Docetism unseats the wonder of Emmanuel, God-with-us.

Thus, Lewis's portrayal of Christ is not Christian but closer to Gnosticism (the notion that Christ's body is illusory is related to Docetism, a very old Gnostic heresy [Arendzen]).

Then Hendricks attacks what he calls "Christians' political docetism." Docetism was the teaching that Jesus was not really human, but only appeared to be so.

These go back to Docetism, a heresy hinted at in 1 John 4 and 2 John 7, developed by second-century Gnostics to the point where Christ's earthly appearance was an illusion, likewise his death, being replaced on the cross by Judaas or Simon of Cyrene.

The precedent for this religious dispensation to practise "subterfuge in defending oneself from one's enemies is to be found in Muhammad's fleeing from Mecca to Medina, in his docetism [Sura 4, 157]".

Instead, they jump from "born of the virgin Mary" right to "suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead, and buried." The historical Jesus acts as a corrective to that incipient docetism. Alan perceptively suggests that the historical Jesus "is the datum of human life that will keep the 'Son of Man' from escaping into self-projection."

My guess is that they were suspected of teaching the heresy of "docetism," the belief that Jesus Christ was not truly human, but only "appeared" (Greek: dolceo) to be so, like a myth of Zeus coming down to Earth in human form--or like an angel.

Get ready for a little trip down "docetism" way, where the author will treat you to the history of a fifth-century heresy that along with its 17th-century companion, Jansenism, continues to influence the Christian community's concept of the human body and the nature of Jesus even today in unhealthy ways.

In contrast, the Catholic Church has too often been inclined to see Jesus as only a divine figure and run the risk of the heresy of docetism, whereby Jesus only appears to be human.

Saul Trinidad and Juan Stain, in their study of Protestant preaching in Latin America, observe: "Protestant preaching has by and large been characterized by a functional Docetism in its Christology....

But even in its officially sanctioned forms, the trinitarianism of the classical tradition ruled out as plainly heretical the docetism, monarchianism and monophysitism that would have justified any such bald statement of Christ's divinity as the slogan "Jesus is God".

In such docetism, we wrote, "Jesus is made irrelevant to the concerns of this world and thus trivialized by a theology that supposedly makes him central."

Thus any sort of docetism, which either reduces the humanity of Christ to a mere phantasma or reduces the divinity of Christ to a mere relation of the man Jesus to the second person of the Trinity, is to be banned.

Gnosticism, Docetism, and the Judaisms of the First Century: The Search for the Wider Context of the Johannine Literature and Why It Matters

Ultimately, an ecclesiology without such regional structures of authority is an atemporal ecclesiology, tending toward Docetism. The Ravenna Statement offers rich reflection on the point that a truly incarnational church must have regional organization: