The Origins of the Idea of Heresy
The Origins of the Idea of Heresy
Concepts die when they cease to correspond to perceived needs or an experienced reality. Others persist because they express ideas that continue to be meaningful, resonating with the experience of individuals and communities. Heresy belongs to this second category of concepts. Although some regard it as tainted and discredited by its past associations with the enforcement of religious orthodoxy, most recognize that heresy expresses an important idea, essential to all who reflect on the deeper questions of life. Every movement based on core ideas or values has to determine its center on the one hand and its boundaries on the other. What is the focus of the movement? And what are the limits of diversity within the movement?
The essential feature of a heresy is that it is not unbelief (rejection of the core beliefs of a worldview such as Christianity) in the strict sense of the term, but a form of that faith that is held ultimately to be subversive or destructive, and thus indirectly leads to such unbelief. Unbelief is the outcome, but not the form, of heresy. Heresy is not, as the historian Fergus Miller notes, a “simple report on observable realities”1 rather, it is a judgment that a certain set of ideas pose a threat to the community of faith. Heresy is not an empirical, but an evaluative, notion. At one level, it is a constructed notion, in that it is the outcome of a judgment or evaluation of a set of ideas by a community—in this case, the Christian church.
From what has just been said, it will be clear that it is not possible to understand the phenomenon of heresy in general, or specific individual heresies, simply at the level of heretical ideas. It is necessary to explore how and why these ideas were judged, often over an extended period of time, to be a threat to faith by the Christian community itself. To understand the nature of heresy, we therefore need to consider both the ideas designated as heretical and the social processes by which they were thus recognized and condemned. Furthermore, heresy is a socially embodied notion, designating communities of discourse as much as ideas, and raising the question of the social or political threat posed by heretical communities to their orthodox counterparts.
One of the more persistent themes in early Christian accounts of heresy is that it smuggles rival accounts of reality into the household of faith. It is a Trojan horse, a means of establishing (whether by accident or design) an alternative belief system within its host.2 Heresy appears to be Christian, yet it is actually an enemy of faith that sows the seed of faith’s destruction.3 It could be compared to a virus, which establishes its presence within a host, ultimately using its host’s replication system to achieve dominance. Yet whatever the ultimate origins of heresy might be, the threat comes from within the community of faith.
For example, consider the recent debate in Indonesia over whether the Al-Qiyadah Al-Islamiyah Islamic sect should be recognized as Islamic or treated as another religion.4 Many Indonesian Islamic organizations are hostile toward Al-Qiyadah Al-Islamiyah because its views deviate from mainstream Islam, most notably in asserting that the hajj, fasting, and the five daily prayers are not compulsory, as well as in its expectation that a new prophet would appear after Muhammad. The central issue is whether the sect’s views are to be regarded as representing ikhtilaf (legitimate differences in opinion within Islam) or whether these are in fundamental conflict with basic Islamic beliefs and practices.5 Al-Qiyadah Al-Islamiyah unquestionably regards itself as Islamic, and its adherents would react with horror to any suggestion that they are kuffar (“infidels”). Yet their critics within Indonesian Islam argue that their ideas ultimately subvert and undermine the core beliefs of Islam.
Heresy thus poses a threat to faith, arguably more serious than many challenges originating from outside the Christian church. Heretics were insiders who threatened to subvert and disrupt. Lester Kurtz speaks of the “intense union of both nearness and remoteness” in heresy, in that the movement is simultaneously an insider and a stranger to its host.6 The social theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1930–2002), in offering a sociological account of the significance of heresy, points to its potential to undermine or destabilize core assumptions of a worldview from within, or to identify some instability within that worldview that leads to its radical modification. In each case, Bourdieu argues, the outcome is the same: unintentionally assisting the movement’s external opponents.7
Every worldview, whether religious or secular, has its orthodoxies and heresies.8 Although the concepts of heresy and orthodoxy had their origins within early Christianity, they have been found to be useful by other religious traditions on the one hand, and political and scientific ideologies on the other. The development of Darwinism, for example, has witnessed the rise and fall of ways of thinking and schools of thought, with the terms “heresy” and “orthodoxy” being widely used within the field to identify friends and foes.9 For example, Motoo Kimura’s concept of neutral evolution (by which inconsequential amino acid replacements in proteins may account for the bulk of sequence differences between species) was regarded as heretical by many biologists when it was first introduced in the late 1960s.10 Today it is a part of Darwinian orthodoxy. The appropriation of religious language to describe such controversies is an indication both of the seriousness with which all sides take their positions and of the feeling that certain positions within the Darwinian spectrum are downright dangerous. If evolution can be regarded as a religion, then it has both its orthodoxies and heresies.11
The same pattern of development can be seen in modern medical science. Considered from a sociological point of view, modern medicine has arisen through a complex interaction of competing accounts of the origins of illness and how they are to be managed. Dominant ideologies regularly arise, sustained in part by their scientific credentials and in part by significant social factors.12 The contemporary debate over the relationship of HIV and AIDS, for example, is regularly typecast in terms of “orthodox” and “heretical” schools of thought.13 Ideas die when they cease to be useful. Heresy lives on—as both a theological and a secular notion.
So how did the term “heresy” come to refer to destabilizing or destructive forms of faith? Words are fluid, shifting their meanings and associations over the years. The English language offers us many examples of words whose meaning seems to have changed so radically over a few centuries that they now signify more or less the opposite of their earlier meaning. The verb “to let,” for example, meant “to prevent” or “to hinder” in the sixteenth century; it now means “to permit” or “to allow.” The word “urbanize” originally meant “to make someone urbane”—in other words, to educate them in the manners of polite society. Today, it refers to the conversion of the world’s diminishing open spaces into the sprawl of the cities. A word with an originally positive association became degraded, coming to refer to what most now regard as a negative development.
