Well, first, I agree that DouglasKC has managed to maintain an wonderfully civilized level of inquiry here. It's a blessing.
The word heresy is too often used of folks who aren't smart enough to agree with me -- even though they ARE wrong, and on purpose too. ;-)
BUT I think this. While I hold that non-Nicene blah blah theology is a heresy, that does NOT mean that all who hold it are heretics. It is consistent with my view to hold merely that they are in error. The ACT of heresy involves a willfulness hard to muster in so skeptical an age and, strangely, there are those who for quite good reasons can disagree with moi with no grave sin attached to that disagreement.
But second, and this to me is VERY important, somehow conversation falters when I just swagger into the room and say, "You, you, and you over there: you're all wrong. Have a nice day."
I mean seriously that to enter into conversation, REAL conversation, is an act of intellectual hospitality. To have this conversation with you is, for me, too re-examine my view on what we might call "articulable orthodoxy," while talking with DouglasKC means trying to go over Trinitarian thought de novo. One reason I really scaled back my participation here in that too often both sides fall into a mutual exchange of rants, like an artillery duel.
I would say that my years of swinging the cudgels here has brought me to a deeper appreciation of reason (and a more persistent wondering just what exactly the heck reason IS) than I came in here with, just as the conversation about "idols" led me to read John of Damascus and to a deeper appreciation of the Incarnation.
So despite the heat and noise, these conversations CAN be helpful. But they are less so when the attitude is not peer to peer, brethren in seeking to know Truth better.
Sorry for preachiness. In haste....
Hear! Hear! DouglasKC's faith should not be in question, even if his orthodoxy might be. I am happy to call him my brother, and his contributions hereon would be sorely missed, were he not here.
While I hold that non-Nicene blah blah theology is a heresy, that does NOT mean that all who hold it are heretics. It is consistent with my view to hold merely that they are in error. The ACT of heresy involves a willfulness hard to muster in so skeptical an age and, strangely, there are those who for quite good reasons can disagree with moi with no grave sin attached to that disagreement.
Such a position is an admirable exception among your fellows, and one of the reasons why I consider you one of a handful of 'the opposition' that is open to reasonable exchange - This is what leads to real ecumenicism - Pointed, even heated argument can lead to learning on both sides. And that is what I love the most in the rough-and-tumble of the FR Rel forum... The absence of kum-bay-yah, happy-birthday, touchy-feely, plastic-banana ecumenicism. It is in the crucible that metal is tried and tempered.
But in that, reasoned debate must guide the process. For that, I thank you, and very much.
As to the heretic, I would draw your gaze to what Ezekiel must have looked like, lying naked in the streets, playing with his sandcastles, and eating his dung-cooked bread. What a spectacle! One can quite easily imagine that the people passing by had him in derision... And the haughty priests snatching back their clean robes, that no impurity would rub off on them, as they declared and mumbled invective at the unorthodoxy of the whole thing. Do you think they listened to his preaching? Yet who was the man of YHWH?
Yeshua himself was an heretic and a blasphemer in the eyes of the keepers of 'orthodoxy'. Yet who was the Man of YHWH?
In this I would suppose that orthodoxy has it's ultimate disadvantage - Historically, it has always wound up being wrong. Warning and correction come on the lips of the unorthodox, every time... the 'foolish things'... As it MUST. It is a caution: Who is it that always kills the prophets?
These things we bandy about are things of YHWH. Fear and trembling, friend, fear and trembling...