HERESY IS PUSHING OPINIONS

It is a common fallacy to define heresy as error or false doctrine, while in fact it has no necessary relation to doctrine at all, whether true or false. One is a heretic because of what he is or what he does, not so much because of what he teaches. One may teach nothing but the truth and still be a heretic, or he may be, like Campbell said of Origen, “guilty of a thousand errors” and still not be a heretic. Heresy is a behavior problem, not a matter of “unsound” doctrine. All of us have surely taught many errors through the years, and while this is not to be desired it is not necessarily heresy. If teaching something false is heresy, then we are all heretics at one time or another. It was in connection with teaching that one apostle was led to say, “We all make many mistakes, and if anyone makes no mistakes in what he says he is a perfect man, able to bridle the whole body also” (Jas. 3:2) There are no perfect teachers, despite all the implicit claims of infallibility in our ranks.

Heresy must therefore involve something that is much more than error, even serious error. The brother who holds that the Spirit is no more than the Bible, teaches what I would consider serious error, but that would not make him a heretic. There are many who can teach their way through Romans and come out with more law than grace, which I view as detrimentally erroneous— “false doctrine” if you please—but this itself is not heresy. James 3:1 might well apply to such ones:”Let not many of you become teachers, my brethren, for you know that we who teach shall be judged with greater strictness,” but I do not believe Titus 3:10 would apply: “As for a man who is an heretic, after admonishing him once or twice, have nothing more to do with him.”

No well-meaning, sincere, honest person who is doing his or her best to understand God’s word and to teach it faithfully can be a heretic, however wrong in his or her deductions and interpretations. In the scriptures the heretic is always deceptive, vain, corrupt, unconscionable. These adjectives are lifted from the very passages where the heretic is identified. 1 Tim. 1:19 says of them: “By rejecting conscience, certain persons have made shipwreck of their faith, among them Hymenaeus and Alexander, whom I have delivered to Satan that they may learn not to blaspheme.” 2 Tim. 2:18 shows that these men “have swerved from the truth by holding that the resurrection is past already.” But this must be more than a sincere but mistaken view of the resurrection, for the next line reads: “They are upsetting the faith of some.” They had already “rejected conscience” and shipwrecked their faith, so they were using their teaching opportunities for the purpose of deceiving the faithful. This is what made them heretics.

We are prepared to conclude, therefore, that every warning against heresy (and every reference to withdrawing fellowship for that matter) points to a behavior problem, not a doctrinal one. No one is ever withdrawn from because of an erroneous or mistaken viewpoint, and no one is branded a heretic for holding and teaching false (in the sense of untrue) doctrine. They are all behavior problems. The heretic in Titus 3:10 is clearly identified in the next verse: “knowing that such a person is perverted and sinful; he is self-condemned.” This cannot be applied to someone like Pat Boone, who sincerely and searchingly came up with an unorthodox position on speaking in tongues. Pat was not and is not “perverted” and “self-condemned.” He may be wrong, but he is not a heretic.

Those who “create dissensions and difficulties” in Rom. 16:1 7 are heretics for just that reason. They are trouble-makers who are out to divide the Body for their own personal gain, as the next lines show. They serve their own appetites, not Jesus, and they deceive through fair and flattering speech. True, such ones might employ their own doctrinal system, as the Gnostics did, but it is their ungodly behavior, designed to wreck and to ruin, that makes them heretics. In time their teaching becomes associated with their evil designs, and may thus become identified as heresy, but it is not the teaching per se that is the heresy. A well-meaning but misguided teacher, who would die before he would knowingly injure the Body of Christ, might stumble into teaching something as seriously wrong as Gnosticism (however improbable), and still not be a heretic. He would be a terribly misled brother with some dangerous ideas, one in need of help, but he would not be a heretic until he was set upon imposing his teaching on others, causing “dissensions and difficulties.”

An anecdote from our own history illustrates this. Aylette Raines was a young preacher of considerable promise back in 1828. He came from the Universalists, also known as Restorationists, into the Campbell movement. Since he still held and preached some of his Universalist ideas, some of the leaders among the Disciples wanted to withdraw from him, accusing him of heresy. When the effort was made to expel him at the next gathering of the Mahoning Association, it was the genial Thomas Campbell who protested by saying: “The devil has brought this question into this association to sow discord among brethren. Brother Raines and I have been much together for the last several months, and we have mutually unbosomed ourselves to each other.”

He went on to say, and part of this may surprise you: “I am a Calvinist and he a Restorationist; and although I am a Calvinist, I would put my right arm into the fire and have it burnt off before I would raise my arm against him.” (Early History of the Disciples in the Western Reserve, by A. S. Hayden, p. 168.)

It apparently didn’t bother Campbell to accept a “brother in error.” He himself, by the way, was a brother in error in that he was a Calvinist and seemed rather pleased with being, assuming Calvinism to be a false system. It had been 19 years since he had begun the Movement and 16 years since he was immersed into Christ. And still he talked about being a Calvinist! Those today who write ever so insipidly about “the neo-Calvinistic unity movement” could not fellowship Thomas Campbell.

