Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Heretics

The first question Andrew Sullivan asks Ross Douthat (who has a new book out on the matter) is if you vote for Mitt Romney will you be voting for a "Christian"?

In the process of the conversation RD analogizes Mormonism to Arianism. He covers a lot of stuff in this interview that we've touched on at American Creation. His thesis is America's current theology though strongly Christian in some sense is also strongly heretical. Arguably it was in the 18th Century, just in a uniquely 18th Century sense. Just substitute Swedenborgianism for Mormonism and Joseph Priestley for Jeremiah Wright. We are the nation we were founded to be: Quite religious, but quite heretical.

4 comments:

Phil Johnson said...

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Too much religionism. Very boring.
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When do we start going in the other direction?
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Let's quite trying to appease the radicals.
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JMS said...

Obviously Mr. Douthat wants to sell books rather write anything new. “Heresy” in Greek means “choice.” We Americans are heretics because we want to choose our faith, not because we desire to be rebellious. During the first twenty centuries of Christianity, believers could choose from a variety of tenets about Jesus. That has not changed.

Phil Johnson said...

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How correct you are, JMS. And a lot of them were burned alive at the stake for making such choices.
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YOU are absolutely right. They followed their own counsel and not that of the Church's magistorium.

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Tom Van Dyke said...

Heresy was a capital crime against the state, not the church, because it threatened order.

Most often, heretics were persecuted not for their beliefs, but for preaching them, that is, "poisoning" the minds of the populace and thereby threatening public order.

This isn't to say there weren't tremendous brutalities, or that making heresy a capital crime is even theoretically defensible. However, to judge past ages by the standards of our own is to do bad history.

An excellent and in-depth piece here on the history of heresy by Michael Novak that covers many necessary bases, not just the Inquisition, but where Plato and Aristotle and Arius and whatever fit in:

http://www.leaderu.com/ftissues/ft9512/articles/novak.html



"The Christendom of the thirteenth century understood itself as having as its foundational form the integrity of Christian faith. For this reason, it was bound to reject heresy as treason to the state. The state could tolerate those who did not pretend to be Christian, for Christian teachings themselves commended such toleration (and actually more than that, a genuine respect for good-faith differences of conscience). What it could not tolerate was those of counterfeit faith, those who said they were Christians while choosing to deny important aspects of Christian faith. For the likelihood of many persons at once launching diverse interpretations of the gospels and organizing themselves in rival organizations, and thus undermining the foundations of the monistic state, was extremely high, as Europe was to experience in centuries after the thirteenth."

The point being that heretics were far more dangerous to the polity than Jews or infidels.