The proponents of the “Reformed Fringe” theology often present their work as a retrieval project. They claim to be dusting off a more authentic, “Ancient Near Eastern” worldview that they allege has been lost or suppressed by the overly systematized, Hellenized theology of later Christian tradition. They offer their listeners a supposedly richer, more “supernatural” reading of Scripture, one that restores the biblical text to its original, mythologically vibrant context. This claim, however, is a profound misreading of church history. Contrary to their assertions, the theological framework of “Reformed Fringe” does not represent a return to primitive Christianity, but a rejection of the Patristic consensus and a revival of the very errors the early church fathers fought to overcome. By re-populating the spiritual realm with a pantheon of lesser divinities, they do not recover a lost biblical insight; rather, they erase the single most revolutionary theological contribution of the early church: its unwavering confession of ontological monotheism.
The Patristic Consensus on the Uniqueness of God
The early church was born into a world saturated with the very worldview “Reformed Fringe” seeks to revive. The religious landscape of the Roman Empire was a teeming marketplace of gods, demons, and spiritual intermediaries. The great intellectual and spiritual battle of the Patristic era was to distinguish the Christian faith from this pagan milieu. The non-negotiable starting point for the fathers was the absolute uniqueness and ontological otherness of the Triune God. To put it another way, God exists in a category of one in every possible respect. They did not argue, as Van Dorn and Moffitt do, that Christians simply choose to worship the “highest” elohim from among a pantheon of real, existing divine beings. Even the subtle distinction between one “uncreated Elohim” and many “created elohim” would have been unacceptable to them, for it still violates the radical otherness of God by placing Him as merely the supreme member of a shared class of beings. Rather, they argued that there is only one uncreated, eternal, and spiritual God, and that the “gods” of the nations were, in fact, created, malevolent spirits—demons masquerading as deities. Justin Martyr, writing around 150 A.D., makes this distinction with perfect clarity:
And neither do we honour with many sacrifices and garlands of flowers such deities as men have formed and set in shrines and called gods; since we see that these are soulless and dead, and have not the form of God (for we do not consider that God has such a form as some say that they imitate to His honour), but have the names and forms of those wicked demons which have appeared.¹
For Justin, as for all the early fathers, there are only two fundamental ontological categories: the uncreated Creator and the created order. The “gods” of the nations fall squarely into the latter category. There is no middle tier of created-but-divine beings. This foundational commitment was summarized in what Irenaeus of Lyons called the “Rule of Faith” (regula fidei), a distillation of apostolic teaching that served as the interpretive key to Scripture and the guardrail against heresy. Irenaeus describes this universal, apostolic faith as follows:
The Church, though dispersed throughout the whole world, even to the ends of the earth, has received from the apostles and their disciples this faith: [She believes] in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven, and earth, and the sea, and all things that are in them; and in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit… As I have already observed, the Church, having received this preaching and this faith, although scattered throughout the whole world, yet, as if occupying but one house, carefully preserves it… For, although the languages of the world are dissimilar, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same… the Catholic Church possesses one and the same faith throughout the whole world.²
Irenaeus’s testimony is a powerful witness against the “Fringe” thesis. The defense against the Gnostic heresies—which, much like “Reformed Fringe,” sought to populate the cosmos with a complex hierarchy of spiritual beings—was not a competing mythology, but a steadfast adherence to the simple, universal, and apostolic confession of one Creator God.
Collapsing the Creator-Creature Distinction in Their Own Words
The fatal flaw at the heart of the “Reformed Fringe” project is its systematic dismantling of this absolute Creator-creature distinction. This is achieved by their redefinition of the term elohim. They argue that it is not a term describing the unique being of God, but a functional title for any inhabitant of the spiritual realm. In doing so, they place God and angels in the same general category, differing only in rank, not in kind. Van Dorn makes this foundational error explicit:
Elohim does not mean omnipotent. It means power. It’s not an incommunicable attribute that only one entity possesses. It’s a communicable attribute that all kinds of entities could possess.³
This single statement is a departure from the entire catholic tradition. By reducing “Elohim” to a shared “communicable attribute” of “power,” Van Dorn erases the very concept of a unique divine essence. Jon Moffitt attempts to soften this by drawing an analogy to Christ’s humanity, but in doing so, only reinforces the categorical collapse:
Jesus is more than human, but he is human. And this is true of Elohim… there is something in common with Elohim that are created and Elohim, that is not [created], there’s something that is in common, but that does not mean there’s an equality. It just means there’s a commonality.⁴
This analogy is fundamentally flawed. While Christ shares a true human nature with us, the term Elohim in Scripture is used to distinguish the one God from all other things. To claim there is merely a “commonality” between the uncreated Elohim and created elohim is precisely the error the early church fought. The distinction is not one of degree (“commonality” vs. “equality”), but of kind—the infinite chasm between the uncreated God and all “originate things.” Moffitt later makes the error even more explicit, stating that the New Testament writers understood that “in some way, angels are Elohim, not improper by title only, but it is a description.”⁵ This is the very thesis that the Patristic fathers dedicated their lives to refuting.
The irony of this error is that the great Christological councils, culminating at Chalcedon, formulated the doctrine of the Hypostatic Union for the precise purpose of preventing this kind of categorical confusion. The union of the two natures in Christ—one fully divine, one fully human—occurs in such a way that the natures remain distinct, unmixed, and unchanged. The entire point of this careful formulation was to confess a Mediator who could bridge the gap between God and man without collapsing the essential Creator-creature distinction. For Moffitt to use the incarnation as an analogy for blurring that very distinction demonstrates a profound misunderstanding of orthodox Christology. We will return to this grave Christological error and its devastating consequences in a later article dedicated to the subject.
