Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Can we talk about heresy?


The following is an extract from Thomas C. Oden's article "Can we talk about heresy?" in the April 1995 edition of the Christian Century. Three comments by way of introduction.

1. Oden's critique accords with the obervation that heresies are alien worldviews dressing themselves up in Christian language (see previous posts on "The Invasion of the Body Snatchers").

2. In the second paragraph, Oden has a remark about Christians being intentionally responsible for the disappearance of the concept of heresy. But doing that surely exposes that such people were Christians in name only. When the concept of heresy left it took the truth with it.

3. Finally, he draws attention to the moral corruption that follows false teaching as night follows day.

"An interloper who steals property must be caught and charged. Thinly disguised atheism and neopaganism are interlopers in liberated church circles. They have engaged in the theft of church property. The stolen property must be reclaimed and the thieves brought to justice.

To point this out means raising the issue of heresy. But in the "liberated" church circles of oldline denominations heresy simply does not exist. After centuries of struggle against recurrent heresies, Christians have found a quick way of overcoming heresy: they have banished the concept altogether. With absolute relativism holding sway, there is not only no concept of heresy, but no way even to raise the question of where the boundaries of legitimate Christian belief lie.

This is like trying to have a baseball game with no rules, no umpire, and no connection with historic baseball. Only we continue to insist on calling it baseball because a game by the name of baseball is what most people still want to see played.

By "liberated" church circles I refer to the sexual experimenters, the compulsive planners of others' lives, the canonical text disfigurers, and ultrafeminists (as distinguished from the great company of godly Christian women who are found at many different points along the scale of feminist reflection). The liberated characteristically understand themselves to be free from oppressive, traditional constraints of all sorts and shapes. "Liberated" is not a term applied from outside, but a term they frequently apply to themselves. By liberated they usually imply: doctrinally imaginative, liturgically experimental, disciplinarily nonjudgmental, politically correct, muticulturally tolerant, morally broad-minded, ethically situationist, and above all sexually permissive.

The intellectual ethos I am describing is not liberal in the classic sense of that word, but intolerant and uncharitable when it comes to traditionalists of any sort, all of whom are capriciously bundled under the dismissive label of 'fundamentalists'."

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Monday, September 04, 2006

The Down Grade Controversy




The following is an extract from Robert Shindler's two part article on "The Down Grade" from Sword and Trowel, April 1887. The original was published anonymously but with the full approval of C. H. Spurgeon.

"In the case of every errant course there is always a first wrong step. If we can trace that wrong step, we may be able to avoid it and its results. Where, then, is the point of divergence from the "King's highway of truth"? What is the first step astray? Is it doubting this doctrine, or questioning that sentiment, or being sceptical as to the other article of orthodox belief? We think not. These doubts and this scepticism are the outcome of something going before.

The first step astray is a want of adequate faith in the divine inspiration of the sacred Scriptures. All the while a man bows to the authority of God's Word, he will not entertain any sentiment contrary to its teaching. "To the law and to the testimony," is his appeal concerning every doctrine. He esteems that holy Book, concerning all things, to be right, and therefore he hates every false way. But let a man question, or entertain low views of the inspiration and authority of the Bible, and he is without chart to guide him, and without anchor to hold him.

In looking carefully over the history of the times, and the movement of the times, of which we have written briefly, this fact is apparent: that where ministers and Christian churches have held fast to the truth that the Holy Scriptures have been given by God as an authoritative and infallible rule of faith and practice, they have never wandered very seriously out of the right way. But when, on the other hand, reason has been exalted above revelation, and made the exponent of revelation, all kinds of errors and mischiefs have been the result".
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The Cruelty of Heresy


This book got me thinking seriously about the nature of heresy. I came across it in a footnote in Don Carson's The Gagging of God and then found it by accident in a book shop that seemed to specialise in the kind of material that the book warns against.

Reading about ancient heresies can be like looking at preserved specimens in glass cases. Some with strange names have died off, others have descendants who are running around today passing on the family genes. As a 17 year old starting to read theology I learned from Anthony Hoekema that the Jehovah's Witnesses who knocked on my door were serving up the same Jesus that Arius preached in the 4th century.

The Cruelty of Heresy stirred me to think about the pastoral nature and effects of heresy.

