LOST Gets in on the Act

So I just watched last night's episode of LOST. Evidently Jacob is a Pelagian and the Man in Black is an Augustinian? But Jacob is the good guy (with his heresy) and the Man in Black is the villain. Oh how very trendy of them.

Just think. If I weren't taking a church history class, I might have been able to enjoy that last episode . . .

Getting It Right

I'm sort of studying for my church history mid-term, only I think I've kind of forgotten how, and also? I'm not anywhere near as Type-A as I was in high school and college. (Maybe I was never really Type-A, but I was definitely very driven by grades.)

I'm hoping writing this post will help me get my head around some things and will, in a sense, be a way of studying. (At least, it makes a good excuse, doesn't it?) I feel like I'm still stuck on heresies.

I don't really have a problem with the idea that there is orthodox belief and heterodox belief. Unlike most postmoderns, I do believe that there is a Truth, that ultimately that Truth is Jesus Christ and effects the whole universe. I believe that you can be walking more in line with the Truth, or less in line with it. But, like any good postmodern, I guess I'm not always sure I understand how we know it. I guess what I'm struggling with is not so much that the church leadership in the third and fourth centuries needed to create creeds and formulas by which to evaluate faith and life. I agree that they needed to decide on a Biblical canon, and I feel that their choices of books to go into the New Testament were right, and the things that were left out were left out for good reason.

I'm just kind of wrestling with the whole process of how they got there. My professor says (in his CD lectures--I've never actually met the guy) that, for example, in the case of the Biblical canon, the Holy Spirit, having inspired the canonical books, infused them with a certain authority, and that "canonisation is a recognition of what has already taken place." I think this is true, but how did they know it had already taken place? How did they know that Athanasius' list of 27 New Testament books was correct, and Marcion's edited Matthew, Luke and 10 letters of Paul were not? (The fact that he edited them himself might have been an indicator, I suppose, but still--I'm just saying.)

Or how about this? Arius, a presbyter in Alexandria, started teaching that "there was a time when the Son was not"--that is, that the "Son" part of the Godhead had had a beginning, and that Jesus was this dude that God put His Spirit on and basically adopted into the Godhead, but who had not existed eternally like the Father. Athanasius said this was bunk, and that the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit were co-eternal. Over the course of the Council of Nicea and the Council of Constantinople (dudes--I can even tell you the years of those!), Athanasius' view was vindicated and Arius' was defeated, but what the lectures didn't tell me and the textbook did was that they went back and forth on these issues a few times, with both Arius and Athanasius being condemned and exiled multiple times (although I think Arius died first and got condemned posthumously a couple of times, too).

Or what about the Council of Ephesus? I'm not even talking about the Robber Synod that came on its heels. I'm talking about how the Antiochene bishops got to the council late and the Alexandrian bishops (and presumably any others--if there were any others) met already and decided that they (the Alexandrians) were in the right in their views on the dual nature of Christ and the title of Mary. The Antiochene bishops were understandably upset, so they came up with this compromise called the "Symbol of Union" which sort of agreed more with the Antiochenes about Christ's dual nature, and sort of agreed with the Alexandrians about Mary's title. You can decide these things via a compromise? What if they compromised on the wrong parts? When told of the issues before being told of the results of the council, I frankly thought the Alexandrians were more correct about the nature of Christ and the Antiochenes were more correct about the title of Mary. What if I'm right and Pope Leo or whomever, was wrong?

Or what if I'm wrong? How wrong do I have to be before I am considered a heretic? If I love Jesus and trust Him to get me to the Father and to have died for my sins and forgiven me and to be gradually transforming me more into His likeness, do I still have to fully understand how He is both fully divine and fully human, or how God is a Unity and a Trinity, or whether the Spirit proceeds from just the Father or both the Father and the Son? What does that even mean?

I feel like there's heresy all over the place, still, today, and often I recognise it when I see it, but I don't always. I don't think anybody does always. How much of our salvation depends on our recognising it? Especially if our salvation is dependent on grace and not works? I think it all does come back to the work of the Holy Spirit. I think He does confirm what He has already accomplished or established. But so many people claim to be speaking for the Holy Spirit. How do you really know the difference?

What's Wrong?

I've been thinking of heresy a lot for the past few months. That's enough to block up anyone's blogposts . . . at least, anyone who is having trouble "wordifying" what she's thinking about the heresies.

The triggers for this current train of thought have been legion, starting, perhaps, with an email from Antagonist-Andrew, which I still haven't answered. (Andrew, if you are even still deigning to read my blog, it's not that I'm ignoring you on purpose. It's just that I'm afraid of rambling again.) On the heels of the email came my Church History class, and in the midst of that came some ongoing discussions with Third Jon. (You have met both First and Second John, but you may not know them by these names.)

