Against Heresy Hunters

There is A Certain Kind of Catholic out there that I would designate a “Heresy Hunter.” I think once you read the description, you'll know the sort. My purpose in describing the Heresy Hunters is to help bring them to self-knowledge, that they might amend their ways.

The Heresy Hunter operates with the intention of preserving the orthodox faith of the Church. A noble cause, to be sure, but while an admirable intention is the beginning of a virtuous act, virtue can easily slide into vice when the method used and the circumstances in which the act takes place are not fitting. How does this happen? What does it look like?

The most frequent way in which the Heresy Hunter slips into sin while on his quest is in his method, specifically his neglect of his most effective and most necessary tool: charity. When I appeal to charity, I do not mean simple “niceness,” meaning a bland desire to not offend another’s sensibilities—so please, refrain from jeremiads against “the Church of Nice” and appeals to Jesus flipping over the money changers’ tables in the Temple. When I speak of charity, I mean it in its deepest sense: the love of the other, willing the good of the other, for the sake of the love of God; so, to speak to another charitably means to speak with them out of a desire for their good and salvation. St. Peter reminds us of this: while we are always to be ready with a defense for the hope that is in us, we must offer that defense "with gentleness and reverence" (1 Peter 3:16). Niceness may not be a Christian virtue, but kindness is a fruit of the Holy Spirit.

When you speak to another about the orthodox faith with charity, your goal is to open their mind to see the truth and persuade them to put aside any biases they may have against it. Your goal is not to berate them for having an incorrect opinion and to put them into a verbal armbar until they tap out and admit that you were right. When you do this, you put the person off and erect a new barrier in their minds against the truth of the faith. Even if your argument is persuasive and your evidence incontrovertible, your interlocutor may still refuse to acknowledge it and may still balk at the notion of entering the Church, because you’re a jerk, and they’d rather not associate with a jerk. This person has been driven away from the faith, not because “they can’t take the truth,” not because “this is a hard saying, who can do it,” not because they have found Catholicism difficult and left it untried, not because they are stupid or wicked or lazy, but because of you and your cold, harsh, joyless presentation of the faith.

There are also many occasions upon which the Heresy Hunter’s hyper-sensitivity causes him to see heresy where none exists. In my experience, this happens because the Hunter is overly familiar with one era of Church teaching but ignorant of others—one further proof of Alexander Pope’s maxim that “A little learning is a dangerous thing.” The Heresy Hunter may have memorized the canons of the Council of Trent but be less versed in Scripture (pun intended). To give an example, I knew of a priest who publicly excoriated his choir for singing a hymn that contained the line “this bread that we share is the Body of Christ,” denouncing the verse as an example of the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation, in which the bread and wine remain really present along with the presence of Christ (like a eucharistic version of Nestorianism, for you nerds playing at home). However, this phrase comes directly from 1 Corinthians 10:16: “The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” It is an understatement to say that one should probably refrain from calling a verse of Scripture heretical. This is the mirror image of the tendency of some of our Protestant brethren to reject any extra-Scriptural term as “unbiblical.” Though its texts are inspired, the words of Scripture do not exhaust the concepts they describe, nor do the quaestiones of the Summa Theologiae, nor the anathemas of Trent.

These two tendencies, the lack of charity and the hypersensitivity to language (and over-emphasis on certain expressions), often come together in that greatest of discussion spaces: Facebook. A prime example often occurs when people write paeans to their lost loved ones. Someone might write, "Grandma's gone, but that just means we have another angel watching over us." This is an expression of their belief in the communion of saints, in their grandmother's continued charitable concern and intercession for them. And most people will take this in the spirit in which it is offered. But the Heresy Hunter does not. Rather than offering condolences to the family member or prayers for the departed person, the Heresy Hunter believes it most pressing to point out that people do not become angels when they die, that angels are pure intellectual forms as opposed to substantial relations of matter and form as humans are, and that It's a Wonderful Life is a terrible movie for spreading such fallacious ideas. The Heresy Hunter here has missed the point, and in his zeal to technically correct a sentimental statement, he has no doubt made that person ill-disposed toward anything further he has to say. (I would like to see someone respond to that by noting that the Greek word angelos simply means "messenger," so that it is appropriate in an analogical sense to refer to any intercessor as an angel.)

