The Wrong Answer Isn't Always a Heresy: A Long Argument About a Short Word

“What is the good of words if they aren't important enough to quarrel over? Why do we choose one word more than another if there isn't any difference between them? If you called a woman a chimpanzee instead of an angel, wouldn't there be a quarrel about a word? If you're not going to argue about words, what are you going to argue about? Are you going to convey your meaning to me by moving your ears? The Church and the heresies always used to fight about words, because they are the only thing worth fighting about.”

~ G.K. Chesterton

For a good stretch of its history, "heresy" didn't sound like an accusation at all. The Greek hairesis meant a choice, an opinion, a school you had opted into. Luke uses it of the Sadducees (Acts 5:17) and the Pharisees (15:5; 26:5), and Josephus did the same, adding the Essenes for good measure.[1] When Paul's accusers call the Christians a hairesis in Acts 24, Paul all but shrugs at the word: he serves the God of his fathers "according to the Way, which they call a sect" (24:14). In 1 Corinthians 11:19 factions arise so that the approved may become evident; in Galatians 5:20 the word sits in a vice list beside strife and jealousy. Isidore of Seville was still working from the old root in the seventh century: "heresy is called by the Greek word for choice" (Haeresis Graece ab electione vocatur), because each man picks what seems best to himself.[2] Wesley complained in his 1786 sermon on schism that the word had been "strangely distorted for many centuries."[3] He overreached. The etymology is a mnemonic, and the New Testament was already moving past it.

It moves in the epistles. Second Peter 2:1 warns of "destructive heresies" brought in by teachers "denying the Master who bought them," and that is no party label. Paul tells Titus to warn the factious man once, then twice, and then to have done with him, since he is "self-condemned" (Titus 3:10–11). The verdict comes after the correction fails. And in Galatians 1:8–9 Paul pronounces an anathema on anyone, himself and angels included, who preaches another gospel. The positive word, orthodoxy, never appears; Paul reaches for "sound teaching," a deposit to be guarded (1 Tim 6:20; 2 Tim 1:13–14; Titus 1:9). Within two generations the vocabulary had hardened. Ignatius warns the Trallians of poison mixed with honeyed wine, error that keeps the Christian idiom and goes down easily.[4] Justin, around 155, notes with some irritation men "confessing themselves to be Christians" while teaching what no Christian could teach.[5] The label alone settled nothing. It still doesn't.

Everybody quoted verses to support their views, so the early church tested teaching by something public. Irenaeus, around 180, points to the faith the Church "dispersed throughout the whole world" received from the apostles: one Creator, one incarnate Son, one Spirit, a resurrection.[6] His case against the Valentinians is nearly forensic. If the apostles had handed down secret teaching, why does no one in the churches they founded know it?[7] Tertullian sharpened the instinct into his barb, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" (Quid ergo Athenis et Hierosolymis?), which is usually quoted as anti-intellectualism by people who haven't read a man who thought for a living, and who later drifted into Montanism himself.[8] Athanasius had a blunter test: Marcion's followers "were called Christians no more, but henceforth Marcionites," and he expected the same of the Arians.[9] Nicaea in 325 condemned a proposition, those "who say there was a time when he was not." Heresy begins as a claim about God and only afterward becomes a question about the one making it.

The tradition turns out more careful than its caricature. Basil's 188th letter splits the field three ways: heresies break with the faith itself, schisms arise over healable disputes, and irregular assemblies gather around unauthorized leaders.[10] Doctrine, communion, order. Aquinas compresses it: heresy opposes faith, schism opposes the unity of charity, though they often travel together.[11] Cyprian is the test case. In 256 he argued before the African bishops that heretical baptism was invalid, and opened by saying he judged no one and excluded no one from communion for thinking otherwise.[12] He was wrong, as Augustine insisted, yet Augustine turned his example against the Donatists who claimed him: here was a man who held his ground and kept unity.[13] Cyprian died a martyr in 258. The mistake did not cancel that.

