TRADITIONAL HERESIES: ORTHODOXY AND THE QUEST FOR LIBERATING TRUTH
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Accusations of heresy are all the rage these days.
In evangelical circles, writers and pastors have recently faced heresy charges for using feminine pronouns for God, questioning traditional sexual moralities and gender expression, and denying the doctrine of the Trinity. Within the Episcopal Church, proponents of same-sex marriage are the most frequent targets of heresy accusations, though not the only ones. John Shelby Spong’s “non-theistic God” provoked similar apoplexy in the recent past.
My goal in this essay is not to pass judgment on whether any of these allegations of heresy are warranted (though for the record, my answers are, respectively: no, no, yes, no, and probably not, though I find Spong deeply misguided). I want instead to call attention to a persistent feature of the accusations: their near-exclusive targeting of theological progressives. There are exceptions, of course. Members of the theological left will occasionally accuse more conservative teachers of heresy. On the whole, however, there is a presumption of orthodoxy in favor of the “traditionalist” side; gender egalitarians must prove their orthodoxy, but not complementarians, and proponents of same-sex marriage have grown used to having their very Christianity called into question while those against same-sex marriage, so long as their views lie somewhat to the left of the Westboro Baptist Church, usually receive the benefit of the doubt.
These facts suggest that we have come to view heresy and orthodoxy in peculiarly modern, and peculiarly wrong, ways. The latent assumption of our association between heresy and liberal or progressive theology is that heresy is a product of innovation, progress, and dissatisfaction with tradition. Orthodoxy, by contrast, favors tradition and resists change and evolution.
A quick glance at church history, however, shows us that this view of heresy is hopelessly one-sided. Traditionalist theologies have incubated heresy at least as often as innovative ones. Consider Montanism, a 2nd century renowned for its strict ethical codes. In the eyes of the Montanists, the church of their day had abandoned its early virtue and stringent asceticism in favor of an easy life more conformed to the world around them. In their attempt to revive “traditional” ethical standards, Montanists went so far as to prohibit remarriage after a spouse’s death, in direct contradiction of Romans 7:2-3 and 1 Corinthians 7:39.
The irony is, I hope, clear: in the name of restoring traditional Christian morality, Montanists put forward ethical standards that Saint Paul himself rejected. It turns out that calls to restore “traditional” church teachings are not always calls for orthodoxy. Sometimes, they are attempts to return to an imagined past – a past that is often far more restrictive and oppressive than the authentic Gospel.
Montanism was not the only heresy to indulge in this false traditionalism. Arianism – arguably the most famous and pernicious heresy in church history – was deeply traditionalist in orientation. Several modern historians, including Archbishop Rowan Williams (1), have argued that Arius and his allies were deeply alarmed by the then-fashionable trend of referring to the Son as homoousios (translated in the Nicene Creed as “of one Being”) with the Father. Against this theological innovation, Arius wanted to preserve the “traditional” belief that the Father alone was truly and properly God; the Son and the Holy Spirit were creations of and subordinate to the Father. They were exalted creations, to be sure, and far closer to the Father in power and glory than we could ever hope to be. But they were creations nonetheless, and to call them the Father’s equals was, in Arius’s mind, to insult the sole exalted divinity of the Father.
Arianism saw itself, therefore, as preserving traditional beliefs about God in the face of theological innovation. Yet Arius’s theology was rightly judged to be inconsistent with the oldest orthodox traditions. Try as he might, Arius could not satisfactorily explain why, if the Son was a mere creation of the Father and not properly God, the very earliest Christians had worshiped and prayed to the Son. Even worse, if Jesus Christ was not God in the flesh, then God had not really assumed human nature. As the famous maxim says, what is not assumed is not redeemed, and so Arianism rendered the good news of redemption in Jesus Christ incoherent.
The same irony that we saw in Montanism rears its head again: the self-styled traditionalism of Arius and his allies proves, in the end, to be less orthodox than the seemingly innovative language of the Nicene Creed.
