Slouching Towards Nestorius

In attempting to familiarize myself with the modern crop of TV preachers, I've noticed a few buzz words that come up a lot. Everybody is "sowing seeds" and "reaping harvests," for example. You also have a lot of "anointing" and "covenant" talk. These were concepts not really mentioned (that I recall) by the preachers I knew, whether in my sojourns to Baptist churches with my family or in my casual contacts with Jerry Falwell or Walter Martin.

The one that I've been mulling over a lot lately, though, is "Jesus was God in the flesh," or some paraphrasing thereof. Of course, there's a perfectly ok way of saying this. The more I watch these guys, the more I'm convinced that these preacher folks don't mean what John was talking about. When they say "God in the flesh," they really mean that God came down and, rather than uniting Himself in a human nature with a human soul and will, He put on a man-suit of flesh. Jesus's humanity, in other words, was just having a body, rather than actually "being" human.

We've seen this before. Over 1000 years before, but it's still Nestorianism. This was the heresy condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431. You may also know this as the Council that declared the Blessed Mother as Theotokos (God-Bearer) since she bore not only a human man-suit, but a single divine person, Our Lord Jesus Christ.

I wonder if this sort of thinking is linked to Protestant rejection of Marian dogmas.

As with most heresies, one bad idea usually leads to all sorts of worse ideas down the road. One of which is the idea of "penal substitution," which I have heard taught in Protestant circles. Basically, it means that Christ's atonement was by His own damnation. Damnation, of course, means total separation of God, which is impossible to claim and still maintain any belief in the Trinity. When I've heard this in the past, it's usually been with the idea that Christ, as God, didn't suffer in hell, but His flesh did. So we ditch either the hypostatic union or the Trinity. Take your pick.

Imagine my surprise when I find out that this thread of Nestorianism runs all the way back to the Reformers. Thanks to Nick for assembling these quotes.

I'm now going to be watching for signs of this on my preacher shows to see how many of them are denying the Trinity. We've talked before about the new emergence of anti-Trinitarian thought. Looks like it might be even more widespread than I figured.