Jude against the dreamers: Three warning signs of false teachers

Saint Jude, whose feast the Church celebrates on October 28, is known the world over for his patronage—that of hopeless causes—and for the Children’s Research Hospital named in his honor.

But what some might not know about Jude is that he’s identified, traditionally, as the author of one of the letters of the New Testament. And that unique and power-packed epistle constitutes a kind of schema for identifying false Christian teachers, of any kind, in any age.

At just twenty-five verses and about five hundred words, Jude’s letter is one of the shortest in the whole Bible. Aside from its brevity, it’s perhaps best known for a line in its opening verses: “Contend for the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints” (3). It’s also remarkable for referencing two apocryphal works, the Assumption of Moses and the Book of Enoch—a move unique to Jude among all the other New Testament writers.

But the heart of the letter itself, which can be read in just a few minutes, is a grave warning about “ungodly” teachers stealing in among an early Christian community (4). Who were these heretics in Jude’s literary crosshairs? What did they believe? We don’t know for sure, but the text itself suggests a group of proto-Gnostics in the late first century, whose root error, like their more organized descendants a century later, was a perversion of spiritual things (4). Jude calls them “dreamers” (8)—the only use of the word in the New Testament—and compares them to “wandering stars, for whom the deepest darkness has been reserved forever,” a uniquely negative spin on a typically positive symbol of spiritual and heavenly heights.

What exactly were these proto-Gnostics “dreaming” about? Jude, interestingly enough, doesn’t examine and dismantle their beliefs in the manner of Irenaeus’s Against Heresies a hundred years later (as important as this kind of theological takedown can be). Instead, he simply points to the quality of their lives—and in so doing, not only tells us all we need to know about their beliefs (since faith and works go hand in hand) but also gives us insight into the kinds of behaviors characteristic of any kind of false teacher, “dreamers” of all stripes, down through the ages.

The first thing Jude notices is that these dreamers “pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness” (4). Again and again in the brief letter, Jude focuses, in a particular way, on “sexual immorality” (7). These false teachers “defile the flesh” (8), act like “irrational animals” (10), and indulge in their own “lusts” (16, 18). A desire to justify, explain away, or otherwise turn a blind eye to behaviors that the biblical tradition—from Genesis through the Gospels to the book of Revelation—consistently condemns is one of the clearest signs that a Christian has fallen on the wrong path, in whatever direction.

For the proto-Gnostics, their immorality stemmed from a “top-down,” “antinomian” rejection of the Mosaic law; for modern secularists, it stems from a more “bottom-up,” “inclusivist” rejection of the natural law; in any case, dreamers wear their lawlessness on their sleeve: They are a law unto themselves.

Next, Jude turns to a second, and more fundamental, warning sign: The dreamers “deny our only Master and Lord, Jesus Christ” (4), reject the authority of the Church (8), and unsettle the celebration of the sacraments, especially the Eucharist: “These are blemishes on your love-feasts”—the “agape meal” of the early Church associated with the Eucharistic celebration—“while they feast with you without fear, feeding themselves.” In short, they stand against what Augustine called Totus Christus—the “whole Christ” of Jesus the Head together with his Body the Church—insisting on their own way and drawing others into it.

The inevitable result is dissension, schism, and fragmentation: “These worldly people, devoid of the Spirit, are causing divisions” (19). Heretics across the ages—whether esoteric or exoteric, “spiritual” or “carnal”—tend to fit this mold.

The open “rebellion” (11) of the dreamers is closely related to a third red flag—namely, their destructive and deceitful use of speech. These teachers, Jude warns, “slander the glorious ones” and “whatever they do not understand” (8, 10); they are “grumblers,” “malcontents,” “scoffers” (16, 18), “bombastic in speech, flattering people to their own advantage” (16). Flouting both moral and spiritual truth, they rely on a warping of words—instrumentalizing them, stretching them, twisting them, weaponizing them, and, at the limit, making them up altogether—both to vindicate themselves and to corrupt others.

We see this trend across Church history, but it’s especially palpable in the age of social media and artificial intelligence, which has made public speech endlessly amplifiable and malleable; indeed, Cardinal Burke recently released a powerful fervorino on digital deception engineered to divide Christians—a trend, he says, that bears “the unmistakable mark of the Evil One.”

Moral disorder, ecclesial discord, and manipulative discourse: one or the other of these might indicate a struggling Christian, but two—and certainly all three—signal a believer caught in his or her own dream of Christianity. And our task, Jude reminds us in closing, isn’t just to contend for our own faith; it’s also to contend for theirs: “Have mercy on some who are wavering; save others by snatching them out of the fire; and have mercy on still others with fear” (23).