We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded by your direct support for ReKnew and our vision. 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
Lighten Up: I’m Not Worried Frank
Well, my dear friend Frank Viola has been spouting off again about how my “logic will be shredded, excoriated, and turned into confetti before a watching world” when we host our debate on Open Theism this fall. I’m not too worried though, since Frank studied the art of debate in the clinic featured in the…
How God Changes the World
God’s hopes for us began before the creation of the world. And what God intended from the beginning gives us insight into how God works to bring about what he intends. In the first chapter of Ephesians, Paul teaches that God “chose us in [Christ] before the creation of the world to be holy and…
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…
A Book That Won’t Leave You Unchanged
St. Ignatius of Loyola, the 16th century founder of the Jesuits, taught that to experience the transforming power of Scripture, we need to read it “with all five senses,” using our imagination to get on the inside of the characters and story we’re reading about. A just-released book by Frank Viola and MaryDeMuth entitled “The…
Does Analytic Thinking Make You Less Religious?
Andrew Aghapour wrote an article that was posted in Religion Dispatches questioning the findings of studies that concluded that analytical thinking negatively affects religious belief. In the article, Does Analytic Thinking Erodes Religious Belief? Aghapour argues that there are flaws in the studies and that the biggest culprit was the most likely the population used…
We’re in This Together: Unity and Disunity
Hartwig HKD via Compfight Christena Cleveland has been doing a series called Beyond Multiethnic on her blog for the last several weeks. It’s superb. In her introductory post, she states: I’m excited about the booming interest in multiethnic/multiracial church, I really am. But racial/ethnic divisions are really just the tip of the iceberg; they’re often the most glaring…