What is a heretic and what is orthodoxy? (A response to Timothy Tennent)

In a recent blog post, Asbury Theological Seminary president Timothy Tennent claimed that the real dividing line in United Methodism is not between “conservative” and “liberal” but between “orthodox” and “heterodox.” Since he gave few supporting details for his claim, I wasn’t sure which heterodoxies he was talking about. Does he mean when the Boy Scouts march an American flag into a church sanctuary as part of a Christian worship service? Or when a church council uses secular business strategic planning methods instead of the prayerful discernment of God’s vision? Or when parishioners choose soccer over church on Sundays to “focus on the family” instead of the kingdom of God? Heterodoxies like these have varying degrees of harm for the life of the church, but I consider a more critical problem in our church right now to be heresy, not heterodoxy. And one of the reasons we have so much rampant heresy right now in United Methodism is because heresy and orthodoxy are both very misunderstood concepts.

Our word heretic comes from the Greek word haeretikos which means a “divisive person.” This word actually appears only one place in the New Testament. In Titus 3:9-11, Paul writes: “Avoid stupid controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law, for they are unprofitable and worthless. After a first and second admonition, have nothing more to do with anyone who causes such divisions [haeretikos], since you know that such a person is perverted and sinful, being self-condemned.” Notice that Paul’s primary concern here is not the incorrectness of the heretic’s views, but the divisiveness of someone who thrives on creating quarrel and controversy. In other words, someone could be on the correct side of a quarrel about the law and termed a heretic by Paul if they are being unduly divisive. That’s just what the word haeretikos means.

Now it’s also true that Paul tells Titus to “rebuke [false teachers] sharply so that they may become sound in faith” (Titus 1:13), so he’s absolutely not telling us that it’s “divisive” to speak up when people are promoting false teachings. Importantly, the word for “sharply” here is apotomes, which doesn’t mean “harshly” but “abruptly.” Paul is not telling Titus to scream at false teachers and assassinate their characters to shoot them down decisively and throw them boldly out of the church. Whatever a “sharp rebuke” looks like, it’s clear that Paul intends for it to happen in a gentle and loving enough way that it doesn’t alienate the false teachers into leaving, because the goal is not to get rid of them but provide them with “sound faith.”

In my own pastoral experience, correcting false beliefs effectively involves listening carefully enough to affirm the truth in what is being articulated and then reframing it correctly instead of telling somebody they’re completely wrong and interpreting their words as uncharitably as possible in order to maximize their wrongness. Most false beliefs are caricatures and misapplications of a legitimate truth. When I’m unjust to that legitimate truth in attacking a false belief because it makes me feel mightier to do a total takedown of somebody else, I am turning what God could use as a teaching opportunity into an “unprofitable and useless quarrel” that promotes me instead of God and alienates the other person from God. I am being a heretic even if I’m right.

There’s a huge difference between picking fights over doctrine heretically and correcting false beliefs pastorally. As I shared in the opening, our congregations are filled with heterodoxies of varying harm. Everyone is at least slightly heterodox about something; we cannot live in the world without acquiring some level of heterodoxy. Those who are hyper-vigilant against the “liberal” heterodoxies are often blind to the “conservative” ones and vice-versa. According to Paul’s use of the word heresy, heterodoxy would become heresy if someone promotes a false teaching forcefully in a way that destroys our communion. But heresy can also happen when we attack heterodoxy in a self-aggrandizing, pastorally reckless way. For instance, I would consider it heretical of me (in Paul’s use of the word) to pick a fight over the American flag in our church’s sanctuary even though its presence is technically heterodox since the harm that it poses to our discipleship is minimal compared to the distraction created by quarreling over it. An Anabaptist might disagree strongly with me about this, and there may be a context where that battle is worth fighting, but for me it would be unduly divisive.

Paul uses another word eris a lot more than haeretikos throughout his letters, and they seem etymologically related. Eris is the word that gets translated as “quarrel” in Titus 3:9. In just about every community to which Paul writes letters, there is some kind of eris going on. In the Corinthian epistles, the eris comes from heretics in the congregation who are trying to pit the teachings of the different evangelists Paul, Peter, and Apollos against each other (1 Corinthians 1:11-12). In Colossians, the eris comes from “super-holy” heretics who wanted to add a ton of rigorous ascetic restrictions to the gospel (Colossians 2:20-23). In Galatians and Romans, the eris comes from the “circumcision” heretics who wanted to force the Gentile Christians to submit to the Jewish Torah.

