Heresy

It is interesting to see how the Covid situation has resurrected the concept of heresy in a secular guise.  I see increasingly strong reactions against anyone who suggests a different interpretation of the information from that offered through official channels.  Indeed, even to question whether HMG's current course of action is wise and humane is enough to get you told that you have blood on your hands - irrespective of whether you have been carefully keeping to the regulations personally!  Why is this?  Because ideas have consequences.  In this case, it is felt that certain ideas will lead to people taking actions which will result in more people losing their lives.

I am not going to dive into the debates around lockdown (not again, anyway).  Rather I wanted to flag that this is a useful illustration of the theological notion of heresy.  Heresy is not just wrong opinion, but the advancement of ideas which are likely to have devastating consequences for individuals and for the church.  Primarily, heresy encourages people to trust wrongly: to put their trust in things that cannot bear that trust, or not to trust those things which they ought to trust.  The Arian heresy encourages people to trust a creature rather than the Creator for salvation.  The Pelagian heresy encourages people to put confidence in their own abilities rather than in God's grace.  And there are consequences.  Only God is able to bear our confidence; only he is trustworthy.  To put the weight of our need on anything else is deadly, eternally deadly, because it prevents us from seeking salvation in the one place where it is available - in God through Christ.

So just as misinformation about Covid could lead to people acting in a way that endangers themselves and others, so misinformation about God could lead to people trusting or failing to trust in a way that imperils themselves and others eternally.

I think the Covid situation does also highlight one of the dangers of the concept of the heresy.  Some of the anti-sceptical folks have reached the point where there are things which are doubtless true, but which may not be said for fear of consequences.  For example, I read an article over the weekend which castigated the lockdown sceptics for talking about the adverse effects of lockdown on mental health.  There was no suggestion that lockdown is not bad for mental health - I don't think that would be plausible - but that whether it is bad or not, one ought not to say so, because of the potential consequences.

In theological circles, sometimes it becomes impossible to ask valid questions, or to explore genuine issues, because they are very quickly linked to heresy.  The heresy flag is waved early in order to halt discussion.  That is not helpful.  There has to be space, even within the most tightly confessional circles, for investigation of theological issues; there has to always be the possibility that even the definition of heresy has to change under the pressure of renewed reading of Scripture.

Teaching falsehood and being a false teacher

Back in the day, when I was working with Christian students, I was once asked to give a little talk about some aspect of eschatology.  I duly delivered, and only discovered afterwards that by a misfortune of timing a local church student worker had also spoken to the issue at hand during the week, and moreover had expressed opinions rather contrary to my own.  The students were a little flummoxed.  Being good conservative evangelicals, they were committed to the notion of truth, and they were aware that the differences they were hearing were not the sort of thing that could be explained as different perspectives or any such thing.  But unfortunately they were not equipped with a category for 'Christian teachers having differing interpretations' - if we were teaching differently, one of us must be a false teacher.  To avoid this conclusion, they opted to assume that they had simply misunderstood the talk in their local church.  They were not inclined to consider either of us a false teacher, and so they had to assume that we had not, in fact, disagreed - despite the evidence of their ears.

This story goes a long way to explaining some of my ambivalence about the term 'false teacher'.

What is clear, to me at least, is that on this occasion at least one of us was teaching falsehood.  I am, of course, inclined to think it was the other fellow.  Our views on the question under discussion were irreconcilable, at least in substance (although doubtless there were elements of truth present in both positions).  If what we were talking about was a real thing, then there is no doubt that one of us was substantially wrong (and of course, both of us may well have been entirely wrong; what is certain is that we were not both right).  But it seems to me that when Christians use the category of 'false teacher' they must mean more than this - more than a different opinion or apprehension on one matter of eschatology.  Since every Christian teacher has, at least from time to time, taught falsehood - by error of positive teaching, by omission, by neglecting or just failing to communicate clearly - the sort of broad category being deployed by these students would leave none of us standing.

So I'm keen to have a category for teaching falsehood without being a false teacher.

But there is no doubt that the NT does present us with people who have gone beyond this - people who are, deliberately or naively, leading the people of God astray through their teaching in a way which directs them away from the true God and away from right living.  And I've been thinking recently that we need to have the courage to recover this category and treat those who fall into it in an appropriate way.  This isn't an alternative to having a certain tolerance for error; it goes alongside it.  In fact, the parameters of orthodoxy are such that there is a wide field over which we can range without stepping beyond the bounds, and certainly within that field we can be and often will be 'wrong' - but without being destructively wrong.