Here are some extracts from the Introduction:

"We are susceptible to heretical teachings because, in one form or another, they nurture and reflect the way we would have it be rather then the way God has provided...heresies pander to the most unworthy tendencies of the human heart. It is astonishing how little attention has been given to these two aspects of heresy: its cruelty and its pandering to sin". p. 17

"It is now almost shameful to call oneself 'orthodox', while the label 'heretic' is worn as a badge". p. 18

"Cynics who have relinquished any search for truth have claimed that 'orthodoxy' is what we believe, as heresy is what others believe". p. 19

"Successful heretics soon claim their opinion to be 'orthodox'". p. 19

"...we do not lack objective standards to which we can appeal when we disagree about whose doctrine is 'correct'". p. 19

"If a teaching is wrong opinion rather than right opinion the consequences are cruel, the Christian faith is distorted, and people who follow these teachings are hurt". p. 20

"...orthodoxy, over time, seems to keep its form but lose its substance". p. 22

And one from the opening of the first chapter:

"In spite of popular ideas concerning heresies, they are, in fact, narrow and limited ways of understanding Christianity". p. 25
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Sunday, September 03, 2006

Wolves in evangelical clothing


The fear of being thought negative, and associating the discernment of error with an unloving attitude, opens us up to soul destroying influences. It actually prevents us from hearing the voice of Jesus as he warns us about wolves in sheep's clothing. We cannot afford to be complacent or naive on these matters.

Church history, that long extended memory of God's dealings with his people, is full of tragedies, triumphs and warnings. Here is a warning worth listening to.

"I dare boldly say, that if ever he [Satan] settle to a stated opposition to the gospel it will be in Socinianism" (John Owen, Vindiciae Evangelicae, p. 53)

Socinianism brought together a pelagian view of human nature, the denial of God's exhaustive foreknowledge (what we know today as open theism), the denial of the Trinity, the denial of eternal punishment, and the denial of penal substitutionary atonement.

Several of these views are in the process of taking up residence in evangelicalism as members of the household. Obviously the Trinity is not being questioned, well not just yet.

Which leads on to a conundrum. Why would anyone identify themselves as evangelical when historically their position is in fact an attack on evangelical distinctives? It makes much more sense to call yourself what you are instead of what you are not.

One can only conclude that there is a benefit in doing so. When teachers change their views and no longer preach what they once did, and when those changes have moved them away from evangelical theology, it is a matter of honesty to give up the name. What seems to happen is that instead of a turning away from evangelicalism there is a turning upon evangelical theology. It is the best representatives of the heritage who are then treated as aberrants instead of the current defectors.

But giving up the name would mean giving up the funds, the public profile, the book contracts, the salary, the home, the conference invitations, the professorship, the pension, the pastorate etc. In terms of this world there is a cost to honest dealings. But then heresy has always been a moral matter as well as an intellectual one. Since 1945 evangelicalism has been a surprise success story. And that success, in terms of numbers and influence, is hard to give up on.

When confronted over errors (in the specific case I have in mind an attack on the atonement) I have heard someone reply that in fact their view is the gospel. But that gospel was not the gospel which, by their own admission, they used to preach. Doubtless it was a sincerely meant statement. But what is morally questionable is the failure to move on to another constituency altogether. Evangelicalism's low doctrinal immune system makes it an inviting host for "different" theologies to thrive on.

In fairness to the Socinianians, as anti gospel as they undoubtedly were, many of them did suffer in the 17th century for their convictions. And in fairness to John Owen he made it crystal clear that behind the "woolly" talk of believing only "what the Bible taught" there was a pelt and a mouth with sharp teeth. Socinianism is "another gospel". The fact that key elements of it are being passed off as viable 21st centuy options for evangelicals won't turn wolves into sheep.
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Saturday, September 02, 2006

He has been a liar from the beginning

And heresies are his lies against the truth. Here is another example of the older perception of dangerous theological error being attributable to the work of the devil. How did Cyprian know this? Because he read his Bible.


"It is not persecution alone that we ought to fear, nor those forces that in open warfare range abroad to overthrow and defeat the servants of God. It is easy enough to be on one's guard when the danger is obvious...

There is more need to fear and beware of the Enemy when he creeps up secretly, when he beguiles us by a show of peace and steals forward by those hidden approaches which have earned him the name of the 'Serpent'...He invented heresies and schisms so as to undermine the faith, to corrupt the truth, to sunder our unity.

Those whom he failed to keep in the blindness of their old ways he beguiles, and leads them up a new road of illusion".

Cyprian of Carthage
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Heresy “connotes doctrinal deviation from the fundamental truths taught in Scripture and the orthodox Christian church, and active propagation of the same”

Bruce Demarest

New Dictionary of Theology (ed. Sinclair B. Ferguson, David F. Wright, and J. I. Packer; IVP, 1988)

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Friday, September 01, 2006

The Tragedy of Heresy is the Corruption of the Gospel


"The primary danger of heresy, however, is not the theft of institutions, communities, and traditions, but the corruption of the church's proclamation"

John Leith, Crisis in the Church, p. 35
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