Augustine supplied the distinction that does the work. Writing in 397, he exempts those who defend an opinion, however false and perverse, "without obstinate animosity" (nulla pertinaci animositate), especially those who inherited it from their parents and are willing to be corrected.[14] The error stays false; the person is not thereby a heretic. Aquinas tied this to the will: heresy implies choice, a settled preference of private judgment over the authority on which faith rests.[15] That fences the category. A geometry mistake isn't heresy; a man who never professed Christ is an unbeliever; one who abandons Christ altogether is an apostate. Voetius excluded involuntary thoughts, a mercy to every believer ambushed by blasphemy mid-prayer, and Torquemada observed that adultery is a sin but becomes a doctrine only when someone teaches it is permissible.[16]

The opposite error is calling novelty heresy. Vincent of Lérins allowed the faith to grow, provided it was "real progress of faith, not alteration" (verè profectus fidei, non permutatio).[17] Chalcedon's four adverbs, unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably, were new words for an old claim, each closing a specific wrong turn. Nor did the fathers make every dispute a salvation matter. Justin, a premillennialist, admitted that true Christians disagreed with him about the earthly kingdom and did not unchurch them.[18] The Second London Confession speaks of saints "not destroying their own profession by any errors everting the foundation" (26.2). Wesley was half right: in 1 Corinthians heresy is not an error in fundamentals. In 2 Peter it is, and the tradition kept the word for the destructive kind.

Then comes the split: who decides? Article XXI of the Thirty-Nine Articles says general councils "may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God." Rome's 1983 Code (canon 751) defines heresy as obstinate denial, after baptism, of a truth to be believed by divine and catholic faith, and lodges the rule of that faith in the magisterium. Both sides agree on the anatomy, error, profession, obstinacy, and fight over the rule that identifies the error, which is why "heretic" so often smuggles in a conclusion nobody has argued yet. Uglier still is the question of penalty. Lateran IV attached civil sanctions in 1215; Aquinas defended handing the pertinacious to the secular arm.[19] Hus burned at Constance in 1415, Servetus in Geneva in 1553, and Castellio's circle answered the next year by asking whether heretics should be persecuted at all. Servetus's anti-Trinitarianism was a grave error. Killing him was a worse one. "This is false" and "this man must die" are different claims, however often they were chained together, and Locke had the practical point: no man can conform his faith to another's dictates even if he would.

Hold the doctrine firmly and the person carefully, as Augustine did. Heresy is real; some teachings cut the nerve of the gospel, and Irenaeus, Athanasius, and the councils were right to say so aloud. But it is a narrow word. It names a false claim about the faith, held by someone who professes the faith, kept stubbornly after honest correction. Remove one of those and you have a mistake, a sin, a schism, an apostasy, or a disagreement between two people who both love Christ. The fathers knew the difference. We forget it constantly, and the word does its worst damage as a synonym for someone I'm annoyed with.

Notes

1. On the nine New Testament occurrences and Josephus, see Lexham Bible Dictionary, s.v. "Heresy" (Lexham, 2016).

2. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 8.3.1.

3. John Wesley, "On Schism," Sermon 75, §6.

4. Ignatius, To the Trallians 6, ANF 1.

5. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 35, ANF 1.

6. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.10.1, ANF 1.

7. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 3.3.1.

8. Tertullian, De praescriptione haereticorum 7.9.

9. Athanasius, Orations against the Arians 1.3, NPNF² 4.

10. Basil of Caesarea, Letter 188.1.

11. Aquinas, Summa theologiae II–II, q. 39, a. 1, ad 3.

12. Sententiae episcoporum (Carthage, 256), prologue, ANF 5.

13. Augustine, On Baptism, against the Donatists 2.6.7, NPNF¹ 4.

14. Augustine, Letter 43.1.

15. Aquinas, Summa theologiae II–II, q. 11, aa. 1–2; q. 12, a. 1.

16. Gisbertus Voetius, Selectae disputationes theologicae 3:742; Juan de Torquemada, Summa de ecclesia, 877.

17. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 23.

18. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho 80.

19. Fourth Lateran Council, const. 3; Aquinas, Summa theologiae II–II, q. 11, a. 3.