A RESPONSE TO “TRADITIONAL HERESIES: ORTHODOXY AND THE QUEST FOR LIBERATING TRUTH”

I read Ben Wyatt’s piece, “Traditional Heresies: Orthodoxy and the Quest for Liberating Truth,” with great interest, not only because Ben and I were seminary classmates, but also because the piece articulates a compelling historical argument—namely, that those advancing traditionalist positions can hardly lay claim to orthodoxy merely by virtue of their desire to protect the status quo. Their impulse to resist doctrinal innovation led them to occupy an unenviable position in the annals of church history. Those who claim a traditionalist mantle in the modern day would do well to think twice before conflating how things have been with how things ought to be—an all-too-common error—and packing their bags and going home.

At the same time, it strikes me as ironic (though this does nothing to detract from the piece) that the argument seems to be that Montanism and Arianism are wrong in large part on the basis of the same authority that the Montanists and Arians claimed supported their own views: tradition. While the piece does describe the Montanists’ chief sin as a rejection of Scripture, its critique of the Montanists focuses on the fact that the Montanists mischaracterized the tradition they purported to defend, where the most faithful interpreter of the tradition, Saint Paul, stood on the other side. Likewise, one of the chief critiques leveled against Arius’s theology is that it was “inconsistent with the oldest orthodox traditions,” such that it could make no sense of why “the very earliest Christians had worshiped and prayed to the Son.”

Tradition is a fickle thing, and as Ben shows, appeals to tradition in our own day can serve to promote progressive and conservative causes alike. On one hand, “calls to restore ‘traditional’ church teachings” may be “attempts to return to an imagined past . . . far more restrictive and oppressive than the authentic Gospel.” On the other hand, they may well be ways of “holding on to those tiny, fragmented pieces of reality that we call ‘revelation’” that then allows us to experience “liberating truth” rather than “falsehoods.”

But what all this points to isn’t a need to distinguish between a “doctrine’s relationship to authority” and a doctrine’s “relationship to truth” in order for us to determine whether a doctrine has “liberating power.” Rather, if liberation is in fact dependent on overcoming falsehoods, then knowing how to pursue liberation will invariably depend on how we make sense of the relationship between truth and authority in the first place. After all, how do we know if a doctrine—indeed, anything we believe—is true, if not on the basis of some authority? This is inherent in the very word “doctrine.” What teaching can there be without a teacher, even if the teacher is sometimes our own experience? And some teachers, as many of us have experienced, are better (and some, worse) than others. Some navigate rocky terrain better than others. If we hope to avoid following them into a pit, it matters a great deal who or what we take for our authority when it comes to truth claims, even if the authority we follow varies depending on the kind of truth claim at stake.

In other words, a doctrine’s liberative power is inseparable from its relationship to the right authority, whether we understand that authority to be one or more of experience, reason, tradition, Scripture, or anything else. In this light, the church’s struggles with Montanism and Arianism are instructive, not only as to how traditionalists can be heretics, as the piece demonstrates, but also as to how the church went about evaluating the traditionalists’ claims in the first place. And in each case, what it meant for the heretics to deny liberating truth was ultimately that they denied, in different ways, the witness of Scripture.

Montanism’s denial of second marriage contradicted, as Ben notes, Romans and 1 Corinthians; moreover, its new prophetic impulses raised the specter of denying the sufficiency of Christ and the apostles’ teachings, while its division of the body of Christ into the spiritual and the fleshly undermined Ephesians’ insistence on one faith and one baptism. Arianism’s denial of the Son’s divinity failed to make sense of John 1, particularly when read alongside the Johannine epistles, and it failed to make sense of why Jesus would allow those whom he had healed to worship him as God while every other created being in a remotely similar position in Acts or Revelation was aghast that anyone dared to bow down before them as if they were God.

The struggle against heresy is a struggle for truth and for liberation, for freedom in the highest sense of the word. It is, as Ben rightly noted, a struggle to help ourselves and others see creation illumined with the splendor of God’s presence. At the same time, the struggle against heresy is also nearly universally a struggle over which authority or authorities ought to prevail. Theologically, the traditionalist heresies that Ben highlights fell because they could not grapple coherently with the apostolic tradition as it was ultimately set forth in Holy Scripture. All those seeking to avoid heresy would do well to build their claims upon that rock, “upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the cornerstone” (Eph. 2:20), lest Saint Irenaeus’s words about the Valentinians be applied accurately to them:

They gather their views from other sources than the Scriptures; and, to use a common proverb, they strive to weave ropes of sand, while they endeavor to adapt with an air of probability to their own peculiar assertions the parables of the Lord, the sayings of the prophets, and the words of the apostles…In doing so, however, they disregard the order and the connection of the Scriptures, and so far as in them lies, dismember and destroy the truth. By transferring passages, and dressing them up anew, and making one thing out of another, they succeed in deluding many through their wicked art in adapting the oracles of the Lord to their opinions. Their manner of acting is just as if one, when a beautiful image of a king has been constructed by some skillful artist out of precious jewels, should then take this likeness of the man all to pieces, should rearrange the gems, and so fit them together as to make them into the form of a dog or of a fox, and even that but poorly executed; and should then maintain and declare that this was the beautiful image of the king which the skillful artist constructed, pointing to the jewels which had been admirably fitted together by the first artist to form the image of the king, but have been with bad effect transferred by the latter one to the shape of a dog, and by thus exhibiting the jewels, should deceive the ignorant who had no conception what a king's form was like, and persuade them that that miserable likeness of the fox was, in fact, the beautiful image of the king. (Against Heresies, I.8.1)