Truth Unites - What is HERESY? (When to Use This Term)

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

Gavin Ortlund offers criteria for when to use the word heresy. Truth Unites exists to promote gospel assurance through theological depth. Gavin Ortlund (PhD, Fuller Theological Seminary) is President of Truth Unites and Theologian-in-Residence at Immanuel Nashville. SUPPORT: Tax Deductible Support: https://truthunites.org/donate/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/truthunites FOLLOW: Twitter: https://twitter.com/gavinortlund Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TruthUnitesPage/ Website: https://truthunites.org/

Christians seem to be attacking one another more and more these days. One of the charges you hear a lot is heresy. Maybe you've seen someone that you know called a heretic. Maybe you've been called a heretic. It raises a question of what is heresy? When should we use that term? It's possible to overuse that term. It's possible to underuse that term. And it's really important to get this right. I'm very grieved about this topic. This is not a topic that I know this video won't get as many views. Though we're going to get into some, I think, important issues, but I'm just, I'm speaking to this out of my deep concern. I think there's a huge issue. in the church right now is it's so important to get this right and not overuse the term. If we overuse the term heresy, there's so many negative consequences of that. One of them is we actually strengthen heresy because of the boy who cried wolf dynamic. So basically, there's a real thing that is

heresy. That's a real problem. And if we overuse the term, we dilute the term. When the real thing comes along, our concerns are not as effective. But we also need to be able to talk about heresy when it is on the table. So we'll define this word in this video. That's the goal of this video is just to get clarity about this. Basically, we'll try to do this in three steps. First, we'll say, when should we avoid the term heresy? And I have two conditions we should try to meet before we get there. Trying to be pastoral here. Secondly, we'll ask the question, when should we use the term heresy? So first, when not to, second, when we should. And then we'll have a more pastoral conclusion to ask the question, can you be saved if you have affirmed heresy?

Which is complicated, actually. But first, before we dive in, I want to give a book recommendation because this is one of the coolest ideas for a book. It's Tim Challey's Pilgrim Prayers. I don't know if you've heard of this, but what a cool idea. You know that I love church history. This is a collection of prayers and devotional poems from church history. And if many of us struggle with prayer coming naturally,

we don't know what to pray for, we get distracted. This is a great way to give language to your prayers is read these wonderful poems and prayers from church history. Each one, they're short. You know, you can just do one each day. It's like page, two pages for each one. And they're for certain scenarios. So it'll be like a prayer to end the day or a prayer for pondering the cross of Christ. And it has different sections. Observe, pray, reflect, apply, very devotional, really useful for devotions, but also for small groups and church groups and so forth. So link in the description. I always try to commend great resources like this. All right, let's dive in. When should we use the term heresy? When should we not? Here are two criteria that need to be met before we use this term, truth and triage. If either of these conditions is not met, then we should not use the term heresy. First, truth, we just need to be clear about what the person in question actually believes. We don't want to call someone a heretic because of a thing that's legitimately heresy, but they don't actually believe it. And this is so simple, but I think it's so important right now because we kind of live in a post-truth moment

where slander and misrepresentation is just becoming democratized everywhere. And the internet feeds this. Trevin Wax wrote a great article recently called The Normalization of Slander. I'll put up this quote. He's pointing out how easily this can happen. I'll put a link to this article as well in the video description. I've seen this in my own life. People, you know, political things.

They'll say that I'm supporting Kamala Harris. Not true. I've been very clear that I don't support her, and yet people just make these things up and they get traction and they go out there. Maybe you've experienced this in your life as well. Simple thing, but it's the first step. If you know the person that you're concerned about whether they're teaching heresy, reach out to them and ask.

If you don't have access to do that, make sure you're getting from their own writings, their own words. If we get things secondhand, there's a possibility for the telephone game to be happening. I think the body of Christ would be healthier if we did more fact checking. Just make sure we're telling the truth. I know that's simple, but man, we need that right now. Sadly, that needs to be said. Second criterion is triage. We need to look at what the issue is and see if it ranks as heresy.

Not every error is heresy. So the word heresy can be used a little bit differently, but typically throughout church history this word has been used, not just for any kind of error, but for theological error that is destructive of the gospel. So the alternative to heresy is orthodoxy. Ironaeus, the early Christian, wrote a book called Against Heresies. And he starts off the whole book, warning about heresies as false teachings that, for example, destroy the faith of the simple and so forth.

