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...
First, thanks for your generous words. I would say that if our love and solicitude for Truth makes us irascible and hostile we're doing it wrong.
I think “heretic” is a word that should be used rarely and cautiously. It assumes knowledge difficult to attain about the inner will of someone else — when we scarcely know our own!
“Heresy,” though, is a term of art and can be used dispassionately. It is largely movies and such that make us hear the seething sneer which does not really belong to the word — or need not.
One of MY exercises,neglected of late — I hope because I've milked it dry — is to try to understand what it is that an “error” seeks to preserve. Even if it were true that all heresy comes from some kind of corrupt intellectual selfishness, still it would draw proponents because they saw some good (or thought they did) in it.
So we can say, for example, that Arius wants, commendably, to assert the unity of the one God, or that the Mormons want to assert (1) the sanctity of marriage, of the entire gestalt of marriage, and (2) the promise of theosis. These are GOOD things to assert.
I observed this: pretty good professors, when you ask them a question, give you an answer. REALLY good professors, when you ask them a question, say,”Oh! What a great question! What do YOU think?”
Also, in my three year seminary, we all studied the history of the early Church the first semester of our second year. and for months we're all going around responding to one another by saying, “THAT’s Nestorianism,” or “THAT’s Pelagianism,” etc.
Nietzsche's remark about how despising youthfulness is itself youthfulness somehow applies. If people get STUCK saying, “That's such-and-such a heresy,” with the air of someone crying “Checkmate!” then we're looking at arrested development.
Not that there is not error, nor that some embrace error willfully, stubbornly, and pridefully... But they do so, generally, for some perceived good and their perception is rarely entirely false.
So I think.
Here my latest doggerel:
Why Preachers Pray
Was it Cassandra's crimes made her ignored?
Rejecting light, rebuffing reason's sun,
Torn and raving, she saw what had begun
To spoil, stir up, distress, to bring the sword.
The startled chorus flinched at her raw word,
Attended in diffident respect as one,
Hearing madness and knowing all peace gone,
Still listens to anguish from broken beauty poured.