Doctrine: Click | View Series

When we understand our sin biblically, we understand why we are prone to great evil and know why the world is not the way it should be. But by knowing that God made us in his image and likeness, we find the source of our dignity, value, and identity. By knowing of the fall and our state as sinners, we understand depravity as the root problem with our life and world. And by understanding the work of Jesus, in our place for our sins, we enjoy the depth of God's love for us, work in us, and eternal future with us as he restores us to the holy state from which we have fallen.

Like a loving Father, God warned our first parents of the consequences of sin. Nonetheless, they and we have each chosen sin. Because God is holy, he must deal with our sin. Because God is loving, he has chosen to do so in a way that we could be forgiven and restored to right relationship with him. In so doing, God is honoring us by showing that we are made for more than sin and that he expects more from us.

From Doctrine, Chapter 5. Fall: God Judges (pgs. 172–173). Available now.

Doctrine Book

Doctrine: What Christians Should Believe is available now. Read a free chapter and find out more.

Know Your Heretics series: Click | View Series

Historical Background

In the years following the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., the church was wrestling with many questions about the person and work of Christ. At Nicaea, the deity of Christ was established as orthodox Christian teaching, but many questions concerning the person of Christ remained.

Apollinarius, named the Bishop of Laodicea in 362 A.D., is responsible for Apollinarianism. This view compromises the full humanity of Jesus by suggesting that the eternal logos (Word) replaced the human soul of Jesus and served as the life-giving principle in the body of Christ.

Apollinarius’ View of Jesus

Apollinarius says, “The flesh, being dependent for its motions on some other principle of movement and action…is not of itself a complete living entity, but in order to become one enters into fusion with something else. So it united itself with the heavenly governing principle [the Logos] and was fused with it…Thus out of the moved and the mover was compounded a single living entity—not two, nor one compound of two complete, self-moving principles” (Apollinarius, “Fragment 107”).

J.N.D. Kelly, a prominent scholar of doctrinal history, writes, “The presupposition of this argument is that the divine Word was substituted for the normal human psychology in Christ.” Put differently, the humanity that was assumed in the incarnation was not a complete humanity but lacked a significant component of personhood. Apollinarius believed, then, that Jesus was only partially human.

The Orthodox Response

The teaching of Apollinarius was condemned at Antioch in 378 and 379 and by the Council of Constantinople in 381. The primary defender of theological orthodoxy was Gregory of Nazianzus, a 4th century Eastern theologian and the Archbishop of Constantinople.

He saw Apollinarius as compromising the saving work of Jesus: “If anyone has put his trust in him as a man without a human mind, he is really bereft of mind, and quite unworthy of salvation. For that which he has not assumed he has not healed; but that which is united to his Godhead is also saved. If only half Adam fell, then that which Christ assumes and saves may be half also; but if the whole of his nature fell, it must be united to the whole nature of Him that was begotten, and so be saved as a whole” (“To Cledonius Against Apollinarius”).

In other words, if all of Adam was lost and ruined by the Fall, then Christ, the second Adam, must put on all that Adam possessed in order to restore human nature and live the life that Adam failed to live. These issues regarding salvation motivated Gregory to articulate a Christology faithful to the Bible.

Why Does All This Matter?

If Apollinarius is right and the “Word” replaced the human soul of Jesus, we are left wondering how Christ can be fully human. Far from lacking a normal human psychology, the Gospels depict Jesus as being completely human in the way he experienced sorrow, pain, and other genuinely human experiences. Certainly Jesus Christ was fully God, as the council of Nicea maintained, but he was also fully man. And it was his deity—as well as his humanity—that allowed him to be our perfect substitute, the mediator between God and humanity for us and for our salvation.

Acts 29 Network

A network of churches planting churches for the glory of Jesus. Get more info.

Know Your Heretics series: Click | View Series

Historical Background

Arius (256-336 A.D.) is the most famous heretic of Christian theology. He was born in Libya and died in Constantinople. Arius held a prominent position as a priest in the Church of Alexandria when he started a theological controversy in 318. Arius denied the eternal deity of Christ and his equality with the Father. He argued that Christ was created by the Father.

Since the age of the Apostles, Jesus had always been considered divine by his followers, but his precise relation to the Godhead had not yet been defined. Thanks to Arius, the Trinitarian controversy regarding the status of Jesus Christ erupted.

Arius’ View of Jesus

Arius did not believe that the Father and the Son were of the same substance. Instead, he believed in the eternal functional and ontological subordination of the Son to the Father—that the Son was a lower being than the Father.

According to Arius, the Son was created before time. In other words, he was not co-eternal with the Father. As he put it, “Before he was begotten or created or appointed or established, he did not exist; for he was not unbegotten” (Letter to Eusebius). Furthermore, the Son was not of one divine substance with the Father. He was rather of a similar substance with the Father (homoiousios). On this view, the divine qualities of the Son are given to him by the Father.

Arius claimed that when the Scriptures speak of Jesus as the “Son” of God, it is merely a title of honor—a title given to Jesus as the one on whom the Father had lavished a special grace. Thus, Arius says, “He is not God truly, but by participation in grace…He too is called God in name only” (Early Christian Doctrines).

Orthodox Response

The theology of Arius became so controversial that Constantine intervened in 325, calling the Council of Nicaea. Athanasius, the leading defender of Nicene orthodoxy and the most prolific writer of orthodox Trinitarian doctrine in the fourth century, saw a major flaw in the writings of Arius and called his heresy the “forerunner of the Antichrist” (Athanasius, Or. Ar. 1:1).