So heresy has this kind of level. It's destructive of faith. Not every theological error does that. In fact, many errors fall short of that. Now, this is the whole idea of theological triage. Unfortunately, over the last few years, this has become more controversial. Many people see this as soft or compromising now. I think that is totally off. John Calvin was not a theologian of softness, but he wrote not all articles of true doctrine

are of the same sort. Some are so necessary to know that they should be certain and unquestioned by all men as the proper principles of religion. Such are God is one. Christ is God and the son of God. Our salvation rests in God's mercy and the like. Among the churches, there are other articles of doctrine disputed, which still do not break the unity of faith. So he's making an argument for triage. That's what he's doing. Calvin went so far as to say that we will not survive without triage. He says a difference of opinion over these non-essential matters. Should in no wise be the basis of schism among Christians, we must leave no church standing, or we must condone delusion in those matters which can go unknown without harm to the sum of religion and without loss of salvation.

book, Theological, what is it called? Finding the Right Hills to Die On? Funny. I'd talk about this more. I quote others like Turritin and others. Another great model is, and I've done a video on, several videos on triage as well. Another great model of doing triage actually is J. Gresham-Machian, the great opponent of theological liberalism. Jesus practiced theological triage with the Old Testament law. When he's confronting the Pharisees in Matthew 23, he's saying there's the weightier matters of the law. Jesus. law, and he's basically confronting them for majoring on the minors. You strain out the net, you swallow the camel. That's an error of triage. If you think about it, triage is just common sense. Of course, not every error falls to the same level, right? And basically my concern right now,

and the reason I'm making this video, is that I think in modern evangelicalism, we often fail to do triage because we don't have theological categories that are informed from church history and from official study. So official study, what do I mean with that? We haven't really done our homework. We're sort of just reacting to the mood of the moment. And so a sort of ignorance of church history leads to this really eccentric and parochial bandwidth

of what we see is acceptable. And often without even realizing it, we can be very casual about issues that people used to give their lives for. And in the other direction, we can make an immovable right, out of something that many Christians, maybe even most Christians, haven't even heard of. In my recent video on fundamentalism, I gave some examples of certain views of the end times

that are assumed as the default view, or in some cases even the only view today in certain circles, but they basically were non-existent for most of church history. My own experience, I've seen this on various questions of science. You know, I'm pretty conservative. This is why I find I'll have a lot of, and I'm going to talk, sort of defend myself here for a minute, but the goal of this video isn't just about me. It's about the general state of things right now, because this is really a problem, the way people are so quick to call someone else a heretic.

But I'm pretty conservative. I'm basically just like a classic evangelical, you know, I believe in biblical inerrancy. I'm complementarian and so forth. But because of my views on creation, in the flood of Noah and climate change and science issues like this, I can't tell you how many times people will call me a hair. heretic. It's amazing. Or they'll say, well, you may not be a heretic, but you're just way out there. And you can tell the judgment is coming from a place of ignorance of church history, because none of these issues have historically been classified like that. Genesis 1, are the days of Genesis 1 24-hour periods of

time? That has really never been a litmus test of orthodoxy versus heresy. And in my videos on these topics, I've talked about St. Augustine, Athanasius, other early Christians, Augustine's non-literal view becoming dominant in the medieval West, talked about modern Christians like Warfield and Hodge and Charles Spurgeon and J. Grashermachian and so many others we could go through, Hermann Bavink, who don't interpret Genesis 1 as 24-hour periods of time. They're not young earth creationists, and yet people see this as a heresy. I mean, it's amazing to me. It really is, again, the ignorance of church history, ignorance of kind of just how.

Christians have always thought leading to this kind of parochial eccentric bandwidth. And then meanwhile, the things that we really should fight about on creation, we just sort of are not as aware of. Creation X. Nealo, that creation is from nothing, the goodness of creation, the contingency of creation. These are the things the early Christians had to fight battles over. On the flood of Noah, same thing. I put out a lengthy video documenting this. This is an extremely common view. I've talked about Herman Bovink's summary of this issue from the perspective of the early 20th century in Europe. I've talked about evangelical treatment of this from study bibles like the ESV study Bible

and from leading evangelical commentaries on Genesis like Derek Kidner's or Meredith Klein's. I won't read through all these quotes. I've done that elsewhere. You can pause and read through them if you want. I've gone through other resources from conservative contexts like the OPC and Westminster Seminary World. these are not liberals, and yet this has really never been seen as like heresy or something like that. It's a common view. With climate change, same thing. It's interesting the way people today assume that sort of the American sociology is the same as how Christians have always

thought about this. It isn't even the same as how Americans 30 years ago thought about this. Ronald Reagan, I've often thought, would Ronald Reagan be regarded as a liberal today because he was very concerned about environmental stewardship. He favored cap and trade legislation. Both Bushes after him did as well. It's only in recent years that this issue has become so polarized in the way that it has and in other places of the world. Climate change is not even seen as a liberal issue. I was talking with a friend who lives in Sweden yesterday, and he was just saying, yeah, we don't even see it in that category. You know, so they sort of look on America with mystification. I'm not saying nowhere, is it like that? But again, it's this sort of ignorance of either history or

