Thanks
Sure...see post #100. I would have pinged you if I would have read your question before posting that response.
Since I only touched on it in passing, I might add this. Almost any decent teacher of the Scriptures will tell you that they are mistaken on some of what they teach. It is just that we don’t know what part of it is mistaken, or we would correct it.
The Catholic Church claims that it, alone, is the repository of truth in the Scriptures. When they take basic statements of the Scripture and recast them to suit their purposes, we object and find this aberrant. If the topic is sufficiently serious as to affect what someone would conclude about salvation, that is heresy. Such are, as I mentioned in the other post, many of the Catholic claims about salvation.
We do know this, many of the basic doctrines regarding salvation such as justification by faith, the election of the believers, the priesthood of the believers, and the utter transcendence and sovereignty of God are so well established from dozens of different statements in the Scriptures, that these are not the place that errors of believers outside of Rome likely exist.
And, I will be quick to note that there are likely believers connected with the Catholic Church, but not because of what the church teaches. Rather, it is in spite of it.
Peripheral issues (what does baptism actually mean?, how does one deal with another believer’s sin?, do we fall asleep in Jesus or go right into His presence at death?, etc.) are not of sufficient consequence to be heretical.
Hope that helps. Grace to you.
Heresy is the obstinate post-Baptismal denial of an revealed truth of the Christian faith. I suppose you could distinguish it from plain old error by saying a person is in error first. If he is obstinate in his views even after he is corrected by competent ecclesiastical authority, he becomes a heretic.
To be a formal heretic is a willful sin. One can be in error or teach aberrant doctrine and not know it.