What "false teaching" was the New Testament Church most concerned about?
You can't escape the numerous warnings against false teaching throughout the Bible. What were their concerns and why do they matter today?
This “Cut for Time” post is material that didn’t fully make it into the final version of my sermon, “By the Book: God Breathed and Useful.”
Tim Keller was famous for saying that anyone who claims “doctrine doesn’t matter, we just need to love Jesus” has just made a doctrinal claim that they believe matters.
You can’t escape theology and you can’t escape making doctrinal truth claims. If you are a person of faith or not, all of us do epistemology, theology, metaphysics, even if you need to Google what those words mean. We’re all thinking about thinking, making conclusions about life, and living in relationship to reality as we develop thoughts about life, God, and meaning.
And this means that truth matters just as much as the distortions of it. The writers of the New Testament were in what many have referred to as “a theological emergency.” The birth, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth upended, fulfilled, solidified, proved, reimagined, and reinterpreted the faith of the Hebrews. It was a group of (mostly) Jewish people who began reading the Old Testament in light of Jesus Christ, finding the ways in which this massive historical event impacting their theology in light of their profound conversion by the power of the Holy Spirit.
Now, as the Almighty filled their “inner being,” they were simultaneously building their theology from the work done in the Old Testament (Hebrews 1:1-4, 2 Peter 1:12-21) and cutting down that which opposed the Messiah’s gospel. As Paul put it to the Corinthians: “We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). That was the work.
And since the resurrection, the people of God have fought “false teaching.” There’s no way around it: some teaching just simply is not Christian teaching. Not everything you hear is the historic, orthodox faith passed down as our deposit and inheritance (2 Timothy 1:4). It may use Christian words, it might even be done in a church (as false teaching often is), and it may even utilize Scripture to make its wrongful assertions, but the question becomes: “when do we depart from the faith that has been given to us?”
I’ve been studying false teaching for about a year and have preached on it a few times. In my study, I looked through the primary concerns facing the church. Here’s what I came up with:
Bad Christology: reworking the nature and work of Jesus Christ as God and Lord—particularly his atoning death and victorious resurrection over Satan, sin, and death; missing Jesus as the center of all interpretation and understanding of Scripture (Matthew 16:13-20, Luke 24:25-27, John 5:39-47, 10:1-42, 20:30-31, Romans 5:12-20, 1 Corinthians 15:1-33, Galatians 3:1-9, Colossians 2:6-15, 1 John 1:1-10, 3:13-17, 5:1-12, 2 John 1:7).
Dismissing Grace: Overburdening believers with commands that contradict grace and require moral behavior and cultural customs to know God (Acts 15:22-35, Romans 3:21-30, 8:1-17, 1 Corinthians 9:1-23, 10:23-:11:1, Galatians 5:1-12, Ephesians 2:1-10, Colossians 2:13-22, 1 Timothy 1:3-7, Hebrews 4:14-16, 9:15, 10:5-18, 1 John 3:1-3, 16-34).
Cheapening Grace: Deceiving people with “cheap grace” that Christ’s cross permits immorality and licentiousness, with special attention given to money, vocational/family life, and sexual behavior (Matthew 5:17-20, 12:33-37, Luke 6:43-47, Romans 6:1-23, 1 Corinthians 6:12-20, Ephesians 5:1-21, Titus 2:11-15, James 2:14-26, 1 Peter 1:13-25, 2 Peter 1:3-11, 1 John 3:1-6, Jude 1:3-6).
Mishandling the Old Testament: Teaching that contradicts, misinterprets, and/or dismisses the Old Testament entirely (Matthew 5:17-20, John 5:37-40, 1 Corinthians 10:1-33, Galatians 4:21-31, 6:11-16, Colossians 2:13-22, Hebrews 13:9-16, 1 Peter 2:4-10, 2 Peter 1:12-21).
Spiritual abuse + hypocritical leadership: Poor leadership that lacks integrity and godliness; taking advantage of the disadvantaged by misquoting scripture at people or leading people with control/manipulation, with special concern for women and children (Matthew 10:40-42, 23:13-29, Colossians 3:18-25, 1 Timothy 3:1-13, 5:1-24, 2 Timothy 2:24-26, 3:1-9, 4:9-16, Titus 1:5-16, 2:1-10, Hebrews 1:1-4, 13:7-8, 17-19).
Much has changed but also a lot has not changed. Certainly we face all kinds of weird theology today (declaration theology, prosperity gospel, Christian nationalism, progressive Christianity, just to name a few), but we also still face the concerns mentioned in the texts above.
It would serve today’s Christian well to just read a few of these texts (and their larger context) a few times. In light of today’s inescapable and constant serving up of ideas via Reels, TikTok, and YouTube clips, it’s impossible to refuse everything. But one can create wholesome diet of theology (see my friend Brett McCracken’s great book on this).
We can develop the discernment of hearing teaching at which the early church would have recoiled. In reading and re-reading some of the texts above, you will start to hear things in modern teaching that just doesn’t sound like the Bible.
There is another emphasis the New Testament gives in its varied warnings against false teachers: their character. What people say and teach is of great importance (as outlined above), but what people did and how they conducted themselves was of equal concern for the Apostles. But that will have to be next week.