I think it is that destructiveness that characterises the true false teacher.

Of course all error is to some extent destructive.  Truth builds up, falsehood pulls down.  But there are two particular types of error which are flagged up in the NT as destructive: error that leads people to such a false understanding of the deity that the God they worship is no longer recognisable as the Holy Trinity; and error that leads people into such egregious moral behaviour that their lives no longer bear the stamp of that holiness without which no one will see God.  These errors destroy people.

Because they destroy people, the appropriate response of the church, and especially of the pastors of the church, is an almost absolute 'no'.  The determined false teacher must of necessity be excluded from the church, treated as a pagan.  There is mercy - there is always mercy! - but in this case it needs to be mixed with fear, fear lest the destructive tendency of false teaching be let loose amongst God's people.

Looking at the confusion in the church on a hundred issues - from things as central to the understanding of God as the divinity of Christ, and things as essential to the moral life as the nature of marriage and sexuality - it seems to me that some lines need to be drawn.  Because I am a product of my time, and because I have the sort of brain and temperament that always wants to nuance everything and see the shades of grey, drawing lines makes me deeply uncomfortable.  But the alternative is worse, much worse: the destruction of faith and morals, with consequences which are potentially eternal.

Being wrong about things that are real

When you read Galatians 1 you can't escape the fact that there are people in Galatia saying things about God which are wrong, at least as far as the Apostle Paul is concerned, and that he is not best pleased about it.  (As an aside, Martin Luther maintains in his commentary that Paul addresses the Galatians here "patiently", "fairly excus[ing] their error", "with motherly affection".  One suspects that Luther was measuring Paul against his own standard of harsh address here...)

Clearly what we are dealing with in Galatians is heresy.  That is to say, it is an error about God and his gospel which is sufficiently drastic to constitute a desertion of grace and a loss of the gospel.  I think that is as helpful a description of heresy as any: it is an error which makes the good news impossible.  In the case of the Galatians, who are tempted to think that righteousness comes by the law, Paul ripostes that if this were the case "then Christ died for no purpose".  In other words, if things stand as the Galatian heretics think, then the good news of Jesus makes no sense.  That is what marks their position out as heresy.

There is, however, error which is not heresy.  Unless we are very arrogant, none of us will claim to have a perfect understanding of God and his ways.  Implicitly, when we confess this lack, we accept that we are wrong in at least some of the things that we believe about God and what he has done.  However, these errors need not be such as make a nonsense or impossibility of the central claim that God in Christ has reconciled the world to himself, not counting our sins against us.  We are wrong, but we are not necessarily heretics.  The distinction is important, because it allows us to get along together with all our misunderstandings without being in a state of constantly judging and condemning one another.  We can have sensible conversations about how we feel our own ideas may perhaps more accurately reflect reality than those of other Christians around us, without thereby anathematising any of those Christians.  Sometimes, of course, we must pronounce Paul's anathema - but not over difference of opinion.

The fact that there is heresy and the fact that there is error which is not heresy both rely on the fact that God is real and has really done things.  This is obvious in the case of heresy: if God has testified that he has sent his Son into the world and justifies us by faith in him, it is wrong and disastrously wrong to deny that he has done this.  If God is real, there can be error which is so serious that it just isn't the real God we're talking about anymore.

But the fact that there can be error which is not heresy also points to the reality of God.  If we were just talking about a form of words, we could learn them by rote, and all make sure we were saying exactly the same things.  But if we're talking about a really existing God, inevitably we will all have somewhat different perceptions of him.  This is true of any really existing person: different things about them strike different observers, and two descriptions of their character, whilst recognisably the same person, have some differences. If heresy is avoided, we can learn from each other's different understandings of God's revelation - and avoid anathematising one another.

Being orthodox

Loosely based on the first chapter of T.F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith.

Because God makes himself known in Christ, to whom the Holy Scriptures bear authoritative witness, there are definite boundaries to our knowledge of God - if we stray beyond the witness of Scripture and the person and work of Jesus Christ (which I have deliberately made co-extensive in the diagram), we do not truly see God; we are heretics.  But if we are orthodox - looking to the Scriptures to see Jesus, expecting that in him we will see God revealed - then we gaze into the infinite depths of the being of God.  We can know him truly, but in knowing him truly we see that we can never know him exhaustively.  There will always be more to know, and yet we don't look to one side or the other to find it: the 'more' is in the depths, not to the sides, and we must continue to focus our gaze on Jesus Christ through the Scriptures.

