Creeping Heresies and Heretics
“For certain people have crept in unnoticed who long ago were designated for this condemnation, ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into sensuality and deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ.”
Jude 4
In keeping with our imagery of 1. a defense, 2. a fortress, and 3. a siege, we have seen that to contend for the faith is to make a defense of the objective body of beliefs that we call names like “Christianity” or “orthodoxy” or “the apostolic teaching.” However, since the subjective sense of one’s own faith is also upheld when we make that defense, we can think of both Christianity and the church as the fortress one is defending. But what is the assault that brings this necessity about? That is where Jude turns to next in verse 4—the siege of the heretics. It seems to me the concepts of “heresy” and “heretics” are as badly misunderstood as when people confuse orthodoxy (the objective faith) with one’s own personal (subjective) or saving faith. So we should start there.
What is Heresy and a Heretic?
On the simplest level, a heresy is any false doctrine about an essential issue. It is not simply an error. It is an error that begins to disintegrate the core of what makes the Christian faith what it is. Now in relating the heretical belief to the person called a heretic, we arrive at a difficulty. Let me make it plain with something we can all relate to. How many of us could have articulated the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity, or even explained the difference between justification and sanctification, when we were new believers? Doubtless many of us took several years to attain understanding in these areas. But error regarding these is the very stuff of heresy. So are we to believe that we were not really saved during that interim period? No! Of course not.
It may help to know that the Greek word for heretic comes from the same word as for “division” or “sect” or “party” or “faction.” If we examine the verses where this word is used, or some parallel concept, what we find is that the false teacher is a very different sort of person than the average new believer I was just describing. He is not fumbling over mysteries. He is leading parts of the church away from his self-made soapbox. That is why Paul says to avoid the hairetikon, or “factious man” (Titus 3:10). Such were the individuals that Jude was exposing—men not merely in simple error, but in deliberate subversion.
Jude 4 hardly looks like a siege which surrounds a city with its archers, catapults, and battering rams. It looks instead like an “inside job,” so to speak. However, this is not so strange. One particular Christian apologist, who used to have his own radio show called “the Bible Answer Man,” would use a phrase to make more room for non-essentials. He would say that such and such is an “in house debate.” Recognizing the difference between essentials and non-essentials is as important to discernment as it is to charity. But there is something subtly naive about dismissing every controversial discussion with this expression.
In fact, all heresy is an “in house” debate! Think about why that is. We do not call Atheists and Agnostics heretics. Nor do we really even list Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, or even Mormonism as heresies. On the typical list of heresies we find labels such as Arianism, Donatism, Monophysitism, and Universalism. Why is that? What is the difference?
Someone once said that every heresy is the result of an exaggerated defense of some neglected truth. However that might be, at the very least, no heresy ever landed in the church like a comet from its outer-space. Heresies are always “home grown,” getting out of control when the church has failed to squash it in its formative stages.
And all of that being the case, it is rather insufficient to dismiss a controversy on the grounds that it is “an in house debate,” since we could say the same about every heresy in the annals of church history. Our more discerning question ought to be whether or not the doctrine being proposed has a distorting quality at the very foundation. The word in Jude 4, μετατιθέντες, is alternatively translated “turn” (NASB) or “turning” (KJV) or “perverted” (ESV), and perhaps the latter word is better for its rhetorical effect, all things being equal.
Turning the Grace of God into Sensuality
The NEB more colorfully says, “wormed their way in” here. But, we might ask, how exactly do “ungodly” teachers “[creep] in unnoticed” (v. 4)? If they are such rank sinners, surely someone would raise some objections. Likewise most people think they could spot a heresy a mile away. Usually the people who think such thoughts are precisely the people who refuse to study doctrine and who resist calls to a deeper pursuit of holiness. By contrast, the maturing saint is increasingly aware of what cannot be noticed on the surface. Paul speaks to the Galatians of “false brothers secretly brought in—who slipped in to spy out our freedom that we have in Christ Jesus, so that they might bring us into slavery” (2:4).
