raising a heretic?

The other day my son (four years old) made a disturbing confession. He boldly declared, (and I paraphrase), “I have two Gods. One tells me to do good, and one tells me to do bad.”

Apparently some Marcionite has been sneaking into our home and reading Gnostic tales to shape his young consciousness.

As you made know, Marcion is often considered the first heretic of the Christian church. He was born in c.85 at Sinope (modern Sinop on the Black Sea) in Pontus the son of a bishop and became a prosperous ship owner and merchant. Epiphanius alleges that his father expelled him from his home church for seducing a consecrated virgin, but this generally held to be a libel among modern scholars. While doing life with a church in Rome he developed his theology, possibly incorporating the ideas of the Gnostic teacher Cerdo with whom he became acquainted.

For Marcion Christ was docetic (he only appeared to be a man, because Marcion considered matter to be evil – the creation of the Demiurge), it is also difficult to see a distinction between his representation of the Father and the Son, leading to the conclusion that he was also a modalist.

“How,” Marcion reasoned, “could an evil tree bring forth good fruit?” So he concluded that there must be two Gods: the Creator God of the OT, who was characteristically a God of Law, who involved himself in contradictory courses of action, who was fickle, ignorant, despotic and cruel; and the Supreme God. This Supreme God, Marcion held, was wholly a God of Love who had remained completely hidden until he was revealed in the person of Jesus Christ.

And so it appears my son may be a budding heretic – or at least he is a person trying come to grips with his own being – and hoping to find a way to point the finger at someone else. I have great hope for heretics; heretics are a gift to the people of God. How we choose to engage heretics reveals more of our gospel then we are even aware.

Peace, dwight