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
When Tradition is a Too Small Cage…and a Fence
fusion-of-horizons via Compfight Jonathan Storment wrote a fabulous article on the functions of tradition and the ways it can sometimes lead to senseless division among us. We’re really tired of division over things that don’t really matter. Aren’t you? Let’s keep the center the center, and offer grace where we differ. From Jonathan’s blog post: We…
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.”…
Lighten Up: You Gotta Believe In Something, Man!
Two things here: 1) How does this philosopher not see that “not believing in believing” is itself a belief? 2) Is that a turtleneck or is that philosopher just really hairy?
Lighten Up: Ball and Chain Theology
Let’s not allow our theology to keep us from encountering one another in meaningful ways.
Participating in God’s Love
Greg took a slight detour from his reflections on free will in this video in order to talk about Jesus’ prayer in John 17. He discusses the idea that God desires the kind of unity among his children that the triune God enjoys. “He wants our love to participate in the triune God.” In order to…