We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
Read This Before You Drop the H-Bomb (“Heretic”) on a Fellow Christian
Image by yhoitink via Flickr
Greg co-wrote the following article on heresy with Frank Viola for BeliefNet. Check it out!
“Heretic.” It’s a favorite word that many Christians have no problem dropping on the heads of their fellow sisters and brothers.
In common parlance, the term is used to describe any person who disagrees with “orthodox Christian teaching.” The problem, of course, is that there are different perspectives on what exactly constitutes “orthodox Christian teaching.”
Some claim this for Calvinism, while others claim this for Arminianism, or for Roman Catholicism, or for Eastern Orthodoxy.
And we must not forget the many Fundamentalist groups who reserve the term “orthodox” only for people who agree with every one of their distinctive beliefs and/or practices.
2,000 years down the church history pike and the body of Christ is sliced and diced into over 33,000 fragments, some of which pull the heresy lever at everyone else without blinking.
In this essay, we are definitely not going to suggest that false teaching doesn’t exist. It existed at the time of Jesus and Paul, and it exists today.
What we are going to suggest is that many people are using the word “heretic” in ways that are not biblical and/or that do not align with its use in church tradition. And this, we believe, brings disrepute on the body of Christ.
Click here to read the rest of the article on BeliefNet.
Category: General
Tags: Belief, Frank Viola, Heresy, Orthodoxy, Unity
Topics: Following Jesus
Related Reading
Is Greg Too Progressive for Today’s Evangelicalism?
Roger Olson recently posted a very interesting essay entitled Stretching the Evangelical Tent Right and Not Left where he notes that many influential leaders within evangelicalism are pushing to include fundamentalists while simultaneously excluding those they consider “too liberal.” It made us wonder if or for how long Greg and other progressive Evangelical theologians like him will be considered “Evangelical.”…
Podcast: Defending the Manifesto (3 of 10)
Greg responds to challenges by William Lane Craig from Craig’s podcast “Reasonable Faith.“ In this episode Greg discusses getting life from Christ and not from “being right” about Christ. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0058.mp3
Why Christ, not Scripture, is Our Ultimate Foundation
In a previous blog I argued that all our theological reflection must not only be Christ-centered, it must, most specifically, be cross-centered. I now want to begin to unpack some of the most important implications of adopting a cross-centered theological perspective. My ultimate goal is to show how a cross-centered theology is able to resolve the…
Overemphasizing Christ?
In response to my work, some have argued that I tend to overemphasize Christ. In light of the claim that in Jesus we have the one and only definitive Word of God and that no previous revelation should ever be placed alongside him or allowed to qualify what he reveals about God, some allege that…
False Gods in the Church
We often think of an idol as a statue, but an idol can be anything we use to meet the needs that only God can meet. In other words, a false god. There is no end to the false gods we create. In Western cultures we often strive to feel worth and significance by acquiring…
Peter Enns Doesn’t Believe in God
R’eyes via Compfight Peter Enns is the master at creating blog titles that are both clever and provocative. The other day he wrote a post that he entitled Why I Don’t Believe in God Anymore. As usual, the title shouldn’t be taken at face value. Peter is actually writing about the challenge of going beyond belief…