have you hugged a heretic today?

Heresies and How to Avoid Them will probably never make it on anyone’s bestseller list.

Doesn’t the cover artwork just pull you in? Who can resist that?

The title had been sequestered on my “to read” shelf for at least 18 months. I think I kept waiting to be depressed enough to dig into it and see what was there. I expected something a bit on the harsh side, a bit judgmental, a nice revisiting of the hard bottom line, the narrow way that all but a few miss, and so forth. It just didn’t sound like nourishing devotional reading. But having been in several discussion and email exchanges about modern day heresy and heretics, it seemed like a good time to pick it up and see what the authors (a diverse group across the Christian religious spectrum) had to say.

And I was very pleasantly surprised.

What greeted me was a rather instructive (dare I say devotional) tour through the first four centuries of Christian thought. It’s ground in church history I’ve traversed on many occasions before, but this time through it provided a real synthesis of the thoughts and workings of the Christian mind in those early years.

Stanley Hauerwas penned the prologue, which not only managed to get my attention but to keep me going through the book’s relatively brief 141 pages with an undiminished appetite. The whole work provided a tour de force in the art of havering – an interesting look at how the church has done it well and done it very poorly at times, and the challenge for us all to haver better.

I had never thought about how orthodoxy, rather than being boring and unimaginative, is actly the stuff of wonder and risk and the unexplainable; that heresy is usually the easy path – because, very simply, it cannot accept the seeming impossibilities and contradictions of what orthodoxy gazes upon with wonder. And so the heretic (daring to think more fully, to explain more definitively and more explicitly what has “always been believed”) defines and challenges and provokes the orthodox, and thereby forces the orthodox to actually grapple with what it is they believe, forming something of a simbiotic relationship between the orthodox and the heretic.

Is Christ God or man? Yes, said orthodoxy (who of course was heretical to the heretic). How? retorted the heretic (actually quite orthodox in their own mind, thank you very much). Impossible. And so the havering commenced. Two natures or one? Two minds or one? Like God or of the same substance? Fully human, or just appearing to be so? And so the debate went on for nearly 200 years – havering that too often led to heretic witch hunts (complete with angry townspeople with pitchforks) against a backdrop of political maneouverings and intrigue. Simultaneous with the Heresies book I was reading Philip Jenkin’s book Jesus Wars. The two books dovetailed perfectly, Heresies with the theological meat, Jesus Wars with the full account of the historical spectacle.

And while I really can’t urge you “Go and read these books!” (particularly Jesus Wars – the history is tedious, the melodramatics of church history and councils redundant and frankly nauseating after awhile), I would commend to you these two thoughts, the first from the Heresies book and the pen of Hauerwas, the second quote actually the final sentence of Jesus Wars:

The language of orthodoxy, as of piety, can be used thoughtlessly when faced with difficult questions, as a stock way to answer, neutralize or suppress them. Perhaps this is evidence of a sort of laziness. Or perhaps the instinct at work is to offset a perceived danger (the danger of being unsettled in one’s faith, or lured from the right path). But the killing of lively thought is a much greater danger. In the end a thoughtless recycling of “what the Church says” will make the narratives and doctrines of orthodoxy stale. As Rowan Williams suggests, “perhaps theology…needs excursions into the mirror-world of what it is not saying in order to find out what it is about.” Things that are vaguely taken for granted need to be made strange – to be made “something of a question” – in order that full-blooded orthodoxy may retrieve itself again. Mere incorporation in the orthodox Christian fold will not neutralize all the dangers, or make the question go away. This book aims to contribute to such liveliness of thought, to assist the avoidance of heresy not just through strategies of denial and censure, but through adventurous detours through the “what-ifs” proposed by orthodoxy’s ancient debating partners, so that the pitfalls and limitations of heresies can be better appreciated, and orthodoxy more wholeheartedly embraced.

Liveliness of thought – what a splendid definition/description of havering! And perhaps it also captures what is the ultimate heresy to avoid – that of killing thought, mortifying real questions as thought is replaced with the parrot, inquiry with the latest inquisition.

And now, Philip Jenkin’s final line from Jesus Wars:

A religion that is not constantly spawning alternatives and heresies has ceased to think and has achieved only the peace of the grave.

Yes, thank God for heretics! They are a sure sign that we are alive and breathing and thinking and growing. Only the dead stay lined up in perfect rows, after all.

And so, how about it? Have you hugged a heretic today?