On the Meaning of the Word "Heresy"

 

     The words "heresy" and " heretic" in the New Testament are badly misunderstood by most today. Most believe they have to do with false teaching and false teachers. There's a new thing going around saying they have to do with "choosing" and making a choice. But neither of these things is really correct where the Greek terms used in the NT are concerned.

      The word "hairesis" in Greek literally means "faction." And the word "hairetikos" literally means "factionalist." The words have to do with creating factions within what is supposed to be a unified body. These are the words used, for example, if you wanted to describe a political party and its members, or separate sects or even denominations of a religion. These words have to do with schisms and schismatics among a population.

      So, both Republicans and Democrats are heretics according to the actual meaning of these words. Both Liberals and Conservatives are heretics. Both the hard core Catholic and the die hard Baptist are heretics. Anyone who seeks to cause or maintain divisions are, by definition, heretics. And where Paul was concerned, anyone who sought to cause or maintain divisions within the Body of Christ is a heretic regardless of what theology he or she professes to hold. Anyone who puts their theological opinions above the love which Christ commanded which holds the body together is a heretic, regardless of how correct those opinions are.

      And according to Paul, heresy was a product of the flesh, not the Spirit of Christ. The need to be right is a product of the flesh, whereas the love for one another, putting each other's needs above our own is a product of the Spirit of Christ.

A Ramble about NDEs

      Recently, I've been watching Near Death Experience compilations from a YouTube channel called "Love Covered Life." The gal who runs it tends to be more progressive, if not outright New Age, but I respect her intentions and her Bible knowledge. These compilations are clips from interviews she's done with folks who have had a near death experience and can remember what happened. None of them know or have ever met each other to my knowledge. But the reason why she put together these compilations of clips was to demonstrate the consistency of their experiences, all of which had been tailored to the individual, yet all of which shared remarkably the same features regardless of who was experiencing it, what age they were at the time, or what their background was. All experienced a "life review" through the eyes of the people they interacted with. All experienced God in roughly the same way, as pure and indescribably love and light. Most experienced meeting Jesus and conversing with Him, regardless of their denominational or religious background, and at least one experienced hell before being rescued from it by crying out to Jesus (this last one I have seen his entire interview).
      "In the mouth of two or three witnesses let everything be established" is what the Scriptures say. There were roughly five to ten people represented in these compilations of interviews. And, as I mentioned before, they did not know each other and had never met each other. It is for these two reasons that, I believe, these accounts cannot just be dismissed.
      What strikes me most about these accounts, which I cannot ignore, is how much their descriptions of God and creation's relationship to Him during their experiences coincide with what I have written over the last several years, even though I have only just seen them (I did see Howard Storm's interview before I left California, but that was the only one). What I wrote came from prayer, study, and my own personal experiences with Him. What also strikes me is how much the Spirit within me agrees and refuses to let me argue with them, but rather gets me to see and hear past the surface words to the commonalities of what they're describing.
      These people weren't theologians. The majority of them that I observed had no axe to grind. They were just ordinary, random people observing and trying to describe what they saw and heard according to how they understood and perceived it. But what they saw and heard profoundly changed them and their beliefs from the time they died to the time they woke up again. The aforementioned Howard Storm, who was the one who initially had a hellish experience before being rescued, was an atheist professor visiting Paris at the time. He is now a UCC pastor and has been for the last thirty years.
      One might say, from a conservative Christian perspective, that God will never contradict His word. And yet in His word He very much does contradict what He has previously said when the need has arisen. One glaring example is Peter's vision of the sheet with the unclean animals on it. Peter knew God had commanded in the Torah not to eat them, and yet here he was being commanded by God to kill and eat them as a metaphor for including the Gentiles into the Church. Jesus' contradictions of Sabbath keeping, one of the Ten Commandments itself, were legendary. So, where these accounts might seem to contradict at least traditional theology if not His actual word directly, I think this must be kept in mind as well as taking the accounts themselves with a grain of salt, discerning what is being embellished and what is not. And where the account descriptions become nearly identical is where I sit up and pay attention. Where they start matching the conclusions I've already been led to is where my attention becomes like a hawk's.
      Like it or not, these experiences are data, and potentially valuable data once the personal inconsistencies are sifted out. And for that reason, I don't think they can just be dismissed. Theology as a science, like any science, must continually evolve in its understanding as more data about its subject is acquired. As you get to know a person, either previously held misconceptions about that person are changed or you become disillusioned. Where God is concerned, either you allow Him to change your misconceptions about Him, or, stubbornly holding on to them, you make those misconception an idol, and refuse to know the real Person in favor of a God of your own creation.

