, one of the founders of Docetism, taught in Asia Minor. When John was an old man living at Ephesus in Turkey, he refused to remain under the same roof with someone who denied the divinity of Jesus. Once, John was entering one of the great public baths, which they called thermae. When someone informed him that Cerinthus was in the building, John turned away exclaiming “Let us fly, that the thermae (steam) fall not on our heads, since Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is in there!” John wrote,  1JN 4:1 Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world. 2 This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, 3 but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming and even now is already in the world. Those who deny the humanity of Jesus the Christ are enemies of Christ and victims of the antichrist spirit. Now you wouldn’t be Docetists, would you? I want to ask you some questions which you might never have heard asked in church before. You might find them embarrassing. You might feel a little shocked to hear me ask these things. But they are a test to see how much Docetism has touched you. Because I want you to understand that Docetism touches us all. It is still active today. Let’s start with a few simple questions. You can answer these ones aloud, because they probably won’t embarrass you too much. First, did Jesus ever get tired? Yes, I think you all agree that he did. After all, he was human as well as divine, wasn't he. Next, we’ve had a few tummy bugs going around at work lately. Do you think that Jesus ever felt queazy or like vomiting? Do you think he ever did actually vomit? I think it would be a pretty good guess that he did from time to time. Now, you know that Jesus was born in the manger in Bethlehem, and the wise men came bearing gifts of gold, frankinsence and myrrh. No one mentions gifts of Snugglers. Did the baby Jesus ever need his nappy changed? Now, you mightn’t want to answer these next ones aloud... What about when Jesus was an adult? Did he ever need to relieve himself? Think about it... he must have, mustn’t he? How do you feel, being asked to think about these things? Now, I want
you to think about some of the temptations you have faced. Did you ever
see something you really wanted, left where you could take it, and it
nearly killed you not to grab it and go before anyone caught you? Maybe
you actually did grab it and go! But I won’t ask you about that today.
My question is, did Jesus ever get tempted in that way? Did he ever see
a coin left on a table and feel tempted to fix his own shortage by
taking it? Here’s the
last one. I guess all of us here are old enough to have had this
experience. If you haven’t had it at least you have wished
you had had this experience. You meet someone rather cute, you have a
hug and a kiss, and it starts getting serious, and all you can think of
is staying there for everything you can get out of that situation. Is
that clear enough for you?
If you answered “no” to any of those questions, you are tainted with the Docetist heresy. Your Jesus is not quite human. He only seems to be. The Bible says (Heb 4: 15,16), 15 For we do not
have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but
we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was
without sin. 16 Let us then approach the throne of grace with
confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in
our time of need.
Jesus wasn’t only tempted to satisfy his physical desires by producing
bread to end his fast. He wasn’t only tempted to throw himself from the
Temple tower and tloat to the ground on angel’s wings. His tests
weren’t restricted to the lust for authority over the kingdoms of this
world.He was human. He was tempted and tested in every way, just the same as we are — yet he never sinned. That’s what makes the difference — he never sinned. Docetism radically disconnected the divine and the human. It severed God from the life of this earth. It aimed to protect God from contact with the corruption of the physical world and, in the process, produced a false religion, one incapable of redeeming the corrupt world. You don’t need to think too far, you don’t need to puzzle too long, to see that the Docetistic elevation of the law above grace is entirely consistent. It makes absolute sense that the Docetists proclaimed a religion of legal obligations. Their only hope of salvation lay in trying to re–establish the righteousness lost in the Fall of humanity under Adam and Eve. There was no contact between the Docetist christ and sinful, failed humanity. That means that the Docetist christ was too small; and that means that the Docetist god was too small too, because a god who couldn’t stand humanity has to be a god who could not become truly and fully human. On the Day of Pentecost, Peter proclaimed good news about Jesus. He said he was ...a man accredited
by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs, which God did among you
through him, as you yourselves know.
