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154 | How Believable Ideas Lead to Dangerous Beliefs - Unmasking Marcionism
6.8k Plays14 days ago
⭐️In this episode Phylicia explores Marcionism's heretical views on the Old Testament, emphasizing the importance of understanding scripture in light of personal biases and promoting the Old Testament's foundational role in Christianity.
Mentioned in this episode:
⭐️ 10 Myths About the Old Testament: https://everywomanatheologian.myflodesk.com/oldtest
⭐️ Join the Old Testament Course Waitlist: https://community.phyliciamasonheimer.com/join?invitation_token=14931948b3f388c349768e3c4ac1d1f4d84cfbe1-730df723-5cda-47be-b3cd-197ef4bdaff1
⭐️ Beginning of the Canon series on Verity: https://zencastr.com/z/RP2eICgo
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👩💻 Watch the entire Series on How to Discern False Teaching: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLybB3dkK5l8kNmt90OhxUDmJ0uoFQ5NXV Subscribe to Verity Podcast:
➡️ https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/verity-by-phylicia-masonheimer/id1495210734
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Transcript
Introduction to False Teachings and Ancient Heresies
00:00:00
Speaker
No false teaching ever begins with the crazy stuff. Every false teaching begins with something that sounds true, but is actually lie.
00:00:14
Speaker
Hello friends and welcome back to Verity Podcast. I'm Felicia Massenheimer, your host and the founder of Every Woman a Theologian. And right now we are doing a series on ancient heresies and false teachings. How do we discern these as they reappear in today's society?
00:00:30
Speaker
In this episode, we're going to look at a heresy called Marcionism, named for a man named Marcion, from the first few centuries of church history. We're going to learn about what Marcion didn't like about the Old Testament and how we're seeing parallels to this same attitude today.
00:00:48
Speaker
Then we're going to talk about the importance of the Old Testament and why Christians need to pay attention to the important truths that are found in this text. This is going to cross over a little bit with what we talked about in the Gnosticism episode. So if you haven't watched those two episodes that we did on Gnosticism, head back and watch those. Let's start with who Marcion was, what he taught, and then we'll get into some of the implications of his worldview.
Marcion's Worldview and Teachings
00:01:17
Speaker
So Marcion was a pastor's kid. His father was a bishop in the southern coast of the Black Sea. And this is still very early on in Christianity.
00:01:27
Speaker
We believe he was not Jewish. He was Gentile or Greek. And at this point, the church has spread out of Israel and Palestine throughout Europe. And so now it's reaching up towards the Black Sea, which is where his father was pastoring a church.
00:01:46
Speaker
And so he grows up in the church. He grows up around Christianity. But as he grows, he begins to develop this worldview that includes two very significant factors.
00:01:59
Speaker
Number one, he absolutely hates Judaism. And number two, he doesn't like the material world. Now, again, if you watched or listened to the Gnosticism episode, you know that a hatred or a dislike or distrust of the material world is a fundamental of the Gnostic worldview because the material world is evil and the spiritual world is where true freedom and true destiny is found.
00:02:26
Speaker
And so Marcion, for whatever reason, developed this kind of um syncretistic view that included Christian elements and also Gnostic elements.
00:02:38
Speaker
Around the year 144, so again this is very very early in church history, he went to Rome and began to teach. And so in Rome, he began to found his own church that utilized these different elements of his philosophy.
00:02:57
Speaker
So because Marcion has this view, like Gnosticism, that the world is evil, he has to come to a conclusion. and And this is what all Christian Gnostics must wrestle with.
00:03:10
Speaker
He comes to the conclusion that the creator of the world, the material world, must also bit be evil. Now, how do you get to this point? I think that like the beginning point for most false teachings, it's looking around at our world and saying, how could there be so much suffering and evil in the material world?
00:03:31
Speaker
Later on, when we start to move into the medieval era, we're going to look at a worldview called Pelagianism. And the starting point there was the same. Pelagius wanted to figure out how to deal with the problem of evil in
Comparing Marcionism and Pelagianism
00:03:46
Speaker
the world.
