I wrote the following heresy quiz to test your knowledge of early Church heresies. All of the following heresies relate to the relationship between God the Father and God the Son. I will reveal the answers after giving you an appropriate amount of time to consider your choices. Choosing the corrent answer may involves the ability to make suble distinctions between similar statements, so read carefully. Those of you who are brave may want to leave your answers in the comment box. Good luck!
Adoptionism:
(A) The philosophy that encourages adopting orphans
(B) The teaching that God “adopted” Jesus, who was a man, by the indwelling of logos, who is not a separate person from God the Father.
(C) The teaching that God adopts us as his children.
Dynamic Monarchianism:
(A) The teaching that a power from on high (i.e. “Christ” or “logos”) came upon the man Jesus and he became deity.
(B) The teaching that monarchs should be dynamic leaders.
(C) The teaching that Jesus was a butterfly.
Modalistic Monarchianism:
(A) The most frequently occurring value in the set of Monarchs
(B) The teaching that Monachs should be model leaders.
(C) The teaching that God the Father and God the Son are one without any distinction in person or essence; they are merely two different modes of the very same God.
Sabellianism:
(A) An new diet based on the cuisine of Sabellius, Italy.
(B) A musical style based on the works of Finnish composer Sibelius.
(C) The teachings of Sabellius that God metamorphosed himself as needed to be either the Father or the Son or the Holy Spirit.
Unitarian Monarchianism:
(A) The teaching that Unitarian Church will one day rule the world.
(B) A secret religion founded by Thomas Jefferson and encoded in the Declaration of Independence.
(C) A Judaistic sect founded by Ebion that rejected the virgin birth and taught that Christ was a man born of Joseph and Mary who was destined to be the Messiah.
EXTRA CREDIT: Anyone who actually gets the subtle jokes embedded into this quiz automatically passes, even if all questions are answered incorrectly.
UPDATE: Yes, as some of you correctly guessed, the answers are (B), (A), (C), (C), (C). I was reviewing my church history notes from a class I took last year when this idea came to me. All of the heresies named above were real heresies that caused real controversy in the early church. The heresies named below, however, are different. Atlantic (who--to the best of my knowedge--doesn't have a blog) brought these to my attention in the comment section. Lest you miss them, I have exerpted her comment below.
I think what she wrote is even funnier than what I wrote! Thanks, Atlantic.'
"Meanist Monarchism
(A) The teaching that God is a mean monarch
(B) The view that ethical behaviour adheres to “the golden mean”
(C) The teaching that God is the arithmetic average of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit (as distinct from Radical Monarchism, the teaching that God is the geometric average of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit)
Medianist Monarchism
(A) The spiritualist practice of attempting to contact monarchs through mediums
(B) Television, radio and internet coverage of butterflies
(C) The teaching that God is one of a set of supernatural beings, of which precisely half are too large for our universe, half are too small – so only God is just right.
Note that these heresies have strict classification systems for sins – some are within one standard deviation, some within two standard deviations, etc. – although different sects use different distributions. The most liberal ones use the “normal distribution” technique, in which all sins are considered excusable because they are “normal human nature” anyway. However, the stricter sects (who can often be identified by the fish decal on their automobiles) use the poisson distribution. "