The same process can be seen in the development of the Greek language. The word hypocrites originally meant “an actor,” and was often used in the fifth century before Christ to refer to the specific actor who took a prominent role in a drama.14 Yet over time the word gradually developed a darker meaning: someone who pretended to be what they were not—in other words, a liar or what we now call a “hypocrite.” An originally neutral word thus acquired a strongly negative association.
A more complex shift of meaning is found with the Greek word hairesis, from which the term “heresy” is derived. This word originally meant an “act of choosing,” although over time it gradually developed the extended senses of “choice,” “a preferred course of action,” “a school of thought,” and “a philosophical or religious sect.”15 Stoicism, for example, is often referred to as a hairesis (in other words, a “school of thought”) by Greek writers of the late classical period, as are the various medical schools of the age. The first-century Jewish historian Josephus refers to the Sadducees, Pharisees, and Essenes as examples of Jewish haireses, by which he means “parties,” “schools,” or “groupings.”16 In no way is Josephus implying that any of these groups are unorthodox; he is simply noting that they constitute separate, identifiable groups within Judaism. The Greek term hairesis is clearly understood to be a neutral, nonpejorative term, implying neither praise nor criticism, referring to a group of people who have common views. The term is descriptive, not evaluative.
It is in this sense that the Greek term hairesis is used in the New Testament. If the word has any negative associations at this stage, these appear to be linked to the social divisiveness and intellectual rivalry that these schools of thought sometimes created. The formation of factions was clearly seen as a threat to the unity of Christian communities.17 Yet at this stage there is no suggestion that a “faction” or “group” is itself dangerous or possesses the subversive or destructive capacity that Christian writers later came to associate with “heresy.” The concern is that factionalization is destructive of Christian unity and encourages rivalry and personal ambition. It is not the emergence of “groups” or “parties” that is the issue; it is the negative consequences of this development for the unity of churches if the development is managed badly by church leaders.
This point has been obscured by influential translations of the New Testament, which have created the impression that heresy was a routine problem for Christian communities of the first century. The most significant early English translation of the New Testament was published in 1526 by William Tyndale (c. 1494–1536). Tyndale demonstrated a linguistic competency and a sociological insight that were ahead of his time. He translated the Greek term hairesis as “sect,” thereby accurately conveying its factionalizing and fissiparous tendencies.18 Yet the hugely influential King James Bible of 1611, often known as the Authorized Version and praised for its accuracy as a translation, routinely translated the same Greek term as “heresy,” thus creating the historically incorrect perception that the later phenomenon that came to be known by this name was present in the New Testament itself. To illustrate the importance of this point, we shall compare the Tyndale and King James translations of 2 Peter 2:1, using the original English spelling found in these sources:
Tyndale (1526): “Ther shal be falce teachers amonge you: wich prevely shall brynge in damnable sectes even denyinge the Lorde.”
King James (1611): “There shall be false teachers among you, who privily19 shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord.”
Heresy may not have emerged as a significant issue in apostolic Christianity, even though there are clear signs of the emergence of views that would later be regarded as heretical. These ideas may have originated during the apostolic era; their heretical nature emerged only during the second century. During this formative period, Christian writers developed a very specific sense of the term haeresis (the Latin spelling of the Greek work hairesis). No longer did it have the neutral sense of an intellectual option or a school of thought. The term began to develop strongly negative associations, designating those whose views forced them either to withdraw from the church or to be expelled from it.20 As we have emphasized, some of these views were known, often in early forms, to New Testament writers. The judgment that these were heretical—rather than merely inadequate or unacceptable—reflects the ecclesiological situation of the second century, not the first, especially in the Roman church. Haeresis now designated a “choice,” in the sense of giving private speculative theological ideas (such as those noted in emergent form by New Testament writers) preference over the mind of the Christian community as a whole.21 Although imperial legal documents continued to use the Latin word haeresis in this neutral sense as late as the fifth century (for example, to designate a “guild” or “association” of professional workers),22 the specifically Christian use of the term was now tinged with associations of religious controversies and their political outcomes.
Heresy rapidly came to be a pejorative, not a descriptive, term. Sociologists have often noted how certain sets of “binary oppositions”—such as “male-female” and “white-black”—play a key role in the social construction of the category of “the other.” The notion of “the other,” regularly used in the rhetoric of exclusion or denigration, is essentially the devalued or stigmatized half of a binary opposition, and it is chiefly used to refer to groups of people who are seen as inferior or who are believed to constitute a threat. Group identity is often fostered by defining “the other”—as, for example, in Nazi Germany, with its controlling binary opposition “Aryan-Jew.” The same point is made, playfully yet seriously, by George Orwell in Animal Farm, in which the controlling binary opposition is formulated as “four legs good, two legs bad.”
In the second century, the binary opposition “heresy-orthodoxy” began to emerge as a way of excluding certain groups and individuals from the Christian church. Hairesis now meant a school of thought that developed ideas that were subversive of the Christian faith, which was to be opposed to orthodoxia—an authentic and normative version of the Christian faith.23 It is this development and the questions it raises that are the subject of this book. How did this happen? Is it a legitimate development? Who decides what counts as heresy and what as orthodoxy? And does the idea of heresy have any continuing relevance for anyone? We shall explore these matters in detail in the following chapters, beginning with the question of the relationship of heresy to early Christian diversity.