On the Practice of Being a Christian

     The whole practice of the Way, of following Jesus Christ, is essentially channeling Him. You can see this in Peter as he stands before Caiaphas and accuses him of Jesus' murder. You can see this in Paul, not only in his writings, but especially in his later years as he interacts with people. And you can see it in the first few weeks and months of the church after pentecost as they were all of a single mind and heart, parts of a body connected to a single head, as it were.

       Our practice is to not say or do anything except what He says or does through us, just as He didn't say or do anything except what the Father said and did through Him. Just as He said, "I can't do anything at all from Myself," so also He said, "without Me you can't do anything at all." And in the ancient church of the first and second centuries it was understood that a person who wasn't living as He taught wasn't to be considered a Christian regardless of what came out of his mouth. That is, if you couldn't see and hear Jesus from this person, then he wasn't a disciple. 

     The power of the Gospel is more than just words, it is literally the Spirit of Christ taking over and living and expressing Jesus Christ out through us so that all around us can see and hear Him even though He wears our faces. Without this, without being able to see and hear Him through us, why should anyone follow or believe what we say? How is it different from any other religious belief without the Spirit of Christ making His presence known? As Paul wrote to the Corinthians, they would know the power behind his words when he came to them, and that he didn't initially come just speaking words of human wisdom.

      This is the greatest problem and challenge in the churches today. People just aren't experiencing Him, seeing Him, or hearing Him from those who claim to belong to Him, and they're calling BS on it. There are too many today who "preach the Gospel," and simply don't see the need to actually follow Him or do anything He said. Thus we have situations like the many pastor scandals, the entertainment churches which, when viewed behind the curtain are full of very material and fleshly concerns, and those who "preach the Gospel" by arguing their own theology viciously and hatefully against others. They "preach the Gospel," but do not love, do not forgive, judge and condemn, and teach others to do the same through their actions if not their words. They "preach the Gospel," and prey on young women and even boys. They "preach the Gospel," while making themselves wealthy from their congregants. They "preach the Gospel" while enslaving their listeners under rules and moral codes which amount to another Law which Paul wrote those who are in the Spirit are not under. They "preach the Gospel," but have no idea what it means, or if they do, do not care.

      You know when you've encountered Jesus Christ through someone, even if you don't make the connection at first. You never forget Him. So also should be all those through whom He lives His life. "I have been crucified with Christ, and I no longer live but Christ lives within me..." This isn't a metaphor, but the summing up of what it means to be a Christian, not following rules and moral codes, but fully surrendering your words, actions, and thoughts to the Spirit of Jesus Christ with whom you have been made one thing rather than to your own neurological and psychological responses.
     So, yes, absolutely preach the Gospel, but more importantly, be the Gospel.

The Goal of Salvation

 

     One of the things which keeps coming up in conversations about salvation is heaven. In these discussions, heaven is imagined as another realm where God and His angels dwell as either a paradise, or some parody of an angel standing at pearly gates checking IDs like a bouncer. Most folks think that entry into heaven is the goal and purpose of salvation through Christ, and this is what we're taught by nearly every church and denomination.

      Except it isn't. Entry into heaven is not the goal of the salvation found in Jesus Christ.

      As I have written before, if heaven is where God dwells, then heaven is all around us infinitely in every direction, because God is omnipresent and there is no time or place in which He does not dwell. We simply don't experience it because of the distractions of this life and our physical senses, and because of our own peculiar human malfunction. In other words, we are all already there, we just can't see the forest for the trees, and are so wrapped up in our own stuff that experiencing the eternal and ever present presence of God at all is considered unusual and beyond extraordinary (and, if I were to be honest, would be overwhelming if it took place all the time in this physical world). Far from a realm of the blessed dead, the dwelling place of God is here and now, and the traditional images and parodies of heaven stem from medieval artwork and theologies, themselves influenced by previous pagan worldviews about the afterlife.

      The primary goal of the salvation found in Jesus Christ is to provide a solution for our common malfunction, that is, to make it so that we don't have to be enslaved to that malfunction in everything we say, do, or think so that we can act and speak free from it. Our salvation is first and foremost deliverance from this primary problem. This is accomplished through union with Jesus Christ in His death, burial and resurrection, intertwining each one of us with His Spirit so that we are parts of Him and He of each one of us as the parts of a body with Himself as the head which controls and guides the rest of it. But as we are united with Jesus Christ so that He may guide and take control of our words and actions, we are also united with the Father through Him. We become one thing with God Himself through Jesus Christ, so that wherever He is, we are, and wherever each one of us is, He is present.

