Catechesis · Inquirer
Heresy and Why It Matters
Catechesis · Inquirer
Heresy and Why It Matters
Because the abstract questions have concrete consequences for salvation. Arianism was not a dispute about the philosophical status of the Son -- it was a dispute about whether hum…
Question
Why did the Church fight so hard about seemingly abstract theological questions?
Because the abstract questions have concrete consequences for salvation. Arianism was not a dispute about the philosophical status of the Son -- it was a dispute about whether human beings can be saved. If the Son is a creature, the Incarnation is a creature entering creation, and the deification of humanity is impossible: only God can give the divine life, and a creature cannot bridge the gap. The Church fought over homoousios for fifty years because the lives and deaths of every Christian depended on getting it right.
The major heresies follow a pattern: each one resolves a genuine theological tension by eliminating one of its poles. Arianism resolved the tension between monotheism and the divinity of Christ by making Christ a superior creature -- a plausible simplification that destroyed salvation. Nestorianism resolved the tension between Christ's divinity and humanity by separating them into two persons -- a plausible clarification that destroyed the unity of the Saviour. Monophysitism resolved the tension between the natures by merging them -- a plausible simplification that destroyed the reality of Christ's humanity and therefore of ours. Heresy is always a simplification that resolves a mystery at the cost of the truth.
The teaching
The heresies and what they got wrong -- why each one threatened salvation
Arianism: the Son is a superior creature, not truly God. Consequence: the Incarnation does not join the human to the divine; it joins the human to an exalted intermediate being. The gap between Creator and creature is not bridged. Theosis is impossible. The response: Nicaea (325), homoousios. "What is not assumed is not healed" (Gregory the Theologian) -- if God did not genuinely take human nature in the Incarnation, human nature is not genuinely healed and deified.
Docetism: Christ only appeared to be human; His suffering was an appearance. Consequence: the Passion and Resurrection are illusions; the body is not redeemed; the Eucharist is meaningless. The response: Ignatius of Antioch's insistence that Christ truly suffered, truly died, and truly rose -- "in the flesh, even after the resurrection." Docetism is the spiritualising heresy that recurs in every generation: the temptation to make Christianity a spiritual religion unencumbered by the scandal of flesh and blood and death.
What is not assumed is not healed. But what is united with God is saved.
Gregory the Theologian's formula is the soteriological key to every Christological debate. The logic is simple: the Incarnation heals what it assumes. If Christ assumed genuine human nature -- body, soul, will, experience of suffering and death -- then these are healed. If He did not genuinely assume any of these, they are not healed. Each Christological heresy that limits what Christ assumed thereby limits what is saved. The Church's insistence on the full humanity of Christ is the insistence that the full human person is saved -- not a spiritual core rescued from a discarded body.
St. Gregory the Theologian
Epistle 101 · c. 382 AD
Gnosticism
The first heresy that never really went away
Gnosticism is not a single movement but a family of religious positions that flourished in the 2nd-3rd centuries and which Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Hippolytus devoted their greatest energies to opposing. Common features: a sharp distinction between the material world (evil or inferior, created by a lesser deity or Demiurge) and the spiritual world (good, the domain of the true God); a teaching that salvation is the escape of the spiritual self (the divine spark) from matter; a claim to secret knowledge (gnosis) that the uninitiated do not possess; and a Christology that dissolves the Incarnation (either Christ was not really human, or the divine Christ departed before the Passion).