Campbell realized that it is the error of the heart that really counts, and believing that Raines was sincerely mistaken, he was convinced he could be saved for the Restoration Movement, and he was, in time becoming an effective leader who gladly surrendered his opinions for the sake of the gospel.

The quotation from Campbell also shows that he would come nearer branding those who wanted to withdraw from Raines as the heretics rather than Raines. “The devil has brought this question into this association,” he complained in his gentle manner, “to sow discord among brethren.” Those who sow discord are the true heretics, not those who are honestly mistaken. Campbell almost said it just that way.

Now is the time to give my pithy definition of heresy, which I borrow from C. C. Morrison’s The Unfinished Reformation. Heresy is pushing opinions. That really puts it on the line, and it fits with the scriptures, the “pushing” meaning to impose one’s own deductions to the point of causing dissensions, difficulties and perhaps division itself.

This tells the ugly story of division after division in our own ranks “pushy” brethren insisting on having their own way on scores of issues, all of them being “matters of which the kingdom of heaven does not consist,” to quote Thomas Campbell again. It was that way with the organ issue. Some were eager to push it in, over the sincere protests of their brothers and sisters, dividing church after church, in spite of Isaac Errett’s plea that they not do that, even though he favored the instrument. Some today insist on pushing it out, even in churches where it has long since been no issue and where the objector does not even attend, if they are to be accepted as brothers and sisters other than “in error.”

We have a great heritage of principles in this regard. Our pioneers always insisted that people have the right to their opinions—in opinions, liberty, they said. But we are not to push our opinions on others. Take an editor, a preacher, an elder, or even an aggressive sister who is pushy and opinionated, and you have the ingredients of difficulty and dissension. This often leads to schism, and the schism to division. It need not be. Love is not pushy. The apostle virtually puts it that way in 1 Cor. 13:5 when he says: “Love does not insist on its own way.” —the Editor

Addenda

After writing the above paragraphs I came upon an interesting example of heretical behavior in the early history of our Movement. You will remember that the Stone wing of the Movement did not agree with the Campbell group on baptism for remission of sins at the time of their union in 1832, though they were both immersionists. Stone and his followers gradually came to accept the doctrine and it was generally preached, though not by all. David Purviance, who signed the Last Will and Testament along with Stone, was one who never accepted it and never preached it during his 40-year ministry, but he had loving forbearance toward those who differed with him. In The Biography of David Purviance (1848), which is really an autobiography, page 81, he refers to this disagreement on baptism: “By a cautious and forebearing course, we got along for the most part, in peace and harmony; and rejoiced to believe that we could live together in Christian love, notwithstanding a difference of opinion existed.”

Then he tells of how one James M’Vey came to his church in Paris, Ky. in 1839 and preached baptism for the remission of sins. He continued his ministry until a lot of excitement was stirred up and an unpleasant spirit was generated, and he baptized eighty people “for the remission of sins.” Purviance says that M’Vey was of doubtful character and one who was calculated to deceive, and he at last divided the church, separating those that were baptized the way he saw it from those who did not. Purviance says he himself was careful to urge baptism as a duty incumbent upon all believers, which is the way he and Stone had taught 40 years before. He thought baptism for the remission of sins tended to separate Christians, and he could not bring himself to reject all pedobaptists as Christians. He said that he and Stone had always insisted that there is but one test to Christian fellowship and that is Christian character.

But M’Vey saw it otherwise and divided the church, undoing the union that had been achieved a few years before. The “once blessed and happy people,” as Purviance described them, were now two churches, wearing different names, one “the Old Christians” and the others “Reformers or Campbellites.” This division was terribly distressing to Purviance.

This shows how one might preach or teach the truth, as I believe baptism for the remission of sins to be true, and still be factious or heretical. Brother M’Vey could have found a way for those who wanted to be baptized for the remission of sins to have done so peacefully, without dividing the Body. It was his divisiveness that made him a heretic, even though his teaching may have been true. There is absolutely no scriptural justification for ever dividing the Body of Christ. Christ came to bring a sword, true, and to divide, but this was from the world. And we are enjoined to “Come out and be separate,” but this is from paganism.

So our pioneers had it right; We are free to differ but not to divide. We have a lot of present-day counterparts of John M’Vey who practice it the other way, we are free to divide, but not to differ. What M’Vey did was very unusual for our people in the 1830’s. They were a uniting people and not divisive.

We have a phenomenon in our day distinctly different from the story Purviance tells—the “walk out” church, These are really in most cases “pushed out” churches, the real heretics being those who must rule or ruin by pushing their own ways and opinions upon others. We have to concede that people might leave a church peacefully for the sake of freedom without having a divisive and factious spirit. But even here great caution should be shown, and the rule should be, Stay and be a loving peacemaker if at all possible, and go the second mile before leaving. Heresy is in the heart, and it finds no place in the lives of those who really love Jesus instead of a party.— Ed.