In some cases, heresy and heterodoxy overlap for Paul. He makes the point that the divisive teachings of the “super-holy” Colossian ascetics are based on “philosophy and empty deceit according to human tradition… and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8). It’s important to note that, in this case, heterodoxy does not involve moral slackening but adding “regulations” that say “do not handle; do not taste; do not touch” (Colossians 2:21). For what it’s worth, most of the heretics with whom Paul battled throughout his letters thought that the gospel he preached wasn’t “hard” enough so they needed to add a bunch of regulations to it.

In the case of the “circumcision faction” who fought with Paul (Galatians 2:12), there is no way to define their heresy as a “heterodoxy” because what they were insisting upon was bringing the new Jesus movement into conformity with Jewish orthodoxy, according to the most straightforward interpretation of Jewish scripture. There was nothing “un-Biblical” about saying that Gentiles needed to be circumcised. The circumcision faction was actually in the position to call Paul heterodox, which he was from a Jewish perspective. But Paul’s heterodoxy as a Jew retroactively became our orthodoxy as Christians. Why? The answer only makes sense if we have a proper understanding of what orthodoxy means.

The word orthodoxy is a combination of two Greek words ortho and doxa. Ortho means “right.” Doxa can have two very different meanings. For the pagan philosophers of classic Greece, doxa meant the common “opinion” of the people. So a pagan definition of orthodoxy would be to have the “right opinions” about a set of topics (which is actually the way that most Christians today define orthodoxy). But a different use of the word doxa comes up in the translation of the Hebrew Bible into Greek. It is used as the Greek translation for the Hebrew kabod, which refers to God’s “glory.” In this second use of doxa, orthodoxy would mean “right glory” instead of “right opinion.”

This second use of doxa is how Paul uses the word in his writing. In my view, Paul provides the best illustration of his understanding of orthodoxy in the beautiful image of Christian communion he depicts in 2 Corinthians 3:18: “All of us with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of God as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” Orthodoxy happens among a community of people whose right perception of the glory of God results in their sanctifying transformation into the image of Christ. Incorrect beliefs disrupt orthodoxy to the degree that they distort our perception of God’s glory; incorrect attitudes about correct beliefs are no less disruptive.

Paul contrasts this vision of God’s doxa being inspired into a group of people as Christ shines more and more brightly in their midst with the spiritually anemic state of those who cannot be inspired by the glory of God because a “veil lies over their minds” when they read scripture (2 Corinthians 3:15)  since they appropriate God’s word for the “ministry of condemnation” rather than the “ministry of justification” (2 Corinthians 3:9). They may have the words of truth before them, but the truth remains inaccessible to them because “only in Christ is [the veil] set aside” (2 Corinthians 3:14). I would argue that many Christians today live under an analogous “veil” that prevents them from really beholding God’s glory no matter how tightly they cling to their Bibles, because even people who have the Bible perfectly memorized can utterly lack the heart of Christ. The difference between Paul’s veiled Bible-clingers and unveiled God-glorifiers is the difference between orthodoxy as a static consensus of the past that we must fight fiercely to retain and orthodoxy as an ongoing dynamic process by which the living God transforms his people “from one degree of glory to another.” Paul’s metaphor is an apt prophetic summary of the church’s subsequent two thousand year history of diving deeper and deeper into orthodoxy as it grapples with the heresies of each phase of its history.

Christians didn’t establish a Biblical canon until the first major heretic Marcion forced us to. We didn’t know that God had to be a Trinity of equally divine, equally eternal persons until Arius, Nestorius, and other heretics forced us to clarify this. We fine-tuned our doctrines of sin and grace because of the heretic Pelagius (though I would argue that these doctrines remain tainted by partial heresies on the part of Pelagius’ rival Augustine who wasn’t infallible and was quite uncharitable to his opponents’ views). We are still working through the tension between the church’s authority and the Bible’s authority raised by the ongoing quarrels started in the Protestant Reformation. It only took Christians eighteen and a half centuries of imperfect orthodoxy to discover that there really is “no longer slave nor free” in Christ. We are still in the process of discovering that there is “no longer male and female” in Christ (Galatians 3:28) as well as recovering from the church’s long-standing semi-gnostic view that sex is always evil and only permissible for the exclusive sake of procreation.

The incorrectness of the heresies in the church’s past may be self-evident to us today, but their incorrectness was discerned and articulated after the fact. If the heresies had never existed, the correct doctrine that had to be articulated in order to condemn them never would have been developed. It simply isn’t historically accurate to talk as though the apostles of the early church had all the answers from the beginning and people have simply tried over and over again to deviate from them. It’s rather the case that Christians have wrestled out our orthodoxy over centuries of contemplating the theological implications of Biblical teaching in their changing contexts. Some teachers within this process had “a morbid craving for controversy and for disputes about words” (1 Timothy 6:4) so they didn’t wrestle in good faith and fell into heresy. To their chagrin, the Holy Spirit guided the church to reject their errors and thus set the boundaries for orthodoxy. The Gnostics, the Arians, the Pelagians, and all the other historical heretics had plenty of Biblical justifications for their teachings. But the way that they used the Bible was ultimately determined to be disharmonious to the communion of the church and theologically incoherent.