In the language that Jude uses, we do not find any word that we would normally associate with heresy. Perhaps one might put forth antinomianism (against law), since to turn the grace of God into sensuality would seem to involve the claim that God’s standard has somehow been lowered because of the coming of Christ.
It is a mistake to make too sharp of a division between heresy and immorality. They tend to go together. Any false teacher who commends sin is going to need a corresponding doctrine to justify the sin. He cannot simply come straight out and contradict God’s law. A skilled liar is not brazen and abrupt. He must pave the way for the full-blown error with an assortment of half-truths. He must do so by increments, and he must first appeal to sentiments. Thus, who could ever resist that “Love is love”? It feels good to affirm and it even conforms to the law of identity. Never mind that it says nothing to the point—the point that it will seek to spread inside the city walls once the Trojan Horse has made its entry.
But as I said, this all starts with subtleties. Who knows exactly what form of sensuality the false teachers were motivated to justify? The commentators admit a silence in the record. What we do know is that they communicated the lie that grace allows indulging in sin.
The Parallel to 2 Peter 2:1-3
The key commonality between our Jude text and the one in Peter is the focus on the reprobation of the false teacher, those “who long ago were designated for this condemnation” (v. 4). Bearing this parallel in mind, one can detect a significant link between these false teachers ordained to be in the church and condemned, and the first example Jude uses in verse 5.
Hints can be found in 1 Corinthians 10:1-5 and Hebrews 10:28-29.
“For I do not want you to be unaware, brothers, that our fathers were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea, and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, and all ate the same spiritual food, and fall drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual Rock that followed them, and the Rock was Christ. Nevertheless, with most of them God was not pleased, for they were overthrown in the wilderness.”
“Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace?”
These are two New Testament passages which display the very same dynamics as in the Old Testament—1. A people group joined in covenant to Christ; 2. A people group described by the language of the signs of the covenant; 3. A people group out of whom some fell away to their destruction.
Now the Calvinist has an answer to the Arminian about “falling away” passages in the New Testament. The covenantal Calvinist has that same answer and another besides. Not only was the apostate never saved (cf. Mat. 7:23; 1 Jn. 2:19), but what he was falling away from was a false profession within the visible church. Now let us take that one step further with a question: Why should this phenomenon be any different when it comes to false teachers? Granted the difficulty only expressly emerges in the 2 Peter 2:1 text and not in Jude 4, but it says this:
“But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.”
Without any background in covenant theology, all people see is that someone who was “bought” by Christ is yet given to destruction. But aside from the covenantal background that Christ joins to Himself a physical people in time, it may also help to know that the word for “Lord” or “Master” here is not the more familial title given to Christ as Lord of His people (kurios), but rather the word despotes. If that word sounds familiar, it should. From it, we derive the English word despot. Let me put it short and sweet: The text is saying that Christ purchased such false teachers in order to work out God’s eternal decree to judge them. But why would God do that? we often wonder. Manton commented,
“Wicked men are able to infiltrate the best churches. God permits this not just to harden them but to work in us through our troubles and trials.”1
So the whole fight is ordained and not merely the false teacher’s end. God intends to toughen up the orthodox, as well as tighten up their orthodoxy, by the fires of heresy.
Jude 4 is the “structural foundation” for the whole section (vv. 5-16) to follow. Towner refers to verses 5 through 19 “a midrash” in relation to verse 4.2 That is, it was a means of exposition in the style of the Jewish writers of the time, as, for example, in the Talmudic writings. He especially has in view its element where “past episodes could be made to speak to present circumstances.”3
What immediately follows only serves to back up this unified picture of Jude 4 and 2 Peter 2:1-3. The first example that Jude uses is Christ’s redemption of Israel from Egypt. This was a redemption. The blood of the covenant was sprinkled on them all. Yet what does it say? The very same thing that 1 Corinthians 10 and Hebrews 10 had said—“Jesus, who saved a people out of the land of Egypt, afterward destroyed those who did not believe.”
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1. Manton, Jude, 74.
2. Towner, 2 Peter and Jude, 173-74.
3. Towner, 2 Peter and Jude, 186.
