Christian Unity (the book) - The Maranatha Community

Some asserted that the Holy Spirit was created by the Son and was thussubordinate to the Father and the Son. (In Orthodox Christian theology, God isone in essence but three in Person – Father, Son and Holy Spirit, who aredistinct and equal.) Those who accepted the heresy were called Macedonians,but were also and more descriptively known as pneumatomachians, the ‘spiritfighters’.Some sources attribute leadership of the group to Macedonius, a semi-Arianwho was twice bishop of Constantinople (died c.362 AD). Today there are sectsand cults which continue this heresy.PelagianismIn the early 5 th Century, as the Goths began to press on the boundaries of theRoman Empire to the north, another heresy, Pelagianism, appeared, whichthreatened the very basis of salvation as taught in the New Testament. Thequestion raised was, can a person in any way save himself?An ascetic theologian from Britain, Pelagius, living in Rome, was concernedabout the moral standing of Christians. Pelagius wanted to safeguard man’sfree will, with each person responsible for his own actions as the basis forjudgement. But he went further and denied original sin and taught that byright choices and good living a man could justify himself before God. This wasstrongly opposed by Augustine, who saw it as undermining the free grace ofGod in salvation.Pelagian ideas, in some form or other, were to survive right through Christianhistory, probably acting as a corrective to those extreme doctrines of gracewhich deny any free will in man.NestorianismIn the late 4 th Century the divine and human natures of Christ caused muchdebate in the Church. Nestorius, a patriarch of Constantinople, seems to havetaught that there were two separate natures in the incarnate Christ, the onedivine and the other human. This was not a question of denying either thedeity or humanity of Christ, but an attempt to show that they were distinct inPage 29