Orthodoxy is more essentially harmony than it is correctness. Heterodoxy can and does interfere with our ability to see God’s glory and be transfigured by it, but people can have heterodoxy in their head and gain an orthodox heart in spite of themselves. There are members of my congregation who have definitely received a deep measure of God’s glory in their hearts along the lines of 2 Corinthians 3:18 despite their intellectual struggles with very fundamental Christian concepts like the meaning of Jesus’ cross and the historicity of his physical resurrection. I don’t call them heretics because they express these struggles privately with a lot of humility and grief rather than raising a ruckus and creating stumbling blocks for other people’s discipleship. In contrast, there are Christians who destroy orthodoxy by smashing others over the head with their correct beliefs in a disharmonious, self-aggrandizing way. If you cause people to lose their faith and leave the church because of your mean-spirited, egotistical approach to “defending” orthodoxy and attacking their erroneous beliefs, then don’t go boasting before Jesus like Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor because he might just kiss you on the mouth like he did to Judas.

The best metaphor I can think of for orthodoxy is to say that it’s like a song in which millions of musicians are trying to improvise simultaneously. There’s a range of possibility for playing within the song of orthodoxy, but it has a certain key and a certain rhythm. Some notes that we play are perfectly on-point; others are unobtrusive enough; other notes are just sour. Some people play by ear and others meticulously follow the sheet music. Either way, you really should spend a whole lot of time learning God’s song by studying scripture and especially the character of Jesus before you try to play with any volume.

Heretics are people who wreck the harmony of God’s song, either by playing sour notes or by playing the right notes too loud or by trying to hijack the song from God and make themselves the conductor. For example, if you tell everyone around you that Jesus’ cross can’t involve a sacrifice for sins in any way, despite all the Biblical references, because to you that means “divine child abuse,” that’s like removing all the G notes from a piano and then trying to play a song in the key of C. It isn’t absolutely fatal, but the song is severely hobbled. Likewise, if you say that someone who was created by God outside the binary of cis-gendered heterosexuality is thus a cursed, broken product of “fallen creation” who needs to spend all of life alone to satisfy your “traditional” sensibilities, that’s like smashing all the clarinets in the orchestra when parts of God’s song require a clarinet solo.

I think the song of orthodoxy has room for key changes and other developments, but only the conductor can make that decision and I’d better be damn sure that he has before I start to play different notes. Every time the conductor does decide that it’s time to transition into a deeper, more perfect rendering of orthodoxy, there’s going to be a big fight on the stage since some people will see the conductor’s signal and others will miss it. There will also be many instances in which the oboes or the cellos simply go renegade for a few bars without the conductor’s direction and have to be reined back into orthodoxy. Ultimately our goal is to get through the song together. As one who plays music by ear, I need the help of those who have mastered sheet music when there are weird counter-intuitive notes that have really cool effects but only if you play them with perfect precision. I would also venture to say that those who meticulously follow the sheet music need to learn how to loosen up and catch the groove from those of us who play by ear.

It would be a heretical disruption of God’s song for me to make a blanket statement that those who disagree with me about homosexuality or any other issue are heterodox while my side is orthodox. What a clumsy caricatured oversimplification that would be! Paul would call me a contentious haeretikos if I did that, because it would only perpetuate worthless, unprofitable quarrels instead of pursuing loving, truthful conversation that seeks “peace and mutual edification” (Romans 14:19). I have no business trying to push other people out of God’s song whom God has put into his song. Instead, I should listen deeply to learn how to speak to their truths in the hope of earning enough trust to offer whatever pastoral correction is warranted by any errors I encounter. Hopefully, I will receive helpful corrections from them that show me how to play my part in God’s orthodoxy with greater precision.

We are all heterodox because nobody has mastered God’s song perfectly, but that’s not to say that we should be content with our mediocrity and give up striving for deeper beauty and elegance. Play your notes softly and tentatively with a readiness to resolve to something else, so that you don’t kill the mood of God’s song when you mess up. You’re only a heretic if you mess up arrogantly and insist that everyone else is wrong. Even when you do that, God will forgive you. Just always stay teachable, admit your mistakes, and be a little less cocky next time. Most of all, seek to order your steps in the rich and perfect groove of the Holy Spirit, because the more that you do so, the more you discover that orthodoxy has quite a beat.