Heterodox?
Posted: March 25th, 2011 | Author: Scott | Filed under: Faith | Tags: Calvinists, christianity, Faith, heaven, hell, martyr, orthodoxy, protestants, roman catholic, worship | 5 Comments »The brouhaha over Rob Bell’s new book, Love Wins, has continued to percolate in the back of my mind. Last week I expressed my frustration over the more modern and truncated understanding of “hell” that many were calling the traditional or historical view and tried to share perspectives that are at least as traditional and historical, if not more so. But even underlying that, I’ve been bemused by those tossing around the idea of an orthodox or heterodox view.
By and large, the individuals using those words have been Protestants of one sort or another. For that part of my life in which I’ve been Christian, I’ve only ever been Protestant, but I’ve still never really understood the basis on which a Protestant calls their own belief orthodox or that of another heterodox. The traditional meaning of heresy flows from the idea that those who hold and promote a particular idea have chosen their own, different faith in practice or belief. Any particular heterodox teaching or understanding is always contrasted to the right worship or belief according to the common tradition of practice and interpretation in the church.
By that definition, it seems to me that to one degree or another, every Protestant is, of necessity, a heretic. One of the fundamental tenets of Protestantism, at least as I’ve understood and experienced it, is that every individual determines or chooses for himself or herself the truth of any given practice, belief, or interpretation. The fact that the thousands of groups of Protestants share some superficial similarities perhaps disguises that underlying reality and what are actually some pretty deep differences. Even when the same words are used, they are often defined and understood differently within different groups.
There is much in that particular Protestant perspective on faith that appeals to me. After all, my formation was more deeply pluralistic and even relativistic than that of most modern, conservative Protestants and that perspective is deeply relativistic. I’m not even sure how I could ever stop deconstructing propositions and choosing what I believe and practice. It happens that I’ve discovered that much of what I’ve come to believe about God (or in many cases had always believed about God) actually coincides with Orthodox teaching. But that doesn’t even vaguely make me Orthodox. I see the distinction even if it’s not as clear to others.
One of the largest groups of Bell’s critics seem to lie among the Neo-Calvinists or those with Calvinistic leanings. I try not to pick on Calvinists too much, but they have been very vocal in their evangel of Hell, and they do have a well-articulated theology that describes a very different God and a very different humanity from that described by most of Christianity. I’ve also noticed that group seems particularly quick to use the orthodox and heterodox labels.
But on what basis?
After all, Roman Catholics in the Council of Trent and in other places and the Orthodox, at least in the 17th century Council of Jerusalem, have both anathematized the core tenets of Calvinism. Taken together, that represents well over a billion Christians world-wide and two of the most ancient traditions in Christianity. Whether you agree or disagree with them, isn’t it strange for the comparatively small and relatively modern sect of Calvin to be acting like the standard-bearers for Christian orthodoxy?
Or is that just me?
As a Protestant, it seems to me we can each say that, as an individual, we either do or don’t believe something is true. And it also seems to me that’s really all we have the authority to say. Having asserted our right to define truth for ourselves, we have relinquished any credible authority to assert it over another. Oh, that obviously stops no-one from attempting to assert their will to power in various ways. And in the history of Protestantism, many of those ways have been violent. My stint as a Christian has been in the Baptist tribe and many of our martyrs were killed by Calvinists and other Protestant Christian groups.
Nevertheless, having asserted our own right to choose, we are hypocrites when we try to deny that same right to another.
It’s not just you.
Interesting that calvinism is heresy, but aren’t baptist free church ecclesiology and believers baptism (for example) and other practices or doctrines from the broad spectrum of protestantism today also anathema or heresy according to the orthodax and catholics?
Given that a number of the wide-ranging Protestant practices are modern versions of ancient heresies, then yes. However, you won’t find as much direct Orthodox interaction with Protestantism (until fairly recently the two were largely in different spheres of the world). The council that considered Calvinism is more the exception than the rule. Catholicism is also confusing. Catholicism had moved quite a distance from Orthodoxy by the high middle ages, but since the Protestant Reformation, they have actually been moving back closer to traditional beliefs. For instance, it once was the Roman Catholic explicit position that if you weren’t baptized Catholic and thus part of the church, you were damned. Now they’ve returned to the more traditional view that we can see where the Church is, but not where it is not.
With that said, I have any number of posts on blog deconstructing specific Baptist beliefs. In this post I was making a broader point and Calvinism provided the clearest foil for that point.
Hmmm. And the broader point of this post was that not only is there no valid means within Protestantism for declaring someone ‘heretic,’ but ‘choosing’ what to believe or not believe for yourself lies pretty close to its foundation. And that’s pretty close to the actual meaning of ‘heretic’ and precisely what all the famous ancient heretics did. At least in theory, there is no tradition of belief in Protestantism. In practice, of course, the vast majority of people simply adopt one of the myriad traditions. And those in charge of different traditions often exert power in one way or another to gain or keep compliance. But periodically in every such tradition somebody is strong-willed enough to believe something different from the rest in their tradition and charismatic enough to convince others they are right. And each time that happens, there’s another schism in Protestant belief and/or practice.
There’s nothing strange about the existence of so many Protestant denominations and non-denominations today. It was inevitable from the moment the Reformation garnered its original political support and took root. That fragmentation is written in the Protestant DNA.
[…] fact much closer to eastern orthodoxy and the church fathers than to calvinism, which is in return a heresy condemned by both the catholic and orthodox church… The whole idea that Jesus came to save us in the first place from the wrath of God would be […]