According to Athanasius, the Son was eternally begotten from the Father such that he can be said to be of the same essence (homoousios) with the Father: “The Son is other in kind and nature than the creatures, or rather belongs to the Father’s substance and is of the same nature as He.” (Athanasius, Contra Arianos, III).

Why Does All This Matter?

There are some today who repeat Arius’ views. However, Jesus claimed to be God and the Christian tradition has held that there is an intimate connection between salvation and the deity of Christ.

We are saved from God by God. Only a divine Savior can bear the weight of God’s wrath in atonement. Only Jesus as the God-man can satisfy the enormous debt and penalty caused by human sin against God. No mere human could bridge that gap. Only a divine Savior can pay the costly price of redeeming us from our bondage to sin and death. Only the God-man can conquer all his people’s enemies. Our salvation rests on the infinite capacities of our savior, Jesus Christ.

ESV Study Bible

The ESV Study Bible is our Bible of choice. To show how good the notes are, we've posted some free study notes on the Trinity. Read them here.

To answer any significant question about where we come from, why we are here, what is right and wrong, who God is, and where we are going when we die requires doctrine. Subsequently, everyone has doctrine. The only question is whether it is truthful, biblical, and helpful.

Admittedly, in the name of being doctrinally vigorous, some people go too far and put secondary issues—those that are unworthy of battling over—in the closed hand of conviction. Conversely, some people do not go far enough and put in the open hand primary issues that are worthy of battling over. In writing Doctrine, my coauthor, Dr. Gerry Breshears, and I sought to follow the storyline of the Bible and focus on the major unifying, liberating, and life-changing doctrines of the Bible.

The timing of this book is incredibly significant. At the very least, evangelical Christians in general, and younger evangelical Christians in particular, seem incredibly confused on doctrine. One study revealing the incredible need for Doctrine is the third wave of the National Study of Youth and Religion (2008) (see note below). It reports the beliefs of the 13.5% of emerging adults (ages 18 to 23) in the United States today who self-identify as Protestant Christian and who attend an evangelical church at least “two to three times a month”:

• 97.2% believe in God.
• 96.6% believe that Jesus was/is the Son of God who was raised from the dead.
• 96.4% believe that God created the world.
• 89% “definitely” believe in angels.
• 76.2% “definitely” believe in demons.
• 82.5% “definitely” believe in any form of afterlife.
• 83.0% believe in astrology “not at all.”
• 83.2% believe in reincarnation “not at all.”
• 94.8% “definitely” believe in miracles.
• 95.0% believe in a coming judgment day, when God will reward some and punish others.
• 91.2% believe that God is a personal being who is still involved in the world today.
• 81.9% believe that only people whose sins are forgiven through faith in Jesus go to Heaven.
  Corollary: 5.3% say that only good people go to Heaven; 2.5% say that all people go to Heaven; 4.9% believe “something else” about Heaven, and 2.2% “don’t really know or care” who goes to Heaven. 3.3% don’t believe in Heaven at all.
• 1.6% tries to include practices from Buddhism, Hinduism, Zen, or other Asian religions.
• 85.5% say that it is “okay for religious people to try to convert other people to their faith.”
• 71.8% say that Christians should only practice one religion.
• 24.6% say that it is okay for Christians to practice other religions as well. (Another 3.6% don’t know.)
• Less than two-thirds (66.2%) say that “only one religion is true.”
• 70.8% say that it is not okay for Christians to “pick and choose their religious beliefs without having to accept the teachings of their religious faith as a whole.”
• More than one-quarter (27.0%) thinks that it is okay to “pick and choose.”
• 89% say that they have “a lot of respect for organized religion in this country.”
• Almost one-quarter (24.3%) agrees with or is still undecided about moral relativism.
• 36.0% “agree” or “strongly agree” that “we should adjust our views of what is morally right and wrong” to reflect changes in our world.
• 52.0% “agree” or “strongly agree” that people should not marry someone of a different religion.

REMEMBER: These statistics are from the 13.5% of emerging adults (ages 18 to 23) in the United States today who self-identify as Protestant Christian and who attend an evangelical church at least “two to three times a month.” In Doctrine we hit all these issues and many more in a readable manner.

Note: The National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) is the most comprehensive and rigorous social scientific research ever conducted on the religious and spiritual lives of American youth. It is based out of the University of North Carolina and the University of Notre Dame. The wave 1 survey was conducted among American youth ages 13 to 17 between July 2002 and April 2003, and produced a total N = 3370. Most recently, a third wave of the survey was conducted from September 24, 2007 through April 21, 2008 with the same respondents—when they were between the ages of 18 and 23 years. (This is during the first half of what developmental psychologists call “emerging adulthood.”) The National Study of Youth and Religion was generously funded by Lilly Endowment Inc. and is under the direction of Christian Smith of the Department of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame. For methodological details and related publications, visit: http://www.youthandreligion.org/.

Mars Hill Global

Serving the church and spreading the gospel. Help support this effort by giving to the Global Fund. More info at MarsHillGlobal.com.

Romans 1:28-2:11
The Biblical truth that I want us to understand, believe and live by today is this: a time is coming when every responsible person, on the basis of his or her actions and attitudes, will meet the final judgment of God either as eternal life or as wrath and fury. With that sentence I am trying to answer three questions about final judgment:

1. Who will be judged?
2. On what basis will they be judged?
3. What are the alternatives they may experience?