of global Christianity that leads us to these very specific judgments. And I'm speaking to this because of a pastoral concern. You know, this really matters. It's the boy who cried wolf thing. I'm sort of grieved as I look out at the landscape of American evangelicalism right now, and I just see so much, I see so much escalation in both directions. There's a lot of sort of deconstruction, a lot of falling away into more progressive views, falling away from historic Christian orthodoxy. but then in reaction to that, you also have these kind of fundamentalist streaks that are gaining so much momentum. And my heart and my pastoral burden is to try to speak into that from my area of academic expertise, which is historical theology, and say, hey, let's get some bearings about what should we call heresy

and what has never been that, you know? Because I think we often need that today. again, the burden is this. If we start narrowing the bandwidth so that now we've adopted a view in which Augustine and Spurgeon and Warfield and Machen, et cetera, are either heretics or they're kind of way out there in an eccentric position, not only are we falling into the schisms that Calvin talked about, but it's the boy who cried wolf. We're actually going to start strengthening the actual heresies. And I'm giving these examples from my own life because of I know these things, I see them happening, but they apply to so many other conversations as well. So the question that comes up is, well, how should we define heresy?

What are the boundaries, you know? And I wrote a book on this, but I'll basically try to condense it into the cliff notes in about a five-minute overview. Here's four questions that I think we can ask in a pinch. How clear is the Bible? What's the historical testimony of the church? What is the doctrine's relationship to the gospel? So they were getting into kind of how it logically relates to Jesus's making us right with God through his life, death, resurrection.

And then what's the practical effect upon the church? That's where a lot of issues are going to move into like second-ranked territory, like the sacraments and church government because they're just unavoidable practically. Now those four questions are helpful to start with. I actually draw them from two longer sets of questions like nine or ten questions. But even just looking at these, you know, just looking at the New Testament itself, we can to see that there's different levels of urgency over different topics. If you look at Paul's letters, on the one hand, you've got Galatians, where he's very fiery, you know, he's giving

anathemas, he's, he's confrontative, he's saying, how dare you, basically. The Judaizers are a threat to the gospel. There's a time for that theological mentality and this sort of culture come out to kind of take our stand and say, come what may, I will die on this hill, right? But then And there's other times where Paul is calling for moderation. You've got chapters like Romans 14 and 1 Corinthians 8, where he's saying, don't judge one another, live in peace amidst this difference. You've even got passages like Philippians 3, where Paul is basically giving space for people to come to their own conclusions. And so what we can observe here is there's different levels of urgency for different issues in the scripture. And we want to try to figure out where did the apostles,

where does the level of urgency rise in the New Testament? Craig Blomberg wrote an article many years ago. I like the title of it. The title is the New Testament definition of heresy, or when do Jesus and the apostles get really mad? Or really get mad? Great question to ask. When do the apostles get mad? As opposed to when they're sort of more circumspect? And he's going through examples of issues that cause that urgency and cause that energy to come in. He gives four examples, the deity and humanity of Christ, salvation by grace through faith, the future coming of Christ, and issues of sanctification or growth in Christ. Now that's not an exhaustive list, but he's giving examples of the kinds of things that pop up where the apostles really drop the hammer. But he concludes the article by pointing out

that our tendency is to fight our fiercest battles at the theological periphery of evangelicalism. He's talking to evangelicals, I am too. I know I'm grateful that I have lots of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox viewers. It's always kind of refreshing when I'm making a view or a video where I'm more criticizing my own side. I think those traditions, in many particular cases can do better on some of these issues like creation and end times. They don't have some of the, again, the parochial bandwidth type stuff. So stemming from that, let's just try to identify some examples of modern-day heresies that we need to be alert to as examples of where we do need to fight, where we do need to say,

