These 4 ancient heresies are making a return to US politics

When I was in theological college, the words heresy and heretic were tossed around rather loosely. Anyone who seemed to be standing outside the theological mainstream, on whatever issue, was stuck with that label.

In my circles, these terms soon lost any substantive meaning and became purely functional: “Anyone outside the mainstream whom I don’t like.” 

What is heresy?

Let’s at least begin with a definition so that we’re not just casting random aspersions. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is especially helpful: “Heresy is the obstinate post-baptismal denial of some truth which must be believed…”

Heresy is first of all, obstinate. It is both deliberate and stubborn. One cannot, in other words, be an accidental heretic. Rather, to be a heretic is to deliberately and determinedly choose to apart from the received faith on a matter of truth that must be believed.

Second, only Christians can be heretics. This is the clear implication of the word “post-baptismal.”  To reject the faith utterly is to move from heresy to apostasy. To have never accepted or rejected the faith is to be, simply, unconverted. A heretic is someone who knowingly rejects received core Christian teaching while still claiming the Christian label. 

Who would do such a thing? Well, Christians have through the centuries and Christians today are not immune. It is my deep conviction that the temptation is particularly strong for those Christians commonly grouped in the “evangelical” category, especially in North America.

That’s not “those people over there,” by the way. That’s the tribe of Christendom with which I identify. These people are my people. And this is a charge I do not make lightly or without self-implication.

I think this is an in-house conversation that self-described evangelicals especially in Canada and the United States need to have. 

Why would they? This answer is a bit more complicated and the first move goes something like this: Western Culture, and North American culture in particular, has banished God from the public square. And the result has not been an easy live-and-let-live secularism. Instead, that absence has been increasingly filled by politics — the ins and outs of how we order our lives together.

Our society’s Simony

Let me be clear: politics is a good. This, it seems to me, is the clear teaching of St. Paul in Romans 13. Keep in mind, he’s speaking specifically of Rome, and of Nero. So rejecting politics for some sort of withdrawal will not do. The issue is not the evil of politics. The issue is what happens when a good seeks to take the place of God. And when a good becomes a god, it becomes a demon. It becomes an enslaving dark power. 

At the same time that politics has assumed this transcendent place, many Christians have tried to maintain a place of influence at the political table. For perfectly good reasons, by the way. It is easy to scoff at those who wish to be “chaplains for Caesar,” as one theologian put it many years ago.

When politics is penultimate, compromise is possible. When politics is ultimate, compromise is replaced merely by ceasefire.

But do we really want to entertain the thought of a Caesar without a chaplain? That situation may well be forced on us at some point. It is certainly the case for Christians globally, who are persecuted for bowing the knee to King Jesus. But we are not there yet and we ought not to cede the ground quickly.  

Still, I worry that many of us have not counted the cost of maintaining our place at the political table and as a result, simply mirrored the polarisation of secular politics inside our churches. And I wonder if we have come to engage in Simony.  

In medieval times, Simony named the practice of buying or selling ecclesiastical favours or offices. Money changed hands, and a favoured son became a bishop.

But the temptation is much older. Rooted in the story of Simon Magus in Acts 8, Simony names the desire to buy or sell the power of the Holy Spirit for personal gain.

In the garb of late modern evangelicalism, Simony looks like a willingness to sell the treasures of the Gospel in order to maintain a position of influence at the political table. When that happens, Jesus becomes a cultural cipher (Gnosticism); the good news of salvation, the bad news of works (Arianism); the kingdom of God, our personal project (Pelagianism); and our opponents, evil that must be expunged (Donatism).

Let’s quickly take each in turn. 

1. Gnosticism 

Gnosticism names an odd hodgepodge of Jewish, Pagan, and Christian groups who believed in all kinds of esoterica. What held them together was the conviction that “salvation” (a liberation of the soul from the prison of the body at death) was attained through the practice of superior knowledge or gnosis by an elite few.

In the various Christian Gnostic schools, this secret knowledge was communicated by Christ, who only appeared to be human. The Apostles and their successors, because they were thick, could only deal in the hints and shadows that these elites had long left behind.  

Today, it’s easy to write these Christian groups off because of the strangeness of their convictions. But we are wise not to do so prematurely. For the chief reason that the adoption of these convictions is easily understandable, and even admirable: cultural relevance.

The Gnostic Christians believed in salvation of a sort. They believed in a saviour. And they wanted to present both in terms their culture would understand. 

The problem is, in their desire to remain relevant, they became indistinguishable. Jesus became another Mithras or Osiris or another dying-and-rising god. And salvation became a matter of spiritual technique for a special few. All of which was easily understood and culturally captive. However noble their motivations might have been, the Gnostics lost purchase on Jesus, and so became heretics. 

Here I need to make the charge a bit more concrete, but I am reluctant to be too specific because this is not a temptation unique to one side of the political aisle. Think of any hot button political issue: addressing poverty, mass migration, environmental care, being generous to sexual minorities without denying a traditional Christian ethic. We can find evangelical Christians at both ends of the debates these issues provoke, utterly convinced that Jesus is on their side and not at all on the other. Jesus and his kingdom are not breaking in from the outside, but are completely captive to one end of the political spectrum. But a Jesus who can no longer call us to repentance, but only the other side, is not the real Jesus. And that, like the cultural captivity of the Jesus of Gnosticism, has disastrous consequences. 

