Heresies and How to Avoid Them

Ideas achieve the status of heresies in Christian tradition because they are thought by the Church to be wrong rather than right teaching, or 'doctrine'. A heretic is a baptized person who obstinately denies or doubts a truth which the Church teaches must be believed because it is part of the one, divinely revealed, and catholic (that is, universally valid) Christian faith. (1)

Heretical beliefs stand in opposition to orthodox beliefs and produce division within the church at the very points where the church should be unified. Though some believe that "beliefs" are irrelevant to Christian identity, history suggests otherwise:

But there is a very good and positive reason why Christianity has been so concerned about orthodoxy, or right belief. From its very beginnings, Christianity said that neither your race, nor your sex, nor your social class, nor your age could ever be a bar to full membership of Christ's body, the Church. Anyone could be a Christian... This was radical stuff. What, though, was left to mark a Christian out from a non-Christian? The answer was: your faith - what you believed in, as embodied in your practices and confessed with your lips... That's why heresy was a matter to be taken seriously, because it called those convictions into question. It threatened a crucial thing that bound the Church together and made Christians Christians. (1-2)

Though our modern culture often assumes a negative connotation to the label, the truth is much less dramatic. Heretics generally mean well. What we now consider heretical beliefs were almost always offered in the name of maintaining theological or philosophical integrity, that is, in the name of preserving orthodoxy.[1] But good intentions are no guarantee of good results. Heretical teaching fails because it either says too much (removing all mystery by explaining what cannot be explained) or doesn't go far enough (failing to maintain the full radicalness of orthodox Christianity and replacing it with a more common-sense solution).

If heresy is guilty of saying too much or not going far enough, the challenge of orthodoxy is great: "When all is said and done orthodoxy is the hard discipline of learning to say what needs to be said and no more" (x). Consequently, "Orthodoxy shows why what we believe cannot be explained but can only be prayed" (x). Orthodoxy is worship. It is the best human expression of divine mysteries. It attempts to preserve the mystery while simultaneously refusing to explain it away. Thus, orthodox belief is not "some sort of easy way out of intellectual hard work; heresy is more often the easier option" (7).

Arianism

Orthodox Christian teaching holds that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. Arianism denied the full deity of Jesus. It taught that Jesus was fully human, but not fully God. Arius' problem arose in attempting to defend the sovereignty of God. How could God in all God's fullness became a man? Arius feared that failing to distinguish the divinity of the Father from the divinity of the Son would demand that the limitations of the incarnate Son would necessarily have to be ascribed to the Father.

The problem with Arianism is that God doesn't quite reach us: "the Son cannot be a bridge between God and humanity if the bridge doesn't fully reach to both ends" (20). "This God does not give of himself, but sends a lesser, created being to show kindness. God remains an isolated, insulated ruler who cannot involve himself intimately with his creation. Orthodoxy is far more radical (and personal) than that!" (20)

Arianism exposes how our philosophical presuppositions can cause us to fall short of orthodox belief: "[Our philosophical] presuppositions, the ideas we bring to a discussion of what God is like, can keep us from discovering the fullness of his self-revelation in the person of Christ" (23). A demand for consistency carves "the reality of God down to fit within our small world of thought, rather than to allow his revelation to stand and reform our own thinking" (23).

Docetism

While Arianism denies the full divinity of Jesus, Docetism denies Jesus' full humanity. Docetism (which comes from the word translated "to seem" or "to appear") teaches that while Jesus was fully God, he only "appeared" to be human. Orthodoxy countered that this teaching, like Arianism, caused God to fall short in truly participating in the human condition. As one church father put it, "What is not assumed cannot be healed."

Another consequence of Jesus not fully participating in the human experience is that his words of warning to the nations lose their power. In Matthew 25, he says, "'In as much as you have cared - or failed to care - for one of the least of my brethren, you have done it, or failed to do it, to me' ... What weight have those words if he is not truly one of us, bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, so that good and bad people alike are his siblings, and ours?" (30)

Eutychianism and Nestorianism

The first two controversies settled the question over the union of the human and divine in the person of Christ. The orthodox conclusion: Christ had two natures, being fully divine and fully human. The next two heresies represented an answer to the question of how the two natures are related. Eutychianism taught that the two natures are fused together into one new nature "producing a hybrid which is something else altogether (as green, a mixture of yellow and blue, is nevertheless itself neither yellow nor blue)" (35). If this were the case, Jesus would neither represent humanity or God.

