Julian Huxley once declared that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions. Andre Suares further observed: “Heresy is the lifeblood of religions. It is faith that begets heretics. There are no heresies in dead religions.” They both agreed, however, that last decade’s heresies may become yesterday’s forsaken beliefs, today’s moral majority and tomorrow’s dogma. Is heresy, then, little more than last year’s apostasies and next year’s certitudes? Somehow, given the dire fate of many heretics, there must be more to heresy than being an unfathomable or unfashionable belief.
It may be easier to understand heresy by first defining its character. Certainly there are many things that heresy is not. A pre-adolescent temper tantrum involving the assertion that a toothbrush is useless does not constitute heresy; nor can condemnation of the Beatles be construed as heresy. Heresy, then, must be substantially more than contrariness. The issue must be serious and the heretic response must be earnest; it must stem from one’s soul and it must engender some measure of personal hazard since it is expressed in the face of those, temporarily in the majority, who fervently believe otherwise.
Furthermore, heresy cannot be frivolous. Declaring total allegiance to the New York Yankees in Fenway Park may be suicidal, but not heretical. Nor can the primary purpose of the heresy be solely to provoke an adverse reaction in someone else ”” “getting a rise out of somebody.”
I have to say that I actually liked a good deal of this. The author is certainly right that heresy is nontrivial and that its continual reappearance in, among other places, the Christian religion is a sign of health. I also understand what he is saying vis-a-vis the need for challenges to the scientific status quo. I am particularly pleased in this regard with the Intelligent Design movement. Whatever the scientific validity of their proffered adjustments to the reigning Darwinian paradigm, their pointing out the limitations of its explanatory power (who really thinks something so simplistic is all there is?) continues to be a great boon the the latter-day scientific enterprise.
That said, his apparent cheerleading of Christian heresy does not strike these eyes as particularly helpful. It puts me in mind of a marvelous quotation from Christopher Dawson’s [i]Dynamics of World History[/i]: “It is the nature of heresy to sacrifice Catholic truth and Christian unity by concentrating its attention on the immediate solution of some pressing contemporary problem of Christian thought or action. The heretic goes astray by attempting to take a short cut, owing to a natural human impatience at the apparent slowness and difficulty of the way of pure faith.” Here, I think, is a nutshell description of, inter alia, the current TEC leadership’s foolish fling with the homosexual movement. In Christianity at least, heresy tends to be lazy, stifling and unimaginative. That its current manifestations tend to be insufferably self-congratulatory only adds to its tediousness.
Note also the difference between the popular treatment of heresy in the scientific enterprise and in the Christian Church. In the case of the former, it is universally recognized that objective truth is at stake while the popular notion of the latter (and the basis for much of the modern heresy itself) is that it is concerned primarily with subjective opinion, the objective nature of Divine Revelation being largely misunderstood.
I appreciate what Dr. Aronson hs to say about the seriousness and genuineness of the true heretic and believe that these things are in abundance amongst the current leadership of TEC. I also appreciate that heretics can challenge the orthodox both to deepen their own faith and provide clarity to others. Even more important is the challenge it presents to Christian charity. Can we reject falsehood without sinning against those who embrace it? In the end, however, I think no one can be grateful for error.
Cases in point:
– Martin Luther, finally receiving favorable press from the Pope
– Galileo
Daniel Muth [#1], it baffles me how the church can continue to assert with a straight face what you nicely summarize as “the objective nature of Divine Revelation.”
Objectivity presupposes evidence so compelling as to leave little or no room for reasonable people to disagree. A canonical example is Galileo’s experiment of rolling balls of different weights down an incline: No reasonable person could dispute that the balls fell at the same rate. (Astronaut David Scott famously confirmed Galileo’s results on the surface of the moon by dropping both a feather and a hammer at the same time.)
It’s indisputable that a universal consensus hasn’t emerged about Divine Revelation. In particular, despite nearly 2,000 years of trying, the church hasn’t even come close to achieving a consensus among humanity about what it claims to be THE Divine Revelation. This strikes me as pretty compelling proof that what the church calls the Divine Revelation is anything but objective.
I guess a little heresy (and exactly how would the Anglican Communion know it if it bit them in the haunch?) might be “good” for you. When anti-bacterial soaps and hand sanitizers were being advertized it was common to object that we need a little bacterial infection possibility to keep the old immune system on it’s toes. Well if that’s the idea for an ecclesial body, fine. The trouble is ECUSA and the rest have an immune deficiency and have for decades. Bishops like Spong, Pike, Schori go without response, Ann Holmes is a Muslim and is suspended for a year (isn’t that anniversary coming up; i certainly hope for updates?), the Bishop of Utah is actually unbaptized. Are these signs of a body with too much or too little disease detection and self-defense? You have plenty of superbugs and no response whatever.