In other words, to Peter on that day, the emphasis is that Jesus is a man. We see it again in the next verse, where he says, 23 This man was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross. In addition, Peter makes it very clear that Jesus was put to death and that he was nailed to a cross. There is no hint of any escape of death here. It was inexorable. Death marched fiorward until it engulfed a very real human being — but it spewed him forth a few days later, because it could not keep him. 24 But God raised him from the dead, freeing him from the agony of death, because it was impossible for death to keep its hold on him. Once again, there is no hint that Jesus might not have died. There is no suggestion that he suffered no pain. On the contrary, he experienced the agony of death, but was freed from its grasp, because it proved impossible for death to keep him captured. The dead arose! Life burst forth once more! There can be no such victory for a phantom Christ. The not–dead can never become the resurrected. But let’s go back to the questions I asked you earlier. Were you comfortable with those questions? Any question you felt uncomfortable with reveals some aspect of your own humanity that you are uncomfortable with. Docetism arises when people fear and loathe their own physical human nature. They can only permit themselves a god–at–a–distance, because they can’t allow their god to corrupt himself by touching them. Just a simple example will suffice. Islam has strongly Docetistic tendencies. It believes that God substituted someone else so that it only seems that Jesus died. Islamic regulations for prayer insist that a person should come to prayer having washed in a prescribed way first. But certain lapses while praying can undo all the ritual cleansing, and that means starting again from the beginning. For example, passing wind while praying is believed to offend Allah and make your prayers unacceptable to him. In psychology, if you attribute to others the feelings you yourself have, it’s called transference, and it’s evidence of damaged areas in your life. If, for example, you begin to believe that someone hates you because, in fact, you are afraid of that person, or you actually hate that person, that’s transference. If you believe that God loathes and detests you because you are a loathsome person, you are attributing your self–loathing to God. Those kinds of feelings are at the heart of Docetism. Their god has to stop short of reaching them, because they couldn’t stand themselves. Sick anthropology creates sick theology. You can't begin to see God as he really is if you yourself hang onto a false sense of what humanity is about. Last week, I spoke about the racism at the heart of the Judaising Heresy. Today we see self-hatred at work in the heart of Docetism. Racism comes from a fear that your own race and culture are of little value; self-hatred comes from a belief that you yourself are worthless. Tony Campolo, the sociologist and Christian speaker, studied in a Baptist Theological College. He was asked one day to lead the class in prayer as the session commenced. Campolo thanked God for his love “...to us worthless sinners...” Immediately, his lecturer stopped him. “Mr Campolo, we are certainly unworthy, but we are never worthless. You may now continue your prayer — but correctly.” Docetism believes that we are essentially worthless — or, at least, that we are in part; real Biblical Christianity knows we are unworthy, but God still loves us, with a love stronger than death and a love that reaches out and touches the most undesirable. Jesus reveals God’s attitude when he reaches out and touches a man disfigured and corrupted with leprosy and all its associated ailments. On the other hand, some famous theologian — I can’t remember who — remarked that demons inhabit those areas of our lives we can’t talk to God about. If you can’t talk to God about bodily functions, if you can’t talk to him about anger or fear or desire or any of those other aspects of life that we have been taught are unacceptable and “worthless”, then satan will be hard at work taking control of those places. The answer to Docetism is to understand how completely and absolutely Jesus bridged the gap between God and human kind. He is in full contact with all that it means to be God, and he is in full contact with all that it means to be human; and he died so that the two could be permanently united.  I want us to
do something this morning that perhaps you have never done.I want us all to sit quietly for a little while, and think about those areas of your life that you are uncomfortable about. I want you to thank God for those areas. I am not asking you to thank God that you may have misused those parts of your life. I’m not asking for thanfulness that you may have sinned in relation to them. But I want us all to give thanks for our humanity — everything God gave us so that if would be good. Give thanks. Then, remember Jesus, who knows all about every part of being human. Ask him to enter those areas of your life. Ask him to make them clean and to make them part of his dwelling place in your life. And give thanks that he has already said, “Yes!” AMEN |
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| © Peter R. Green 2003. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. | |
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