Back in the saddle, and I see that there have been some developments at Patheos. They’re trying out a new “subscription blog” format, perhaps inspired by Andrew Sullivan. The first such blog is going to be produced is Christian Piatt’s A Heretic’s Guide to the Bible, where $4.99 a month buys you a progressive Christian’s reflections on the Bible.

I hope this works out for Piatt, both for his own sake and because success would make Patheos more stable. I’m also politely skeptical, but then I’m hardly the target audience, am I?

One thing annoys me. Piatt joins a host of progressive Christians in embracing the “heretic” label. There’s something irritating about a white American Christian whose faith is likely just a few degrees off of the Evangelical straight-and-true calling himself a heretic. It’s a smack in the face to the people who died in the Arian-vs-Athanasius trenches, or kept alive the flame of the Manicheans in the face of anti-Cathar persecution.

Here’s the problem: what is a heretic?

Some Christians believe that their dogma can be traced directly back through the bishops to the disciples to Jesus. Heresy means diverging from the true faith passed down through that channel.

Setting aside the lack of historical basis for this claim, the idea that the apostles were able to control and pass on the proper message is called into question by the texts of the Bible. Paul’s letters show a diversity of beliefs already taking shape in the 40s CE. In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, he forcefully separates his own authority from the apostles. This makes Paul himself one of the divergent factions.

A more modern definition incorporates democracy: the majority represents the orthodoxy and minority factions are heretics. There’s an intuitive sense to this that makes it popular today. I suspect that this is what Piatt means when he calls himself a heretic: he’s willing to diverge from what the majority of Evangelicals believe.

This makes it impossible to talk about heresy in the early period, when we have no reliable numbers to tell us who was in the majority. It’s problematic today, when competing sects make for a complicated field: if Catholicism is the largest denomination, are all the thousands of other sects heretics? Finally, is religious truth really something we want to determine by consensus?

In reality, the difference between heresy and orthodoxy is a difference of power. An orthodoxy exists when one faction has enough power to force other factions out of the community. Power explains why the Waldensians were declared a heresy while the Franciscans were not.

While their central message was basically the same(*) – poverty and evangelism – the Waldensians inadvertently undermined the authority of the hierarchy by acting without official approval and translating the Bible into Provençal. In contrast, Saint Francis famously sought the pope’s permission before launching his order. The Waldensians ignored the powers-that-be and were heretics, while the Franciscans submitted to the powers and were accepted into the orthodoxy.

The bottom line is: if you can call yourself a heretic and get away with it, then you’re not a heretic. If there’s no one who can or will enforce the boundaries then heresy doesn’t exist.

That’s the situation in the modern era, where a range of Christianities have to coexist peacefully and the idea of religious tolerance is widespread, the idea of heresy and orthodoxy is obsolete.

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(*) Initially. After being branded as heretics by the hierarchy, the Waldensians suddenly developed a strong anti-clerical message. Can’t imagine why.

The other day I had someone throw the charge of “anti-supernatural bias” at me. It’s a common accusation that tries to explain why the consensus of historians do not accept the historicity of Jesus’ miracles or his resurrection. The argument goes that secular historians have an “anti-supernatural bias” that causes them to throw out all supernatural claims from the past without considering the evidence, and therefore they cannot be relied on to accurately judge the historicity of the gospels.

I would argue with the bias part. I feel that it isn’t a prejudice, it’s a stance based on sound historical principles. However, I must admit that that in effect it is accurate.

First, I am highly skeptical of supernatural claims, and it would take a massive amount of evidence for me to accept their validity.

Second, it is probably impossible for such evidence to survive from ancient times in both sufficient quantity and quality.

So the upshot is that I almost automatically dismiss miracle claims from ancient times. It’s my default stance.

I could go into why I think this stance is justified, but I don’t think it’s worth it right now. I’d just like to point out that everybody accepts this stance when dealing with claims from other religious traditions.

I’ve yet to meet a Christian who accepts both the virgin birth that we read in Matthew and the conception of Cesare Augustus by the God Apollo that we read in Suetonius. They also reject the miracle stories of Muhammad, Buddha, and other religious figures. If they’re Protestant, they generally reject miracles in the stories of Catholic saints.

Shouldn’t we all try to apply the same standards to our own stories that we apply to everybody else’s stories? As James McGrath once pointed out, that’s not just a historical principle, that’s the golden rule:

And so what does it mean to do history from a Christian perspective? It doesn’t mean to allow for miracles in the Biblical stories while assuming that, when the cookies are missing and your child says he or she doesn’t know what happened to them, that you’re dealing with a lie and theft rather than a miracle. It doesn’t mean defending Christian claims to miracles and debunking those of others, nor accepting Biblical claims uncritically in a way you never would if similar claims were made in our time.

It means doing to the claims of others what you would want done to your claims. And perhaps also the reverse: doing to your own claims, views and presuppositions that which you have been willing to do to the claims, views and presuppositions of others