Grossly Oversimplified Heresy of the Week

An idea I have been toying with is the idea of doing a bit of teaching in the form of a Christain Heresy of the Week. This week, despite the tempation, we are not going to look at the iconclasm of Luther's Toilet (see below), or as I have dubbed it Toiletism. Oh my, clergyman humor, you gotta love it!

But seriously, this week we look at Marcionism, named after...huh huh...Marcion, of whom little is known as after being labelled a heretic, most of his own work was burned or lost.

Marcionites, who had some Gnostic tendencies, believed the world to be evil because the God of the Old Testament-the God of the Jews- was an evil and vindictive God, creator of evils, lustful for wars and self contradictory.

Christ was sent by the more powerful God of Goodness to rescue us.

Marcion taught the rejection of the Old Testament in its entirety, all the gospels except Luke, and all epistles except the works of Paul, as it was the work of a perverted, evil God.

Marcion is important, however, because he was the first Christian to attempt to create a "canon" of scripture that is authoritative. This ultimately led to the Christians proper to finalize the Christian canon of the New Testament.

See? Isn't heresy fun, boys and girls?

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