I recently discovered that Amazon Prime offers a $7.99 per month subscription to The Great Courses. My life has been transformed! No longer will I be a prisoner to the inanity and insanity of standard TV fare. Good-bye, Colin Cowherd! Adios, FOX News!
I used to buy the CD versions of The Great Courses to listen to on my 40-mile commute to and from work. They were wonderful. My first exploration of the video version is a 24-part series on Gnosticism by a world-class scholar: The Great Courses.
In my experience, most modern Christians have little grasp of how tremendously influential the early heresies like Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Docetism, Arianism and others actually were. We tend to think Christianity flowed fairly seamlessly from Jesus' life and teachings to Paul's epistles and the Gospels to the seven Ecumenical Councils to the mainstream Christianity we have today (fractured and fragmented as it may be). The heresies were just pesky nuisances that popped up here and there and had to be stamped out like theological Whack-a-Mole.
Uh, not exactly. The heresies were tremendously influential and make appearances in the New Testament in passages most of don't recognize for what they are. If you don't understand why 1 John 4:3 says every spirit who doesn't confess Jesus came in the flesh is not of God and is the spirit of the Antichrist, you need to brush up on your Docetism.
Even the doctrines most branches of mainstream Christianity accept today were negotiated and hashed out in ways that involved more political intrigue and even violence and murder than nuanced theological debate. Read the history of the doctrine of the Trinity, for example – it ain't pretty.
All the major heresies were and are fascinating, intellectually sophisticated theological systems. They mostly attempted to deal with two key issues: (1) How could an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God have created a world so obviously flawed and so thoroughly in the grip of evil; and (2) who and what was Jesus? The Gnostics and Manicheans confronted the first issue head-on and said, "He couldn't have." The Docetists and Arians confronted the second and rejected the notion of Jesus as both fully human and fully divine.
Why are they "heresies" and not simply "alternative understandings" of Christianity? Well, because there evolved a Christian power structure that eventually prevailed and declared them anathema. We like to tell ourselves the process was guided by the Holy Spirit, but when you examine the process (and how many of us ever do?) it looks more like a feud between Trump and Biden supporters or perhaps the Spanish Inquisition than anything guided by the Spirit. It ain't pretty.
When I study the major heresies, I'm always struck by how often I encounter something that has me saying "Yes, that makes a lot of sense" or even "Wow, that's pretty much the understanding I arrived at on my own."
But this isn't really a blog entry about the supposed heresies. I'm not peddling Gnosticism or Docetism.
We accept that what we call mainstream Christianity is correct because it's what prevailed. We tell ourselves the Holy Spirit guided the process because this is certainly more satisfying than admitting it was mostly an ugly, very human power struggle.
But wait, forget the supposed heresies – what is "mainstream Christianity" anyway? What is the level at which the Orthodox, Catholics and Protestants all agree? It would have to be an exceedingly basic statement of Christian essentials. I don't believe all who consider themselves mainstream Christians would agree on something as basic as the Nicene Creed – and many would insist it's much too basic. Maybe we need another seven Ecumenical Councils, eh?
Are Catholics heretics? The Orthodox and lots of Protestants pretty much think so. Are Protestants heretics? The Orthodox and Catholics pretty much think so. To the extent they don't actually use the term heresy but tend to speak of "misunderstandings" or "incorrect doctrines" or even "different understandings," it begs the question: Where is the line between "Christian brothers and sisters who have a different understanding than we do" and heretics?
On the Christianity Board forums, there are so many different notions of Christianity, what the Bible is and how it works, and the key doctrines that it's astonishing – and this is just one little slice of Christendom on a fairly small forum. Just yesterday I encountered people whose understandings were so different from any Christianity of which I can conceive that I'd call them "pretty much insane" and they'd cheerfully label me an "ungodly heretic" or worse.
In a nutshell, I think we're all heretics for two principal reasons – the elephants in the room that typically go unacknowledged:
1. The Bible is simply not an internally consistent, coherent document. Those who try to pretend it is, to make sense of it as though it all fit together into a coherent whole, drive themselves to the edge of madness and sometimes beyond. The rest of us are forced to pick and choose those portions that make sense to us and resonate with us and attempt to fit them into narrative that is coherent to us and intellectually and emotionally satisfying to us. Us, us, us, us. So even though we may identify with a particular branch or denomination, we really have our own individualized Christianity (and who's to say that our chosen branch or denomination is any more correct than the Gnostics or Manicheans anyway?).
2. Even the mainstream Christian narrative makes no sense at anything other than the 30,000-foot level. It's like an oil painting - eight feet away, it's beautiful; up-close, all you see are brush strokes and globs of paint. It doesn't really answer the questions with which the supposed heretics struggled any better than they did. The fact is, I think, that at some level we know the mainstream Christian narrative isn't Ontologically True (meaning really and truly the way things are, the way you'd see and understand them if you were God). It's a narrative that was negotiated and hashed out in an effort to deal with exactly the same issues with which the Gnostics, Manicheans, Docetists, Arians and others struggled. Like those supposed heresies, it's an allegorical, metaphorical attempt to deal with what are fundamentally unfathomable mysteries. We pretend it's Ontological Truth when at some intuitive level we know it isn't.
The big fiction – or so it seems to me – is that the whole ugly process of arriving at a mainstream Christianity was guided and inspired by the Holy Spirit and that the mainstream narrative does in fact represent what God wants us to understand about the Ontological Truth. But then we bump up against the fact that "Christianity" had fractured into feuding understandings even before Paul wrote his first epistle and has only become more fractured and fragmented through the centuries. The fiction is a house of cards that won't withstand the slighest breeze.
There really is no Christianity that can be neatly divided into mainstream doctrines and heresies. There is only some mysterious Ontological Truth that the supposed heresies may portray as accurately (or inaccurately, as the case may be) as any branch or denomination of mainstream Christianity. We are all, either individually or as part of some branch or denomination, attempting to arrive at a coherent, emotionally and intellectually satisfying understanding of this Ontological Truth. Insofar as the Ontological Truth is concerned, however, we're all heretics. Those who insist they aren't, that they actually grasp the Ontological Truth, are the most delusional of all.
Your mileage may vary – and once again I'll bet it does!
