article of the Christian faith,” due to the introduction of “foreign elements” and resulting in a perversion of Christianity, and an amalgamation with it of ideas discordant with its nature (Fisher’s History of Christian Doctrine, p. 9). It has been generally assumed that the ecclesiastical authority was always competent to determine what are the fundamental articles of the Christian faith, and to detect any departures from them; but it is necessary to admit the possibility that the error was in the church, and the truth was with the heresy. (ii.) There cannot be any heresy where there is no orthodoxy, and, therefore, in the definition it is assumed that the church has declared what is the truth or the error in any matter. Accordingly “heresy is to be distinguished from defective stages of Christian knowledge. For example, the Jewish believers, including the Apostles themselves, at the outset required the Gentile believers to be circumcised. They were not on this account chargeable with heresy. Additional light must first come in, and be rejected, before that earlier opinion could be thus stigmatized. Moreover, heresies are not to be confounded with tentative and faulty hypotheses broached in a period prior to the scrutiny of a topic of Christian doctrine, and before that scrutiny has led the general mind to an assured conclusion. Such hypotheses—for example, the idea that in the person of Christ the Logos is substituted for a rational human spirit—are to be met with in certain early fathers” (ibid. p. 10). Origen indulged in many speculations which were afterwards condemned, but, as these matters were still open questions in his day, he was not reckoned a heretic. (iii.) In accordance with the New Testament use of the term heresy, it is assumed that moral defect accompanies the intellectual error, that the false view is held pertinaciously, in spite of warning, remonstrance and rebuke; aggressively to win over others, and so factiously, to cause division in the church, a breach in its unity.
A distinction is made between “heresy” and “schism” (from Gr. σχίζειν, rend asunder, divide). “The fathers commonly use ‘heresy’ of false teaching in opposition to Catholic doctrine, and ‘schism’ of a breach of discipline, in opposition to Catholic government” (Schaff). But Schism.as the claims of the church to be the guardian through its episcopate of the apostolic tradition, of the Christian faith itself, were magnified, and unity in practice as well as in doctrine came to be regarded as essential, this distinction became a theoretical rather than a practical one. While severely condemning, both Irenaeus and Tertullian distinguished schismatics from heretics. “Though we are by no means entitled to say that they acknowledged orthodox schismatics they did not yet venture to reckon them simply as heretics. If it was desired to get rid of these, an effort was made to impute to them some deviation from the rule of faith; and under this pretext the church freed herself from the Montanists and the Monarchians. Cyprian was the first to proclaim the identity of heretics and schismatics by making a man’s Christianity depend on his belonging to the great episcopal church confederation. But in both East and West, this theory of his became established only by very imperceptible degrees, and indeed, strictly speaking, the process was never completed. The distinction between heretics and schismatics was preserved because it prevented a public denial of the old principles, because it was advisable on political grounds to treat certain schismatic communities with indulgence, and because it was always possible in case of need to prove heresy against the schismatics.” (Harnack’s History of Dogma, ii. 92-93).
There was considerable controversy in the early church as to the validity of heretical baptism. As even “the Christian virtues of the heretics were described as hypocrisy and love of ostentation,” so no value whatever was attached by the orthodox party to the sacraments Heretical baptism.performed by heretics. Tertullian declares that the church can have no communion with the heretics, for there is nothing common; as they have not the same God, and the same Christ, so they have not the same baptism (De bapt. 15). Cyprian agreed with him. The validity of heretical baptism was denied by the church of Asia Minor as well as of Africa; but the practice of the Roman Church was to admit without second baptism heretics who had been baptized with the name of Christ, or of the Holy Trinity. Stephen of Rome attempted to force the Roman practice on the whole church in 253. The controversy his intolerance provoked was closed by Augustine’s controversial treatise De Baptismo, in which the validity of baptism administered by heretics is based on the objectivity of the sacrament. Whenever the name of the three-one God is used, the sacrament is declared valid by whomsoever it may be performed. This was a triumph of sacramentarianism, not of charity.
Three types of heresy have appeared in the history of the Christian Church.[1] The earliest may be called the syncretic; it is the fusion of Jewish or pagan with Christian elements. Ebionitism asserted “the continual obligation to observe the whole of the Mosaic law,” and “outran the Old Testament monotheism by a barren monarchianism Types of heresy.that denied the divinity of Christ” (Kurtz, Church History, i. 120). “Gnosticism was the result of the attempt to blend with Christianity the religious notions of pagan mythology, mysterology, theosophy and philosophy” (p. 98). The Judaizing and the paganizing tendency were combined in Gnostic Ebionitism which was prepared for in Jewish Essenism. In the later heresy of Manichaeism there were affinities to Gnosticism, but it was a mixture of many elements, Babylonian-Chaldaic theosophy, Persian dualism and even Buddhist ethics (p. 126).
The next type of heresy may be called evolutionary or formatory. When the Christian faith is being formulated, undue emphasis may be put on one aspect, and thus so partial a statement of truth may result in error. Thus when in the ante-Nicene age the doctrine of the Trinity was under discussion, dynamic Monarchianism “regarded Christ as a mere man, who, like the prophets, though in a much higher measure, had been endued with divine wisdom and power”; modal Monarchianism saw in the Logos dwelling in Christ “only a mode of the activity of the Father”; Patripassianism identified the Logos with the Father; and Sabellianism regarded Father, Son and Spirit as “the rôles which the God who manifests Himself in the world assumes in succession” (Kurtz, Church History, i. 175-181). When Arius asserted the subordination of the Son to the Father, and denied the eternal generation, Athanasius and his party asserted the Homoousia, the cosubstantiality of the Father and the Son. This assertion of the divinity of Christ triumphed, but other problems at once emerged. How was the relation of the humanity to the divinity in Christ to be conceived? Apollinaris denied the completeness of the human nature, and substituted the divine Logos for the reasonable soul of man. Nestorius held the two natures so far apart as to appear to sacrifice the unity of the person of Christ. Eutyches on the contrary “taught not only that after His incarnation Christ had only one nature, but also that the body of Christ as the body of God is not of like substance with our own” (Kurtz, Church History, i, 330-334). The Church in the Creed of Chalcedon in A.D. 451 affirmed “that Christ is true God and true man, according to His Godhead begotten from eternity and like the Father in everything, only without sin; and that after His incarnation the unity of the person consists in two natures which are conjoined without confusion, and without change, but also without rending and without separation.” The problem was not solved, but the inadequate solutions were excluded, and the data to be considered in any adequate solution were affirmed. After this decision the controversies about the Person of Christ degenerated into mere hair-splitting; and the interference of the imperial authority from time to time in the dispute was not conducive to the settlement of the questions in the interests of truth alone. This problem interested the East for the most part; in the West there was waged a theological warfare around the nature of man and the work of Christ. To Augustine’s doctrine of man’s total depravity, his incapacity for any good, and the absolute sovereignty of the divine grace in salvation according to the divine election, Pelagius opposed the view that “God’s grace
- ↑ For fuller details see separate articles.