Athanasius, Nicaea, and the Rejection of Creaturely Mediators
This foundational commitment faced its most severe internal test during the Arian crisis of the fourth century. Arianism was, in essence, a more sophisticated, “Christianized” version of the pagan impulse to populate the cosmos with intermediary beings. The Arians, much like our modern speculators, posited a being—the Logos—who was more than a mere creature but less than the one true God. He was a kind of high-ranking, created divine being, the first and greatest of all that God had made.
It was Athanasius who rose as the great champion of orthodoxy against this error. His entire theological project was to defend the biblical truth that the Son is homoousios (of the same essence) with the Father, not merely homoiousios (of a similar essence). Athanasius understood that to compromise on the absolute, ontological unity of the Godhead was to surrender the gospel itself. He systematically dismantled the notion that any created being, no matter how exalted, can share in the divine nature in the same way as the Son. He writes:
For if there were no unity, nor the Word the own Offspring of the Father’s Essence, as the radiance of the light, but the Son were divided in nature from the Father, it were sufficient that the Father alone should give, since none of originate things is a partner with his Maker in His givings… No one, for instance, would pray to receive from God and the Angels, or from any other creature, nor would any one say, ‘May God and the Angel give thee;’ but from Father and the Son, because of Their oneness and the oneness of Their giving.⁶
Athanasius’s logic is devastatingly simple: there is an infinite, qualitative distinction between the Creator and the creature. The Son can be a giver of grace alongside the Father precisely because He is not a creature; He shares the one, undivided divine nature. Angels and other “originate things,” by contrast, are on the other side of that infinite divide. His argument is a direct refutation of the “Fringe” thesis that elohim can be a title for both Yahweh and created angels. Athanasius insists that to even think this way is to misunderstand both God and angels.
The definitive Patristic statement on this matter, however, is the Nicene Creed (381 A.D.). The council, guided by the theological insights of men like Athanasius and the Cappadocian Fathers, explicitly condemned the Arian position by confessing the Son to be “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial (homoousion) with the Father.” Each phrase is a hammer blow against the kind of theology “Reformed Fringe” is attempting to revive. The Son is begotten, an eternal relation within the Godhead, not made as creatures are. He is of the same essence as the Father, not a similar or subordinate essence. The “Fringe” model, which places the pre-incarnate Christ (the Angel of the Lord) in the same category of being (elohim) as created angels, directly contradicts this conciliar and universally-accepted standard of Christian orthodoxy.
Rejecting a Return to Paganism
What the “Reformed Fringe” presents as a recovery of a “supernatural worldview” is, in reality, a regression. By redefining monotheism not as an ontological claim (“only one God exists”) but as a loyalty claim (“we only worship one God from among many”), they abandon the Patristic consensus and return to a worldview that is functionally indistinguishable from the paganism the early church confronted. Their system is a form of henotheism (the belief that multiple deities exist while one is held as supreme).⁷ Van Dorn accepts the existence of a pantheon of elohim and merely debates their worthiness of worship relative to Yahweh. This is the logic of paganism, not the gospel.
The early church was so committed to guarding the uniqueness of God as the sole object of worship that it even formally condemned the veneration of angels. The Council of Laodicea (c. 363 A.D.) decreed in its 35th canon: “Christians must not forsake the Church of God, and go away and invoke angels and gather assemblies, which things are forbidden. If, therefore, any one is found engaged in this secret idolatry, let him be anathema.” What “Reformed Fringe” attempts to normalize as a biblically-warranted “divine council,” the early church fathers rightly identified as “secret idolatry” and anathematized it.
The fathers would have recognized this theology for what it is: a dangerous and retrograde step back toward the pagan darkness from which Christ delivered the world. They would see it not as a recovery of biblical truth, but as a surrender of the Bible’s most fundamental and revolutionary claim: that “the LORD, he is God; there is no other besides him” (Deut 4:35). This is not a statement about loyalty; it is a statement about reality. It is the rock upon which the church is built, a rock from which “Reformed Fringe” has, sadly, drifted.
Footnotes
¹ Justin Martyr, “The First Apology of Justin,” The Ante-Nicene Fathers, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, vol. 1, Christian Literature Company, 1885, p. 165.
² Irenæus of Lyon, “Against Heresies,” The Ante-Nicene Fathers, edited by Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, and A. Cleveland Coxe, vol. 1, Christian Literature Company, 1885, pp. 330–32.
³ Doug Van Dorn and Jon Moffitt, “The History of the Word ‘God,’” Reformed Fringe, podcast audio, 25 Aug. 2025, 11:15, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reformed-fringe/id1673785890?i=1000723422818.
⁴ Van Dorn and Moffitt, “History of the Word ‘God,’” 13:58.
⁵ Doug Van Dorn and Jon Moffitt, “What ‘No Other Gods’ Doesn’t Mean,” Reformed Fringe, podcast audio, 1 Sept. 2025, 40:40, https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/reformed-fringe/id1673785890?i=1000724369041.
⁶ Athanasius of Alexandria, “Four Discourses against the Arians,” Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, 2nd ser., vol. 4, Christian Literature Company, 1892, p. 400.
⁷ Donald K. McKim, “Henotheism,” The Westminster Dictionary of Theological Terms, 2nd ed., rev. and exp., Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.