Heresy as Orthodoxy

All people believe. They all believe in something or someone. People base their lives here and their lives hereafter on what they believe about God, gods, and themselves. Unfortunately, believing does not make it true! The problem is that most people, atheists and agnostics excluded, in some way believe in the Bible. Even heretics make their appeal to Scripture to justify departure from orthodoxy.

In our culture the subjective, experiential, and existential aspects of one’s personal spiritual journey is beyond question. The credo “I just believe that . . . .” is not to be judged, challenged or disputed. Someone might as well say, “What I believe is true for me and if it works for me who is anyone to say it’s wrong?” People become so psychologically invested in what they personally believe that they demand the right to believe and they insist everyone must respect that belief even if that belief makes no rational or biblical sense. The only requirement of belief is that it be sincere. Non-Christian writer, Curtis White described in Harper’s Weekly this type of subjective, narcissistic, belief this way, “Yahweh and Baal – my God and yours – stroll arm in arm, as if to do so were the model of virtue itself.”

In his article “Hot Air Gods”, White went on to say “Consequently, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that our truest belief is the credo of heresy itself. It is heresy without an orthodoxy. It is heresy as orthodoxy. The entitlement to belief is the right of each to his own heresy. Religious freedom has come to this: where everyone is free to believe whatever she likes, there is no real shared conviction at all and hence no church and certainly no community.” Over 10 years ago in the publication Modern Reformation, Shane Rosenthal humorously described this contemporary spiritual anarchy with the question, “Was That Your Karma That Ran Over My Dogma?”

Fighting liberalism was easy. Liberals outright denied the inspiration and inerrancy of Scripture. We don’t need to go any further in recognizing that liberal Christianity is not Christianity at all. Machen settled that argument. New Age mysticism with its “the divine within us all” mantra discovered through serious “naval” contemplation is both irrational and blasphemous. And I’m not sure that outside of California, Public Broadcasting, and the Ivy League anyone really cares.

But what happens when everything sounds Christian, the terms are right, yet the practice of the faith smacks of “another gospel”? The great threat to evangelical Christianity in our day is not that which is evidently false but that which tickles our ears and seems right but isn’t; where subjective spiritual experiences and a undefined personal relationship with Jesus (or whoever) stand above and authoritatively over the clear doctrines of Scripture. This results in the God of Scripture being reinterpreted to reflect a god we can live with. As Dorothy Sayers, the British playwright of the last century said, “We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mild,’ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”

To put this in an historical perspective, during the Reformation the formal principle was whether the Church was over the Bible or the Bible over the Church. In our day I think the issue is whether the Individual will be shaped by the Scripture and thereby be conformed to Christ or whether the Individual will look into the mirror of the Bible and only see god in his own image.

“We are thus the congregation of the Church of the Infinitely Fractured, splendidly alone together.” Curtis White, Harper’s Weekly, December 2007