How Horrid is Heresy? (Greg Spearritt)
(07 September 07)How Horrid is Heresy?
By Greg Spearritt
I’d have to say I’m all for heresy. It’s from the Greek, apparently: ‘to choose’. Orthodoxy, one supposes, must mean ‘to be told how it is and to like it or lump it’.
For mine, Robert Dessaix says it well:
Heresy to me is sacred. Heresy is the rogue genetic mutation that makes the species multiply. Heresy is the very source of all the colours and shapes and pain and joy in the world. Those who would stamp it out are my enemies. (Night Letters,231)
Happily, Dessaix is unlikely to face the fate of Spanish physician and theologian Michael Servetus, who for his sins – unorthodox trinitarian views, mainly – was burned alive by Calvin in 1553 (though, to be fair, Calvin would apparently have preferred beheading). Poor old Michael was executed again a few months later – in effigy – by the Catholic Inquisition in France. But that awful stuff just doesn’t happen nowadays, at least in our ‘civilised’ parts.
So who really worries about orthodoxy, even in religion, these days?
Well, for one, that grand old dame, the Anglican Church in Australia. It’s been alleged – by former Anglican Primate Peter Carnley, among others – that Sydney Diocese has fallen into the error known as Arianism. (Interestingly, Arius is described in Arius: Heresy and Tradition by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams as a theological conservative.)
At the 1999 Synod of Sydney Diocese, the Diocesan Doctrine Commission reported on the doctrine of the Trinity. It opined that the Son was in some sense subordinate to the Father (though it was careful to say that this did not imply the Son was in any way inferior).
On the face of it, as Carnley has pointed out, this runs foul of the Council of Constantinople in 381 (where the Nicene Creed was pretty much given its final form), at which subordinationism was specifically condemned.
The burning question for many of us would be: who cares? But there is a point to it all. The actual title of the Sydney Doctrine Commission’s report was ‘The Doctrine of the Trinity and its bearing on the Relationship of Men and Women’.
Aha! Just as Christ is subordinate but (somehow, in the mind of the Doctrine Commission) equal to the Father, so women must be subordinate to men. It doesn’t mean they’re not equal to men, you see, it just means they can’t wear a frock and a dog collar, or make the big decisions at home.
As serious as this may be for members of the Sydney Anglican Diocese, most of us can at least choose to belong somewhere else if we want to be part of organised religion.
Of course, for some who’ve invested much in the churches, and who come to see orthodox views as inadequate or even harmful, openly professing heretical views can mean loss of community or even career. Michael Morwood, the former Catholic priest and progressive thinker who ran foul of Archbishop George Pell, is a case in point.
But heresy, religious or otherwise, can have far more serious real-world consequences. As American Skeptic Michael Shermer has pointed out, President Mbeki of South Africa chose for several years to disregard the ‘orthodox’ view that HIV causes AIDS, with the result that millions of AIDS sufferers there were denied anti-retroviral drugs.
Global warming skeptics have, arguably, a lot to answer for, given that their increasingly ‘heretical’ views held sway for so long in places like Canberra (and, more to the point, Washington) and contributed to an unconscionable delay in mitigating the consequences several generations of people worldwide are likely to face.
Being a ‘heretic’, then, is not always a light-hearted matter. With heresy comes responsibility: on at least some issues, choice needs to be well and truly informed. Blindly following the orthodox line on anything is hardly to be recommended, but choosing to differ on a whim, or because we like to buck trends, is no better.
