HERESY – on its prevalence & intensity

www.american-anglican.fsnet.co.uk

Over the centuries the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church has distinguished – at least for practical purposes – between the prevalence & the intensity of heresy. In general, the prevalence has been addressed by preaching, teaching, writings & pastoral care; but, the intensity has been addressed by the further addition of special synods, councils, and meetings, usually accompanied by major controversy and dislodgement.

No doubt many Christians in the early Church had an imperfect and often wrong understanding of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, Three Persons one God, and also of the Lord Jesus Christ, One Person made known in two natures, divine & human. These general deficiencies were addressed through consistent, week by week liturgical, catechetical & pastoral means.

However, when a person or group began to major on the erroneous doctrine, to make it prominent and to claim it to be the Truth (e.g., when Arius in A.D. 320 taught in Alexandria his doctrine of three “Gods” of descending order of divinity and of importance) then there was a major crisis in the Church; and there arose major debate, controversy, church synods and councils, followed by confessions of faith and of mutual excommunications. The Arian controversy in its various forms lasted for two centuries or so in the Church within the Roman Empire, but eventually the dogma of the East and the West in the Church made it very clear that Arianism is heresy and to hold it means that one is not a Christian.

The profound attraction of Arianism to so many people was that it was in harmony with semi-popular philosophical views of the nature and character of the universe and of the relation of the universe to Deity. So the biblical message & teaching was set in the context of a widely-held philosophical-religious world-view and the result was Heresy.

In modern times – and through the centuries – there have been homosexually active persons in the Church. Most of the time they have been “closet homosexuals” who have kept quiet about their sexual attractions and activity. Often a blind eye has been turned to them as, in some cases, quiet, unseen pastoral care has been offered.

However, since the 1960s in a new cultural environment, where human rights, human autonomy and human self-worth & fulfillment are prominent themes, homosexual persons have banded together (LesBiGay) to claim their perceived rights and their chance to experience self-realization – much the same as divorced persons have claimed their right to re-marriage in state and church since the 1950s.

Within the Church this LesBiGay agenda has taken the form of claiming that God created some people heterosexual and others homosexual and that therefore each grouping should have the same rights in terms of the Sacraments, means of grace and ministerial opportunities. Thus what was before the 1960s an unseen presence became after the 1960s a militant group with a message that had the power potentially to change completely the Church’s received teaching on sexuality. By 2003 the militant group has become the accepted group, whose demands and teaching are now those of a majority of Episcopal leaders, clergy & laity.

The Lambeth Conference of Bishops in 1998 and the Primates’ Meetings since then have clearly stated that active homosexual relations, relationships, partnerships, liaisons and encounters are wrong and will always be wrong, even as adultery & fornication and serial monogamy are wrong. The fact that the ECUSA and individual bishops and dioceses in other Western Provinces did not receive this message as godly advice and moral suasion but chose to ignore it reveals the intensity of this heresy amongst Anglicans of the West.

The heresy is that there exists alongside marriage between two persons, male and female, another relation between two persons of the same sex/gender, and that the latter is dynamically equivalent to the former and is therefore acceptable to God and open to his blessing through his ministers. And western governments and political parties wholly support this general position.

So the traditional teaching of the Church is now completely different from that of the State. At the same time since the Church is in the world then the Church can so easily absorb what the respectable world teaches and thus can become of the world in her teaching on sexuality.

In a culture of human rights and of self-worth/self-realization and where serial monogamy is taken as a right in state and church, this heresy of the morality of same-sex relationships is likely to grow in intensity in the churches of the West. It is especially dangerous because of the fact that it does not & cannot exist alone, for it is a parasite. It only is accepted and grows in a church environment where the ground is prepared through the presence there of secularism dressed up in “god-language” as “relevant” worship, doctrine, morality and discipline.

As the Anglican Family of Churches possesses no central authority to deal with crisis and heresy – only the Voice of Moral Suasion and the Plea of brotherly love from the “Instruments of Unity”, the expelling of heresy and the anathematizing of it has to be done by each Province/National Church on its own, encouraged by other faithful Provinces. Let us not expect quick results; and let us not think that any of us by going into separated existence will be immune from the Zeitgeist which empowers the LesBiGay and other related movements. We all need to be praying, “Lord have mercy upon me, a sinner.”

The Rev'd Dr. Peter Toon M.A., D.Phil. (Oxon.)