“D.C.” #3 –
This is by now a pretty old (in more than one sense of the word) discussion. Like pretty much any Pharisee of his time, Paul is quite straightforward regarding the objective reality of the created order as discussed in Romans 1, noting that those who deny it may actually sink to the point of indulging in homosexual activity. The created order of which Paul was speaking obviously includes much, much more than the merely scientifically observable (which entails a very tiny fragment of knowable reality). C. S. Lewis discusses what he calls the “Tao” in [i]The Abolition of Man[/i] as an objective moral and aesthetic order which is currently very much in dispute but certainly should not be, at least among those with any semblance of a commitment to truth. The plain fact is that we live in an painfully backward and philosophically benighted age.
You cite an obvious example of universally observable physical property of which there are comparatively few and even then they are not widely accepted. I spent some six thousand-odd hours of hard work earning a Nuclear Engineering degree only to have to listen to various nitwits who knew absolutely nothing about decay constants or two-group diffusion equations tell me that they knew my job better than I did and that the nuclear plant at which I was then employed should be shut down because it might blow up like Chernobyl. This is, of course, physically impossible, but why should that stop your average ideologue?
The fact is, there are very, very few things in this world that are available for universal consensus. No religious tenet – not a single one, including any of yours, “D.C.” – falls into this category. Does that make them all equally true? Well, obviously, no, since many contradict each other. Are they then all subjective? I don’t see the possibility of a coherent case being made here. Something has to be objectively true and that something is far more available to philosophical than scientific investigation if for no other reason that science is too cramped and narrow to be able even to examine its own assumptions. Philosophy examines far more but even then is limited.
Ultimately, we can only truly know of God what He reveals to us. Philosophy can examine General Revelation, but Special Revelation is absolutely necessary for us to know ultimate ends and meaning. Judeo-Christian tradition claims to be just such a revelation and the Church says that it is an objective one not only with a straight face, but with full confidence (which does not exclude the odd element of doubt) and hope, as in the theological virtue. You are welcome to argue that agnosticism is the only option for any would-be religious believer since no other religious belief commands sufficient consensus. It’s cheap, but nonetheless true that this view has had even fewer votes than Christianity over the last 2000 years and so by your own criteria can’t possibly be objectively true.
You seem to these eyes either to place yourself in the position of denying objective reality beyond the crabbed confines of the scientifically demonstrable (and how then would you explain the existence of higher mathematics?), or descent into incoherence. I see nothing compelling about your claims.
Excellent response Daniel Muth #5.
Now, getting back to the article on heresy…
The emphasis is on “occasional.” Maybe a physical property of the universe is revealed as we observe the gravity well that has become TEC. Sucking in so many heretics into this singularity. The universe is stranger than we can imagine.
Daniel Muth [#5] writes: “Something has to be objectively true and that something is far more available to philosophical than scientific investigation if for no other reason that science is too cramped and narrow to be able even to examine its own assumptions.”
When Galileo (and, later, moon-walker astronaut David Scott) demonstrated that objects fall at the same rate, they were refuting Aristotle’s “philosophical” view that objects naturally fall at different rates depending on their weight.
Both are necessary: “Philosophical” investigation is quite useful for generating ideas, but it takes science to test those ideas for validity. Cf. Deut. 18.21-22 (if what a prophet says turns out not to be true, or doesn’t come to pass, then it’s not something the LORD told him to say) and 1 Thess. 5.20 (don’t despise the Spirit’s fruits, but test everything, and hold on to that which is good).
Incidentally, on the subject of nuclear-power expertise: When I was a callow young Navy nuclear propulsion officer, having spent most of two years at sea, I took and passed a two-day written and -oral examination in Admiral Rickover’s office to qualify as [chief] engineer officer of a naval nuclear-powered ship. Just before the exam, I was sent to a two-week prep course, during which we brainstormed various what-if scenarios that, strangely, didn’t seem to have been covered in the one-year basic nuclear power training course. That exercise scared the hell out of me. At sea and with civilian shipyard workers, I’d seen first-hand the ubiquity of human error. (You’ll recall that human error was the root cause of both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl; there’s an old Navy saying that goes something like this: Never underestimate the power of any given human being to f** up.) In dismissing people who are worried about your reactor blowing up, keep in mind that expertise can act as blinders, causing the experts to miss out on a needed perspective.
“D.C.” #7 –
Additional clarity on the limitations of science and a better understanding of the ubiquity of human error (as you correctly note, we know a little something of it in my profession) would, I suspect, particularly in this day and age, go a long way to breaking the spell of heretical error in the Church. In particular, I would hope that it would point up the inadequacies of your definition of objectivity in #3 as presupposing evidence that leaves little or no room for reasonable people to disagree. This is the old Enlightenment definition that, as Alisdair MacIntyre has amply demonstrated, leaves its proponents with an incoherent world view and/or leads them to dismiss all who think differently as unreasonable. While the orthodox have their fair share of dismissiveness, it tends to be built into heresy, particularly modernist heresies that believe themselves somehow “scientific” (ideological claims about “sexual orientation” being a case in point), that those who disagree are ultimately irrational. The Christian tradition holds that revealed realities like the Trinity can be objectively true yet mysterious and therefore not necessarily available to all reasonable people.
