Terullian!

[Doom]

For a writer who seems to have later fallen into heresy, he does seem to be the most important and influential of the Ante-Nicene Fathers.

He appears to be the first writer known to use the words “Trinity” and sacrament” to describe baptism, saying that baptism is like the oath taken by Roman soldiers upon entering service, the “sacramentum”. Also the language “God from God, light from light, true God from True God, begotten not made” is all a verbatim quote from Terullian.

Has any other heretical writer had such as oversized influence on orthodox theology?
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[anawim]

One other person who had a checkered writing anthology was Origen.

I recently checked the heresy of Marcion, and he was criticized by Tertullian, Irenaeus, Polycarp, and Hippolytus. Which makes me wonder, when did Tertullian go off the rails?

[Doom]

It is not at all clear what Origen actually held, none of the heretical beliefs attributed to him in later centuries appear in any of his extant works. I suppose it could be argued that this is because the heretical works were burned, but it is impossible to disprove a negative like that "he was a heretic but all the evidence was destroyed", an irrational argument if there ever was one.

A lot of the accusations against him seem preposterous on the face of it. For example, it is often claimed that he castrated himself based on the words of Christ "some make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven", but it has often been observed that Origen seems to be the least likely person in the early Church to err by interpreting the scriptures too literally.

My personal opinion is that Origen held few if any of the heretical ideas later attributed to him, he was just the kind of guy who tended to make a certain kind of rigorist, ultra-orthodox Christian completely go bonkers and get hysterical with wild accusations. We could say they had Origen Derangement Syndrome, stage 4, terminal case.

[anawim]

I'd have to go back and check, but while Origen is reported to have said something unorthodox about the trinitarian nature of God, apparently he was corrected by the Pope at the time, and received that correction with all humility. So it's also possible that given the sometime slow nature of communication, he may not have been officially corrected on some of the other things that he wrote.

The other thing to consider is the fact that most of what he wrote about would not be universally taught for another 100 - 200 years. I think he can be forgiven on those two counts.

[Doom]

Origen held to subbourdinationism in the Trinity, that Jesus and the Holy Spirit were inferior to the Father. But this wasn't one of the heresies he was accused of. He was accused of teaching universalism, including the eventual salvation of the devil, and of believing in the pre-existence of the soul, similar to modern Mormons. None of these beliefs can be found in any of his extent writings.

[aussie_aussie_oi_oi]

One other person who had a checkered writing anthology was Origen.

I recently checked the heresy of Marcion, and he was criticized by Tertullian, Irenaeus, Polycarp, and Hippolytus. Which makes me wonder, when did Tertullian go off the rails?

It was after the year 206 that he joined the Montanist sect, and he seems to have definitively separated from the Church about 211. After writing more virulently against the Church than even against heathen and persecutors, he separated from the Montanists and founded a sect of his own. The remnant of the Tertullianists was reconciled to the Church by St. Augustine.

Montanus lived in the Phrygian area of Asia Minor at the back end of the 2nd Century AD. He declared that the Holy Spirit was giving new revelations to the church, and named himself and two women, Priscilla and Maximilla, as prophets, although there were others. This was referred to as the New Prophecy. In the west, among the Montanist leaders was Proclus, with whom the Roman presbyter Gaius published a Debate. The emphases of the New Prophecy seem to have been on resisting persecution, fasting, and avoiding remarriage, together with hostility to any compromise with sin. Few of these points were controversial when judged against the ascetism of the next century. Tertullian tells us (in the quote by 'Praedestinatus' and in De Ieiunio) that the Spirit proclaimed no innovation in doctrine, but only gave directions about matters of church discipline, which were coming to be the prerogative of the bishop. It would seem that the Montanists were orthodox in all matters of doctrine.

Responses to this were quite mixed in the church. After all, prophecy was a genuine gift of God, according to the New Testament. A reading of the anti-Montanist writers in Eusebius' Church History reveals a great deal of uncertainty among Christians at all levels as to whether the new prophecy was genuine or not. It seems also possible that Montanism in its homeland may have been heretical, but that it masked a genuine move of the Holy Spirit which in other places was entirely orthodox, and would today be regarded as pentecostal. In reality, it is very difficult to tell from the surviving remains, which include some wild rumours of the sort that circulate, albeit in good faith, where there is little real information and no means to check what is going on.