I think the main thing that kicked off the maelstrom in my head, however, was that question about Constantine. Overall good, or overall bad? If I say (as I said) that overall, he was bad for the Church, then what about the fact (as bryancti pointed out) that the new freedom and power that Constantine afforded the Church also afforded them time to work out doctrinal issues? When you're on the run from the powers that be all the time, there's not a whole lot of time to sit down and codify exactly what you believe. I could make a nice romantic assumption (and statement) that you also don't have time to come up with any heresies, but that's not true, because most of the big Early Church Heresies started floating (and I do mean floating) around before Constantine was even thought of. Lots of those people who got burned at the stake or chomped on by wild animals in the Coliseum were not only standing up for Christ in the face of polytheists who thought they were atheists, so different was their concept of God, but had already faced up to esoteric fallacies about Christ from people who claimed to have something to do with Him.

But I'm struggling. I think it matters that Jesus is the Son of God--that He is and always has been co-existent with the Father and the Holy Spirit--that they are an eternal Trinity. I think it matters that He was/is both fully God and fully human. I think it matters that there is original sin. I think it matters that God isn't a dualistic force and we don't live in a dualistic universe--Jesus came to prove it by sanctifying both matter and spirit and bringing them together in one. I can get pretty heated about this stuff, actually.

I also know that the apostles dealt with some of these very issues--Gnosticism was already around when Christianity got started. They just conveniently tweaked a few Christian ideas and absorbed them. The Apostles Paul and John both wrote against Gnostic ideas. It matters that God finally revealed Himself to us through Jesus, and we don't need some special hidden knowledge in order to be enlightened and saved.

The thing is, though? Sometimes I feel like even the orthodoxies turn into claims that we evidently do need some special hidden knowledge in order to be enlightened and saved. I do believe it's the Holy Spirit who convicts people of the truth and that we couldn't know or understand the Gospel without that enlightenment. But I feel like the way we "orthodox" Christians talk about this stuff? A lot of times our codification of how salvation happens sounds awfully Gnostic if you really think about it. I was listening to an evangelical speaker on a DVD this week, and he was very good, and the things he said about Jesus were true, but at the end he said, "If you believe and if you trust and if you understand such and such . . . you're saved."

Most of my life I have subscribed to that sort of teaching and understanding, and to some extent I still think that's true. But there's another extent to which that just sounds like more of "works salvation" to me--except that the "work" that "saves" us is accurate belief of certain propositions. You have to be enlightened enough to know all this stuff, and believe in it, and regurgitate it, and support the Republican party, and then you'll be saved.

And I just thought it was God-driven, God-initiated, we-never-could-do-it-or-even-think-it-ourselves, grace.

It's okay. I've already been called a heretic.

You Learn Something New . . .

I have enrolled in my first seminary course. It is "Church History to the Reformation," and I am finding myself surprisingly riveted. I've always had a sort of passive interest in church history (feed it to me and I'll gobble it up, but no hunting/gathering really happens here), but I think what surprises me most is that the main textbook for the class--naturally a weighty tome--is so well-written. I've never had a textbook, which wasn't a novel for a literature class, that I have looked forward to reading so much. (Well, except for maybe Dr. Blomberg's Jesus and the Gospels.)

As I'm reading it, I'm finding lots of thoughts entering my head, not to mention information I never knew before. Like this: in 1975, when this book was written? The author thought that Gnosticism had totally died out. Huh. Maybe not.

Here's something else. It is impossible, in a post-DaVinci Code world, not to have heard about the bad, bad, misogynisitc, racist, close-minded clerics who gave Gnostics and other heretics a run for their money . . . or tried to get them to totally die out. Said clerics may in fact have been misogyinistic and/or racist--or they may have been products of their time and not been thinking about those issues because they were thinking of whether or not Jesus was both fully God and fully human and what that meant. There were some less-than-pleasant characters among them. I'm just saying, they might not be the villains it is currently fashionable to paint them as.

Among the lesser-known details about these accounts is that on occasion, the heretics won out--at least temporarily. Arius, for example, was sent into exile, but for some time later his doctrine almost completely triumphed, dying out mainly because divisions within the group's own ranks.

I have friends who promulgate something like the Arian heresy and although I disagree, I don't feel inclined to exile them or anything. If I get brave and motivated enough, there may come a post one of these days where I wrestle more with the question of heresy and orthodoxy in general. But right now, because I'm feeling a little fed up with fashionable conspiracy theories, I feel like telling some heretics to stop whining--they had their day, and they still have it . . . heresies come and go and come back, for goodness' sake (or something?), so stop making stuff up about the 2nd and 3rd century theologians (not to mention, say, the apostle Paul) and try to deal with orthodoxy. Accept it, reject it, whatever. Just . . . is it really necessary to make up stories about Paul being a Gnostic and Jesus marrying Mary Magdalene just because we're uncomfortable with Jesus' life and claims?

Okay. Enough soap-box. It's going to come back to bite me (if soap-boxes can bite), via my own words or someone else's--or both--soon enough.

But here's the other thing I just found out. Evidently, in the time of Tertullian, when people got baptised, there was a lot more to the ceremony than there is in most churches I've ever been in, but also, after the baptism, the one who had just been baptised "refrained from the daily bath for a week after having received the rite" (Latourette, p194). I'm glad that tradition didn't stick around . . . although it might explain why people hardly bathed at all during the Middle Ages . . .