Nestorianism taught that "the two natures divided from one another, each remote from and unaffected by their union" (35). The union of God with humanity in the person of Christ transforms humanity:

The union of fallen human nature with the utterly holy divine nature necessarily changes the unholy: divine nature acts like a refining fire, burnishing away the tarnish of sin and death - and everything changes for us and for the whole cosmos as a result of this blessed marriage of the uncreated with the most cherished of all creatures...

this wondrous union not only heals our nature, but makes it better than it ever was before. The incarnation does not take us back to what we were in the garden of Eden. We were originally made, as Psalm 8 tells us, just a little lower than the angels, but through the incarnation, human nature receives blessings far beyond what is given to the angels. Through our union with Christ in baptism we are granted, each of us, the consequences of the union of divinity and humanity in Christ and are granted a relation to the blessed Trinity we could never otherwise have had: a relation of union. (38-39)

The Centrality of Jesus in the Early Church

It is interesting to note that all the early heresies focused on the person of Christ and not on the work of Christ. This highlights the significance of Jesus:

Our salvation is worked precisely not by a work: it is not in the first instance what Christ does that saves us, but who he is: what he does is simply the logical working out of his identity as fully divine and fully human. That is perhaps why there are no heresies condemning any of the various theories of Christ's work or what he did; the Christological heresies are all concerned with Christ's person, with the question of who, exactly, he is. (38)

Marcionism and Gnosticism

Other heresies are addressed in this book, some more well-known than others. And some that are more relevant than ever.

Marcionism still exists in various forms throughout the church. "Marcion was convinced that the cause of the contradictions in the Church's message lay in the Old Testament and that Christianity could be freed from its errors only if it detached itself from its Jewish heritage" (76). Marcion believed the God of the Old Testament was cruel, hateful, and arbitrary. He believed that the God of Jesus Christ was the exact opposite. Marcion rejected the Old Testament and formed his own canon which consisted of an edited Gospel of Luke and edited letters of Paul.

This heresy is alive and well in the church. It even has a New Testament form in the Jesus Seminar:

In my experience there are certain kinds of apparently liberal theology which take themselves very seriously indeed and know which parts of the Bible are authentic and which have been corrupted. They know what Jesus really taught and what the early Church added on. In the 1990s there was a group of New Testament scholars in the United States who gave themselves the name of 'The Jesus Seminar'. (79)

Gnosticism is also alive and well. The belief that matter is evil and that spirituality is a release from matter through enlightenment found in arcane beliefs is perhaps the most common folk-theology in America. Simply consider

the continuing attraction of the Gnostic idea that the official Scriptures of the Church are not enough for finding the truth about Jesus [as popularly taught in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code]. The real truth is allegedly to be found in unofficial books, which the Church does not want you to read, and has energetically tried to suppress. Apart from its gross simplification of the historical process by which the canon of Christian Scripture came into existence. This stands the true dynamic exactly on its head. It was the Gnostics who wanted to keep the truth about Jesus hidden. One had to be worthy to be initiated into the real truth about him. (109)

Generous Orthodoxy

Orthodoxy is important because heresies fail to communicate the full breadth and depth of the divine mystery revealed in Jesus Christ.

However, the fact that orthodoxy is important is no reason to use the truth as a club. "That one of the tests of orthodoxy is beauty means orthodoxy betrays itself if it is used as a hammer to beat into submission those we think heterodox" (x).

Orthodoxy should lead to joy and confidence, not self-righteousness and protectiveness. "When orthodoxy becomes defensive rather than a form of love and proclamation it denies its own reality" (x).

Ultimately, orthodoxy must lead to orthopraxy, for its purpose "is to help believers to love God better, and to be better Christians in the world" (6). The latter cannot happen without the former. For this reason, Christians must learn to discern heresy and delight in orthodoxy.

Quotes excerpted from Heresies and How to Avoid Them: Why It Matters What Christians Believe edited by Ben Quash and Michael Ward

© Richard J. Vincent, 2009