Heresy

From party to destructive teaching

The Greek hairesis (αἵρεσις) first meant simply a choice, and so a party or school. Acts calls the Sadducees "the party of the Sadducees" (Acts 5:17), and Paul tells Felix that he worships God "according to the Way, which they call a sect" (Acts 24:14). In the letters, though, the word grows heavy:

Now there were also false prophets among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you. They will secretly introduce destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them — bringing swift destruction on themselves.

2 Peter 2:1

Paul lists "factions" (Galatians 5:20) among the works of the flesh and tells Titus to "reject a divisive man after a first and second admonition" (Titus 3:10). Wesley took the heretic of that verse to be one who stubbornly pursues foolish questions and so "occasions strife and animosities, schisms and parties in the church" Wesley. In Scripture, then, heresy joins false teaching with the stubbornness that divides the church. The test is Christ and the gospel: John asks whether a spirit "confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh" (1 John 4:2), and Paul warns against anyone who preaches "a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you" (Galatians 1:8).

How the church has judged

In the second century Irenaeus wrote Against Heresies to answer Gnosticism, and the councils of the fourth and fifth centuries rejected teachings such as Arianism and Nestorianism, drawing the boundaries in creeds (see After the apostles). The Catholic Church defines heresy as the obstinate denial or doubt, after baptism, of a truth that must be believed, and distinguishes it from apostasy, the rejection of the faith as a whole, and from schism, a break in the church's communion Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The Reformers and later Protestants distinguished fundamental articles, necessary to salvation, from other questions. Evangelicals today generally speak of heresy when a teaching overturns what the ancient creeds confess about the Trinity and the true deity and true humanity of Christ, the authority of Scripture, or salvation by grace through faith. They do not call it heresy when faithful churches differ over the mode of baptism, predestination, spiritual gifts or the order of the last things. For practical discernment see How can I tell a heresy or cult?

The weight of the word

Church history also remembers this word becoming a sword. From the late fourth century the empire punished those condemned as heretics, and in the Middle Ages some were put to death. In the Reformation era Anabaptists were killed in Catholic and Protestant lands alike, and in 1553 Michael Servetus, who denied the Trinity, was burned at Geneva, with Calvin closely involved in his trial. The church must remember these things with humility. Matthew Henry insists that we contend for the faith "by suffering with patience and courage for it, not by making others suffer if they will not embrace every notion we call faith, or important" Matthew Henry.

In Korea the word is used above all for groups whose leaders present themselves as the returning Christ or a new saviour, or set new revelation above Scripture, and many denominations study and rule on such teachings in their general assemblies. Used lightly against churches that merely think differently, it loses its weight; as Matthew Henry says, "There is a strange proneness in us to think that all do wrong who do not just as we do" Matthew Henry. The aim of discerning heresy is not condemnation but protecting people and keeping a way home open. Its measure is orthodoxy: the faith Scripture teaches and the church has confessed together.