Heresy

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Heresy

Heresy is the denial by a member or members of a religious group of an officially held belief of that group. Churches and other religious organizations typically provide several things for their adherents. One is a code of conduct. Another is a set of worship practices. Another is a worldview. Heresy is a member's rejection of all or part of the worldview. Religious groups routinely regard rejection of their world-view as a threat and respond to it by rejecting the heretic.

Heresy would seem to be out of place in the modern world because modern people are trained to think for themselves and to decide for themselves what to believe. Indeed, the word "heresy" is from the Greek word hairesis, "choice," and choices are precisely what modern people are expected to make. In fact, however, religious groups, like all groups that endure for long periods of time, require boundaries, and these routinely include boundaries of acceptable beliefs. Groups in the modern world require boundaries as much as groups in the past. The need of churches and other religious groups for identity and boundaries comes into conflict with the need of individuals educated in the modern way to have the freedom to explore and embrace ideas that are in conflict with the ideas of the churches and other religious groups to which they belong, so the fact of heresy continues to occur today as much as in the past, even in groups who do not use the word "heresy."

Some religions have confronted many alleged heretics; others have not. For example, there have been almost no trials for heresy among American Jews and none at all among African-American Christians. On the other hand, there have been many trials for heresy among other American Christians. A possible account of these unexpected facts is that there are religious communities in which the community's practices are emphasized so strongly that if a member follows the practices, the community will ignore any deviant beliefs the member may have.

Those who defend heresy point out the priority of practice over beliefs: Love matters more than faith. Of course, that is itself a belief. They also point out that heresy is an expression of the responsibility of individuals to think for themselves; that today's heresy often becomes tomorrow's orthodoxy ("Christianity began as a Jewish heresy"); and that the treatment of heretics frequently has been morally outrageous. Those who oppose heresy point out that churches and religious groups have rights just as individuals do, and that heresy is cruel because it prevents people from receiving the help they need from the truth offered to them by their church or religious group.

The most famous charges of heresy in American religious history are among the earliest—namely, the witch trials at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692. Their fame rests in part on the number of persons involved: More than one hundred people were jailed, thirteen women and six men were hanged, and one man was pressed to death for the practice of Witchcraft. New England Puritans understood Witchcraft to be a heresy and a sin. Since it involved using the devil's powers to do grave harm to others, it was also a crime and was punishable as such. Many modern people find it difficult to sympathize with the Puritans because these modern people do not believe in the possibility of Witchcraft. They find stories of modern heresy trials more understandable.

One of the most famous of these came two centuries after the trials at Salem. It was the trial of Charles A. Briggs, a professor of Hebrew and Old Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York, then affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in the United States. Briggs, an ordained Presbyterian minister, was a proponent of critical study of the Bible and had been led by his studies to conclusions regarding the Bible and other subjects that were thought to be at variance with those of the Presbyterian Church. In 1892 he was accused of heresy, and in 1893 he was found guilty and suspended from the office of a minister in the Presbyterian Church. Union Theological Seminary was disaffiliated from the Presbyterian Church and kept Briggs as a faculty member.

Both the Salem witch trials and the trial of Briggs were formal heresy trials, but many churches and other religious bodies do not have organizational structures for the conduct of heresy trials. Baptists, for example, are organized so there is no body beyond local congregations that has the authority to try any person for heresy. Baptist associations and conventions can decide whether to accept and retain as members congregations with deviant beliefs or practices, but they have no authority to try either congregations or their members for heresy. As a result, the treatment of heresy among Baptists is informal rather than formal.

This in turn means that among Baptists and similar denominations it is almost always professors or other persons employed at denominational institutions who are tried for heresy. For example, in 1983 the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary refused to renew the annual contract of its longtime professor of theology, Dale Moody, because of Moody's beliefs about the revocability of salvation, and in 1993 the same institution dismissed theology professor Molly Marshall because of some of her views about God and the Bible. Neither Moody nor Marshall was formally tried for heresy, but each was dismissed from teaching because of allegedly deviant theological beliefs. When an accused heretic is a professor, issues related to heresy become entangled with issues of academic freedom, a freedom that is essential for the flourishing of institutions of higher education.

It seems unlikely either that heresy will disappear from American religions that embrace beliefs as part of their identity and boundaries, or that such religions will be able to maintain their identity and boundaries without from time to time exercising some form of discipline over alleged heretics.