From someone’s review of a neighborhood church:
(Hebrews 13:17).
Until I resigned, I led an apologetics (defending Christianity) life group at Cottonwood Creek.
In Mar ’23, I was in a class on campus where staff pastor1 taught the Kenotic heresy (“Jesus performed miracles as a man, not as God”). I confirmed it via text with pastor1 (“That’s exactly what I said”, see photo) a week later and reported to pastor2 who confirmed it was heresy and said he would “take care of it”.
It took 14 months to get through pastor2 and various falsehoods, to pastor3, and then to pastor4 before he finally called it heresy and took minimal action. More than just a false teaching, heresy means you are outside orthodox faith. You have the wrong Jesus, and he cannot save you.
Every heresy is destructive, and especially the Kenotic heresy which enables so many other false teachings that are harming the church today.
Every elder (pastor=teaching elder) is required to teach sound doctrine and rebuke those who teach otherwise (Titus 1:9).
Pastor1 is now gone, but the reluctant pastors2/3 (who I call ‘the elders who won’t elder’) and the reluctant church culture remain.
None of this is private. The heretical teaching was public. Rebuking is public. Mark and avoid is public. The 14 months it took to get pastor4 to call it heresy and the various falsehoods that were used to downplay the severity and delay any action or decontaminate students in that class (start with the attendance list) and another 6 months of silence after I told pastor3 this was not resolved (pastor2 just “added two more falsehoods to the pile”) tell me this is also a church culture and leadership problem.
In sharing this here, I hope Cottonwood leadership will eventually take the rest of this seriously, others at Cottonwood may come forward as I think this is a pattern and more than just one isolated event, and still others may be warned. These are my opinions and fair comments based on my experiences and observations. Dec ’24.
= = =
Steefen:
Philippians is considered an authentic letter of Paul.
2:6
Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
verse 7
rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.
verse 8
And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!
Steefen:
Heresy?
Doesn’t sound like heresy to me.
‘staff pastor1 taught the Kenotic heresy (“Jesus performed miracles as a man, not as God”)’
Did Jesus’ students perform miracles:
as men?
as God?
Matthew 10 (NABRE)
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1 Then he summoned his twelve disciples
and gave them authority over unclean spirits to drive them out
and to cure every disease and every illness.
2 The names of the twelve apostles are these…
Luke 10 (Peshitta Holy Bible Translated)
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1 After these things Yeshua appointed another seventy of his disciples
and he sent them two by two before his presence
to every place and city where he was prepared to go.
…
17 And those seventy whom he had sent
returned with great joy
and they were saying to him,
“Our Lord, even the demons are subject to us in your name.”
18 But he said to them,
“I was beholding Satan himself who fell like lightning from Heaven.”
19 “Behold, I have given you authority
that you may tread on snakes and scorpions
and all the power of the enemy
and nothing will harm you.”
20 “However, you should not rejoice in this,
that the demons are subject to you,
but rejoice that your names are written in Heaven.”
Of course, this belief does not violate the Nicene Creed, so it is not the kind of “fundamental” heresy which would rule out a Christian sect that held to it from being considered “a Christian denomination”. This is a question where the general doctrine of the Trinity can allow either answer, because it does not ask whether Jesus as God had the power to perform miracles but whether he exercised that power as God, or as a man called upon God the Father’s power to perform the miracles, so it is getting into the weeds of the details of how a denomination views the Trinity as reflected in the New Testament … which is always a theologically tricky exercise, since the doctrine of the Holy Trinity was created a long time after the canonical form of the New Testament books were solidified.
Now, to be clear, it is possible to ascribe to a version of Kenosis which contradicts the Nicene creed, where Jesus could not perform the miracles rather than having the power but setting it aside.
IIUC, even the tamer version may easily be heretical for Catholic doctrine, but given the massive number of Protestant denominations, I don’t know how many it is a heresy for.
Indeed, it is entirely possible that the “pastor1” in the story was teaching a version of kenosis that was allowed in that denomination, but the critic confused the existence of kenotic heresies with the idea that any theory of kenosis must be heretical.
After a little more digging around, I found that one reason I was unsure how many denominations a “voluntary” Kenosis is a heresy for is my childhood background in Methodism, since it is a doctrine that Methodism has never adopted fully but which some American Methodist theologians flirted with in the late 1800’s / early 1900’s. In its Nicene Creed compliant version, of voluntarily refraining from using some or all divine capabilities in order to not “cheat” on being fully human, browsing around makes it seem like more of a doctrine of Lutheranism.
If the OP is referring to some form of Evangelical Church, and pastor1 is teaching a version of Kenosis along the lines of Lutheran theology, I could well see somebody getting upset that such a “heretical” doctrine could be allowed in an Evangelical Church — not in the sense of being anti-Nicene Christianity, but rather in the sense of it being from a group of Nicene Christians “that get many fundamental questions wrong”.
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert
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