Aug 08 2006
Another time where I feel like writing…
And yet, I don’t know what I want to talk about.
Tonight at Bible Study, we discussed a topic about which most Christians do not want to consider: Heresy. In fact, most Christians want to deny that this even exists or has existed in the church. Much of this stems from the fact that many Christians have no basis with which they can reject any system of beliefs, because they don’t even know their own epistemology. They don’t even know how they can know what they profess to know, so they have no way to tell anyone that their beliefs are wrong.
The world would paint this as a rosy place to be. They would claim that no one can tell anyone else that their belief system is faulty…until they are ready to tell someone else that their belief system is faulty. But the world by wisdom knew not God. Paul tells us this. So how can they tell us anything about the Lord of the Bible?
The biggest reason, actually, that I see Christians shying away from the topic of heresy, and by extension the whole concept that someone’s beliefs can be pronounced wrong, or anti-Biblical, is that in at least one case, the mainstream evangelical church believes something that the historical Christian church, and all the Protestant Reformers, understood to be a heresy. Several hundred years ago, the church met to proclaim this particular system of belief to be Scripturally unsound, and proclaimed it to be heresy. Those who believed this dangerous belief set were called heretics, and were called upon to repudiate their beliefs or be cast from the church.
Yet mainstream evangelicalism has embraced this system of beliefs. The great reformers such as Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli would have considered the modern evangelical church to be in error, and would have called upon them to repudiate these beliefs. This is why the modern church doesn’t like the concept of heresy…yet the fathers of the Reformation obviously thought differently. If the fathers of the Reformation believed as the mainstream church believes, they would never have protested in the first place. There are obviously beliefs that are dangerous…scary that so many people would see no problem with them.
on