Once we have lost purchase on Jesus, “salvation” soon ceases to be the good news that God has saved us, and becomes the bad news that we must save ourselves. Thus we move from Gnosticism to the modern version of the ancient heresy of Arianism.

2. Arianism

Arius was a presbyter from Alexandria who began to teach that the Son of God was the first of God’s creatures. That there was a time when the Father was not a father because the Son was not. He was opposed by St. Athanasius, who insisted that the Son was begotten from the Father from all eternity. “God of God, light of light, very God of very God, begotten, not made,” as the Nicene Creed would later put it.  

Arius faced the consequences of his position squarely. If the Son is a creature, then God, who dwells in unapproachable light, is as much a mystery to him as God is to the rest of us. And if the Son is to be united to God, he must work at it. He is the Saviour only insofar as in his life and death, he gives us model which, if we follow it, will result in our own salvation.

St. Athanasius, thank goodness, would have none of it. Why, he wondered, did Christians name the Son, the Saviour if he does not in fact save? It took some time — and for poor St. Athanasius, five different periods of exile — for the Church to see sense. Only God can save us. The Son is the Saviour. Therefore the Son is God.  

The bad news of self-salvation in our era is easily seen when Jesus is placed in the service of this or that ideology. It is not the peculiar purview of the right or the left, the progressive or the conservative. Christians on both sides can, and do, press their culturally captive Jesus into the service of their preferred ideological programme.

And when that happens, he is no longer the fully divine, fully human Lord of heaven and earth who calls all to repentance. He is reduced to an idol, a mere mouthpiece for a political vision that may well have little to do with him or his Gospel.  

3. Pelagianism

Which brings us next to Pelagianism. Pelagius was a British monk and spiritual director who garnered a wide following. His message was simple: Christians should be holy. In the hands of some of his more educated followers, notably Julian of Eclanum, this was spelled out in a heretical way.

Human beings were born morally neutral and became sinners only through imitating the bad example given to us since Adam. We can obey God’s commands. But because of that bad example, we need to be set straight. We need a good example to replace Adam. God has given us Jesus as that example to follow and the Church to help us along the way. But in the end, we save ourselves by working very hard at it.  

Pelagius’s great opponent was Augustine of Hippo who knew in his bones that if our salvation is down to us and our efforts, we’re doomed. It was his own experience, recounted in the first eight books of The Confessions, that sinful human nature could not cooperate with grace. It needed first to be converted. God had to act to rescue us, to raise us to new life, before we could cooperate with the Spirit in the work of growing in holiness.  

If Jesus is merely the most important spokesman for a political programme that exists apart from him (Arianism), then his kingdom becomes conflated with, even lost in or supplanted by our political projects. He does not save us; we save ourselves by bringing that political vision to reality. This is Pelagianism in a fresh set of clothes.  

Now, if our political dream is in fact the kingdom that we will bring in through an act of our will, it becomes very easy to describe those who demur as impure, sinful, even evil. And if there is a defining feature of contemporary politics, it is just this: the willingness, even glee, with which we demonise our opponents. This is Donatism. 

4. Donatism

Donatism takes its name from a Bishop — Donatus — and a group of churches in North Africa who had come out of the last great persecution of Roman Christianity. 

They asked a very simple question: now that the persecution is over, what do we do with people, especially leaders, who recanted under persecution, who handed over Bibles and prayer books to be destroyed, but who now sought readmission?

The Donatists were straightforward: there was no readmission. The Catholics, on the other hand, were more generous. After a period of repentance, readmission to participation and even leadership in the life of the community was possible.  

For the Donatists, the holiness of the Church was the holiness with which her members conducted themselves. It was moral purity and faithfulness, to death if need be. For the Catholics (led once again by St. Augustine), the Church’s holiness was the holiness of Christ, always extended as a perfect gift and always received and lived out imperfectly by Christians.

No Christian could ever know the soul state of another and so would have to withhold ultimate judgment. The problem with the Donatists was not their concern for faithful Christian living — Augustine was a champion of that, too. The problem was the way they let that concern pre-empt the judgment of God.  

a Jesus who can no longer call us to repentance, but only the other side, is not the real Jesus

When we demonise our (Christian) political opponents — examples abound on the rage machines of social media — we are acting as the Donatists. We arrogate to ourselves a level of holiness that is not ours and a sinfulness to our antagonists that is possibly unfair.

When politics is penultimate, compromise is possible (compromise is, indeed, very often another good!). When politics is ultimate, compromise is replaced merely by ceasefire. War will at some point will be resumed, and we will fight until the last person standing. And with the growing willingness to engage in violence on both sides, sadly, that is not an overstatement.

Repent  

So what do we do? If this temptation, and ensuing set of heresies, is before us, how ought we to respond? Well, we do what we ought to do when any sin is exposed: repent.

That is, renounce it, seek to repair what damage it has caused, and seek the forgiveness of God and others. In our case, that means renouncing “relevance above all,” returning to the one who alone can save, so serving his kingdom that our political vision returns to second place, and allowing for the possibility that our brothers and sisters who are politically mistaken may be just that: mistaken.

And so might we. We must therefore always speak truthfully and tenderly, seeking the peace of our city. For in its peace, we shall find our own.

When Politics Becomes Heresy by Rev Tim Perry (Lexham Press) is available now