What is Docetism?

The truth is that Jesus Christ — that Person, the eternal Son of God — came in flesh, so that He was a true Man amongst us. The antichristian teachers did not confess this. They were not sound as regards His Deity, as 1 John 2:22 showed us. They were not sound as to His Manhood, as this verse shows. History informs us that one of the first heresies to afflict the early church is that which John is meeting here. It is known as Docetism: the teaching being that, as matter was evil, Christ could not have had a true human body of flesh and blood; it must only have appeared to be such, being in reality a phantasy. Another form of error as to Christ's humanity also troubled the early church, when men arose who recognized that the seat of sin is found in the spiritual part of man rather than in his material body. These denied the spiritual part of His humanity, while emphasizing the reality of His flesh; but they rose up a century or two later and there is no reference to them here.

Jesus Christ came in flesh of a perfectly holy kind, and hence there was in Him that wonderful manifestation of eternal life, of which the first verse of the epistle speaks. To deny His coming in flesh would mean the denial not only of the possibility of this clear manifestation amongst us, but also of there being in Him the Divine fulness to be manifested. But the matter is put here even more strongly. We need not wait for a flat denial for even non-confession of the truth betrays the spirit of antichrist.

In the early days of the Church, Docetism, a gnostic heresy, owing to belief in the fundamental evil of all that is material, rejected the reality of our Lord's Humanity on the ground that a true incarnation of God was impossible by virtue of the supposed antagonism between what God is as infinitely good and what matter is as fundamentally evil. Thus we perceive that, quite apart from the grossness of the error, this denial of the truth of a real incarnation resulted from an a priori assumption. And I wish to shew how the denial of the Eternal Sonship of Christ in our day has also resulted from a similar a priori assumption. For before they have considered any Scriptural teaching or any feature of Divine revelation, those who deny this truth rest their hypothesis on the arbitrary assumption that Godhead and sonship are irreconcilable. Thus, in the eternal Person of our Lord Jesus Christ, according to the interpretation that the whole Church has placed upon Scripture, true Godhead and true Sonship have met and have subsisted from all eternity. So we speak of that sonship relation of Jesus with God the Father firstly as Divine because it subsisted in His Godhead, and secondly as eternal because He was the Son of the Father before all worlds; John 5:17-18, etc.; John 10:30, 38; John 14:7-11; John 16:28; John 17:5, 24. The Divine equality of John 5:18, the Divine unity of John 10:30, and the Divine co-inherence of John 14:11, prove the first truth; whilst the pre-incarnate activity of John 16:28, and the pre-incarnate glory and love of John 17:5, 24, prove the second truth. Such is the Divine and Eternal Sonship of Jesus Christ our Lord.

18 John 1:14. — "Became flesh." On the Incarnation, see such works as Bishop Gore's "Bampton Lectures," Professor Orr's "Kerr Lectures," No. 6, and Turton, p. 262 ff. It was either denied or undermined by Gnosticism, in its earliest form known as "Docetism," one of the representatives of which was Cerinthus, contemporary with the Apostle John. His errors Irenæus (III., 11, 7) attributed to misuse of the Gospel of Mark. Cerinthus held that JESUS would rise again with the rest of mankind in the day of judgment, for which Ronan compares Qoran, iv. 156 (see Hansel, Lecture VIII.). The "Docetæ" derived their name from holding that our Lord had only an apparent body (see 1 John 1:1, 4:2 f., 2 John 7). They made use of the Apostle's own writings, as of the Gospel (3:5 f.), in support of the evil of matter. The Apocryphal "Gospel of Peter" issued from this school (see "Exposition of the Epistles," p. 251). Basilides (Mansel, Lecture 10) was an Alexandrian active between 117-138 A.D.; Valentinus (Lectures 11, 12) was doing his mischief from 140-155 A.D. He, too, quoted this Gospel. The error of Nicolas is referred to in Rev. 2:15 (see "Exposition of Revelation," p. 51.

One of the first attacks came from a sect called Gnostics, their name derived from the Greek word, Gnosis, knowledge. They denied that the Lord had a true human body. They taught that He was an apparition, appearing in the likeness of a man, that He suffered on the cross in appearance only, and not in reality. They professed that they knew. Their attitude is described thus:

The chief of the tenets of these Gnostics of the apostolic times was that they affirmed that the manhood of our Lord was not real, that He had the appearance of a man, but that He was an apparition, a phantom, without any substance. What then is the real significance of confessing that “Jesus Christ is come in the flesh”?

Some have repudiated explanations offered on the ground that these virtually supported a Docetic view — that is, that our Lord "feigned a condition which did not actually exist for the benefit of His disciples." The Docetists, such as Cerinthus, held that the flesh of Christ was not real (see Strong, p. 99, and cf. Fairbairn, "Christ in Modern Thought," p. 353). Réville (ii. 313), condemning words of a sermon by Bossuet, questions the authenticity of the words, which he supposes were due to Arian influence on the manuscripts of the Gospels. Worst of all, Schmiedel (article on "Gospels" in "Encyclopaedia Biblica," col. 1881) boldly says, "In the person of Jesus we have to do with a completely human being," and that "the Divine is to be sought in Him only in the form in which it is capable of being found in a man." He seems to seek to blunt the edge of these soul-corrupting words by adding what is true — that the historical value of the Gospels goes with the presence of such passages in them.

