Heretic

 

  The Christian Church had its first heresy to deal with about five minutes after Jesus ascended into Heaven. His command to spread the Good News has proved more difficult than anyone thought. The first heresy was about circumcision. Even Peter was on the wrong side on that one.

  Between the second and seventh centuries I counted 33 heresies that have been condemned by one or more Christian churches. And those 33 came from a list that included only the more important heresies. It was a busy time back then figuring out exactly who Jesus was and what his relationship was with the Father and the Holy Spirit. Or is it Holy Ghost? You had to be careful about your choice of words or you could be toast, literally.

  In the second century there was Docetism, which said Jesus did not have a real body, but an illusory one. Adoptionism said Jesus was not the Son of God from eternity, but was adopted at some point in his earthly life. One I like is Universalism which believes that all people will eventually be saved. If that was correct then I know I'd be in for sure. Of course I'd have to rub shoulders with Hitler, Stalin, and Johnny O'Malley who used to beat me up in sixth grade, but I'm ok with that.

  Universalism gets a thumbs down from the Catholic Church, the Eastern Orthodox Church and mainline Protestant Churches. The threat of eternal fire is needed to get some of us out of bed on a Sunday morning. These heresies can all find Bible verses to back up their beliefs. Even the shortest verse can be spun into a new sect, which will then spin off several more sects based on nuances. It's all in the interpretation.

 It was hard for the Church to deal with heretics in the early days, because the Roman Empire considered them heretics and used violence to break up their services. Fortunately the Emperor Constantine's mother became a Christian and that put the kibosh on feeding Christians to the lions.

 The church was then free to call a council in Nicea in 325 to deal with Arianism, which believed that though Jesus was divine he had been made by God before time existed. The average Christian didn't think much about these matters. They left the debates to the bishops and theologians. Love your neighbor was already hard enough for the Faithful.

  From this distance, the debate seems like the arguments between Republicans and Democrats. The non-Arians won out because they had better debaters. Arianism did not disappear though. They just went underground. Even today Unitarians and Jehovah's Witnesses hold Arian-like beliefs. Constantine himself was only baptized on his deathbed, and the ceremony was performed by an Arian bishop. When Christianity became the official religion of the Empire in 380, the Church then had the power of the state to enforce conformity. No more lions; it was now the rack and burning at the stake.

  Christians quit fighting with each other in the seventh century and joined forces to fight the new religion of Islam which was on a mission to take over the world. The Muslims were not considered heretics because you had to be baptized to be a heretic according to the Church. That little technicality did not prevent Christians and Muslims from shedding oceans of each other's blood. We're still at it today.

  The Church split into east-west halves in 1054. The schism was over one word in the Nicene Creed and about who was going to be pope. The two halves did not call each other heretics. That would have been harsh. 

  The Church's greatest heresy was the Protestant Reformation. The story is that Luther initially just wanted to reform the corruption in the Church. It quickly got political and the lines hardened. In just a few years Luther went from being a devout monk to calling the Church "The Whore of Babylon," and the pope, "The Antichrist". Luther believed that people should interpret the Bible for themselves. That didn't work out very well and many people were burned at the stake for their unorthodox interpretations. Without a pope to keep things in hand, Protestantism split into hundreds of sects. The sixteenth century rivaled the twentieth in the proportion of its population killed unnecessarily.

  The Irish Peace accords in 1998 ended the last Catholic-Protestant mayhem. Could the great Christian churches ever reunite? The Catholics and the various Protestant religions meet from time to time to discuss reunification. They tiptoe around the fact that the pope has not canceled the title of Heresy that was awarded to Protestantism by Pope Leo X half a millennium ago. Fingers crossed.

Guilty of heresy.