The God of Masks and the Localized Gospel: Refuting a Theological Yard Sale

Heresy is rarely original—it's just ancient errors duct-taped together by someone who thinks they're the first to finally read the Bible correctly

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Heresy is rarely original. It’s usually just a couple of ancient errors duct-taped together by someone who thinks they are the first person in 2,000 years to finally read the Bible correctly.

Recently, a commenter stopped by my blog to drop off a manifesto or two. It was a theological yard sale. The author had taken 3rd-century Sabellianism (Modalism), duct-taped it to 19th-century Hyper-Preterism (the idea that all prophecy, including the Second Coming, was fulfilled in AD 70), and littered the whole thing with enough emojis to make a teenager dizzy.

He confidently informed me that Trinitarians share a heresy with Islam and Jehovah’s Witnesses—two sides of the same heretical coin. He bolstered his Christology with a theologically rigorous use of the flexed bicep emoji, and he let me know that anyone waiting for the Second Coming is a fraud.

Normally I would not give much time to refuting such an argument, and even here my refutation is much shorter than it could be—but I have encountered both the Christological errors and the bizarre redefinition of the Gospel many times over the years in a variety of places.

Because while this might look like a digital clown show, the root of these errors is actually quite common.

Here is the problem: Heresy—which literally means “to choose” one’s own path apart from the historic Church (derived from the Ancient Greek haíresis, which literally means “choice” or “thing chosen”)—always shrinks God. It reduces the eternal, relational God of the Trinity into a lonely monad who just wears different “masks” (Father, Son, Spirit) depending on the era.

And it reduces the cosmic, death-trampling Gospel of Jesus Christ into a localized Roman military campaign.

Both of these errors stem from a failure to understand the scale of who our Lord God and Savior Jesus Christ is and what He came to do.

The “Flesh Suit” Christology

Let’s look at the appeal of this for a moment. The Trinity is, by all accounts, an incomprehensible mystery. It defies our categories, and our simplistic metaphors we use to explain it. It is intellectually much easier to shrink God into a single guy wearing three different masks. It feels like solving a math problem.

The author doubles down on this simple math, claiming that Jesus is just the Father wearing a human body. He writes: ”Jesus is only a son by virtue of the fact that the human flesh that the SINGULAR GOD occupied belonged to God... not a second or different person!!”

We’ve touched on this before, but it bears repeating because this logic falls apart in light of the Gospel narratives. If Jesus is just the Father in a flesh suit, the New Testament becomes some kind of bizarre Divine Ventriloquist theater.

When Jesus cries out on the cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46), is He just talking to Himself to put on a show? The author quotes John 14:9 (”He that has seen me has seen the Father”) but ignores John 14:11, where Jesus says, “I am in the Father, and the Father is in me.” There is a clear distinction of persons being made by our Lord.

Historic Christianity teaches that God is one in essence (ousia) but three in person (hypostasis). As St. Philaret’s Catechism puts it: “The Father is true God, the Son equally true God, and the Holy Ghost true God; but yet so that in the three Persons there is only one Tri-personal God.”

They share the exact same divine nature, will, and power, which is why seeing the Son is seeing the perfect image of the Father. But they are distinct persons. Different conditions do not equal different persons, but eternal relations (unbegotten, begotten, proceeding) do.

St. Athanasius didn’t endure five exiles from home to defend a “flesh suit” theology. He defended the Trinity because if Christ is not the eternal Son of God, our salvation is null and void.

The “Gospel Wasn’t the Resurrection” Absurdity

Once you have a lonely, single-person God playing dress-up, you have to rewrite the rest of the story to fit. And here is where the commenter goes entirely off the rails, claiming: “THE GOSPEL JESUS PREACHED WAS NOT DEATH BURIAL & RESURECTION ...HE HARDLY EVER MENTIONED IT!”

This is historically and scripturally illiterate.

Jesus explicitly predicted His death and resurrection repeatedly (Mark 8:31, 9:31, 10:33-34). Furthermore, Saint Paul defines the Gospel with absolute, undeniable clarity in 1 Corinthians 15:1-4: “Now, brothers and sisters, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you... that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day.”

The AD 70 Trap

This redefinition of the Gospel is necessary for his final trick: Hyper-Preterism. He claims that the “end of the world” and the “days of vengeance” were entirely fulfilled in the AD 70 destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. The earth that was to burn up was just “a people -> Israel NOT a planet!!”

I get the psychological appeal of this. Waiting for Christ to return and fix this broken world is exhausting. Living in the tension of the “already, but not yet” is hard. Hyper-Preterism is a cheap way out—if it all ended in AD 70, you don’t have to wait or hope anymore.

Did Jesus prophesy the destruction of the Temple? Yes, absolutely (Matthew 24, Luke 21). There are aspects of preterist interpretation in some Orthodox holy fathers, but the Church has always understood that the events of AD 70 were a localized judgment and also a type (or a foreshadowing) of the final judgment.

But Hyper-Preterism—the claim that all prophecy was fulfilled in AD 70—is a heresy that guts the Christian hope.

If the Second Coming already happened in AD 70, then the resurrection of the dead already happened. If that’s true, then death has not been defeated, the cosmos has not been restored, and we are still in our sins. Some Gospel.

As St. Paul warns in 2 Thessalonians 2, we are not to be deceived into thinking the Day of the Lord has already fully come. The Creed we recite every Sunday is clear: “He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.”

The Second and Glorious Coming of our Lord did not happen in a fly by night operation in AD 70. He did not wrap things up yet.

“If the Second Coming already happened in AD 70, then the resurrection of the dead already happened. If that’s true, then death has not been defeated, the cosmos has not been restored, and we are still in our sins. Some Gospel.”
- Jamey Bennett

The Rubble or the Empty Tomb?

Why does this matter?

• If the Gospel was just about God taking “vengeance” on Jerusalem in AD 70, then Christianity is just a historical footnote about Roman siege warfare.

• But we believe in a Gospel where the eternal Son of God took on our human nature, descended into Hades, shattered the gates of death, and rose on the third day so that we might be united to God.

The author’s theology shrinks God into a lonely actor and shrinks the Gospel into a localized history lesson.

We belong to a Church that offers a cosmic, eternal, death-defeating reality. We don’t need to invent a new theology in the comment section. The saints already bled for the true one.

Stick with the Holy Fathers.