Heresy: That Special Moment When...

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!

For four decades, I was convinced that Eph.2:8-9 taught we are saved by agreeing that Jesus Christ died for our sins and rose again, and that we don't need to do anything else to be saved because that would be salvation by works: "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, that no one would boast." But those Bible preachers and teachers conveniently omitted verse 10 - "For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared before that we would walk in them," that tells us our normal and expected response to God's saving grace is to do "good works" ...and if we don't, others are right to question whether we have really been saved at all: see James 2:20 - "But do you want to know, vain man, that faith apart from works is dead?" (See also James 2:17 & 26 that repeat this idea.)

What lies behind these misconceptions, these heresies about God the Father, Christ the Son, the Holy Spirit, and our salvation? In the late-300s, Augustine of Hippo, trained as an orator and lawyer, was converted from paganism to Christianity. Although he was born and raised around Carthage, North Africa, part of the Greco-Roman Empire ruled from Constantinople, his native language was Latin and he only knew Greek poorly. So he relied on St. Jerome's translation of the New Testament from Greek into Latin. Unfortunately, Jerome had translated a key passage incorrectly:

Jerome in his Latin Vulgate translation rendered the end of Rom. 5:12 as "...death passed to all men, in whom [Adam] all sinned." The pronoun, however, cannot be translated as "whom" because it is neuter in Greek. People deserve or earn death only for their own sin: this corresponds to the Greek text of this verse - "Therefore, as sin entered into the world through one man, and death through sin; and so death passed to all men, in that all sinned." So Augustine, who knew less Greek than did Jerome, picked up as the basis of his early teaching the idea that all sinned in Adam and are guilty of Adam's sin. Orthodox teaching is that human nature is weakened by the Fall, predisposed to sin and subject to death, but not guilty of Adam's sin. The doctrine that all mankind is subject to death (but not guilt) because of the Fall is repeated in 1 Cor. 15:22 - "For as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive."

What effect does Augustine's doctrine of total depravity and predestination have on us? It divides humanity into two classes: the vast majority are the damned, and the little minority are the elect. If you're of the former, that's just a tough break, it's your karma, there's nothing you can do about it. But if you're of the latter, you are virtually infallible and inerrant, you have a ticket to heaven so you can "continue in sin so that grace may abound" - a direct contradiction of Romans 6:1-2. So it deprives the vast majority of free will and enables a small minority to become supremely all-powerful over the damned "drones." It may be no coincidence that Gelasius I, Pope of Rome from A.D. 492 to 496, another person from North Africa, strongly asserted Rome's supremacy over the Church as opposed to the conciliar form of governance by all the patriarchs. If God is utterly sovereign and all-powerful, should not His representative on earth be the same?

What does Augustine's false doctrine do to our understanding of God the Father? It makes Him out to be an angry, vengeful God rather than loving and merciful: in his correspondence with Jerome, Augustine agonized over the thought that God would damn innocent newborn babies who died without being baptized, but that was his logical conclusion of this doctrine. Such a divinity would hold "sinners in the hands of an angry God" as Jonathan Edwards (one of my ancestors) preached in 1741 in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Thus the doctrine is key to understanding not only Roman Catholic but also much of Protestant (Lutheran- and Calvinist-based) theology. Grace becomes simply "unmerited favor" or a "free gift," not the powerful, transforming energies of God Himself fused into our spirits so that we become coworkers together with God ("synergy" in Orthodox theology) through faith. God works in us as the irreplaceable senior partner, but we must also work with Him.

Most interesting is the little-known fact that near the end of his life, Augustine recanted from his doctrines of total depravity and predestination: St. John Cassian and St. Vincent of Lerins were asked to refute Augustine's new teachings on predestination, prevenient grace, total depravity, and limited atonement, and in his last great work, The City of God, Augustine brings his earlier teaching on original sin, predestination and inherent human sinfulness closer into harmony with the Eastern Church Fathers: at the beginning of this book he wrote that Adam and Eve "merited this [death] by their disobedience; for by them so great a sin was committed, that by it the human nature was altered for the worse, and was transmitted also to their posterity, liable [likely] to sin and subject to death." But his earlier doctrines had taken hold and spread throughout the West. BTW, virtually all Bible translations have now corrected Rom. 5:12 to follow the Greek - even Roman Catholic translations - but Augustine's doctrines are still widespread.

What other heretical doctrines have wrought havoc among Christians? In the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther insisted on "sola gratia, sola fide, sola Scriptura" - the idea that we are saved by grace alone (not by works), by faith alone, and the Scriptures alone must be used as the basis for doctrine. We've dealt with "sola gratia" above, but what about "sola fide"? In that same passage of James' Epistle we read - "You see then that a man is justified by works, and not by faith alone" (James 2:24): the only place in the whole Bible where "sola fide" occurs totally negates Luther's idea of "sola fide", so what did Luther do about it? He downgraded James' Epistle to "an epistle of straw" and nearly excluded it from his Bible translation.

