Whatever Happened To Heresy? Heroes Or Heretics?—Two Classic examples

By Larry Dixon

Larry Dixon is a graduate of Emmaus Bible College and Professor of Church History and Theology at Columbia International University Seminary and School of Missions. He is the author of numerous publications and is a frequent speaker at various assemblies and Bible conferences. Larry has taught at Emmaus as an adjunct faculty member. This is the second article in a series on heresies in the church.

“You’d be a beast to not hope universalism is true, but you’d be a fool to preach it.” (anonymous) 

“I argue that universalism allows us to affirm the central claims of traditional orthodoxy in a way that eternal conscious torment does not.” (Gregory MacDonald) 

“Jesus is Jehovah God’s highest creation!” (Your neighborhood Jehovah’s Witness)

Introduction

In our first article of this series, we stated that God has given us choice (a primary meaning of the word “heresy”). The “sweet spot on the curve” is to believe what the Word of God clearly teaches, recognizing our tendency to go our own way instead of God’s, especially in matters of truth. There are—and ought to be—consequences to wrongly chosen teachings that contradict God’s Word. Those who proclaim heretical views should be held accountable. All choices are not equally valid, or true, or worthy.

We laid out our three working assumptions as we began our study: (1) the functional authority of the Scriptures; (2) there is great confusion about the essentials versus the distinctives of the Christian faith; and (3) doctrinal truth has consequences. As we reflected on the fact that heresy means choice, we illustrated from the world of marketing the fact that sometimes we have too many choices.

False Teaching In The New Testament

Before we tackle two prominent early heretics, we must note that false teaching did not have its beginning outside the New Testament period, but within it. Two particular texts stand out in this regard.

We read in 2 Timothy 2:17-19 the following:

Their teaching will spread like gangrene. Among them are Hymenaeus and Philetus, who have wandered away from the truth. They say that the resurrection has already taken place, and they destroy the faith of some. Nevertheless, God’s solid foundation stands firm, sealed with this inscription: “The Lord knows those who are his,” and, “Everyone who confesses the name of the Lord must turn away from wickedness.”

We learn from this text that false teaching is not innocent but will spread like gangrene (cancer). We also see that Paul is not hesitant to name names: [1] it is Hymenaeus and Philetus who have not only wandered away from the truth, but are engaged in teaching false doctrine. Their specific heresy is that the resurrection has already taken place, resulting in the destruction of the faith of some believers. False teaching is not innocent. When people believe untruth, there are consequences. How awful it would be to become convinced that God had already raised all the dead that he was going to raise—and you weren’t one of them. You were truly left behind!

Paul does not fall into despair as the result of false teachers and their heresies. He reminds us that “God’s foundation stands firm” (v. 19). In other words, false teaching cannot change the truth of God. And they cannot fool God, for “the Lord knows those who are his” (v. 19). False teachers may walk and talk like true followers of Christ, but God knows their heart. For those who confess the name of the Lord, there is an obligation to “turn away from wickedness” (v. 19). In this context, that wickedness is intellectual error, proclaiming something to be true which isn’t, turning away from the authority of God’s Word about the resurrection.

A second text we need to examine is I Timothy 6:3-4:

If anyone teaches false doctrines and does not agree to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching, he is conceited and understands nothing. He has an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions.

This text is not dealing with someone with honest questions or doubts. [2] The person described here is active in teaching false doctrines and has taken a stand in rejecting the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ. I imagine someone could quietly reject biblical teaching and remain silent about their unbelief. This person, however, has found what they consider to be “a better message.” [3] He or she is engaged in propagating another gospel (see Gal. 1:8).

Paul does not say, “Leave them alone. Let them teach what they have found to be true for them!” No. He describes this false teacher as conceited and understanding nothing. He has an unhealthy interest in controversies and quarrels about words that result in envy, strife, malicious talk, evil suspicions. [4]

A Survey Of Warnings About False Teachers

The Lord Jesus warned his disciples on several occasions about false prophets. He says that they will masquerade as sheep, but they are in reality ferocious wolves (Matt. 7:15; see also Paul’s address to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20:17-31).