      And so of course to be absent from the body is to be present with Jesus Christ, because we are one thing with Him. Of course when the physical body is stripped away we are exposed to the unfiltered presence of the Eternal, omnipresent, omnipotent, omniscient Being who is love because we are already one with Him. God's solution to our malfunctioning neurology as human beings is to graft us to Himself, with our cooperation and permission, so that His Spirit and His Eternal life can be the new source of our behaviors and words. And the consequence of this grafting is that we are always wherever He is, and He with us, regardless of whether we are in the body or out of it.

      This is why the common misconception that salvation is all about who goes to some imagined celestial paradise, gets a big mansion in the sky, and lives out eternity in a kind of paradaisical retirement plan really, really bugs me. It's a distortion of the worst kind, and leads to all kinds of misunderstandings, spiritual abuse, and some pretty harmful theology. Everyone is just concerned about who gets through the gates and who doesn't, when that whole scenario is as much a product of medieval mythology as the Elysian Fields are a product of Greek mythology.

      God isn't going to ask anyone, "Why should I let you into My heaven?" like some Zeus like figure deciding who's been good and who's been bad, or deciding whose theology is correct enough. This is a popular image and the one most people think of when they think of it. But this isn't the reality of what our salvation found through Jesus Christ entails.

"How can God forgive that?"

      Tonight, I heard an interesting thing. Max Lucado, the well known devotional author and pastor, upon hearing of the prison conversion to Christ of Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer and cannibal, described it as one of the most difficult things he has wrestled with, and asked, "How can God forgive someone like him?" This is a question which often comes up, either as a hypothetical or as a real world difficulty of faith in the case of Dahmer. The actions of some are so heinous, so harmful, so vile, so evil that the question is raised about the reasonable limits of God's forgiveness. "God couldn't forgive that, could He?" or also as Max Lucado asked, "How could God possibly forgive that?"
      Imagine for a moment that you have a child who has a psychiatric disorder which makes them hurt themselves and others, sometimes badly. R.A.D. can be one such disorder. There have been documented severe cases where small children have not only attacked their parents and caregivers, but also seriously injured or killed themselves. Psychological disturbance can take many forms, and there are many disorders which can influence a child to have extremely harmful behaviors. That child spends the next twenty or more years so messed up that he or she leaves a trail of injured, hurt, and scared people behind them. And all you want is for that child to come to their senses and be rid of that disorder. All you want is to be able to love them and have that love returned. All you want is for them to be happy, successful, and at peace with themselves and everyone else.
      And then, one day, they change completely. They are no longer the same person at all, but are loving, affectionate, at peace and are able to participate in life like a normal person.
      How would you respond? Would you hold every evil thing they did against them? Or would you rejoice that this miracle had occurred and let go of who they had been and what they had done before?
This is God when someone comes to their senses and turns around from what they were doing, no matter what came before. His focus is entirely on recovering those lost to our common human malfunction, regardless of how that malfunction presents in any one human being. No one presentation of that malfunction, whether it be greed, murder, theft, lying, or just wanting what someone else has is worse than another because they all stem from the same disorder. When your kid starts acting like a normal kid instead of the devil incarnate, you start jumping for joy and hugging them relentlessly. The point isn't how bad the psychiatric illness got, or what kind of damage was done. The point is that it's no longer in control of your kid.
      We project our desire for retribution onto God, and because we want the person who hurt us or others to themselves be hurt at least as bad as the person whom they hurt, we assume God must want that too. But God's justice is about restoration and healing, not punishment and destruction. When an "evil" man turns away from his evil and does what is right, God says flat out in Scripture that the former evil will no longer be remembered. And the same is true of a "good" man who turns away from his good and does what is harmful or wrong. The good will no longer be remembered. Why? Because either one has become a different person altogether, and you don't punish or reward someone for something a different person has done, and we are each one of us different persons from one decision to the next.
      I don't know if Dahmer's conversion was sincere. I really don't. I do know that if he really had turned around and come to his senses, then God would have been rejoicing with tears, not debating about what to do with him.

