Why Heresy Matters

By Prof. Savvas Bournelis [1]

IN THE RELIGIOUSLY PLURALISTIC society we live in, humanity has grown accustomed to a smorgasbord of religious beliefs and practices to such a degree that many people (including Orthodox!) nowadays adopt a relativistic mentality. A person may often hear remarks such as, “We all believe and worship the same God, it doesn’t matter what religion you are!”, “All religions are the same in truth and power”, “All paths lead up the same mountain”, “What does it matter what faith you practice, as long as we all are followers of Christ and are good Christians then that’s what really counts!”, or “I’m spiritual but not religious, I don’t need the church and all that religious fanatical stuff!” This sort of worldly “koumbyaism” that lulls and dulls the conscience of man’s heart ignores or at least fails to understand the real danger heresy poses to the human soul.

Heresy (false doctrine/worship) matters because truth matters. Truth is not relative, but objective and God-revealed, and truth is intended to ultimately lead to communion with Truth who is a person, Jesus Christ (Jn 14:6), which is our very salvation (Union with God is salvation).

Conversely, when we do not submit in humble disciple-like obedience to God-revealed truth, and instead arrogantly insist on our own personal opinions, valuing our feelings and ideas above objective truth, we in fact are walking away from having communion with Truth, and thus, the consequence to this is our soul being harmed.

What you believe will affect how you live your life, and how you interact both with God and your fellow man, which then has eternal consequences. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick writes:

Ironically, though, even though most Christians no longer care about doctrine, they still believe in it, though more often at a subconscious level. But even beyond the question of belief is the effect that doctrine has on their worship, their morality, and their sense of how to bring the Gospel to other people. Here are a few examples: If you do not believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, you probably will not have communion often, and when you do, you may well give it to just anyone. If you believe in “once saved, always saved,” logically, you can spend your life in sin, being comfortable in the knowledge that you have your irrevocable ticket to Heaven. If you do not believe that any one church is the true Church, then you will probably not care about heresy and you will not care that people who believe something radically different from what you do could be heading in a different spiritual direction than you are; you may even begin to say that all religions are “true” paths. Whether we like it or not, whether we are conscious of it or not, doctrine really does matter. It matters even for atheists. What you believe about the nature of the universe, whether or not there is a God or gods, whether or not a divine being would become a man, and what all that means will have a profound effect on how you live your life, both for yourself and in community (or lack thereof) with others. [2]

In other words, we can think of doctrine as a sort of roadmap we use to arrive at our intended destination, or a set of instructions we follow to get a particular result from an experiment we conduct. Continuing with Fr. Andrew:

Theology and doctrine aren’t the mealy-mouthed meanderings of professors in seminaries and universities. They’re the how-to manual for mystical union with the divine, for properly living this life and getting into the next in one piece, and for seeing and experiencing the deep meaning present in every person, every tree, every rock and every sub-atomic particle. If you follow the how-to manual in the right way, you get the right results. If you follow it in the wrong way, or you follow some other manual, then you get different results. Theology isn’t just a bunch of spiritual opinions. Theology is not just life and death, but eternal life and death.[3]

In regards to the mentality, “I’m spiritual but not religious and don’t need to go to church,” Fr. Andrew responded similarly in a way that helps us understand how heresy harms the soul:

Doctrine is a kind of road map for how we get to the goal that we have as Christians, which is to be saved in Christ, to become fully like Christ. And so if we want to get there, then we have to follow the road map correctly. The difficulty with not going to church and with not being taught the doctrine of church is that it means essentially we're making our own road map, which if truth is something that's simply a matter of everybody's opinion, then why not? Why not just come up with your own way that suits you? But if truth instead is something that's actually revealed by God, revealed by God in his son, Jesus Christ, who then gives it to the apostles, who then pass it down from one generation to the next, that means we have to listen to him and to what they say and to what their successors say, rather than just our own opinions. There's nothing wrong with their having our own opinions. But when we're talking about things that are truth and about facts, then my opinion doesn't matter. It's not really about our opinions… So one more analogy I'd like to give for the spiritual life is that spiritual life is actually like being in a chemistry lab, right? So when you go into the lab, there's all kinds of equipment there. There's all kinds of possible things you could be doing. There's all kinds of strange things in jars and so forth, and you can mix them together. You can light them on fire. There's all kinds of things that could happen. But if you don't know what you're doing, if you don't have the right lab manual, you might get some very surprising results, and maybe even something that could injure you. Part of what Orthodox Christian tradition is about is it's that lab manual. It tells us where to go and exactly what to do to get the results that we're looking for. The results that we're looking for is to become like Jesus Christ. There's only one Jesus Christ, and there is an objective reality to who he is. So that means that the way to get to him also has a very solid, truthful way to get there that you have to follow that lab manual. If you don't follow that manual, if you instead change your method, then that means you're going to get different results. And if you know anything about chemistry, you know that one atom to be changed in a chemical formula can come up with something very, very, very different. For instance, if you have two atoms of hydrogen and a single atom of oxygen, then you have water, right? Those H2O, that's water. But if you take off that oxygen atom, then you've got H2, and that can be very explosive. And it's just hydrogen. So we have to follow the lab manual. We have to do the things that our tradition says that we have to do, not because it's made up by smart people who want to impose their opinions on us, because it's not their opinion. This is what Jesus Christ himself gave to us through the apostles and then handed down from one generation to the next. So we know that it's reliable.[4]

So heresy is the choice to not simply disobey Truth, but to close oneself off from having communion with Truth that leads to their personal salvation. So yes, heresy matters. Along these lines, Hieromonk Gregorios of the Holy Mountain writes:

Those who do not participate in Truth cannot participate in the Life. Those who do not participate in the unity of the Faith cannot enter into communion of the Holy Spirit... Christ said: I am the Truth (John 14:6). Those who do not believe in the truth or mix the truth with lies [heresy] cannot enter into communion with Christ; nor does Christ force them to enter into communion and be united with Him.[5]

Truth leads to eternal life, heresy leads to eternal death.