They will appear and deceive many (Matt. 24:11), performing great signs and miracles to mislead even the elect (Matt. 24:24).

The apostle Paul speaks of false apostles who are deceitful workmen masquerading as apostles of Christ (2 Cor. 11:13). Paul lists false brothers as one source of danger (along with rivers, bandits, and Gentiles) to his personal safety (2 Cor. 11:26). He does not hesitate to speak of false brothers who “infiltrated our ranks to spy on the freedom we have in Christ Jesus and to make us slaves” (Gal. 2:4).

Paul charges Timothy with commanding certain men not to teach false doctrines any longer (1 Tim. 1:3) and to recognize those who do not adhere to the sound instruction of our Lord Jesus Christ and to godly teaching (1 Tim. 6:3). He pleads with Timothy to “guard what has been entrusted to your care. Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge” (1 Tim. 6:20).

The apostle Peter warns believers that history will repeat itself, and just as “there were…false prophets among the people,…there will [also] be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the sovereign Lord who bought them—bringing swift destruction on themselves” (2 Peter 2:1).

The apostle John minces no words in challenging believers when he writes, “Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 John 4:1). [5]

Origen: The First Systematic Theologian—And Heretic?

The early Christian scholar Origen (c. AD 185-254) was reared in a Christian family. Historical rumor tells us that when his father was being taken away to be martyred, Origen’s mother hid Origen’s clothes, lest the son join his father in death! Hardly would anyone accuse Origen of a lack of zeal for spiritual matters.

Origen revived the catechetical school of Alexandria, known for its allegorical interpretation of the Scriptures. [6] Philo, a Jewish philosopher and contemporary of Jesus, used Platonic and Stoic categories to interpret the Jewish scriptures. His general practices were followed by the Christian Clement of Alexandria, who pursued the allegorical sense of biblical texts. Clement discovered deep philosophical truths in the plain-sounding narratives and precepts of the Bible. His successor, Origen, systematized these hermeneutical principles. Origen distinguished the literal, moral, and spiritual senses, but acknowledged the spiritual (i.e., allegorical) to be the highest. In the Middle Ages, Origen’s threefold sense of scripture was expanded into a fourfold sense by a subdivision of the spiritual sense into the allegorical and the analogical. [7]

One example of Origen’s strange hermeneutics is his eleventh homily on Joshua, which deals with the five kings who attack Gibeon in chapter 10 and end up hiding in the cave at Makkedah after the Lord’s lengthening of the day and the destruction of their armies by Israel. Origen writes, “Now these five kings indicate the five corporeal senses: sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell; for it must be through one of these that each person falls away into sin. These five senses are compared to those five kings who fight the Gibeonites, that is, carnal persons.” [8]

Origen’s magnum opus was The Hexapla, an important work of biblical criticism. In his discussions with the Jews, Origen became aware of the significant differences between the Hebrew Bible used by the Jews and the Septuagint of Christians.

He also wrote commentaries on most of the books of the Bible. His De principiis (On First Principles) lays out his philosophical exposition of Christian doctrine and is often considered the first systematic theology.

Origen has been accused of numerous heretical views. [9] One source states:

The chief accusations against Origen’s teaching are the following: making the Son inferior to the Father and so being [the] precursor of Arianism; spiritualizing away the resurrection of the body; denying hell; a morally enervating universalism; speculating about preexistent souls and world cycles; dissolving redemptive history into timeless myth by using allegorical interpretation, thus turning Christianity into a kind of Gnosticism. [10]

Origen’s View Of The Soul

One of Origen’s ideas was the pre-existence of the soul. He taught that the soul passes through successive stages of incarnation before eventually reaching God. This theology involved human souls existing prior to their instantiation in matter. According to this teaching, human souls existed independent of matter along with the angels. There was then a fall for some of the spiritual beings, and these beings ended up forming angels, men, and demons, depending upon how great of a fall a particular spiritual being had. Origen wrote, “Whole nations of souls are stored away somewhere in a realm of their own,…but by some inclination towards evil these souls lose their wings and come into bodies, first of men.” [11]

