I probably spend way too much time on the internet, but one thing I can’t help but notice is how often myself or someone I know gets called a heretic by a stranger online.
A sermon is shared, a quote, or maybe even a news story about a church and within a few minutes the comment section is full of people who are 100% certain they know what is going on inside someone else’s heart. It’s ridiculous. Most of the time it happens to a pastor or someone who has spent decades preaching from and studying the Bible and they get described as someone who “clearly doesn’t believe a word of it.” The word heretic gets thrown around as casually as someone complaining about the weather. And the funny thing is, they would never say it to their face. Instead, they just write people off they have never met and probably never will. And what’s more annoying is the algorithm rewards those kinds of comments. The angrier and more absolute a comment is, the more that people react to it and the more people see it.
The All-or-Nothing Switch
Most of the harshest rhetoric comes from a way of thinking that works like a light switch. People genuinely believe that the Bible is either perfect in every detail and doesn’t contain a single error, or it’s no different than Moby Dick or nice poem that someone wrote last week. Those are the only two options. And if you think that way, then anyone who reads scripture differently than you gets flipped all the way to the other side. Even though the pastor, writer, or theologian has spent years preaching from the Bible, praying over it, and building their entire life around it, immediately gets labeled a heretic.
That switch-like thinking leaves out almost everything that is true. The vast majority of Christians across history have held the Bible as sacred and authoritative without needing it to be a flawless textbook. In Methodism, we talk about Scripture as primary, but read it alongside tradition, reason, and experience. The framework later became known as the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. Scripture has always held a unique place in that framework because the church has heard God speak through the Scriptures for thousands of years and we keep hearing God speak through it today.
There isn’t a single mainline pastor I know that reads the Psalms at a funeral service the same way they would read a chapter of a novel.
The authority is real. The reverence is real. It just rests on the living God who meets us in those pages and on Jesus, the one that all of Scripture points to.
Biting and Devouring
The letter to the church in Galatia talks about what happens when believers start fighting with each other like this. In Galatians 5:15 we read, “If you bite and devour each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other.” The writer here is using some pretty intense language here. It is language of animals tearing at each other and the warning is that nobody walks away from that fight unscathed. I have seen it countless times in over 15 years of ministry.
It’s as if we have forgotten the 9th commandment. Bearing false witness. The assumption is that verse is talking about lying under oath, but it also means describing someone in a way they would never recognize. There is a rule that we should all follow:
If you can’t describe what someone believes in words they would nod along in agreement with, you haven’t earned the right to critique it yet.
May We Not Love Alike
John Wesley preached a sermon called “Catholic Spirit,” and in that sermon he asked a couple questions that I come back to all the time. He asked,
“Though we cannot think alike, may we not love alike?” May we not be of one heart, though we are not of one opinion?”
And then he answers his own question, “Without a doubt, we may.” Wesley had plenty of convictions, and he argued for them, but he also knew the body of Christ has always contained people from very different places and the things that unite us in Christ are more meaningful than they things we fight about.
We have to remember that faithful people have held the Bible up with reverence and humility in a lot of different ways. We can disagree and still be kind. You can believe someone is wrong about something and still describe them honestly and not jump to conclusions. You can ask clarifying questions first. You can still consider them to be a sibling in Christ. The church has always been a big, loud, complicated family table and there is room for your convictions and room for mine. Because at the end of the day Jesus is at the head of the table and he is the one passing around the bread.
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So true. I've been thinking along these lines recently. It is so easily for me to shove people on the right and to the left of me into 2-D, binary theological categories, instead of the fully-fleshed, complex people they are. Thanks for putting it so eloquently!
A ministry colleague, years ago, joked that the definition of heretic was “anyone who disagrees with my perspective.” Sadly, this has become lived reality these days.