stop calling your neighbor a heretic
sometimes a sheep isn't a wolf, it is just a different-looking sheep.
When I was a freshman in bible college, I’d regularly meet with a group of friends at the campus coffee to discuss the chapel speakers we heard that week. Barely into our first year of education, we would deem which speakers were heretics, and which were true believers.
All enrolled in our “early church history” and “introduction to doctrine” courses, our professors taught us a method of validating Christian truth claims through a series of historical and linguistic tests. These criteria, they explained, would lead us all to the univocal (singular) meaning of any given biblical text.
This hyper-fixation on legitimizing our beliefs formed us to be on the lookout for false doctrine—for wolves in sheep’s clothing—that might lead us astray. We were the new generation of heresy watchdogs, guardians of the flock ready to call out false teaching wherever we saw it.
This mentality, I think, extends far beyond overly ambitious undergrad students and into the church. Most often, we do this by attempting to universalize our particular experience of Christianity as the correct way (even the superior way) to follow Jesus in the world.
One consequence of this universalizing project is a negative framing of relationships made across lines of difference. Engagement with those whom one disagrees (religiously, politically, ideologically, etc.) is not welcomed as an opportunity to learn but a betrayal of one’s community. This is because disagreement in this univeralizing endeavor doesn't only necessitate that another is “wrong” but also that they are “evil.”
At its core, heresy is that which distorts the gospel proclamation that “Jesus is Lord.” It is an attempt to manipulate and co-opt God’s self-revelation in Christ towards ends that are antithetical to the life and ministry of Jesus, which is the very center of our shared faith.
I find Schleiermacher’s contrasting of the "heretical” with the “ecclesiastical” helpful here. Schleiermacher’s first theological move is not to primarily contrast heresy with doctrine or orthodoxy. Instead, Schleiermacher identifies the greatest offense of heresy as the distortion of the life and ministry of the church.
Why is this important? Because, by the power of the Holy Spirit, active participation in the church creates in us an awareness of both God’s divine action in the world and our absolute dependence upon God. Schleiermacher goes as far as saying that “our participation in that Spirit and our own bond with the living influence of Christ are one and the same thing.” To belong to and worship with the local church is to participate in the active work of God in the world today. Heresy disrupts and manipulates this work.
The presence of heresy is a distortion of the Gospel, manipulating our understanding of God’s divine presence in the world and distracting us from our ultimate dependence upon God. To call someone a heretic is a weighty claim that we ought to lament and mourn because it means that minds have been deceived and souls have been turned away from the true knowledge of Christ and the redemptive work of God.
Because we cast the accusation of heresy so often, it has lost its weight. Today, too many Christians cry “wolf” whenever we see a sheep that looks different from their tribe or grazes in a different pasture. Here the accusation of heresy functions not as a warning sign, but as a tool to distance ourselves from our neighbors. When we determine those we disagree with are heretics, we can ignore what they believe about God and remain unchallenged by how their faith leads them to act in the world.
However, this challenge of difference is exactly what the church has been molded and formed by for centuries. The worship-filled reality of the earliest believers was a joining across our differences that reshaped one’s self-perception in light of a new community marked by the centrality of Jesus Christ.
If we desire for the church to thrive in our world today, the solution is not greater isolation and accusations of heresy against our neighbors. Rather, the possibility of ecclesial flourishing lies in our shared commitment to Jesus Christ and communal seeking of the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.
Reading:
Karen Swallow Prior, “I am the Prioress of My Soul” (
)Terry Stokes, Jesus and the Abolitionists: How Anarchist Christianity Empowers the People (forthcoming with Broadleaf Books, 2024).
Talique Taylor, “Why I'm Not An ‘Exvangelical’” (
)- , “Haunted by Home” (BitterSweet Monthly)
Watching:
Quarterback (Netflix)
Righteous Gemstones (HBO)
Barbie
Love this perspective. Thank you for holding space for the difference. It strikes me that this also is connected to the political dimension of the early church, a time where they did not have much political power within Rome. Could heresy have been like prophecy in the OT? False prophets were stoned in the OT for getting the word wrong because Israel was so frail. Heretics perhaps were castigated and excommunicated in the early church because the church was so frail. By contrast, what is the means of heresy post-constantine? And is heresy principally a move of Whiteness? I don't hear Black Christians emerging from Black Christian space concerned about heresy. Notably, I don't hear that amongst most musicians of faith either. What does doctrinal rigidity due for the ossification of Whiteness and of creativity?
Good point. This attitude has led to the ridiculous number of denominations/churches in today's America.