“The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from Yahweh. All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes, but Yahweh weighs the motives.” (Proverbs 16:1–2)

According to the Bible, the heart is the seat of motives. Notice this points out the phenomenon of people being clean in their own eyes. This is God’s indictment against those who forsake the commandments of God.

“Why does the wicked person condemn God, and say in his heart, ‘God won’t call me into account?’” (Psalm 10:13)

The KJV renders this passage more sharply: “Wherefore doth the wicked contemn God? he hath said in his heart, Thou wilt not require it.” This version makes it clear that people hold God in contempt when they believe in their hearts that God will not require them to keep His commandments. That is the attitude of those who read that God is ‘one He’ by commandment, yet assume they are exempt from accountability. According to Scripture, that’s holding God in contempt.

Jesus defined those whose hearts were far from God:

“Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me. They worship me in vain, teaching as doctrines the commandments of men.’” (Mark 7:6–7)

Jesus is quoting Isaiah 29:13, which uses lev (לֵב)—the Hebrew word for heart. In Hebrew thought, lev is not primarily the seat of emotion, as English speakers tend to assume. It is the seat of:

• Will and intention—what a person actually purposes to do
• Understanding and judgment—how one weighs and decides
• Moral orientation—the direction one is fundamentally aimed

So “their heart is far from me” means something like this: their actual intentions, allegiances, and moral orientation are pointed elsewhere—regardless of what their lips are doing.

Motives are therefore not just implied—they are the primary meaning.

The contrast Jesus draws is precise:

• Lips = public performance, external conformity
• Heart = actual motive, real allegiance, what they’re truly serving

The worship is called vain—empty, without substance—precisely because the motive driving it is self-referential—they are serving their own traditions, their own authority structures, their own theological constructions—while using God’s name as a pretense (thus, “lip service”).

Teaching the commandments of men as doctrines of God is not just an intellectual error in Jesus’s diagnosis. It is a motive problem. The heart was never fully submitted to God’s self-revelation, which is why it went looking elsewhere for the concept of His Word.

We have plenty of examples of this in the Bible. Think of Eve in Genesis 3, looking at the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil instead of having her heart set on God’s commandment. Think of King Saul, David’s predecessor, who claimed obedience when he was caught in blatant disobedience, saying to Samuel, “I have performed the commandment of Yahweh” (1 Samuel 15:13). Unfortunately, it is a pattern that is repeated all too often by those claiming to serve God.

The problem isn’t a lack of sincerity. The problem is a lack of submission. We tend to get defensive when we are being corrected, when, in truth, we are actually called to help correct each other toward a standard that we aren’t at liberty to invent for ourselves. Scripture is clear about what that standard is and what happens when human tradition replaces it.

Isaiah 29:13—“Their fear of me is a commandment of men which has been taught.”

This is a foundational text. Jesus quoted it directly against the Pharisees in Matthew 15:8–9 and Mark 7:6–7, which shows us the pattern repeats. Worship that originates in human tradition rather than divine command is rejected regardless of sincerity. The way people cling to the Trinity rather than to God’s commandment to love, worship, and obey “one He” is the very pinnacle example of this phenomenon. Why are people so enamored by a doctrine never taught in Scripture, but that was conceived in Egyptian mythology, refined by pagan philosophy, and later imposed as law by a secular Roman Emperor?

Galatians 1:10—“Am I now seeking the favor of men, or of God? Or am I striving to please men? For if I were still pleasing men, I wouldn’t be a servant of Christ.”

Paul’s logic here is clear: God-pleasing and man-pleasing are mutually exclusive categories. A religion built on human theological tradition—however sincerely held—is on the wrong side of a line the Bible clearly draws.

Paul testified about the zeal—the misdirected sincerity—of the wayward Jews:

Romans 10:2–3—“For I testify about them that they have a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. For being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and seeking to establish their own righteousness, they didn’t subject themselves to the righteousness of God.”

Paul explicitly credits his Jewish opponents with zeal for God—sincerity beyond question—then explains why it fails: they substituted self-constructed righteousness for submitted obedience. “Did not subject themselves” is our key phrase.

James gives us the solution and the proper response:

James 1:21–22—“Therefore, putting away all filthiness and overflowing of wickedness, receive with humility the implanted word, which is able to save your souls. But be doers of the word, and not only hearers, deluding your own selves.”

And Jesus made it extremely clear:

Matthew 7:21–23—“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the Kingdom of Heaven, but he who does the will of my Father.”

These are people who were sincere. They prophesied, cast out demons, and did miracles in Jesus’ name. How can anyone reading how God feels towards those who change His commandments for traditions of men sincerely believe that the man-made Trinity meets God’s standards of meekness and submission to His words rather than the commandments of men?

Therefore, we must examine the ‘heart’ Jesus identified—namely, the will, intentions, motives, and moral orientations that led them to seek the gods of the pagans for help in understanding the God of the Bible in the first place.

In this regard, Tillich’s contrast between his conclusion and Harnack’s was not semantic. Isaiah called it by its right name, and Jesus fully agreed. But it started before the Trinitarians. It started with Gnostics. Tillich even admitted that thinking philosophically began with the anti-Christian Gnostics. He admitted as much in this quote provided earlier in Chapter Seven:

“Harnack saw in this development a second wave of Hellenization. The first wave was Gnosticism, and the second wave was the formulation of the ancient dogma. The first was rejected by the church; the second was accepted and used by the church…Harnack’s…shortcoming was that he did not see the necessity of it…I would not accept the idea which one hears so much that all the Greek elements must be thrown out…If this were done consistently…it would rule out the whole history of doctrine (dogma).” —Tillich, 515-519.

