March 16, 2013
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Heretic!
We have some incorrect beliefs about God, but we are supposed to be teachable and humble -> not required to have penetrating insight as a prerequisite nor are we left to figure things out by ourselves.
But I’d be hesitant to use ‘heretic’ in the sense that someone has erroneous ideas about God. There’s a world of difference between someone who has an incorrect belief about God, and someone who insists that his incorrect belief is right contra Scripture (or contra what is inferred from Scripture by “good and necessary consequence”, e.g. often the traditional interpretation, particularly in the Reformed or Calvinist strand).
Someone who likens God to three states of matter, e.g. ice-water-vapor (even though that analogy is more modalist than triune), is quite different from someone who, when being corrected as to how that formulation is wrong, keeps arguing the point and subverting the authority above him.
It is the latter, and not the former, who is a heretic. Or maybe what I’ve said just now is still going too far: perhaps he’s only a heretic if he holds the position despite church discipline.
I am only saying this because I have come to understand heresy as that which is associated with hellfire. The person who is teachable or accepts church discipline was not a heretic until the point he learned the right formula. We never know God well enough or full enough to exhaust who God is with a formula or a description or analogy or theological model.
Thus, a heretic is someone who lives in unrepentant doctrinal sin, whereas someone who makes an error unknowingly is just erroneous or ignorant of sound teaching. The former should’ve known better and continues anyway; the latter is willing to know better and hence accepts rebuke.
This guards us from saying that someone who becomes a new Christian is not really a Christian until he gets his doctrine straight, or from this implied notion that you can be a heretic and never realize it.
