What's A Little Heresy Between Friends?

How Being An Occasional Heretic Fits In My Life and Spiritual Journey.

Since American Christianity is in a period of major realignment (that’s a nice way of saying it is a complete shit show), and since everyone is accusing everyone else of being a heretic or Marxist or fascist or whatever, I have decided to share with you, the reader, a few of my favorite heresies. You will see that my favorite heresies are often opposites of one another. This is because I’m a human being and full of contradictions, just like you.

I suppose a note on heresy is appropriate here. It’s a difficult thing to speak of heresies nowadays. Language being what it is, an ever adapting and evolving organism, the term heresy has come to be used in a couple of ways. It has a specific usage and a general usage, and they are often interchanged. In a specific sense, heresy is any theological proposition that is contrary to the theological formulae produced by the first seven ecumenical councils. Basically, anything that challenges the dogmas of the Nicene Creed. But, in a general sense, heresy is used to describe anything that people in one church don’t like about people in another church. Technically, the term “heresy” describes anything you choose for yourself, the implication being that what you choose for yourself is not what the Church has chosen. Ah, the problem of human autonomy, that burden of choice. So here we go…

My first two are based on a view that salvation is transactional, Quid pro quo, some deal you work out with God so you go to heaven when you die.

Antinomianism:

Oh man, this is a favorite of mine. The term literally means “against the law.” But not in the way that, you know, cops arrest you and throw you in jail (or shoot you). It means being against legalism. Legalism, another of my favorite heresies I’ll get to in a minute, establishes your righteousness through your fidelity to certain rules or fulfilling certain obligations. Antinomianism is a claim that since I have been saved by the grace of God, there are no rules or obligations. We don’t want people thinking I’m going around trying to earn my salvation by doing good works. The Holy Spirit will direct me where to go and who to help. If I don’t want to help someone, the Spirit must not have chosen me to help. Sincerely, this is my get-out-of-uncomfortable-situations pass and I use it to convince myself that I don’t need to take care of everyone. God will send someone else.

Legalism:

You’d think if I liked antinomianism so much, I would really hate this one. Yeah, that’s not how heresies work. This one is great because if I commit to doing what the scriptures tell me to do, my salvation will be secure, and God will be happy with me. No need to rely on the arbitrariness of the Holy Spirit to mystically speak to me about what I should do. No need for any kind of ongoing relationship with God, you know, where you pray and worship and act out of gratitude for all things. That shit takes work and I am not disciplined enough to live that out every day. I vacillate between antinomianism and legalism because, depending on the situation, they are ways out of confronting my fears of inadequacy. You probably like these too.

Deism:

This is a great one for when things are going well, and you got your shit together. It’s basically the Watchmaker Theory that God created everything, wound it up, and let it go. He’s not involved with his creation in any way. The divine principles of goodness can be found in the created order and if we live in harmony with it, things go well. It’s been my experience that when things are going well and I’m feeling good, some act of God crashes down and messes it all up. When that happens, I’m not a deist anymore.

Arianism:

Arius, the arch-heretic of early Christianity, professed that Jesus was created, just like you and me. He was the first and most perfect creature, but he was still created and not eternally existing with the Father. Aphorisms attributed to Arius are things like, “Christ shone but by reflected light” and “There is a time when Jesus was not.” This is, of course, a violation of Nicene Orthodoxy. But I am deeply sympathetic to Arius and his conclusions about Jesus. There are times I need Jesus to be just like me. I am sincerely trying to be like him as I move through the world, but there are times when his divinity is a hinderance to my own journey to become like Christ, a burden too heavy to carry. I can’t raise the dead or walk on water or glow with the uncreated light of God. I am just trying to be the Jesus who meets the woman at the well and makes her feel human again, or who eats meals with people who are on the fringes of society. So, if Jesus is a creature just like me, without all that divinity, living the Christian life seems more doable.

Gnosticism:

This one is sooooo satisfying for the same reason Arianism is satisfying. If you are familiar with Gnostics, you are probably saying, “Yeah, Erik, but what school of Gnosticism? Mandaeism? Valentianism? Marcionism? Messalians? blah, blah, blah…” Don’t be pedantic. I’m talking about the run-of-the-mill dualist sects that claimed special, secret knowledge of God. Matter bad, Spirit good. That kind of thing. The reason I like Gnostics is that they make the world make sense. The Gnostics are like your average role-playing gamer, you know, D&D and all that. They assort the universe into varying moral categories and bring order to the actual chaos and randomness of our existence. And there is a game master who controls all the events and the beings and, if you know him well enough, he’ll help you out along the way. For the Gnostics, the physical world is evil, and the spiritual world is good, but there is a Way to transcend the evil matter into the spiritual realm of God. It’s all secret names of angels and creating these various levels of divine and semi-divine beings who are responsible for all the bad and good stuff that happens. It satisfies my periodic need for order in my spiritual life but leaves room for mystery.

And finally, Pelagianism:

Pelagius goes right at the idea that we inherit original sin and insists that Adam’s sin is his own. For someone like me who was raised in a very fundamental Evangelical tradition that was overly concerned with morality and sin, Pelagius is there to push back and insist that we are born morally neutral and that, in fact, any sin we commit is due to the bad example of the world we inhabit (especially the bad examples of well-meaning religious leaders). He went wide of the mainstream when he insisted that if we just follow the example of Jesus, we can earn heaven ourselves, apart from any action of divine grace (basically Legalism). Still, the simple behavioral model of sin Pelagius provides soothes my own anxieties about whether God likes me or not. If I just do the good things, it doesn’t matter if God likes me. He has to let me into heaven.

There you go. I’m a heretic. I admit it. But I lack the commitment or discipline to choose just one and stick with it. This is why Orthodoxy has been good for me. I know what I believe to be true about the Christian faith. I’m never certain, and rarely confident in my beliefs, but I believe them, nonetheless. Every Christian heresy that exists arose from a desire to understand and explain an ineffable God in certain terms. In the end, they are reductionist and diminish the expansive and mysterious character of God. But before you revile the various heresies and their originators, keep in mind that the incarnation of God in the person of Jesus was an attempt to reduce the ethereal existence and character of an utterly transcendent God into a man-sized image. What the councils of the Church decided, after much arguing and fierce dispute, was that it is a far better thing to leave the mystery and terrifying glory of God intact than to reduce it to something that could be contained in a fragile, fleshy shell. That the theological, liturgical, and moral traditions of Christianity insist on keeping God shrouded in mystery suggests that, perhaps we should be working toward allowing God to be bigger than we can imagine than reducing him or her into something we can exert control over.