Heretics

I’ve posted about a couple of people recently who have gotten the label ‘heretics’. There’s my own denomination, the United Church of Christ (but that accusation is old news), Jay Bakker who I blogged about recently, John Shelby Spong the controversial retired Episcopal bishop and writer, and Rob Bell.

Now it’s not the case that I automatically like anyone who gets this label, but it seems to me that it gets slapped onto a lot of Christianity’s best and brightest. It got me wondering, just what is a ‘heretic’?

The definition of heresy I found at wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn is:
• unorthodoxy: any opinions or doctrines at variance with the official or orthodox position
• a belief that rejects the orthodox tenets of a religion
In other words, a heretic is an original thinker, someone who asks intelligent questions, someone who looks for new insights rather than going along with the program. It’s someone whose approach to religion is, to some degree, like that of Jesus whose unorthodox ideas put him on the wrong side of the religious leaders of his day.

Let me back up a bit. This probably sounds like I’m saying that orthodoxy is always thoughtless, narrow, intellectually lazy, hard-hearted and wrong and that what gets labeled ‘heresy’ is always faithful, honest, penetrating, expansive, generous and true. It’s not that simple. No point of view is ‘always’ right or ‘wrong’.

There are a lot of doctrines and creeds in Christianity. They are teachings designed to answer troubling questions of faith. As a rule a doctrine or a creed is written to counteract a teaching that is perceived as wrong-headed and dangerous. Sometimes this makes a great deal of sense. Innovative ideas can easily take people down a path that is self-destructive or harmful to others. It’s only responsible to denounce such an idea.

An extreme example is Rasputin the “mad monk” who lived in Russia in the early 20th Century. Rasputin believed that the greatest bliss came from being forgiven… but you can’t be forgiven if you haven’t done anything. He decided that life should be a series of drunken orgies, followed be extreme penance and managed to combine the lifestyles of frat boy and flagellant monk. He also managed to leave a trail of damaged people behind him. I’ve got no quarrel with saying he falls outside the bounds of useful religious teachings.

The problem is that doctrine which is created to address a specific problem is then made into a universal principal that covers every time and every place. When Paul said that women should cover their hair in church he was writing to a city where cultic prostitutes advertised by going around with uncovered hair. It makes sense in the context, but becomes oppressive nonsense anywhere else.

What are worse to my mind are doctrines about salvation. The Bible has some wonderful, statements of faith about salvation. As a rule these are poetic, couched in parables, or otherwise presented as storytelling literature. That’s something you do with truths so profound that prosaic language can’t handle them.

You can sense the truth of such a faith statement. Its power and meaning will resonate on a level that makes it feel right. Unfortunately for the literal-minded among us, such statements are weak on details. That’s when people like Calvin step in. John Calvin was one of the great lights of the Reformation. He started out as a lawyer. While lawyers can be wonderful people, they don’t make the best interpreters of poetic statements of faith. They transform them into inflexible legal documents, which basically cause them to lose all real meaning.

In claiming to have the last word on the inner workings of God’s mind, we get lost in our own arrogance. We cite all kinds of scriptures to prove ourselves right but we forget that, in the scriptures, Job’s friends, and the Pharisees, and even Satan all pulled that trick. It didn’t work for them and won’t work for us. We need to learn enough humility to say those three simple words: “I don’t know.”

I like that statement because it’s honest. With so many difficult questions of faith the only honest answer is “I don’t know.” But that’s also the beginning for some really good conversations about faith.

That’s what the heretics give us. They challenge our arrogance when it needs to be challenged. They question our answers about the things that we really don’t know and the doctrines that are no longer make any sense. So, thank God for the heretics, we really need them.