Christ Healing the Sick

It is not an accident the Holy Scriptures, Fathers and Saints describe the Church as a hospital in which we are cured and healed of our spiritual maladies. Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos emphasizes the importance to correct doctrine as it relates to the health of the soul:

How then is the soul cured? First we must emphasise correct faith. We Orthodox attach great importance to preserving the Faith, just because we know that when Faith is distorted, the cure is automatically distorted. We have previously emphasised that theology should be interpreted as medicine. Medical science has the healthy person in view when it tries to guide the sick person to health by various therapeutic methods. We can say the same thing about theology. Theology is the teaching of the Church about spiritual health, but also about the path which we sick must follow in order to be healed. That is why we Orthodox give great weight to keeping the doctrine intact, not only because we fear the impairment of a teaching, but because we could lose the possibility of a cure and therefore of salvation.[6]

Similarly, Fr. John Romanides wrote at length regarding this very point:

During the Middle Ages, those in power were well aware of the difference between Orthodoxy and heresy. What is the difference? The difference is really quite simple. In heresy the human nous is not healed, while in Orthodoxy it is. In Orthodoxy, the healing of the human personality is a reality. The saints are proof of this. Throughout history, heretics have been a lot like modern-day quacks. They would promise some kind of life after death, but in this life here and now, they could neither cure their followers nor offer them anything more than yet another superstition… A heretic was someone whose doctrines were not Orthodox and whose doctrines consequently hindered him from reaching purification and illumination. Orthodoxy, however, offers this cure and can guide the believer to purification and illumination… What is the fundamental difference between Orthodox Christians and members of other Christian confessions? What makes some people Orthodox and others heretics? What is the crucial difference between Orthodox Christians and heretics? I think that we will be able to understand the fundamental difference if we look to medical science as a model. In the field of medicine, doctors belong to a medical association. If a doctor is not a member of the medical association, he cannot practice medicine or work in the medical profession. In order to legally become a doctor, you not only have to graduate from a recognized medical school, but you also have to be a member of the medical association. The same kind of standards applies to lawyers as well. In these professions, constant review and re-evaluation are the norm. So if someone is guilty of misconduct and does not properly practice his profession, he is tried by the appropriate board in the professional association that he belongs to and is removed from the body of the profession. But the same proceedings also take place in the Church when a member of the Church is expelled or cut off from the Church Body. If that person is a layman, the corresponding process is called ‘excommunication.’ If he is in holy orders, it is called ‘removal from the ranks of the clergy’ [kathairesis]. In this way, heretics are excommunicated from the Body of the Church. It is impossible for the medical establishment to give a quack permission to treat patients, and in like manner it is impossible for the Church to give a heretic permission to treat the spiritually sick. After all, since he is a heretic, he does not know how to treat others and is not able to heal others. Heretics are not able to cure the spiritually sick. Reading a lot of medical books does not make you a genuine doctor. Being a bona fide doctor means that you have not only graduated from a university medical school, but that you have also been an intern for a considerable period of time near an experienced medical school professor who has demonstrated his competence by curing the sick.[7]

When I choose heresy over truth, it’s like refusing to be healed. So, in conclusion: What you believe matters because it is the rudder of your life, the direction you are heading towards - either towards communion with God or not, either towards being healed or not. And that’s “Why Heresy Matters.”

ENDNOTES:

[1] Savvas Bournelis is Adjunct Professor of Bible and Theology for Malone University and a Religious Studies Instructor at his home parish. He received his MDiv from Holy Cross Seminary in May 2023. He is an editor, writer, and researcher for UMP/OE. Savvas regularly uploads papers to his Academia.edu page and videos of classes, presentations, and sermons on his YouTube channel (@Orthopraxia33).

[2] Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick, “Doctrine Matters,” blogs.ancientfaith.com, Doctrine matters. – Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Fr. TedTalks Orthodoxy Worth Spreading, “Fr.TEDTalks EP06 - Spiritual But Not Religious,” youtube.com,

Fr.TEDTalks EP06 - Spiritual But Not Religious.

[5] Hieromonk Gregorios, The Divine Liturgy: A Commentary in Light of the Fathers (Columbia, MI: New

Rome Press, 2012), 260-261 and Orthodox Faith, Worship and Life (Columbia, MI: New Rome Press,

2021), 160-161.

[6] Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, Orthodox Psychotherapy: The Science of the Fathers, 3rd ed. (Levadia, Greece: Birth of the Theotokos Monastery, 1997), 42-43.

[7] Fr. John Romanides, Patristic Theology (US: UMP, 2008).