Origen’s Universalism

Origen also speculated about the end of created things. He wrote of the apokatastasis, which is the restoration of all rational beings back to union with God, including Satan. [12] He described this as follows: “Just as when the Son is said to be subjected to the Father the perfect restoration of the entire creation is announced, so when his enemies are said to be subjected to the Son of God, we are to understand this to involve the salvation of those subjected and the restoration of those that have been lost.” [13]

Origen’s Christology

A major area of Origen’s theology that led to controversy was his ideas about the relationship between the Son and the Father. In his theology, he taught that the Logos was subordinate to God as the First Principle. This is an explicit subordinationism of the Son to the Father. Origen wrote, “The Son, being less than the Father, is superior to rational creatures alone (for he is second to the Father).” [14] One writer says that “this does not mean that Origen should be considered a heretic. The Trinitarian theological terms at the time were still vague, and Origen’s writings are not always nuanced enough to make the proper theological distinctions. Therefore, this subordinationist tendency in Origen’s writings ‘betrays a theological insufficiency and not a dogmatic position.’” [15] Nevertheless, the subordinationism within Origen’s writings had grave consequences, since the Arians were able to use it to argue for their position that Christ is not divine. Origen’s views were declared anathema in the 6th century. [16]

Arius: The Patron Saint Of Your Friendly Neighborhood Jehovah’s Witnesses

The concepts that Jesus was Jehovah God’s highest creation, that “there was a time when He was not,” and that the doctrine of the Trinity is a damnable heresy did not originate with Charles Taze Russell and “Judge” Joseph R. Rutherford, founders of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ cult. They were popularized by a theologian/songwriter by the name of Arius back in the 4th century.

Tempest Over A Diphthong?

Born about AD 256, Arius was educated by Lucian, a presbyter in Antioch, [17] and held the position of presbyter in the church of Alexandria. Around AD 318 the controversy began concerning the eternal deity of Christ and his equality with the Father. Arius denied the term homoousia (of the same substance), teaching that Christ was of a different essence from, and a creature of, the Father. [18]

Arius affirmed the preexistence of the Son, but emphasized that he was created by the Father before the world. He would use expressions such as the following: “There was when he was not,” and “Before he was begotten, or created or determined or established, he did not exist.” He owed his existence to the Father’s will, “having received life and being from the Father and various kinds of glory, since he gave him existence alongside himself.” [19]

Arius denied that the Son is equal with God. He was a creature, the Father was Creator, and consequently they were totally unlike in substance. And he should “not have come into existence if the Father had not wished to make him.” [20]

G. W. Bromiley says that the controversy stirred up by Arius was one “which for complexity, intrigue, and bitterness has seldom, if ever, been exceeded in the history of the church.” [21] Because of Arius’s concept of “unbegottenness,” the view that God is necessarily uncreated, unbegotten, and unoriginal, “he concluded that the Logos could not be true God, for he is described as begotten. The Logos must be a creature alien and dissimilar in all things from the Father, a perfect creature and immensely above all other created beings, but a creature nonetheless.” [22]

Arius was adamant about the Son when he said, “there was when he was not.” The Arians cited texts which seemed to teach the createdness of Christ (such as Prov. 8:22 and Col. 1:15). Helyer deals with the term “the firstborn of every creature” (Col. 1:15) and concludes that the expression might better be rendered “Lord over the creation.” The expression is used to ascribe to Christ a primacy of status over against all of creation; he is God’s heir par excellence. [23]

Theological Defeat

There is no evidence of any moral failings on Arius’s part, for he was attacked only for his teachings about the Son. He challenged the views of Bishop Alexander but was condemned by the synod of Alexandria in AD 320.