I will die on this hill. The most obvious one I always think of is a denial of the resurrection of Christ. I mean, this is just, you know, it's like this is just sort of a no-brainer. see in Paul's writings, he himself sort of does triage on this and says, if you deny this, your faith is futile, your sins are not forgiven. You could go through each of those four questions I gave, and it's pretty clear cut down the line. There's some issues like this that's just very clear. But there are, of course, people who deny this, who will say the resurrection of Christ is a metaphor and so forth. I don't think that's the most tempting option for most of us

today, but you find that out there, but that's just a real clear-cut issue. It's like, that's a heresy. If you don't think Jesus bodily rose out of the tomb, you are not a Christian. You're not within Christian orthodoxy. Orthodoxy just means the parameters of what is actual Christianity. So you can see how important this distinction is between orthodoxy and heresy. It's really important to get that right, right? We're not saying that we shouldn't call people heretics. We're just trying to say we should get the boundaries right and not overuse or underuse the term. Another example of an issue that I regard as heresy is full preterism. This is actually pretty common today, interestingly, in certain internet circles, it's growing. Full preterism basically means, so I said, this is tricky

because I'm a partial preterist. When I was doing my ordination exam, the term preterist gets thrown out there. And so this can be tricky. We want to be very careful. Between full preterism and partial preterism, there's a world of difference. Partial preterism just means you think some of the less significant eschatological events, meaning end times events, were fulfilled in the past, typically in the first century, so the great tribulation we regard as being fulfilled, you know, Matthew 24, Mark 13, Luke 21, the Olivet discourse talks about this tribulation. We think that's basically happening at the culmination of the first Roman Jewish war, culminating in the siege on Jerusalem, destruction of the temple and so forth. I don't really emphasize that. I hold that loosely. It's not

you know, emotionally decisive for me, but that's just what it seems like is the best interpretation of that passage to my mind. And I have a video on eschatology if you want to see my views on all that, why I think partial preterism makes a lot of sense. But full preterism, which says everything has already happened and we're currently living in the new heavens and the new earth. This would be heresy. You know, again, we've got just a very clear identification from the Apostle Paul, where he's naming individuals who taught this. If you don't think it's possible to teach this, it is. You will find this. People believe this. And he very clearly says, with regard to Hymenius and Felitis, this is swerving from the truth and upsetting the faith of some. By the way, it's also just outside

of the Apostles' Creed. The Apostles' Creed is another great metric. It's not exhaustive, but it's a good metric. If you're saying something, so in the Apostles' Creed, we have a future coming of Christ. He will come to judge the living and the dead. This is the whole thing of partial preterism, as we just think there was a judgment coming of Christ, but it's just a type or anticipation of the second coming. So anyway, not to get into prederism too much, but the point is, if you can't affirm the Apostles' Creed, this is not good. These are the kinds of issues that we should, that's like why we have the term heresy. Another issue I'll mention is I think denying the Trinity is a heresy. And I know I won't have good friendship with some of my Unitarian friends.

We can still be friends. But Sam Tideman made a response video to me on this. We're talking about trying to find a time to talk. I'm so swamped right now. I don't know when that'll be, but we are going to try to engage a little bit on this. But this is where we would just disagree. And I would say, the doctrine of the Trinity is absolutely fundamental. It basically comes down to who do you worship? Who is God? Who is this creator that we relate to? Is he the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit or not?

And then how do we achieve reconciliation to that God? Do we have an incarnation of the second member of the Godhead, the God man? Do we have a hypostatic union to achieve reconciliation through his atoning death, his resurrection, etc.? I know Unitarians have their own view of Jesus, but I'm just saying the different is go down to the roots there of how we understand that. And so I would say, yes, if you would deny the Trinity, you are endangering your soul, you are affirming heresy. Jesus himself taught recognizing his own identity as divine is essential.

In John 824, the phrase, I am there, is drawing from the divine name in Exodus 3, I am who I am, just like he says in John 858, I am, before Abraham was born, I am. am. So this is serious stuff. If we, again, I know they'll have their own construe of how to interpret that, but this gets down to basically who do we think Jesus is? Do we worship Jesus as God? That's the fundamental issue. We either worship Jesus as God, like the original disciples did after the resurrection. They're calling him God and they're worshiping Him. We either worship Jesus as God or we don't, and that's a fundamental divide. Another example I would give would be a denial of sanctification. By that I mean any view that basically says you don't need to grow in Christ, you don't need to fight sin, you can just sort of live

freely in sin and complacently in sin. And this would be heretical. I think that that is very clear in the New Testament. You get this, and you'll hear that today. You will hear this kind of complacent view of the Christian life. And in the New Testament, it's pretty clear. I'll put up 1st Corinthians 6. You know, the urgency of the need to fight our sin is real. We also have in the New Testament these warnings about false teaching that promotes greed and promotes sensuality and so forth in Jude and 2nd Peter and so forth. We need to take these very seriously. So any teaching that comes along and says you don't really need to fight for holiness,

you can live complacently in sin. We would use this ranking for. Now, those are not the only issues, but those are just, I'm trying to give representative examples of where we do need to use this word. This is an important word. We have this word heresy to make this kind of distinction between like the basic gospel and then that which falls outside of Christian orthodoxy, that which subverts the gospel. There's some issues that come close to heresy maybe.

