KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 23 January
Epiphany is miracle
We can, perhaps, learn a lot from heresies. Heresies claim partial truths as absolute. That entails a choice. The meaning of the Greek word, hairesis or heresy is choice, choosing a particular perspective or position as absolute to the exclusion of all else. But choice implies the priority of subjective opinion over considered and corporate reflection. How then do we learn from heresies? Because, at the very least, they point to the questions that are most important and thus contribute to the process of thinking things through more completely and more comprehensively. There is usually, if not always, something partly right in positions that are later called heretical because they are too limited or partial; in short, incomplete and inadequate.
Cultural relativism denies the very idea of heresy because it assumes that all perspectives are equally true and, consequently, that there really is no truth. The idea of heresy is heresy! Everything is relative, it is absolutely asserted. We might note the paradox of contradiction and the dogmatism inherent in the claim.
The earliest ‘heresies’ in the emergence of Christianity were Marcionism and Docetism. Marcion was a 2nd century thinker who saw the idea of God in the Old Testament as irreconcilable with the idea of God in the New Testament, opposing justice and goodness absolutely. This led Marcion to get rid of most of the Hebrew Scriptures or Old Testament and, for that matter, huge chunks of the New Testament, keeping only what suited his interests, namely Paul’s Epistles and parts of Luke’s Gospel. What is revealing in Marcion’s perspective is the refusal (or inability) to reconcile the testaments in the manner which was already at work in establishing the Canon of Scripture. In a way, his rejection forced the emerging Church to think more deeply about the unity of the Scriptures in and through their diversity of expression. In our times, the same tendency is inherent in the phenomenon of ‘cancellation culture,’ a kind of intolerance through the negation and proscription of ideas, persons, and texts.