The nub of my gist here is that the Heresy Hunter treats a means as an end: the purpose of our seeking to refine our theological language is not to end up with a fine set of spiritual encyclopedias all perfectly accurate and up to date; rather, the purpose of such precision is to aid us in our contemplation of God, and our growing in friendship with Him. We write theological books not to bash others over the head with them, but, in a sense, as love letters to the Lord. The great saints and the great theologians are marked by a joy and serenity. The Heresy Hunter is marked by anger and sourness. I would encourage the Heresy Hunter to keep his eyes fixed on the Lord. Contemplating His face brings us peace, a peace that compels us to draw others in to enter into their Master's joy.

On Nuns and Bad Teaching

I've had a number of discussions with people of my parents' or grandparents' generation who consider themselves faithful to the Church's teaching who have uttered rank heresies: we have to earn our salvation through good works; unbaptized babies will go to Hell; only Catholics can go to heaven. When I try to correct their mistaken notions, they reply defensively, "Well, that's what the nuns taught us when I was growing up."

My interlocutor here is invoking the spotless reputation of the "pre-Vatican II nun," in full habit, always faithful to the Church's teaching, praying for our souls whenever she isn't teaching our children, the bulwark of the local parish in the days before the Council allegedly turned everything upside-down and changed the Church's teaching, etc. Surely Sister wouldn't have taught us something that wasn't so? She wasn't like, you know, those nuns we have today.

First of all, there are many good and holy and faithful religious sisters today, just as there were then. And there are heretical and unfaithful nuns today, just as there were then.

We also have to consider the possibility that you have remembered incorrectly or you initially misunderstood what it was that the sisters taught you. Maybe you took their exhortations toward good works to mean that they are the mechanism by which we are saved, instead of that by which we are built up in holiness and closeness to God. Maybe you mistook the theological theory of the Limbo of unborn babies to be a hellish place. Maybe you thought when Sister talked about all the benefits of the Catholic faith (the grace of the sacraments, the fullness of the truth), you thought she meant that without these things it was impossible for anyone to be saved. Perhaps that was it?

And then there's this, a thought quite likely anathema to many: perhaps Sister taught you wrong. Maybe she was too stringent in her theology. Maybe she went beyond what the Church officially taught and believed. Maybe you weren't taught what you should have been. We could give the benefit of the doubt and assume a good intention, though. Perhaps Sister, living in a predominately Protestant country that openly discriminated against Catholics, got a little defensive and pushed a little beyond what the Church taught, in order to distinguish "us from them" and establish a firm identity with firm teaching: "No! Earn your way to heaven! Only baptized babies can get in! Only Catholics!" A bad result, but people can be excused at least a little for what they do when their backs are against the wall; or if not excused, at least we can sympathize.

Now, you might say to me, "Nick, you're a post-Vatican II child, you don't know all the changes that happened! That's what the Church used to teach! Things ain't the way they used to be."

Dude. I can read.

I've read theology manuals from before the Council, the ones used in seminaries and universities. They do not say that we earn salvation by works. They do not say that unbaptized babies go to Hell. They do not say that only Catholics can be saved. Indeed, they say pretty much exactly what the documents of the Second Vatican Council and subsequent teachings say. There are shifts in tone and emphasis and certain thoughts are developed more, but those are not substantial changes. The faith is essentially the same as it ever was, expanded and deepened but never contradictory.

If Sister taught you those things back then, she was wrong. Let's presume the error is in your memory and not in her instruction. Yes, the Church looks rather different on the outside in many ways compared to then. People hear things put in a different way than when they grew up, and they wonder what the change was about, and why it happened, and they long for the certainty they once had when Sister taught them such hard and fast doctrine. But let's make sure, in our search for certainty, that we're not certainly wrong.

The Origins of the Creed

In the first few centuries after the birth, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, the hot topics of conversation within the Church often centered on these questions: who is Jesus? What is Jesus? How do we make sense of all of the things he said and did? He healed the sick, fed multitudes from a few loaves and fish, even raised the dead, even rose from the dead himself. He was clearly a prophet, perhaps the greatest of prophets, the Messiah who was to come and restore Israel. But he also said certain things, like “I and my Father are one,” and “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” Was… was he claiming to be equal to God somehow, or to be God Himself? How could Jesus be God if there is only one God? Could God become a human being and still be God? And even if Jesus were God, how would we reconcile that with him saying things like, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone,” or with the Gospels saying that Jesus grew in wisdom (does God need to learn anything)? Is Jesus a man? Is he God? Both? Neither? Something else? How do we express his identity?