They're really serious. They affect our experience of the gospel in some way, but they don't quite fall into being heresy themselves. This is why I use these four buckets in my book. You can read the book for more on all of that. But the basic burden here is let's use the... the word heresy for those kinds of issues. Right now we're seeing this proliferation of accusations of heresy for all manner of other things. And I'm just firmly persuaded. So much of that

does come out of a position of ignorance of church history. We're just not aware of historically how Christians have thought about heresy. So these more specific issues get put in that category. Final pastoral concern here. What about someone who's worried about their salvation or the salvation of their friend who affirms heresy. What do we do about that? This is actually pastorally complicated, because I want to avoid extremes, because on the one hand, we want to say, yes, heresy endangers your soul. And the other hand, we need to say there are on-the-ground complexities for how this can actually play out in particular cases. So here are, I think, four or five distinctions that can help. First of all, I think we should distinguish between what we must affirm versus what we must

not deny. Some Christians just don't have the knowledge to affirm all the different essentials of the gospel. If you're an eight-year-old child, you won't understand all the intricacies of the Trinity or the hypostatic union of Christ, but those things will be implicit in what you do understand, and it's a problem if someone denies those things. Second distinction, it helps to distinguish between what you know at the moment you become a Christian versus what we want to hold forth as characteristic of Christian discipleship. Sometimes people come to faith based upon very limited information. It's wonderful to hear about all these dreams that Muslims have bringing them to faith. We think of the thief on the cross, so many examples like this. It's amazing sometimes when someone comes to faith. Sometimes we're not even sure

exactly when it happens because there's very limited information at the time, but then we want to call people to kind of a full-orbed discipleship over time. Here's another distinction between a first-rank, denying a first-rank doctrine or affirming heresy because you are confused versus a persistent and willful and knowing affirmation of heresy. Look, we need to have some charity here to recognize. Sometimes Christians are confused. Sometimes a person is a genuine Christian inhabited by the Holy Spirit, but in their prayers

to God, they might totally get the Trinity wrong. And we know our father is gracious. I'll come back to that. We're not trying to be nitpicky here, right? So we can make a distinction between someone, and in that case, the pastoral response is to teach and to gently shepherd the person. This is very different than someone who is knowingly persisting in heresy. Fourth distinction, it helps to distinguish between our responsibility of guarding entrance into the church, through church membership and through participation in the Lord's Supper, versus making judgments about entrance into heaven. God is the judge of who goes to heaven.

We don't fully know that. We can have proximate judgments, but we're not omniscient. We don't know someone's final state of heart in their life, for example. I think it's wise to be cautious, and we don't always know that. and it's not our job to know that. But God has entrusted to us the responsibility of church discipline in certain cases. So our job is to regulate entrance to the church. God's job is to regulate entrance to heaven.

We should have more caution when we speak of the latter. Final thing to say is that just a pastoral comment here is just to encourage people. I know so many people who struggle with anxiety about their salvation. I've been surprised to find the dominant focus of my YouTube channel is to try to encourage people toward assurance of salvation because there's such a need for that right now. But I will just say, God is not looking to trick you. Your salvation and your relationship with him is not like a test. You know, it's a whole existential reality in your life. And he loves you. So if you are sincerely seeking the truth and walking in the light to the best degree that you can, you don't need to live

in fear that at the 11th hour, some surprise will erupt and you realize, oh, no, I I actually affirmed heresy or something like that. At our church this morning, we were just talking about sometimes our greatest sin is failing to believe that God is really as good and loving as he says he is. The scripture speaks of God's character in this definitional passage in the Old Testament, slow to anger and rich in love. And I would just love to say to everybody watching this video, dare to believe that for you. Place your everlasting salvation, literally your soul forever and ever on trusting this.

that, that God will be abounding in mercy to you, rich in love to you. So we seek the truth with all, we oppose error to the best of our ability, but we don't need to live in constant fear. If God sent Jesus to die for you, then you're not going to be damned over a technicality. So seek the truth, but don't live in fear. All right, I hope this video will help us boldly stand against heresy, but also recognize sometimes, not every, we say we can go there too fast. caution and moderation, and frankly, more love in the body of Christ and more listening and dialoging over a lot of these other lesser issues. So I hope that this video will help serve that end. Don't forget the links in the video description. Later this week, I'm going to have a video

coming out about Guardian Angels. I just got asked about this enough. I thought this is actually helpful in a way to see the gospel as well. Next week, I have two videos coming out responding to Bart Airman on questions of the historicity of the Gospels. So be on the lookout for those as well. Thanks for watching, everybody.