Several of the Asian churches favored his ideas, and he was received by both Eusebius of Caesarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia. Although a reconciliation between Arius and Alexander took place, it did not last long. Their dispute escalated and “the whole Christian world rang with the contest.” [24]

Arius was defeated at the Council of Nicaea (AD 325) and banished to Illyria. Athanasius, the leading defender of Nicene orthodoxy and the most prolific writer of orthodox Trinitarian doctrine in the 4th century, saw a major flaw in the writings of Arius and called his heresy the “forerunner of the Antichrist.” [25]

The Eusebian party, through Constantia, the sister of the emperor, used their influence to recall him from banishment. All the leaders in the Eusebian party waited at Constantinople to receive him back into the bosom of the church, but he suddenly died the day before the ceremony in AD 336. He was over eighty years old. His enemies saw Providence’s intervention as a condemnation of his doctrine; his friends attributed his death to poison. One scholar of the day compared Arius’s death to that of Judas the traitor.

Arius’s principal work was called “The Banquet,” a defense of his doctrine in an entertaining popular form, half poetry, half prose. That work has been mostly lost. Two of his letters are extant. [26]

Battle Of The Bands

Arius denied the deity of Christ and promoted his doctrine by the use of musical worship teams. The singers, who were women, were automatically suspect when they put themselves in this role, but they did serve to attract the masses. At first Arius’s band of musicians ceased their singing when the Lord’s Supper was served and prayers were being offered. One scholar writes:

The Arians, as we have said, held their meetings without the city. As often therefore as the festal days occurred, that is to say, the Sabbath and Lord’s day of each week, on which assemblies are usually held in the churches, they congregated within the city gates about the public piazzas, and sang responsive verses adapted to the Arian heresy. This they did during the greater part of the night; and again in the morning, chanting the same responsive compositions, they paraded through the midst of the city, and so passed out the gates to go to their places of assembly. [27]

However, the Arian bands did not desist from making use of insulting expressions in relation to the Homoousians, often singing such words as these: “Where are they that say three things are but one power?” The Homoousian party was not to be outdone, assembling their own choirs to chant nocturnal hymns to obscure the effort of the Arians. However, the revenge-minded Arians attacked their rivals and several vocalists were killed. The emperor was angered and forbade the Arians from chanting their hymns any more in public. [28]

Constantine had invited Arius to be present at the council and listened earnestly when Arius explained the nature of his beliefs. He was not particularly surprised when Arius burst out into a long, sustained chant, having set his beliefs to music. These chants and songs were sung by the people, and Arius may have thought the emperor would listen more keenly to chanting than to an explanation of the faith. The following lines, according to some scholars, may have composed one of the chants:

The uncreated God has made the Son
A beginning of things created,
And by adoption has God made the Son
Into an advancement of himself.
Yet the Son’s substance is
Removed from the substance of the Father:
The Son is not equal to the Father,
Nor does he share the same substance.
God is the all-wise Father,
And the Son is the teacher of his mysteries.
The members of the Holy Trinity
Share unequal glories.

The anti-Arian bishops were appalled, closed their eyes, and put their hands over their ears. One writer says, “It was as though in the middle of a critical debate on the future of the world, someone interrupted with nonsense rhymes or a series of perplexing and meaningless mathematical equations.” [29]

The heart of the Arian mystery, one scholar suggests, was in these rhymes sung to a music employed by the Alexandrian dance bands. “Arius, gaunt, white-faced, his stringy hair reaching to his shoulders, could repulse any theological argument by simply chanting one of these songs, and when Athanasius [or likely another] answered with a close-knit argument, there was consternation, for they seemed to be talking in different languages about different things—like two men from different worlds or different universes.” [30] Some suggest that Arius used the songs or odes contained in the book called Thaleia—which he wrote after his first condemnation, in order to popularize his doctrine—to be set to melodies with infamous associations. Even after Arius’s excommunication, he did not lapse into subdued silence, but wrote jingles and set his doctrines to music!