Not only was the Nicene Creed more traditional than its traditionalist opponents; it may also have been more liberating. Several historians have noted that Arius’s insistence that God was an omnipotent monad, sharing power and wisdom with no one else and ruling the world by delegating tasks to subordinates, made God look uncomfortably like the Roman Emperor. Nor did Arius’s allies hesitate to apply these abstract parallels to the real world. Eusebius of Caesarea, a high-profile bishop and political ally of Arius, delivered the infamous Oration in Praise of Emperor Constantine, in which he argued that imperial rule was the best form of government because it most resembled the way the Father ruled all creation. While Eusebius’s Nicene contemporaries were by no means innocent of complicity with state-sponsored oppression, none of them descended to his level of bootlicking.
We should admit that while many historians accept this analysis, it is still somewhat controversial. Given that Arianism never became the Church’s official teaching, any link between Arian theology and political oppression must be somewhat speculative. Yet there is a second, and ultimately more important, reason to believe that Nicene orthodoxy is liberating: it is the truer system, and the truth shall set us free.
Our modern association of heresy with progressivism misses this crucial link between truth and liberation. It leads us to think that a doctrine’s relationship to authority, rather than its relationship to truth, determines its liberative power. But this is simply not so. Oppression always makes its bed with falsehoods: an imaginary hierarchy of genders, a deeply muddled account of human sexuality, or bad histories of race relations. Oppressive narratives justify themselves by substituting figments of human imagination for a far more complicated, and therefore often less attractive, reality. Just so with heresy, which substitutes a figment of human imagination – a nostalgic view of an impossibly pristine past; a rigid insistence on one’s own understanding of God; or, occasionally, a utopian vision of human-driven, human-centered progress – in place of the reality of a God who transcends all human imagining.
In the end, truth and liberation are not two different concerns we must weigh against each other. They are two sides of the same coin. There can be no liberation without an understanding how the world truly is, and who God truly is, apart from our distorted prejudices. Likewise, truth remains only half-grasped if it stays in our heads; it is only when we fight for liberation that we truly believe what we say.
The great danger of heresy is that, by severing our connection to reality, it traps us inside our heads and prevents us from experiencing this liberating truth. The great hope of orthodoxy is that, by holding on to those tiny, fragmented glimpses of reality that we call “revelation,” we can encounter the living God who is Reality itself, and whose service is perfect freedom.
That is a hope worth striving for.
To grasp the fullness of any piece of God’s self-revelation to us would, I think, be like nothing so much as seeing a lightning bolt on a dark night that transforms the indistinct, inky night into a stunning tableau in which we see everything as it is. In that moment of illumination, we would see the earth and its animals as fellow creatures of God, in whom God takes deep and irreplaceable delight. We would see each other as fellow images of God, resplendent with the borrowed glory of our Creator. We would see ourselves as the utterly beloved and forgiven beings that we are. And we would see God, radiant Truth itself and perfect Freedom itself.
Simply put, we would see the truth, and the truth would set us free.
It is, I will grant you, an audacious and unbelievable hope. There are many who find themselves unable to seek it after two thousand years of seemingly interminable controversy and debate among Christians. There are many more who are rightly outraged by the appalling violence that has been executed in the name of so-called “orthodoxy.” The quest for liberating truth is long, difficult, and all too easily corrupted.
Yet it would be a very sad thing indeed for us to lose sight of God’s promise of liberating truth. We cannot allow the world’s principalities and powers to rob us of our hope, especially as cynicism and lies infect more and more of our public discourse, with disastrous results for the most vulnerable among us. In such a time as this, how can we not speak of our hope that contact with ultimate reality, beyond all human prejudice and conceit, is possible? How can we not share the good news that we can find truth because Truth has already found us? How can we neglect the explosive, subversive power of proclaiming that Christ has set us all free – and that he shall not rest until every rod of oppression is broken?
We have a chance, dear reader, to give the world a tremendous gift.
Let’s take it.
Williams, Rowan. Arius: Heresy and Tradition. London: SCM Press, 2005, 95-117.