00:03:46
Speaker
And he didn't think that it was possible for people to take responsibility for their sin unless they had a completely free will and had to take complete ownership of their own evil.
00:03:59
Speaker
And so out of that worldview, he developed a very unbiblical framework that took God basically completely out of the equation in terms of salvation. So here we're seeing similar things. The starting point is honest and it's real, but the solution to the problem is not consistent with what Christ taught.
00:04:22
Speaker
So, instead of falling into Gnosticism, which relies on these genealogies of eons and these different um spiritual entities that you would try to comprehend or come in contact with to reach Gnosis, Marcion says instead that the God and Father of Jesus is not the same as Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament.
00:04:50
Speaker
So Yahweh made the world. He's the material God. And the father of Jesus only wanted a spiritual world. He didn't want a material world.
00:05:01
Speaker
So Yahweh makes this evil physical world. And this other spiritual father is the father of Jesus. This is very similar to Christian Gnosticism.
00:05:13
Speaker
And it's also very similar to some modern ideologies that we're seeing pop up through YouTube teachers, through health health and wellness bloggers and influencers that are saying that the God of the material world, the God in the Jewish scriptures, Yahweh is evil, but there's a different ah different God that is the the father of Jesus.
Marcion's Rejection of the Old Testament
00:05:36
Speaker
So what this led Marcion to do was to be extremely dissatisfied with the Old Testament, right? Now, he already had a bias against Judaism. And we don't know if his bias against Judaism was because of his view of the Old Testament Or if it had another reason, it's kind of a chicken and the egg situation. Did he hate Judaism because he hated the Old Testament God? did he hate the Old Testament God because he hated Judaism for other reasons? We don't really know.
00:06:06
Speaker
But what we do know is that he wanted to remove the Old Testament from the Christian ethic from the Christian church practice.
00:06:19
Speaker
So at this point, remember, in church history, the church comes out of the synagogue. The word church is a comes from the Dutch word kirk, and it refers back to the Hebrew word for assembly in Old Testament. So the Greek word in the New Testament regarding the church refers to assembly as it is used in the In the Hebrew scriptures. So in the Hebrew scriptures, the word church would have been the assembly of the righteous. And that's how it's used in the New Testament.
00:06:49
Speaker
And then when it goes through all the different translations into other languages, it becomes church. So when we see the church referred to here, it means the assembly of God's people.
00:07:00
Speaker
And as he is, you know, looking out at how the church is using the Old Testament, which carried forward from when the church was predominantly Jewish and then becomes predominantly non-Jewish, they're still using the Old Testament. They're reading it aloud.
00:07:17
Speaker
And if you've ever been to an Anglican church service or a Catholic church service where it's more liturgical and they give you the readings that you're following along with, you'll see that there's big chunks of of Old Testament readings that you're going to be reading from alongside gospel readings and psalm readings.
00:07:32
Speaker
Well, psalms are in the Old Testament. But all of this, again, pointing back to this legacy that began very early of reading the Old Testament and it being a ah significant part of our of our faith and liturgy. Well, Marcion did not like this, and he wanted to remove the Hebrew Scriptures from Christian life and worship.
00:07:52
Speaker
And again, the reason for this is that Yahweh in the Old Testament, Marcion perceived him as vindicative, yeah full of favoritism, um selfish.
00:08:04
Speaker
He's not willing to he's not willing to um you know listen or hear his people or show mercy. He sees him as an evil God with with an arbitrary sense of justice.
00:08:18
Speaker
And my source for this, if you'd like to follow along um or read more about this, is The Story of Christianity by Justo Gonzalez. It has a whole section on Marcion. If you'd like to read more about it, I'll put the link in the show notes. so So Marcion decides we're just going to get rid of the Hebrew scriptures.
00:08:36
Speaker
We're going to not use these at all because this is, though this as Justo says here, it is the word of an inferior god. So I'm not going to receive that.