Many people tried many solutions to the problem, but most of them tended to fall on one side or the other of the “God or man” equation. Docetists said that Jesus was really God, but only appeared to be human (“Docetist” from the Greek dokein meaning “to appear, to seem”); he didn’t really suffer or die, but sort of went through the motions, his human form being a mere suit of clothes or mirage. Adoptionists said that Jesus was really a human being, but was granted special favor by God and elevated or “adopted” at the moment of his baptism in the River Jordan (“This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased”). Different Gnostic groups took some things they read in Neo-Platonic writers and constructed a whole mythos in which human souls were trapped in bodies by an evil creator god (the Demiurge), and Jesus was a spirit who had come to free them by giving them the knowledge that they were imprisoned (“Gnostic” from Greek gnosis meaning “knowledge”).

None of these seemed right. The general sense, gathered from Sacred Scripture, the apostolic tradition of the Church, and the teaching of the bishops around the world, was that Jesus had to be somehow both God and man. But how could that be? Many more made attempts. Some said that God was really one, but appeared in different forms at different times: sometimes as Father, sometimes as Son, sometimes as Spirit. Various ideas had this basic concept, and became known as monarchianism ( Greek mono + arche = “one beginning/origin/power”), or modalism (as in, “God appears in different modes: Father mode, Son mode, Spirit mode”), or patripassianism (Latin “pater” + “passio” = “The Father suffering,” meaning that though it appeared a different person, the Son, was suffering, the Son is just a mode of the Father, so it was really the Father who suffered on the cross). There were others, all falling to the same problem of not respecting both the unity of God and the distinction between the Father and the Son.

Many of these teachers began trying to make use of philosophical terms to help explain themselves, terms like substance, nature, and person. Several challenges stood in the way of this, though. One, the eastern part of the empire was largely Greek-speaking, while the west was Latin-speaking; add to this that the Greek theologians were using more terms than their Latin counterparts, and problems abound. The Latins heard ousia and physis and hypostasis and prosopon and tried to cram them into persona, natura, and substantia. It also didn’t help that the Greeks couldn’t decide what their terms meant—they had a bad habit of using these words without defining them. One person uses physis to mean “nature/essence/what-it-is,” while another uses it to mean “center of subjectivity/who-it-is.” Confusion abounded.

Then, a priest from Rome named Arius began teaching in the Egyptian city of Alexandria that the Son was distinct from the Father, but that he was a creature, the greatest of all creatures and nearly a god himself, but that “there was a time when the Son was not”: he was not eternal; he was not God. But, being that he died for our sins and was glorified by God, he was still worthy of our veneration.

This idea became very popular, especially among certain influential Roman nobles, and the Germanic barbarians living on the borders of the empire. Much of the Church in the Eastern part of the empire took to this new teaching; as St. Jerome wrote, “The world awoke and groaned to find itself Arian.” The western part of the empire still largely held to the traditional view laid out by Tertullian a century before: that Jesus was one person, but a person with two natures, one human and one divine.

Things got bad. Factions sprang up. People were persecuted. Bishops were forced into exile away from their cities.

In 325 AD, the emperor Constantine summoned all the bishops of the world to the resort town of Nicaea and asked them to settle the issue. More than 300 bishops from all over the empire attended, including two legates representing the Pope. This was the first ecumenical (“world-wide”) council in the Church’s history. The bishops discussed, and debated, even fought: St. Nicholas (yes, THAT St. Nicholas) was so furious with Arius that he punched him in the face! The bishops overwhelmingly agreed that Arius was dead wrong. They came up with a summary definition of the Church’s faith in Christ, adding to it at another council held 50 years later in Constantinople. Today we know this definition as the Nicene(-Constantinopolitan) Creed. You say it in Mass every Sunday.

(Tangential epilogue: People sometimes wonder, if the Creed is supposed to be the most basic and fundamental expression of the Christian faith, why is there no mention of the Eucharist, expressing the Church’s belief that it is truly the Body and Blood of Christ? The answer is simple: nobody disputed this point at the time. Creeds and council declarations address the points being controverted at the present time. The Eucharist as the Real Presence of Christ? That was obvious. The nature of Christ himself? That’s the hard stuff.)