So Quickly Drifting To A Different Gospel

Paul told the Galatians, "I am amazed that you are so quickly deserting Him who called you by the grace of Christ, for a different gospel" (Galatians 1:6). He expressed a similar sentiment to the Corinthians (2 Corinthians 11:4).

If churches as early as these Pauline ones were in such danger and sometimes erred while under Paul's supervision, there's even more potential in some ways for later individuals and churches to err in that manner. My post earlier this week provides many examples of how that sort of thing happened a lot in later church history, regardless of which side of those later disputes you take. The disputes happened, and both sides (or more than two in some contexts) couldn't be right, given the nature of their claims.

I'm not suggesting that every or almost every post-apostolic source before the Reformation wasn't a Christian or anything like that. As I've argued in many previous posts and elsewhere, there was far more belief in justification through faith alone among the pre-Reformation sources than people often suggest. And I allow for the salvation of people who hold false soteriological views. People are often inconsistent, as we see with Peter and the Galatians, for example. In some ways, later individuals and groups who have contradicted Paul's soteriology have been better than the Judaizers. They've accepted the authority of the apostles, have often read documents like Paul's letters in their church services, etc. So, when Cyprian sees two sacraments (baptism and the laying on of hands) as a means of justification in John 3:5 or a medieval Roman Catholic believes that you have to obey the Pope in order to be saved, for example, I allow for the possibility or probability of their salvation. I make a judgment based on the totality of the evidence, including their access to the gospel and their affirmations of it in some places, even if they were inconsistent with it at times.

My main point here, though, is that departing from the gospel isn't as difficult as some people make it out to be. It was a prominent concern in Paul's day, and it sometimes happened even with people under the apostles' supervision. People often underestimate the soteriological inconsistencies we see in post-apostolic church history. Supposedly, none or few of the soteriological contradictions we see among the church fathers, medieval theologians, and other sources rise to the level of a false gospel. But it makes more sense to acknowledge that the soteriological errors are more significant than that and allow for the salvation of the individuals involved, despite their false soteriology.