What about "sola Scriptura"? Isn't the Bible the basis for all doctrine? What does Scripture itself say about this? "But if I wait long, that you may know how men ought to behave themselves in the house of God, which is the Church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth" (1 Tim. 3:15). The Church existed for about 375 years before the Canon of Scripture was agreed upon in 397 A.D. How did it exist without the written Scriptures? St. Paul wrote - "So then, brothers, stand firm, and hold the traditions which you were taught by us, whether by word, or by letter" (1 Thess. 2:15). We see here that oral tradition ("paradosis" in Greek, that which is handed down orally from one generation to the next) is of equal weight to "by letter."

Keep in mind that from the first century all the way up to the fifteenth century, not many people knew how to read and write, also parchment or paper was very expensive and hard to produce, thirdly it took two years of hard work to copy the Scriptures by hand, so the Bible was extremely rare and expensive - few people could afford to own a Bible. But then came Johann Gutenberg's invention of the printing press in Germany and his first printed Bibles in the 1450s. By the time of Luther's Reformation about sixty years (two generations) later, people simply assumed that Bibles were "always" and "everywhere" available!

It's just like today when teens can simply not fathom the idea of civilized life without TV, smartphones and internet access everywhere... but I, two generations older, clearly remember a good childhood without such technology. I can hardly imagine having to hand-copy a whole Bible, although some persecuted Christians have done this even in our day and age. So Luther's notion of "sola Scriptura" is an "anachronism" - projecting something from more modern times back into the distant past. Such a notion would have been laughed at for the first fifteen centuries of the Church. I've seen several icons of New Testament saints holding a Bible bound in black leather: another anachronism because the "codex" bound book hadn't been invented until centuries later.

People will object - "But the Bible is the Word of God!" What does the Bible itself tell us about this? People will often quote Hebrews 4:12 - "For the Word of God is living, and active, and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing even to the dividing of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and is able to discern the thoughts and intentions of the heart." But by cherry-picking a verse here or there, it's easy to misinterpret the Scriptures. Look at the very next two verses - "There is no creature that is hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and laid open before the eyes of Him with Whom we have to do. Having then a great high priest, who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold tightly to our confession." From this context, where the author has been and continues writing about Christ as the high priest forever after the order of Melchizedek, it becomes clear that "the Word of God" and "His" refers to a person, Jesus Christ, not to a book.

Probably the clearest Bible text on this is Revelation 19:11-13 - "I saw the heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and He who sat on it is called Faithful and True. In righteousness He judges and makes war. His eyes are a flame of fire, and on His head are many crowns. He has names written and a name written which no one knows but He Himself. He is clothed in a garment sprinkled with blood. His name is called 'The Word of God.'" And again in ch. 1:1-2 - "This is the Revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave Him to show to His servants the things which must happen soon, which He sent and made known by His angel to His servant, John, who testified to the Word of God, and of the testimony of Jesus Christ, about everything that he saw."

In the Bible and in other ancient literature, in a phrase like "of the Word of God and of the testimony of Jesus Christ" the second part is an "appositive" or a repetition of the first part using different words. So the meaning is "the Word of God is the testimony of Jesus Christ.". Keep in mind that the New Testament hadn't been compiled then, not until hundreds of years later, so again, to say that "the Word of God" here refers to the Bible is an anachronism. Similarly in John 1:1-14; 2 Peter 3:5-7; and Rev. 20:6 it speaks of "the Word of God" being Jesus the Messiah, the Christ, the Son of God... not a book.

To conclude, St. Peter wrote - "...as our beloved brother Paul also, according to the wisdom given to him, wrote to you; as also in all of his letters, speaking in them of these things. In those are some things hard to be understood, which the ignorant and unsettled twist, as they also do to the other Scriptures, to their own destruction" (2 Peter 3:15-16). Here he states that the Scriptures (Paul's letters that eventually became acknowledged as Scripture) are sometimes hard to understand. And yet, Luther and his followers taught that "every cowherd and every milkmaid" could understand the Bible by themselves.

This is a dangerous heresy that has brought about the 20,000 or more mutually-contradictory "Christian" denominations that we are faced with today. St. Peter wrote also - "knowing this first, that no prophecy of Scripture is of private interpretation, as no prophecy ever came by the will of man: but holy men of God spoke, being moved by the Holy Spirit" (1 Peter 1:20-21). Notice the connecting word "as" - it is a comparison: it requires holy men of God to properly interpret the Scriptures just as holy men of God wrote the Scriptures. It is simply utter foolishness to assume that any cowherd or milkmaid can pick up a Bible, read it and begin to preach "as the Spirit leads" without inserting their own often erroneous, private interpretations.

We need to be very careful, however, in using the words "heresy" and "heretic." While it is OK to label as heresy a teaching that has been recognized as heretical by a Church Council, it isn't OK to pin the "heretic" label on a person who you think is teaching heresy. "Reject a heretic after a first and second warning" - St. Paul wrote to Titus in ch. 3:10. This principle has come to mean that a Church Council must come together to warn someone twice who is teaching heresy. Only if a Church Council warns a person and only if he persists after two warnings can he be rightly called a heretic. So speak the truth in love to people going astray!

In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit! Christ is among us! He is and ever shall be!