One of my most treasured belongings is also one of the most humorous. During graduate school at Boston University, I was known for calling out any and all comments that could even remotely be interpreted as heterodox. I assure you that I was not on some sort of intentional campaign. More often than not these comments were part of witty interchanges. But in the midst of this fun, another doctoral student gave me a wonderful gift, a bespoke stamp with the word “HERESY.”
I’ve never actually used that stamp as a stamp. But at the beginning of classes, I’ve often brought it out to show it to my students with the promise that if they cite Wikipedia in their research papers, I will use it. A few times I did have students make heretical claims in their papers, but each time I would speak to them privately – without the stamp – and each and every time it was ignorance rather than heterodoxy that was really at play.
Words such as heresy, apostasy, heterodoxy, or even their converse such as orthodoxy, are all ecclesiastical words with a great deal of history behind them. And they have meaning, even if in today’s ecclesiastical climate they’re not always used well.
As Wesleyans, the Bible is our primary source for understanding God’s will for the creation, for “all things necessary to salvation.” We can also adopt Wesley’s affinity for “primitive Christianity,” not as equal to Scripture but in addition to it. Wesley believed that the early Christians held firmly to the faith despite numerous challenges to it both without and within the Christian community. He often lists church fathers as faithful guides. This early period is seen as part of the great consensual tradition of the Church, a tradition with general agreement on core Christian beliefs, sometimes referred to as the Rule of Faith.
It was in this earliest period, though, where we see the use of the word “heretics,” particularly in Irenaeus’ broadside against Gnosticism. Various forms of Gnosticism held that the physical was itself evil and that select knowledge was the means by which salvation – freedom from the physical – could be gained. Irenaeus quickly saw that if these ideas were applied to Christianity, the core of the faith would be in jeopardy. And he was right to be alarmed. This Gnosticism when applied to the Christian message undermined key theological claims such as Christ’s Incarnation, the efficacy of his death, and his bodily resurrection. For the Gnostic, God would never become tangible; knowledge rather than the blood of Christ was the key to salvation; and anything close to resurrection would entail freedom from the body, not a resurrected one. At the heart of Gnosticism is escape from the physical world. At the heart of Christianity is the full redemption and renewal of God’s creation. The teachings of the church on God’s creating work, the nature of Jesus Christ, and of salvation itself were at stake.
Continue reading at Firebrand Magazine here.
Ryan N. Danker is the director of the John Wesley Institute, Washington, DC and assistant lead editor of Firebrand.
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