“Heresy,” Dr. Karen Finch explains, “is a word that should be reserved for when it is really meant,” adding that “You don’t really know what you believe until you’ve had a fight about it with your roommate.” She was speaking on the subject of “Christ Alone: What We Can Learn from Calvin’s Response to Christological Heresies” at the recent Presbyterian Scholars’ Conference held in Wheaton, Ill.
Finch, an assistant professor of Theology at Whitworth College, defined heresy as “not a particular position that scares you. A heresy is something taught within the Christian community by a person who is a confessing Christian and it must be dangerous to the heart of the gospel.” She distinguished apostasy from heresy saying that apostasy “includes a falling away – the break in the relationship. An apostate is someone who was in love with Jesus but who is no longer in love with Jesus. But it does not necessarily include heretical thought or belief.”
Finch said that as we deal with false teachings of our day, we can look to John Calvin to learn effect methods of refutation. Calvin, Finch said, interacted two Christological false teachings in his day – and she added, “both heterodox viewpoints are very much with us today.”
Finch says we can learn from Calvin’s polemic of dealing with the “bad guys” of his day. Taking a deep dive into Calvin’s interactions with Francesco Stancarro and Andres Ociander, Finch demonstrates how Calvin’s Biblical, specific, humble, respectful approach was effective in confronting the Christological heresies of his day.
She said, “Read your Bible instead of speculating out of your own observation.”
What do we learn from the method of Calvin’s refutation? Finch identifies six things we can learn from Calvin’s methodology:
- “Draw from the WHOLE Bible – claim Jesus as mediator throughout; the big salvation history narrative matters
- “Do not deal in generalities; deal in particulars.
- “Where there is heresy, there is pride, power, politics and desire for acclaim. Be the theologian of humility. This has to do with theology and persons.
- “All the heresies lead into one another. All ideas in orthodoxy are likewise connected. You can get to anywhere from wherever you start.
- “Recognize that heretics are trying to make the Christian faith simpler than it is. It takes a lot more Biblical acuity and awareness to hold onto Orthodoxy than to embrace simple heretical ideas.
- “The medieval polemic is vitriolic, Calvin responds in respectful gentleness.”
Finch said, “Bad theology hurts people, we might as well make that plain.”
Following her lecture participants engaged in a Q&A seeking to make application to issues confronted in the church today.
One inquirer asked, “how does the conversation about essence and being and nature connect to the debate today about who we are and the skin we’re in?”
Finch answered, “I think of it of this magic trick of being you – over time. Christianity needs to regain the ground of self and soul. We must fight the illogical nature of the current conversation.”
She then explained, “If selves do not persist in time and space, if this is not even a person who has coherence, then what are we? Who are we? Confront heterodox ideas being bandied about by talking about self as what you lay down when you love. Use references to the giving away of self – that’s a powerful Biblical call today and an entry point for people to enter into the conversation about the soul and the self. We can’t solve problems of social concern without a reclamation of the self – in all the fullness of what that means from God’s perspective, not our own.”
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This lecture addesses important issues in this day when hot topics – pluralism, multicuturalism, racism, and race often make a muddle of
Christian thinking.
Thus, I appreciate the proper return to Calvin because the 16th century also
had to sort wheat from chaff.
The late Professor Harold O.J. Brown dealt with this topic in one of his books, a lengthy study heresy in the church. It is worthy close study, too.
What is this topic important. In another Presbyterian seminary, the professor of Muslim studies invited an iman to his class. The iman was not adverse criticizing doctrines that are integral to the Christian faith – atonement, Trinity, Resurrection, etc. The students did not engage him until the iman hit today’s cultural “hot” causes: homosexuality, lesbians, etc.
The professor was surprised that not one of the seminary students defened the core doctines of the Christian faith. Rather the students were intolerant when cultural issues were criticized. Furthermore,
most of the students displayed their intolerance when the iman invited the students and professor to a feast in the mosque. Once at the feast, the students enjoyed the time.
This example taken from one seminary setting suggests many of today’s seminary students are throughly modern in their thinking.
Intolerant when it comes to cultural matters – gays, etc. – but indifferent to distinctive Christian and core thinking of Presbyterianism and Calvinism.
With all the issues in church and society, the church can ill afford
seminary graduates who find the Faith of the Church to be of marginal value when it comes to swimming in the pool of modern
and passing and changeable concepts. Who wants to join a church in which distrinctive doctrines are irrelevant or thought to be?
The Columbia Seminary students, I am sure, are “indifferent to distinctive Christian (doctrines) and core thinking of Presbyterian and Calvinism” only up to the point where someone might require them to believe and teach these doctrines. Their spiritual forebears railed against “subscriptionism”; if someone were to insist today that PC(USA) pastors believe and teach the core doctrines of the Christian faith and the distinctive Calvinistic doctrines of historic Presbyterianism, both as found in the Westminster Standards, they would be just as agitated in shock and rage as when the imam defined homosexuality as “un-Islamic, not of God, unnatural.”
Hersey has existed side by side with orthodoxy from day one. And many times the difference lies in who or whom is defining such. As in all cases and examples, the counsel and witness of Scripture, the Saints and the general path of history has proven what is wheat from trash.
Gnosticism was consigned to its place in the trash heap, not only because of various church councils, but it never fully captured or complemented work or Christ and the Cross. And at the end of day it was never fully satisfying to the believer or provide the hope of salvation.
Now as applies to the contemporary PCUSA is the new orthodoxy of multiculturalism, pluralism, diversity, relativism satisfactory in and of themselves to salvation and eternal life? Or even provide peace of heart or mind? Of course not. At best they are social policy constructs or aspects of social engineering which may have broad secular values, but cannot really be attached to the matters of God, Christ, Church, confession and doctrine. At best it is the weak and watery gruel the PCUSA dished out all the time to all comer’s. Hence its members starve, even though their bellies are full of such teaching. Hence they die and hence the PCUSA is in a death spiral. Its not rocket science.