Greetings everyone,

A couple of weeks ago in our Sabbath letter, we addressed a challenge that comes out against the divinity of Christ. Specifically, we looked at whether Christ was a created being. One of the more interesting things to look at is the doctrinal challenges that the apostle John faced. As the last living apostle, I always picture him as the last physical bastion for doctrinal purity. Amidst persecution and imprisonment, John still spoke firmly in his letters directly confronting the issues that were presented to the Church of God. When reading both the Gospel of John and his epistles, there is so much packed in with regard to truth, love and the identity of Christ.

One of the specific heresies that he addressed was the ideas contained we know of as Gnosticism. This idea (in part) states that Christ was a phantom. One branch is that of Cerinthianism. This belief says that there was a physical person of Jesus apart from a divine being. This person lived on earth, but upon baptism was overtaken by the divine being of Christ. This divine being basically controlled Jesus like a remote-controlled human. Once the being of Christ had accomplished the work intended through this man, the spirit left. This apparently occurred just prior to his death. Another variation that existed was that the person of Jesus never existed. Instead there was what we would call a hologram that projected itself on earth and accomplished the works we see in scripture. This is called Docetism.

No matter the form this doctrine takes, the underlining belief is that corrupt physical nature cannot exist in concert with the purity of the spirit. This was a major tenant of gnostic thought. This was combatted by John, but the tentacles of Gnosticism really took off and influenced much of the false teaching of Who and What was Christ. The premise of Christ being a phantom seems ludicrous, but it was the initial belief of many of the deniers of the divinity of Christ and presented itself in a myriad of ways. The underlying belief of "dualism" (spirt=good, physical=bad), contributes to immortal soul doctrine, nullifying of the Old Testament and many more heresies. The influence is seen in the doctrine of the Trinity and the explanations required to account for one being of the triune god dying. The belief of the trinity submits that each portion of the God is required to sustain the other. This becomes a problem when we see that Christ died and was buried for 72 hours. Adhering to the idea of Christ as phantom, attempts to solve this by saying the physical man Jesus was killed, but the spirit Christ simply left the man and was not subject to death.

So, was Christ just a phantom? Certainly, this is not the case. While we have shown in our previous writing that Christ was indeed divine, this aspect really zeros in on how this is manifested. How do we understand the fact that Christ was God in the flesh? Can spirit and flesh exist together? Next week we will begin to answer these questions, but until then, I would be a good opportunity to develop our own responses based on scripture.

Pray that everyone will have a safe, warm, and edifying Sabbath!

Devin Schulz