00:08:49
Speaker
I'm going to receive the New Testament, which is the word of a superior your God, the true God. So when he removed the Old Testament, that meant that in his churches, now you have this massive void. I mean, there's 39 books in the Old Testament and there's only 27 in the New and Old Testament is a significant portion of scripture.
Impact of Marcion's Biases
00:09:10
Speaker
So he makes his own list of books and these included the Epistles of Paul, the Gospel of Luke, who was Paul's companion, and the rest he removed because he claimed that these were affected by Jewish viewpoints.
00:09:26
Speaker
So clearly Marcion was unapologetically anti-Semitic, which is a problem in and of itself. um But it also reveals that he could not comprehend.
00:09:40
Speaker
He's so fully biased by his own determined philosophy that even in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus consistently speaks of his Jewishness, how he came to fulfill the law, how he came as the Jewish Messiah, the fulfillment of Abraham's prophecy, the fulfillment of the Adamic and Noahic and Mosaic Abrahamic and Davidic covenants,
00:10:09
Speaker
that he is the sacrificial lamb, he is the Lion of Judah, that all of the significant prophecies of the Old Testament are fulfilled in Jesus Christ, Marcion lost all of this significance by cutting off the Old Testament.
00:10:26
Speaker
but But why did he cut off the Old Testament? Again, his struggle with what he perceived as a God of injustice and evil. And what's sad about this is that his personal hatred of the Jews kept him from understanding the context of the Old Testament that would have helped him see that Yahweh is a God of mercy, not a God of arbitrary justice.
00:10:53
Speaker
And I think there's a warning in this. Obviously, we can see how Marcion's actions are being replicated today in our society, but there's there's another lesson here.
00:11:05
Speaker
And it's how our personal biases can prevent us from understanding the truth, especially the truth about God, that we get so comfortable and we get so um content and stuck in our ways with what we think.
00:11:27
Speaker
We're unwilling to possibly be wrong. Even if being wrong means that there's good news at the end of it. He was so set in his ways, so stubborn, his own will so elevated that he refused to consider the possibility that his hatred for Judaism and for the Jews was preventing him from understanding Jesus rightly.
Evaluating Modern Relevance of Marcionism
00:11:54
Speaker
And in the end, what did he have to do? He had to disrespect and dishonor the words of Jesus' own disciples who knew him better than anyone else in order to preserve his worldview.
00:12:09
Speaker
He had to disrespect and dishonor an Old Testament that Jesus quoted continually, that Jesus had memorized, that Jesus had gone to Torah school to study, that Jesus fulfilled.
00:12:22
Speaker
He had to elevate himself above Jesus to say, this is the real Jesus you need to follow. And that's the lesson here.
00:12:34
Speaker
How often do we allow our own philosophies, our own ideas of who Jesus is, make us think, I know Jesus better than Jesus knows himself. And i know Jesus better than 2,000 years of church history, all the apostles and disciples and early church fathers who attested to who he was and what he did and what he said.
00:12:54
Speaker
I know better. And you guys, that is the very first sin. That's the very first sin. If we go back to Genesis 3, that was the very first thing.
00:13:08
Speaker
Did God really say? Casting doubt on what God says, not just to do, but also what God says about us and what God says about himself.
00:13:20
Speaker
And then saying, well, if you disobey him, you aren't actually going to die. There won't be any negative effects. He's lying to you. He's exaggerating.
00:13:32
Speaker
That's not the truth. This is how the enemy works. This is how evil works. It's never going to present you with this blatant idea or philosophy that is just absolutely wackadoodle and you accept it right out, right?
00:13:47
Speaker
It always starts with something subtle. I'll give you an example of this. So um I follow a couple of ex-New Age bloggers and teachers And it's interesting to hear their testimonies about what they believed when they were still embroiled in New Age philosophy and astrology and things like this.
00:14:10
Speaker
And so they'll talk about how they believe things like lizard people in Hollywood, like that that Hollywood actors are like lizard people that are sent from other planets to dominate society.
