How Heresy Happens

I don’t like public controversy, and the kind of arguments Christians get into. This kind of divisive sectarianism gives Christianity a bad name. Plus, I don’t like it when people criticise me, and so I don’t want to do the same to others. However, sometimes we come across such a significant theological error, which also highlight problems influencing the church’s teaching today, that we have to speak out.

I came across a church recently where doctrinal error combines with ethical compromise. Their Pastor was describing the vision of the church, and explained that, as a Christian Church, they believed in one God, ‘in three parts’.

My initial reaction was that it was nervousness, while speaking to a large public gathering. But I checked their website, and there it was again. Either this is simply sloppy, careless, theology; or it is a deliberate departure from Christian Orthodoxy, on the Doctrine of the Trinity. Whichever it is, this is a breach of pastoral responsibility for sound teaching in the local church (Titus 2.1), where we are required on pass on the received doctrines of our faith (2 Thess. 2.15), to protect the sheep against wolves (Acs. 20.29).

This is more than a pointless debate about mere words. Rather, it exposes the necessity of truth, precision, and clarity, when talking about God. The relationship between the Trinity is of Persons, not Parts. Moreoever, instead of our modernist notion of isolated, individualistic, Personhood; each hypostasis mutually indwells the other, in a perichoresis, performing a relational dance, of unity. This congregation’s, perhaps unwitting, reformulation of the Trinity risks replacing this dynamic model of Divine flow, with a reductionist, rationalistic, static conception.

Coincidently, later that week, someone else talked with me about this church, observing that they did marvellous social outreach and community work, especially among young people; and not only those within the church, but also in the wider neighbourhood. Commendable, but also a further symptom. For, although I have always been involved in community action from my local church base, I have also noted that churches adopting this missional stance, frequently fall into the trap of de-emphasising the need for correct Doctrine.

Doubtless, we need a corrective against dry orthodoxy, a re-balancing in favour of orthopraxis, the requirement that we live out our faith, in solidarity with the poor, and excluded. Too often, especially the Evangelical Churches, have actually been guilty of further ostracising those whom society has already marginalised.

And then, I heard that they had also recognised Same-Sex Marriage. Several high-profile leaders, from the New Churches, had also apparently joined the Church, another sign of the rapid theological shift occurring among Evangelicals, in order to fit in with the zeitgeist. 

But truth is of a piece, indivisible. What we change in one part of our beliefs will always affect another aspect. Ethics and Doctrine are inseparably connected, indeed they are listed as such in Scripture (1 Ti. 1.9-10). We are in the midst of a theological slide, and we must be vigilant.