Ideologies never stay separate from our real lives.

They emerge and they touch us in every single way.

And this is why it's so important to be able to discern them and to think through them

with patience and critical thinking and the wisdom of the Holy Spirit,

because these things are not neutral and they never just stay in our nice little spiritual boxes.

They are going to come out elsewhere.

Hello, friends. I'm Felicia Masonheimer, founder of Every Woman a Theologian, and welcome to Verity Podcast.

We are beginning a new series on understanding and discerning false teaching.

And through this series, we're going to look at some of the ancient heresies,

the ancient false teachings that are now recirculating in a completely brand new package.

We're going to look at how Christians in church history dealt with these particular

teachings and allow that to guide us and how we can discern through them today. And so in this

episode, we're going to look at the very first false teaching of the early church that really caused a massive controversy

among those early believers. Now, of course, there were other false teachings other than this

one, including Gnosticism, which we're going to look at in the next episode, as well as

some of the ancient pagan religions, like the Roman religion, as well as

some mystery cults. We'll look at those two eventually. But for now, we're going to focus on

the first great controversy that the church faced, and this led to what we know today as the

Nicene Council and the Nicene Creed.

And you'll see how that happened, how we got this famous creed that we still say in church

today out of this era of battling a false teaching. But let's start with what it is. It's called

A-R-I-A-N-I-S-M. It's called Aryanism.

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