00:14:23
Speaker
Right. And when I hear that, or probably you hear that, you think that is insane. Like, are you crazy? How could someone believe that? Because it didn't start with that. It started with something like astrology, where it's like, well, I can look at the stars. And if I follow my birth chart and i can see the stars, I can sense them. And the horoscope seems to line up with what I'm experiencing.
00:14:46
Speaker
That makes sense to me. And starting with something like that, they start down a pathway that opens into these other ideas that are offshoots as they keep deep diving throughout their worldview.
00:15:01
Speaker
And you can arrive at wild things from almost path. avenue, any worldview. You can come to extremes. My point though is, whenever you're looking at heresy or false teaching, it's never going to be this situation where it's like, oh, here's an absolutely insane idea and I'm going to sell you on that first.
00:15:20
Speaker
It's always going to start with something that's very believable, very sane. And that's how Marcion started. He looked out, he saw a suffering world, and he said, there's no way a good God could create this.
00:15:36
Speaker
But what's wild about this to me is that he completely skipped over the fact that a good God created a good world. And it was human beings who chose to break it.
00:15:49
Speaker
So when we are looking at the Bible now, I just want to encourage you to be honest with yourself about the biases that you bring to the Old Testament and ask yourself, are there things you assume about it that maybe aren't true? Now, in the second half of this episode, we're going to talk more about the Old Testament and my encouragements for those of you who want to learn to study it. But before we get there, I want to tell you about a brand new topic.
00:16:15
Speaker
totally free PDF download that I made for you. I made this last week and I think it will be so helpful to those of you who really are bothered by the Old Testament. Maybe you're listening to this or you're watching this and you're like, that's me. I just feel like the Old Testament intimidates me and I have so many questions.
00:16:32
Speaker
This free PDF is five pages long. It's called 10 Myths About the Old Testament. And it's just just a short, readable PDF that includes an overview of the genres of literature that are in the Old Testament, the purpose of these books, and then a list of 10 myths that are often shared about the Old Testament.
00:16:53
Speaker
If you are interested in this free download, I am going to put the link right in the show notes, whether you're on iTunes, Spotify, or watching on YouTube.
Resources for Understanding the Old Testament
00:17:01
Speaker
You can just head to the show notes, click it, enter your email, and you'll immediately receive the download.
00:17:06
Speaker
So hopefully this 10 myths of the Old Testament PDF is helpful to you. And if you read it, you still have questions, feel free to email me at felicia at feliciamasonheimer.com. Okay, so back to the Old Testament and kind of responding to Marcion's idea.
00:17:21
Speaker
What's so interesting about Marcion is that he was actually a bigger threat, according to Gonzalez, than Gnosticism was. Why do you think that is? I think it's because he was so convincing.
00:17:35
Speaker
Right. Gnosticism is kind of like the lizard people. Like when you read about Gnosticism as a Christian, you're like, I mean, y'all are a little crazy. But if you read Marcion's arguments,
00:17:50
Speaker
it's a little bit more convincing. And that's why when we see this repackaged Marcionism today, particularly the idea that Yahweh is not the same as the Father, Father God and Jesus, because Jesus and the Father and the Spirit are one, they're trinity. This is important. We're going doing an episode on that soon.
00:18:08
Speaker
When we look at things like this, it's easy to go, well, that's actually really convincing because like, didn't Yahweh just like arbitrary kill a bunch of people in the Old Testament? Or didn't Yahweh like harden people's hearts?
00:18:23
Speaker
Didn't Yahweh like strike people dead? And we start to think that, you know, yeah, it seems like God is kind of unfair. Yahweh is kind of unfair.
00:18:36
Speaker
And so we don't ever deal with those particular situations. We don't actually learn to wrestle with them. And so we then come away with kind of this just little idea in the back of our minds that maybe Marcion is right.
00:18:49
Speaker
And that's what's happening still today. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about the Old Testament and why we should care about it In contrast to Marcion's view.
00:19:03
Speaker
So the Old Testament, we call it the Old Testament because of the Greek and Latin words that were used for that particular section of scripture, testamentum.
00:19:16
Speaker
Now, what it really meant was old covenant and new covenant. So the old and new testaments, testimonies, really are referring to the old and the new covenants.