The idolatrous character of the Gnostic infidelity may be accounted for — at least in part. For Oriental philosophy, which influenced the West, taught as a fundamental principle that the Universe was an intelligent being, of which matter was the body and God the soul. This Pantheistic notion of God (which as a form of infidelity seems anterior to the purely Atheistic form) was the prolific source from which were educed the wildest theories — so wild that even heathen mythology might be called wisdom compared to them. Mixed with the truth the amalgam is more abhorrent than Atheism. Professors of Christianity could not of course adopt the gods of Paganism, nor Brahm's development and sudden expansion into numerous deities. These monopolisers of "true knowledge" attempted a compromise. In place of gods they had "emanations" from the "Original Unity," the "monad" of Eastern philosophy. Each prominent Gnostic had his peculiar theory to which he wickedly but vainly attempted to bend the word of God. Evil as well as good was personified as emanations or "aeons" from God. Thus making God the source of evil as well as of good. Christ was an "aeon," by some accounted the highest and sent into the world to correct the mischief wrought by others. Some maintained that He was by title the Son of God, but inferior to the Father. They denied His humanity because matter was essentially evil. His body was only the appearance of matter. It follows necessarily that there was no real suffering, no real death: it was all illusion. Where are the foundations of Christianity, and of truth? What becomes of the character of God as a Just Governor? Where is the love of God in giving His Son, or the truth of the declaration of John 3:16, if there was no reality in the cross? Without the cross all would be confusion and contradiction, the book of nature and the book of revelation alike unintelligible. The cross is the central point in the whole universe of God. It declares God's righteousness for the past or present, and is the proof of His love, upon which His highest glories hang. If the cross be an illusion, so is exaltation in millennial glory; and our glory with Christ a myth.

332 The other form these speculations took was wilder, if not worse. There was a πλήρωμα, a fulness, of Godhead, which, in spiritual abstractions, of which depth, man, church, wisdom, and other scriptural subjects, formed part in male and female characters: an idea which entered into all Brahminical, Rabbinical, Egyptian, and Gnostic theology, the Egyptian being nearest to the Rabbinical. The πλήρωμα was limited by ὄρος (boundary). The πλήρωμα was within; outside was ὔλη, or matter. The male and female of each pair were called συζύγεις, or yoked pairs. Σοφία (wisdom), one of the lower members of the πλήρωμα, wanted to unite herself with, penetrate into by research, βάθος, or depth, the first origin of the whole πλήρωμα. She got outside the limit (ὄρος), and hence this world, a mixture of matter and spirit. Christ, a new member of the πλήρωμα, came out to disengage what was spiritual from what was material, and bring it back within the limit or ὄρος. This branched out into a thousand forms and speculations useless to follow here. It connected itself with Manicheism in Persia, and reached on to the Bulgarians and Albigenses in France and Italy. But for a long time it was a great plague for the Church. They forbade to marry; commanded to abstain from meats. Christ had no real body (there was no atonement — could not be, if He was not a man). Abstinence and disengaging spirit from matter — that was really saving. This also the Spirit anticipated. The apostle John carefully tells us that confessing Jesus Christ come in flesh was essential to Christianity; that the Word was made flesh, that they had touched Him with their hands; and Paul, that all the fulness (πλήρωμα) was pleased to dwell in Him; and He was not an aijwvn, as they were called, but that all the fulness (πλήρωμα) of the Godhead dwelt in Him bodily; that every creature of God is good and to be used with thanksgiving — marriage honourable in all.

106 But to the point. First; when the controversies as to the two natures of Christ were on foot, and yet earlier, on the possibility of His taking flesh, which the Gnostic heretics denied, they insist on the bread being there when He is spiritually or divinely present, as a proof that the two things can be together. Here their whole point was, that it was still bread; just as His flesh, as a living man, was true flesh, which the heretics denied. Thus Tertullian: "He made the bread, received and distributed to His disciples His body, saying, This is my body, that is, the figure of my body; but it would not have been a figure unless the body was truly such; for an empty thing, which is a phantasm, cannot have a figure." The reader must know that early heretics denied that Christ had a real body: Tertullian argues, from the Eucharist being a figure of His body, that the body must be real. Irenaeus argues in the same way, and is very positive as to the bread being there after the consecration, of which he speaks: "For when the bread, which is from the earth, receives the invocation of God, it is no longer common bread, but the Eucharist, consisting of two things, earthly and heavenly; so our bodies," etc.

Then what does it mean to become flesh? It surely means the true full manhood of our Lord. The heretical idea that our Lord was an apparition, a phantom, and that His manhood was not substantial and real, is surely a blow at the whole scheme of redemption; for how could a phantom die on the cross, how could blood and water flow from the pierced side of an apparition?