More Thoughts on Repentance and Forgiveness

     The worst injustice we as human beings do to God is to project our own ways of thinking onto Him, and assume that He thinks the same way we do. We assume that He holds grudges because we do. We assume that He demands retribution because we do. This was true as soon as Adam and Eve ate the fruit they weren't supposed to. Why in the world would they have hid from God because they were naked? Every animal on the planet was naked. The answer is that their minds had become so warped that they believed being naked was shameful, and so of course they believed God would see it as shameful because they did. We project a darkened, deranged, malfunctioning mind onto the One who is without error or darkness because the malfunctioning human brain cannot imagine that someone else might think differently from itself.
      This is the reason why we do not trust God to forgive just because He says it. This is the reason why we want guarantees. We instinctively do not trust because of our inherent derangement, and because we know that, deep down, we want retribution for when we ourselves are injured or offended and letting go of that is incredibly difficult.
      And there is of course the temptation, the darker desire to be able to get or do what we want without consequence to ourselves, to be able to "work the system" to our advantage. Thus in ancient times you have wealthy "religious" people breaking commandments with what they believe is impunity as long as they keep the sacrifices flowing. Thus you have men of power and influence doing what they want as long as they make regular confession and donate the right amount of money to the churches. They believe they have "guarantees" of a "do what I want and get away with it" card, not understanding that God sees it, and that's not how this works.
      When God says something, He doesn't have to back it up with a guarantee. He's going to do it. He doesn't have to take an oath. His "yes" is as good as a promise engraved in diamond. And His "no" is as immovable for a human being as a mountain of the heaviest metal. When He says He will forgive the wrongdoing of a person if that person turns away from that wrongdoing and does what is right, He will do it. Period. When He says He will choose not to remember the wrongdoing, He will do it. Period. He doesn't need a sacrifice to bind Himself to that word. He isn't the same as we are. He isn't deranged or erroneous. He doesn't harbor secret, dark things within Himself. He doesn't talk out of both sides of His mouth. What He says is what He will do. God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all.
      The sacrifices were written into the Torah as a concession to our own fallen psyches. They were written in as a concession to our own malfunctioning consciences. He does not need them in any capacity, and would be just as good without them. They were written in as a mercy to our own inability to forgive ourselves or others, and as a counterpoint to projecting that inability onto Him.
      Jesus Christ died for us, but not because God needed blood to forgive us; rather, He died for us so that we wouldn't have to continue in that malfunction and inherited derangement. He died and resurrected so that we could operate from a different source of behaviors than our own malfunctioning neurology, our own erroneous flesh. All that it requires is that we shelter in place within Him, admitting and recognizing our own internal derangement, and handing ourselves over to the control of His Spirit so that He, free from that derangement and malfunction, would be the source of our actions, words, and thoughts. And the very act of turning to Jesus Christ, trusting Him and following Him, is itself turning away from the previous errors and wrongdoing. Of course God would forgive in so doing, because He said He would. Of course there is forgiveness found in Jesus Christ, because the person truly seeking to remain in Him and follow Him is a person who is repentant and has confessed and continues to confess his own errors, and so of course God is faithful and just to forgive that person's errors and wrongdoings, because He said He would forgive the repentant person to begin with, just as He justified the repentant tax collector but not the Pharisee.