00:19:26
Speaker
And this is a reference to at the Last Supper, Jesus says, this is the new covenant in my blood. Do this in remembrance of me. So what he's saying is the final covenant, there was Adam, Noah,
00:19:41
Speaker
Abraham, Moses, David, you have, and I'm sure I'm missing one in there. I think Ezra renews the covenant. um You have Jesus cutting a new covenant in his blood instead of in in the blood of animals.
00:19:59
Speaker
Right? Right. So when we say Old Testament, New Testament, we're just referring to the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. In Judaism, the Old Testament is not the Old Testament. It's the Testament. It's the covenant because they do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah. So that is why their scriptures are the, we have the same scriptures in the Old Testament, but theirs are in a slightly different order just because of how through church history, ours were moved from scrolls to codexes.
00:20:28
Speaker
and then rearranged. Same content, different order. And if you want to learn more about that, you can head back to the second season of Verity Podcast and listen through the Canon series where I talk about how the Bible was translated, how it was compiled, or you can head to our website, feliciamasonheimer.com, and I have a book called How the Bible Came to Be if you prefer to read about the history of the Bible instead of listening.
00:20:52
Speaker
So we have the Old Testament, but these are the same content as the Jewish scriptures, which are divided in three parts, Torah, writings, and prophets.
00:21:04
Speaker
Again, we have the same books. We just have them in a different, slightly different order, and we don't have them divided out in the same way that the jews do So all of this to say, we're both referring, both Jews and Christians are referring to the same content. Obviously, Christians see it differently because we see the Old Testament as pointing to and being fulfilled in Christ. And that Christ was the Jewish Messiah who came to fulfill God's promise to Abraham that through Abraham, the whole world would be blessed.
00:21:37
Speaker
So Israel was chosen according to Exodus and Deuteronomy, not because they were better than everyone else or not because that they were um holier, bigger, greater, you know, more moral than anybody else, but because God loved them and he wanted to use their family, their nation as a way to bring life and blessing to the whole world.
00:22:02
Speaker
And as you go through the book of Exodus and Deuteronomy, we just finished this in Bible in a year, we're looking at God forming a nation, but not just a random nation. It's not like God's like, oh yeah, I just liked you better. So this is what I'm doing. No, Israel was set apart in the Old Testament to act as a priest to the world.
00:22:25
Speaker
So you have this microcosm. If you look down inside Israel and in Exodus and Deuteronomy, you look inside and you see um there's 12 tribes. The Levites are consecrated. They're set aside as the priests of the people.
00:22:40
Speaker
So they take care of the tabernacle where the whole presence of God dwells. And so they are the priests to the people. They're set apart. But all the tribes, all of Israel is priest to the world.
00:22:54
Speaker
So the nation itself is also set apart. They also have a responsibility.
00:23:02
Speaker
This is why the law was given. It is the grace of God so that Israel can live in the presence of God. It is the new Eden, the new garden, new Eden.
00:23:14
Speaker
That is where God dwells with his people. This was happening back in Eden. Sin breaks it. God makes a way for himself to dwell with his people again. and he dwells in a temple made by hands.
00:23:26
Speaker
And he gives them a law so they can be holy. So that they can draw all nations unto him. And if you go back into Exodus, I believe it's in, I want to say it's Exodus 14. It says that when the people left Israel, the Exodus is the most important event like in the entire Old Testament. theyre This is the pillar event that is anchoring, looking forward. I mean, like everybody in Genesis is looking forward to it, and everybody in the rest of the Old Testament is looking back to it.
00:23:55
Speaker
This is the formative event. And so in this event, God delivers his people out of slavery.
The Role of Exodus and Fulfillment in Christ
00:24:02
Speaker
This becomes an emblem, an icon, if you will, of that represents everything God is and everything God would do in the future.
00:24:11
Speaker
The Passover is to remember this. An important event that showcases God's faithfulness throughout the years. Why am I bringing all this up? Because in that event,
00:24:25
Speaker
It says that a multi-ethnic crowd went up with Israel. These were the people in Egypt who believed. who believed God, who marked their doors with blood and who were passed over and redeemed.