An On-Going Controversy

The controversy with Arianism continued over fifty years. Athanasius’s emphasis was on the desire to affirm the full deity of Christ while safeguarding monotheism. The deity of the Son would be lost if Christ were acknowledged to be a creature. Therefore, Arianism had to be rejected. However, the formula “sameness of essence” (homoousia) did not really safeguard the distinction of the Persons. Athanasius also began to have suspicions about the view of his ally Marcellus, who reverted to an older, economic interpretation of the Trinity and denied the existence of distinct Persons in the Godhead. In his later writings, Marcellus developed the “sameness of essence” position in such a way that it really did sound like Sabellian modalism. [31]

We must emphasize that efforts to explain how the three can be only one God can easily gravitate toward one of two errors: modalism (in which the unity of nature denies the threeness of the Persons) or tritheism (in which Christians become practical polytheists, believing in three separate gods). Arianism tried to bridge the gap between polytheism and monotheism, but it was neither true Christianity nor the worship of the one God of Scripture. In the early decades of the Constantinian era Arianism did facilitate the “conversion” of countless pagans, for it seemed to reduce the clash between Christianity, interpreted in an Arian way, and pagan philosophical monotheism. [32]

My Big Fat Greek Theology?

The adoption of the Nicene Creed in AD 325 and the Chalcedonian Creed in AD 451 stabilized the doctrines of the Trinity and Christ for over one thousand years. Believers made use of Hellenistic categories and thinking to bring about that stability.

As Green points out in his article “Arianism—An Early Heresy,” the important question to ask is not whether orthodox theology betrays Hellenistic influence. Nothing else was possible in the cultural climate of the time. The important question is whether this orthodoxy represents a proper and correct interpretation of New Testament Christology or whether it seriously distorts it. Arianism’s rise and spread in the 4th century made it plain that the early rule of faith, the Apostles’ Creed, was not sufficiently explicit about the relationship of the Son to the Father. Green says that if we are unwilling to accept the Nicene Creed because we find it too Hellenistic, we should not be surprised to fall once again into mistakes of the kind that the newer creed was intended to prevent. [33]

One writer says, “It seems fair to conclude that Arianism, feeding on the plea for simplicity and riding on the band-wagon of protest against non-biblical jargon, is endemic to the church. The concept of God as undifferentiated monad will always have its appeal, while attempts to explain the relations between co-equal divine persons can easily be portrayed as special pleading. Yet, for all its plausibility, Arianism is fatal to Christianity.” [34]

The fact is that we cannot call a creature, however glorious, Lord! For this reason, Arianism is unacceptable and falls outside the range of theological views acceptable within the church.

Concluding Comments

There are some today who repeat Arius’s views. I have had numerous conversations with those who insist that Jesus was Jehovah God’s highest creation. However, Jesus claimed to be God and was worshiped as such.

As one writer says:

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. [35] 

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. [36]

Although both Origen and Arius are viewed as heroes by some heterodox writers, their teachings (and their disciples) should be resisted and opposed by those who affirm the authority of Scripture. In our next installment, we will look at several contemporary “sons of the church” who likewise have gone astray.