Orthodoxy is closed to anything that departs from the Biblical Christ, but infinitely open to the God revealed in Jesus as we see him in the Bible.

Incomprehensible

Just a last quick Christmas thought before the decorations come down tonight.

I don't think we understand the incarnation.  To put it more strongly, I don't think we can understand the incarnation.  Think about what we say: we say that God became a man, took on flesh, clothed himself in our nature.  I think it's quite possible to understand some or all of these words and concepts - but is it really possible to grasp what they actually indicate?  Can we really have any understanding of what it means to say that God becomes a human being?

It's interesting to read the history of christological controversy in the early church as an attempt to understand this - and it is interesting that orthodoxy, as far as I can tell, always comes down on the incomprehensible side.  The heretics are trying, as a rule, to simplify things, or at least to bring them within the realm of things we might be able to grasp.  What is Arianism, after all, but an attempt to make the incarnation a bit less incomprehensible?  Arius does it by making the incarnate actually something less than God, and in so doing seems to avoid the apparent category mistake of the orthodox, who insist that it is actually God, the invisible God, who appears in the human nature of Christ.

Or the various disputes about the natures and will of Christ.  The monophysites want to make Christ a mix of divine and human (actually, whether they wanted to do this is debatable; certainly their theological descendants would repudiate this project.  But that is the tendency which the orthodox thought they saw in monophysite thought).  Although that is still pretty hard to understand, it does at least mitigate the harshness of saying that Christ is at once infinite and finite, invisible and visible, God and man.  A blend is easier to comprehend, but it is heretical.  On a less ontological and more psychological point, the monothelite want to give Christ but one will, the divine will standing in for the human.  Simpler, sort of makes sense.  But the orthodox insist that Christ has two wills, divine and human - even though this makes it more or less impossible for us to imagine or comprehend his inner life.

The point is that we don't understand, and that has to be okay.  If we understood, it wouldn't be God-in-the-flesh.  Our concepts can do nothing more than point us to the reality, which is Christ; that's why in Christian theology the story is prior to the concepts, which can only serve it.

Aiding and Abetting

Today I've been thinking about the Homoiousians.  I imagine you think about them from time to time as well, but just in case they've not been at the forefront of your mind recently, let me remind you who they were.  The Homoiousians were the moderate party in the fourth century debates about the person of Christ.  They positioned themselves between the Homoousians on the one hand (note the lack of 'i' - homo rather than homoi) and the Arians on the other.  To boil it right down, whilst the Homoousians said that God the Son was of one being with the Father, and the Arians said that God the Son was unlike the Father, the Homoiousians said that the Son was similar to or like the Father in his essence and attributes.

As we all know (right?), the Homoousians ultimately won the day; the Gospel story required the relationship between Father and Son which they championed.  Arianism has been denounced as heresy by all branches of the Christian church.

But my thinking today has not really about the Trinitarian and Christological controversies of yesteryear.  Rather I've been thinking about the role played by the 'moderates', the Homoiousians, in all this debate.  They were a varied bunch.  Some were very slippery characters; they had Arian sympathies, but lacked the courage of their convictions.  Others were simply concerned for the unity of the church; they wanted to try to acommodate the views of as many as possible (whilst ruling out the extremes of Arianism).  Others just felt that it wasn't as important as everyone was making out; they just wanted to preach the gospel without getting mixed up in this abstract argument.

History has not judged their efforts kindly, nor should it.  Whatever the motives, good or bad, the attempt to moderate and compromise and hold people together led to the Homoiousians advocating, or at least tolerating, heretical doctrine.  They did not, in the final analysis, speak the truth about God.  Had they been allowed to triumph, the Gospel would have disappeared.  In the end, whatever they hoped to achieve, they were in fact aiding and abetting the enemy.

I've been thinking about Homoiousians as I reflect on the role some people I respect very much are playing in the big debates in the church today - especially around gender and sexuality.  I worry that in trying to be gentle, kind, moderate...  they're running the danger of being on the wrong side.  When it comes down to it, on this and all issues, we have to listen and speak.  If God said nothing on the subject, we'd jolly well better shut up.  But if he spoke, we'd better hear what he says and articulate it clearly.  No messing around.  No fudging, no hedging, no softening the edges.  Rather, gentleness with clarity.