00:24:39
Speaker
And then when you get up to the promised land, they enter the promised land. And one of the very first accounts we see is the story of Rahab, who saves the Israelite spies, who were told to come in.
00:24:51
Speaker
They're coming in to judge the Canaanites. Israel's being used by God to judge the Canaanites who've had 400 years to repent. Earlier in the Old Testament, God is talking with Abraham, Genesis 15, 16, and he predicts the coming slavery of their people. But he says this about the Canaanites. He says, the sins of the Amorites have not yet reached their full measure.
00:25:15
Speaker
So while Israel is enslaved, God is showing mercy to the Canaanites, giving them chance after chance to repent and know him. And then when Israel comes as judgment on the Canaanites for their complete abject sinfulness and evil and injustice and child sacrifice, when he comes and he and Israel goes in even then ah Canaanite could call upon the name of the Lord and be saved.
00:25:42
Speaker
And that's what we see Rahab do. She saves the people of Israel, she puts her faith in God, and she and her whole household are saved. So it's not like God in the Old Testament is playing favorites.
00:25:52
Speaker
Because if you go further in to Kings and Chronicles, God is prophesying through his prophet saying, turn from the ways that you're following. You're following after these old Canaanite ways. Don't you remember what they did? Don't you remember the judgment that came on them?
00:26:08
Speaker
If you do not turn, you will be judged as they were judged. And that is exactly what happens. And that's why you see the Babylonian and Assyrian exiles to Israel and to Judah and why they are taken away and they are in captivity.
00:26:22
Speaker
Because they chose to follow the ways of the Canaanites instead of choosing to follow the way of the Lord and act as a priest to those nations. When you understand the context of what's happening in the Old Testament, when you understand the mercy of God to continue to strive with his people, to try to reach them, to show them his grace, to live among them in a fallen and broken world as a holy, holy, holy God, you You see that Marcion's hatred for the Jewish scriptures and for the Jewish God was extremely misplaced and the product of his own lack of study and his own bias.
00:27:03
Speaker
And this is what I want to leave you with today. Where are you bringing your own bias? Where are you bringing your own reluctance to really study these things and allowing it to change your view of God?
00:27:18
Speaker
No false teaching ever begins with the crazy stuff. Every false teaching begins with something that sounds true, but is actually a lie.
00:27:30
Speaker
So you have the opportunity to study this for yourself.
Conclusion and Further Learning Opportunities
00:27:33
Speaker
And I hope that you do so. Remember, Verity Podcast is just the starting point. We can't answer all your questions, but we can point you, at every woman a theologian, to the answers.
00:27:44
Speaker
And we're so happy to do that. Now, before we end this episode, I want to remind you that we have the 10 myths about the Old Testament free download available. Head to the show notes. Go ahead and click that. It will answer some of these questions, including the hardening of Pharaoh's heart and some questions about women in the Bible.
00:28:01
Speaker
But I want to mention one more thing. March 31st, 2025, we are launching a brand new understanding the Old Testament course. I'm so excited about this. This course is going to be six modules and it is co-taught both myself and Chad Bird from 1517.org.
00:28:17
Speaker
Chad is a phenomenal Bible teacher. He knows so much about the Old Testament, about Christology, so the appearances of Christ in the Old Testament, and understanding hard passages like the Lament Psalms um or the Imprecatory Psalms where it sounds like David is wishing judgment on people or um Proverbs 31. He's going to talk about that in the course.
00:28:40
Speaker
Our courses during this launch at the end of March will be $45 one time fee. You get to own the course. You're not paying more than 45, but the price will go up after the launch. So in later April, we're going to be raising the price. So if you are interested in understanding Old Testament, highly recommend that you stay tuned for that launch.
00:29:01
Speaker
If you download the 10 Myths About the Old Testament guide, we will be sure to let you know when the course comes out. And we hope that you can join us in studying the Old Testament for yourself.