Just tighten it a little

Toward a functional view of heresy

What do you think? Agree or disagree with me in the comments. And there’s still room in my reading group- do get in touch if you’d like to join.

I have a dripping faucet. Its the kind of small annoyance that ends up taking an outsized space in your head— too small to warrant a call for a plumber, but too persistent, it seems, for me to fix the issue with a wrench alone. It drips, somewhat consistently, and every time I hear it I think both of my water bill and of my failure to fix the problem with the tools at hand. And it remains, drip, drip dripping, background noise to the rest of my life.

Or maybe its a toilet that intermittently runs, seemingly at will. You’ve tried the small fixes but it seems that you can’t get to the bottom of the problem.

And don’t even get me started on the septic tank.

Plumbing problems call for a certain kind of expert, and there’s nothing like an enthusiastic plumber. Such a man arrives on the scene, jolly and intrepid with his toolbelt on. Experience and good compensation have together debrided him of any embarrassment regarding the nature of the job he does. In fact the bigger the problem, the more his joy seems to overflow (pun intended). The best plumbers seem to have endless knowledge of systems and their effects, and they understand how small modifications can yield significant results.

He can fix your problem, but he also knows something about how the system is supposed to operate. He has almost a sense of wonder at a well functioning set of pipes. He’s nostalgic for certain tools and implements that are no longer used. He usually gives you a few suggestions regarding how you might improve the whole thing, though thats often not in the budget.¹ And he almost always casts a little scorn on whoever the last guy was who worked on your plumbing. Whoever installed this, he suggests- that guy was cutting corners. He didn’t do it the right way. Mistakes were made.²

In a reading group yesterday, I started to explain that I like to take a functional view of heresy. Heresy, I said, is more like observing that someone’s faucet is leaking than it is like damning them to hell. For many, this is counterintuitive. Because we have been trained to think about judgments regarding orthodoxy or heresy as themselves what saves us, any judgment that one of our beliefs is wrong carries with it very high stakes. When heresy is raised, it seems to the listener that they are being accused instead of assisted. The fact that heresy has historically been violently corrected certainly enhances the view that the stakes involved in theological error are life and death.

If it is in fact the case that the stakes of false doctrine are death, a few things follow. First, a person might go to any extremes to correct false belief. If believing the wrong things about God will result in a person’s death, you would understand this. A heresy hunter would think that they are doing a great favor on behalf of the one who believes falsely. Any rhetorical tool, any ecclesial device up to and including excommunication would be useful here. The stakes, after all, would be saving a person from hell.

However, if a person is not saved on behalf of what they believe about God, but due to the finished work of Christ, the stakes are reassessed.

This does not mean that “wrong theology” has no bad effects- it can cause grave disorder among clergy, it can harm trusting souls, and it can lead people to believe the wrong things about God- things that inevitably result in misdirected human behavior. To follow our example, bad plumbing is a pretty big deal- you could end up with shit in your basement, for one thing. Though its maybe not life or death, you can’t live that way for long. In fact, the effects of such a thing would kill you, over time. But the solution here is not to punish the people living with that in their basement. The plumber wants to help them, because doing so promotes life.

Do you see how altering the stakes completely changes the project in this example? Invoking “heresy” inevitably raises the hackle of the people involved when the stakes are life and death. Of course it does! But for this reason, theologians who are seeking to build consensus avoid using the word. The problem, as I see it, is that avoiding its use leaves a lot of faucets leaking. Some things just need to be corrected if the system is going to work right.

Unfortunately, if we ignore “heresy” as a technical determination, there is little language left available to us to diagnose and treat the leaking faucets of doctrine. Heresy as a technical term allows us to invoke the tradition of thinking about God that certain judgments run afoul of. The system of theology, when working properly, refers to a set of determinations about God and the world that are based on Scripture and tradition. These rules have been decided, and so we adhere to them. Saying something is a heresy is making a judgment that a claim, practice, or instinct runs afoul of this settled content.

Now there are many matters that have not been settled, and that is where the fun is. You can bring a good bit of artistry and creativity to these bits. Sadly many people- even theologians- don’t know the difference between the settled bits and open ones.

Fortunately, because we’ve read Lindbeck, we know that false theology is not itself damning. No one is saved based on what they believe about God.³ We are saved by the finished work of Christ, which reconciles us to a God who has already committed himself, from before time, to our lives spent with Him.

I’d like to explain a bit more of what I mean by that, using the example of this plumber. But that will have to wait for another day.

For now, let’s leave it here:

• Calling something a “heresy” need not be a dread-filled pronouncement.

• Theologians might be considered more like plumbers- modest journeymen who know something foundational, tradesmen who delight in their work but know their limits.

• Doing theology right should make the whole system work better. But its also fitting that the work itself remain invisible to most people. I just want everything to work well, so everyone else can go about doing the real thing- which is living lives toward God. That is, after all, the point of it all.

1. This is exactly what happens when I suggest a theological reconstruction to people with broken systems, fwiw.

2. We might do without this sort of in-group nitpicking, but its irresistable. He was probably an Arminian.

3. Perhaps we need to revisit this?