Let’s take a little license to put this quote in context of what I’ve been exposing in this book. Let’s see how it looks if we don’t sugar coat certain words. Here’s how an honest reading would look:

“Harnack saw in this development a second wave of Paganization. The first wave of paganization was Gnosticism, and the second wave of paganization was the formulation of the ancient dogma. The first paganization was rejected by the church; the second paganization was accepted and used by the church…Harnack’s…shortcoming was that he did not see the necessity of paganization…I would not accept the idea which one hears so much that all the Greek paganization must be thrown out…If this were done consistently…it would rule out the whole history of paganizing doctrine (dogma).”

There, now let’s let Tillich defend his case.

Tillich just justified going to the gods of the people around him as “a necessity.” That’s like Adam’s response when God asked him why he also ate from the tree along with Eve: “she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate it” (Genesis 3:12). That excuse didn’t justify Adam or let him off the hook.

This book has documented that what Tillich called “the ancient dogma” was actually a long development through evolutionary stages. Tillich even admitted it in his words, “the whole history of doctrine.” That signifies development: evolution from the faith once delivered to something different four hundred years later. When Tillich says that the idea “that all the Greek elements must be thrown out” is to be rejected, he is referring to what I have been calling the chisel marks on the Rock of truth that Jesus and the apostles established. He is basically saying Apostle Paul was wrong when he commanded to teach no other doctrine. He is also saying Peter was wrong when Peter said to be established in the present truth.

But most importantly, he is saying God was wrong in commanding not to go to the gods of the people around them. And now we see why: paganization is what results.

The irony is this: even Tillich acknowledged that John did not intend to use the word logos in a philosophic sense:

“The idea that the universal Logos became flesh could never have been derived from the Greek thought. Therefore, the church fathers emphasized again and again that while the Greek philosophers possessed the idea of the universal Logos, what was peculiarly Christian was that the Logos became flesh in a personal life.” —Tillich, 15-16.

Here, Tillich—the defender of Trinitarian dogma—is defending what was peculiar to anti-Christian Gnostics before Tertullian took the doctrine of emanation from his competitor Valentinus. This is precisely the subtlety Paul warned of when he cautioned against being moved away from the Jesus the apostles preached. Tillich has just aligned himself with the Gnostics—and with the pagan philosophers behind them—when he calls “the idea of the universal Logos” Christian. Had the Gnostics not first imported the doctrine of emanations from the pagans, and had Tertullian not then taken it from Valentinus, the idea that “the universal Logos became flesh in a personal life” would never have entered Christian theology at all.

And yet this is exactly the process Tillich calls necessary—the same process of borrowing outside doctrines from non-Christians that Harnack himself identified and named Hellenization.

Now let’s take one more look at this Harnack quote:

“…The Gnostic systems represent the acute secularising or hellenising [paganizing] of Christianity, with the rejection of the Old Testament; while the Catholic system, on the other hand, represents a gradual process of the same kind with the conservation of the Old Testament…” —Harnack, Chap. 4, par. 2.

This time let’s reconsider the Catholic system’s “preservation of the Old Testament,” while the Gnostics rejected it. Harnack overstated the case here. The Gnostics did not wholesale reject the Old Testament text. In fact, most Gnostic systems made extensive use of it—though Marcion’s school was a notable exception—but as a document to be reinterpreted against its plain meaning. What they specifically rejected was:

• The Demiurge—the creator God of Genesis—as the true, highest God
• The authority of God’s commandments as binding on the spiritually enlightened
• The plain reading of the OT as spiritually sufficient

The Gnostics openly kept the text but dethroned its God—reassigning Yahweh to an inferior, ignorant, or even malevolent divine being, while positing a higher, true God above him.

The Trinitarian move is much more similar to the Gnostic move than Harnack’s framing suggests. More properly: neither rejected the Old Testament text. Both effectively rejected the Old Testament’s central theological claim—that the one God is a singular personal He, undivided, with no coequal divine companions.

The Gnostics said: Yahweh is not the true God. The Trinitarians said: Yahweh is three persons.

Both end up displacing the ‘one He’ of the Shema—one by demotion, one by multiplication.

The Gnostics were honest enough to say they were replacing the God of the OT. The Trinitarians kept His name “with the rejection of” His nature, His number, and His greatest commandment. This is a matter of degrees rather than a matter of methods. Trinitarians are thus a reformation of Gnosticism, not a representation of the original orthodoxy of the majority of Christians prior to Justin and Tertullian.

Here is a fact lost on Tillich and Trinitarians alike:

Gnosticism was never monolithic—these sects constantly out-imagination-ed each other—and proto-orthodox Trinitarianism was simply another branch of that same attitudinal family tree, distinguished ultimately only by its political alignment with Roman imperial power, not by any fundamentally different interpretational or morally mandated method.

The shared DNA:

• Syncretism justified as recovery of lost or hidden truth
• Hypostatized logos as a divine intermediary being
• Emanation as the mechanism of divine self-expression
• Pagan philosophical categories imported into biblical language
• Rejection of the ‘one He’ of the Bible

The Gnostics got condemned. The Trinitarians got Nicaea: same root, different political outcome. As the record shows, Justin, Tertullian, and, officially, the emperors all, in their own way, acknowledged that they were departing from—or imposing novel doctrines upon—the majority of existing Christian belief.

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