Notes

1. In a subsequent article we will lay out a biblical foundation for dealing with false teachers, one of the first steps being that of removing their anonymity.
2. Perhaps some false teachers begin as people with honest questions who are told to just be quiet and believe.
3. This is what the universalist Philip Gulley says: “Now I have a new formula. It too is simple and clear. It is the most compelling truth I’ve ever known. It is changing my life. It is changing how I talk about God. It is changing how I think about myself. It is changing how I treat other people. It brings me untold joy, peace, and hope. This truth is the best news I’ve ever heard, ever believed, and ever shared. I believe God will save every person.” (Philip Gulley and James Mulholland, If Grace Is True: Why God Will Save Every Person (New York: HarperOne Reprint, 2010 [=2004]), 7).
4. Even a strong believer like Simon Peter could fall into false teaching as we learn in the book of Galatians. His refusal to fellowship with Gentile brothers was a compromise of the gospel, according to the apostle Paul!
5. The Epistle of Jude shows that Jude changed the purpose of his epistle (led by the Spirit of God) because of the sneaking in of false teachers (see v. 3 especially).
6. The School of Antioch, however, sought to take a more literal approach to the Word of God.
7. As one writer points out, Origen lived an austere life characterized by extreme self-discipline and ascetic practices, including his own self-castration in accordance with a literal reading of Matthew 19:12. Odd that he would not apply his allegorical interpretation to the Matthew text. I certainly would have!
8. John Franke, “Origen: Friend or Foe?” (Christian History Oct. 1, 2003).
9. Joseph Jaskierny’s paper “Heresy in Origen and Origenism” is quite helpful here (accessed Thursday, July 22, 2010 at http://www.veritasvosliberat.com/uploads/heresy_in_origen_and_origenism.pdf).
10. Attributed to the 1968 Encyclopedia Britannica article on Origen.
11. Origen, On First Principles, trans. G.W. Butterworth (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), I.VIII.4.
12. See my discussion of Origen as the first universalist in my The Other Side of the Good News: Confronting the Contemporary Challenges to Jesus’ Teaching on Hell (Christian Focus, 2004), Chapter 2, “The Other Side—Will It Have Any Occupants?” 33-39.
13. Origen, III.V.7.
14. Origen, I.III.5. Cited in Jaskierny.
15. F. Prat, “Origen and Origenism,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11, transcribed by Anthony A. Killeen (New York: Appleton, 1911). Cited in Jaskierny.
16. Origen is today cited as a hero by those who have been seduced by universalism. We will examine several contemporary universalists in a future article.
17. Lucian held that the Logos took upon himself a human body, but not a soul; in other words, according to later standards, Lucian’s Jesus was not only not fully God, he also was not fully man.
18. “The apparently trivial nature of this difference led Edward Gibbon to remark that ‘the profane of every age have derided the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousians and the Homoiousians.’” Cited in http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Arianism. Accessed July 29, 2010. One scholar says “this assumes that the point at issue had been whether Christ was consubstantial (homoousios) with God or merely like (homoiousios) him. But this was not the question at Nicea. Arius rejected homoiousios as firmly as he did homoousios and held instead that the Son was heteroousios (of another and alien substance from the Father). Whether there ever was a party using the slogan homoiousios is open to doubt.” Donald Macleod, “God or god?: Arianism, Ancient and Modern,” http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/pdf/eq/1996-2_macleod.pdf. Accessed on July 26, 2010.
19. Cited in R. P. Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), 6-7.
20. Hanson, 16.
21. G. W. Bromiley Historical Theology: An Introduction (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1978), 69.
22. Larry R. Helyer, “Arius Revisited: The Firstborn Over All Creation (Col. 1:15),” JETS 31/1 (March 1988): 59-67.
23. Helyer, 67; cf. Daniel B. Wallace, Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996), 104, 128.
24. “Arius & Arianism,” http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/arianism.php, accessed on July 26, 2010.
25. Athanasius, Or. Ar. 1:1.
26. Summary of Phillip Schaff’s “Arius” in The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, 13 vols., 3rd ed. (Toronto, New York & London, Funk & Wagnalis, 1908-14), 1:139.
27. Socrates or ‘Scholasticus,’ Ecclesiastical History, Book VI, Chapt. VIII., 314.
28. http://www.piney.com/MuArians.html. Accessed July 29, 2010.
29. http://www.harvestnet.org/basics/councilofNicea.htm. Accessed July 30, 2010.
30. http://www.harvestnet.org/basics/councilofNicea.htm
31. E. A. Green, “Arianism—An Early Heresy.” http://home.sprynet.com/~eagreen/arian.html. Accessed on July 29, 2010.
32. E. A. Green, “Arianism—An Early Heresy.”
33. E. A. Green, “Arianism—An Early Heresy.” As another scholar notes, “References to Arius in the works of such adversaries as Athanasius need to be treated with the greatest care, not least because the reputation of Athanasius the Great is not quite what it used to be. Recent scholarship has raised serious questions as to his personal integrity. R. P. C. Hanson, for example, accuses him of equivocation, mendacity, sharp practice and treason, and this generally unfavorable verdict is endorsed by other contemporary scholars such as Professor Rowan Williams.” Hanson, The Search for the Christian Doctrine of God, 6.
34. Donald Macleod, “God or god?: Arianism, Ancient and Modern,” accessed at http://www.earlychurch.org.uk/pdf/eq/1996-2_macleod.pdf, July 26, 2010.
35. This is Anselm’s argument in his classic Cur Deus Homo? (“Why the God-Man?”).
36. http://www.theresurgence.com/series/know_your_heretics. Accessed July 29, 2010.