Regarding Forgiveness and Taking Refuge

     I was going through the Scripture readings for today this morning in the "Daily Roman Missel" I still have. It's a thick black book of liturgy, prayers, and readings for every day of the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church. I bought it in preparation for the priesthood oh, about eighteen years ago now, used it for Sunday Mass for several years, and still keep it for sentimental reasons, not least of which because it contains a record of those people whom I baptized. Now, it's held together with duct tape, and the pages are bulging from use and water damage which happened years ago. It's one of those books that's just been a companion through everything since that time.
     This morning, the last verse in the Psalms (34:23) reading caught my attention. In the Missel it reads, "The LORD redeems the lives of his servants; no one incurs guilt who takes refuge in him." (NAB) Either on a hunch or prompted by the Spirit, I'm not sure which, I looked up the same verse in the King James Version (34:22, the KJV doesn't include the title as the first verse), and curiously it read, "The LORD redeemeth the soul of his servants: and none of them that trust in him shall be desolate." After reading the extreme difference in translation, I then did what I normally do and went to the Hebrew text followed by the Greek LXX and then the Latin.
     The Hebrew text reads, literally, "YHWH redeems [the] soul of His slaves and all the ones taking refuge in Him do not suffer for their guilt." The Latin and Greek were something along the lines of "...and all those hoping in Him are not guilty" (Vulgate) and "...and all who hope in Him will absolutely not trespass." (LXX)
     I checked a couple of other translations, and they were all some combination of either the Latin reading or the Hebrew depending on who was doing the translating.
My question then becomes, why did the KJV editors and translators so badly deviate from the original texts? According to what I've been able to research, they didn't copy it from Tyndale as Tyndale didn't translate this Psalm.
     I have to wonder if the reason for the deviation has to do with theology. At least, this question has crossed my mind. In my experience, the theology of a translator tends to color the way he or she views the original text, and they render it in a way which aligns with that theology whether or not the text actually does. Frequently as well, translators simply don't understand what the text is talking about, even if they understand the use of language, because they're not at the same point of spiritual development as the prophets and Apostles who wrote it.
     The Hebrew text says that Yahweh redeems or ransoms the soul of His slaves, and all those who take refuge in Him will not be held guilty. I'm not sure how much more clear a message of forgiveness and mercy for those who turn away from their wrongdoing and "take refuge" in Him there can be. Notice too that there is no mention of sacrifice here as being necessary for that being held guiltless, only taking refuge in Him.
Jesus said, "Remain in me and I in you." The word used in the Greek literally means to "stay put," or more to the point, "make your home." If that's not a similar concept to taking refuge, then I don't know what is. "Shelter in place" in Him might be another way of saying it.
     Another part of the readings today was from Luke 18 and concerned the pharisee and the tax collector. In Luke 18:14 there's an interesting use of words here. It reads, "I say to you, this one [referring to the tax collector] went down having been justified [made right] into his house as opposed to that one [referring to the pharisee]..." All the tax collector did was sincerely repent and acknowledge that he had screwed up. He said, literally, "God, be conciliated [or appeased] with me, the screw-up." Again, no mention of sacrifices being made.
     The only thing God has ever truly required for forgiveness and mercy is that we recognize the wrong we are doing, and turn away from it. Even Abraham was made right in God's sight, not from sacrifices for sin, but just because he believed Him. The sacrifices which were prescribed in the Torah were already a cultural thing, and were meant to help deal with the guilty conscience, but they were for human psychological benefit, not because God wanted animals slaughtered. We wanted a physical guarantee of forgiveness, a contract which said we would be forgiven, rather than trusting His word that we would be. And in the ancient world, the blood of animals was used to sign contracts.
     Those who believe in and follow Jesus Christ are forgiven because that belief and following presume a recognition and confession of one's screwing up. One agrees with God about his error, and God is faithful and right to forgive and to cleanse them of all wrongdoing. One takes refuge in Jesus Christ, and then His Spirit works within that person for him to be able to not screw up, and not cause harm, just as He was without error.
      It was never about the requirement of blood, but about the turning to God and sheltering in place in Jesus Christ.

*  *  *

Regarding the verse, "For without the shedding of blood, there is no remission":

    It's Hebrews 9:22, and in context, the author is describing what had to happen according to the Torah, not necessarily the laws of spiritual physics. The phrase itself doesn't occur in the Torah, or in the rest of the Old Testament as a requirement for forgiveness whereas turning away from one's wrongdoing and turning to God as a requirement for forgiveness is all over the Old Testament, and both Jesus and John the Baptist preached for people to repent and turn around rather than go and make sacrifices. It's clear in many places in the Old Testament, that God gets fed up with people making sacrifices instead of turning away from their wrongdoing; that is, sinning and then expecting Him to forgive because they spilled the blood of an animal. He says very clearly that such things abhor Him. 

     Also, as Paul wrote, Abraham lived long before the Torah was ever written. He had no Ark of the Covenant, no Holy of Holies, no prescribed altar of sacrifices, Day of Atonement, or any of it. There is no mention of him ever sacrificing an animal for the forgiveness of sins. Instead, we read about him slaughtering animals to sign a contract with God. We read about him nearly offering Isaac in sacrifice to God, but there is no mention of what the sacrifice was for except as an offering which was requested. Abraham simply trusted what God had said, and God counted it as good enough for Him. This is also true of Isaac and Jacob as well, who themselves also did not have the Torah. They only trusted God with what He said. 

     Going back to Hebrews, the thrust of the author's argument is that blood sacrifice could never "take away" sin. Notice, he doesn't say "forgive," he says "take away" which is a different matter. Only the death of Jesus Christ could take away sin, and this is accomplished through union with Him in His death, and submission to His Spirit whereby He who is without sin acts and speaks through us, and there is no sin found in our actions and words. Thus, sin has been taken away through Jesus Christ.