Christian Unity (the book) - The Maranatha Community

his repentance and restoration. The Epistle of Jude and 2 Peter give evidencethat heretical teachers were causing trouble in the Church, but in both theseEpistles there is no suggestion that they are to be dealt with by temporalpunishments: God alone will judge them.The first and second Epistles of John are also concerned with the problem ofheretical teachers. They are to be discovered by the proclamation of the truthof Jesus’ real humanity and real deity (1 John 2.4, 15), and 2 John 10 warnsagainst allowing them to be welcomed into the church and our homes.The time had not come when heresy was to be seen as deserving ofpunishment by the State. The Church was a minority in society and beginningto be persecuted. There is a story that John the Apostle fled from the publicbaths in Ephesus when he learned that the heretic Cerinthus, a Doceticteacher, was also in the baths! Shunning heretics and proclaiming the truthagainst them seems to have been the apostolic method of dealing with them.The question of heresy does not come into the texts of the Gospels, butMatthew’s church teaching does include how to settle disputes in the church(Matthew 18.15-17), and the final sanction against an offender is to put himout of the church.Both Matthew’s and John’s Gospels have the saying of Jesus which is taken insome churches to mean that the church has authority to forgive or not toforgive an offender, to bind him or loose him (Matthew 16.19 and John 20.22-23), but what exactly the binding and loosing entails is a question of muchdebate. In any case there seems to be no sense of temporal punishmentinvolved. In the days of the Early Church, heresy was not punished other thanby excommunication.However, when the Church became a State religion, from the latter part of the4 th Century, heresy was seen as divisive both in the Church and in society as awhole. Measures began to be taken to root it out by force.The first known killings of heretics came in the middle of the 4 th Century whenPriscillians 37 at Trier were executed in 385 AD for heretical views, but large-37Priscillian was a Spaniard, a high-ranking layman who by his example of asceticism andself-denial gained many followers. He was consecrated Bishop of Avila by sympatheticbishops but his teaching, possibly of a Gnostic nature, was condemned. Finally, he andseveral of his followers, including a woman supporter, Eucrotia, were executed, in spite ofthe protests of Martin of Tours.Page 52