Reasonable people can be heretics, Muslims, Bhuddists, agnostics, etc. The Church, with, again, a straight face, believes all of these people are objectively, and possibly, at least in some cases, damnably, wrong. She has a duty to witness to what she knows and to leave the rest, including the eternal fates of these people, up to God. As Christians, we can agree that a willingness to explore previously unconsidered possibilities is a boon to improving science’s description of the physically observable universe. We can also agree that, being created in the image of God, we can express some sense of that creativity with which He has gifted us by exploring the implications of both Special and General Revelation. But we cannot celebrate untruth. And heresy in the Church always involves untruth. As Pilate proved, human error is capable of far worse things than TMI. Yet one of those objective truths that the Father has revealed to us is that He is far more ready to forgive than we are to repent.
[blockquote] …nor can condemnation of the Beatles be construed as heresy[/blockquote] no, simple boorish troglodyte sensibilities do not rise to heresy. (they probably condemn Mozart, too)
Slightly more seriously, the issue raised is “how do we know what we know?” I can well appreciate the point that heresy is necessary, and for several more reasons than presented.
If we (in our massive, slow-responding ship) are off course 5 degrees to the starboard, it may take a tugboat pressing, not 5 degrees to port, but pressing with all it’s might to port as hard as possible, to straighten us out quickly. That tugboat’s course is heretical, but can be used by the captain to keep us off the pilings to starboard. An example would be Marcion, whose purging of texts that did not fit his theology played a role in getting the Church to define itself, and establish the canon. Even when wrong, they may be used of God.
To change metaphors, a P-51 pilot and my daughters God-father told me once that his biggest obstacle in learning to fly a straight course was his determination to fly a straight course. White-knuckled sweaty-browed determination only made it worse. Focusing on the heading he wanted, eyes on the goal, caused the erroneous courses to cancel out. The parallel is the instruction about not trying to remove all the tares, least you cause more harm than good.
The third point is perhaps more to the authors intent: previously unknown “truth” must almost by definition start it’s career as antithetical to known truth. But, even in the sciences the process is not just repeat the new over and over until it becomes customary, and thus the accepted opinion. The test is always some variant on “does this thought explain reality better than the old idea,” Does a sun-centric solar system explain the rest of the known data better or worse than an earth-centered system?
In theology it is no different. Does this new thought validate and tie together previously understood truth-even if in previously unsuspected ways, or does it cause all that was known to be simply discarded? If the latter, I would be very suspicious. Truth verifies truth. Adding knowledge will add clarity, even while raising new questions.
When I have learned something new, or at least new to me, it has had that effect, of shaking isolated known things into a context, like the missing letter on a crossword that makes the other words make sense. I think it a strong method for recognizing truth.
Daniel Muth [#8] writes: “Reasonable people can be heretics, Muslims, Bhuddists, agnostics, etc. The Church, with, again, a straight face, believes all of these people are objectively, and possibly, at least in some cases, damnably, wrong. She has a duty to witness to what she knows ….”
The church “knows” most of what it claims to be true in pretty much the same way that Muslims, Mormons, etc., do: Either they rely on what someone else told them, or they “just know it.” They do not, however, seem to be able to support their claims with evidence of the quality that typically changes minds of contrary predisposition. Almost never will an intelligent, honest, committed Mormon (for example) look at the evidence supporting the claims of Islam and think, “son of a gun, those folks are right”; the same is true for essentially all religions.
(This of course leaves us with a dilemma: Which, if any, of these competing, mostly-unsupported claims must be believed as a prerequisite to “salvation,” whatever that is — and why those claims but not the others?)
In science, on the other hand, when the evidence is there, doubters eventually come around. The medical establishment was initially scornful of the notion that common peptic ulcers are caused by bacteria. As the evidence piled up, inexpensive antibiotics became the treatment of choice. The two Aussie doctors who pioneered the “heretical” view were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Incidentally, Dan, you keep putting “D. C.” in quotes: That’s my name, D. C. Toedt III; because of the Roman numeral, I’ve been called by my initials since birth.
Mr, Toedt –
I regret that it is difficult to tell who in this space is writing under his own name and who isn’t. I try to be as clear as I can in that regard. As to your last post, I have little to say. As I have noted multiple times above, there are very few things that can be successfully appealed to science. The effort to build a satisfactory worldview on scientific certitude has been an abject failure for 500 years and will continue to be so, science providing, among many other lacunae, moral guidance on absolutely nothing. Religious disputes are a permanent feature of human society and as I noted in #1 above, per Dawson, the effort to take shortcuts tends to lead to heresy, which is always a false version of whatever religion it purports to be. I appreciate your contributions to the discussion and wish you well. – DWM
DC,
Enjoy your comments. But I think you lost it when you equate the objective evidence for Christianity with that for Islam and LDS. While there is plenty of objective evidence for key points of Christian (and Jewish) theology, I am not aware of any supporting Islam, only the basic facts about Mohammed’s life. And the incontrovertible fact that Islam was spread by the sword, while Christianity was spread (for at least the 1st 300 years) against the sword should give any reasonable, objective person a clue as to which is true. And the linguistic evidence debunking the story of the Mormon tablets seems unassailable.
(PS – the Hyman stories are hilarious; heard a few more during a recent reunion.