We All Teach Heresy, But Be Intellectually Honest About It

In one of my classes I teach epistemology, the science of knowledge. My challenge is “how to do you know what you know and how do you know what you know is right?” I then give the students an epistemological quiz (20 questions) to test their theological consistencies. A sampling of the quiz, adapted from Paul Hiebert, true or false:

1. Muslim believers in Jesus cannot continue to pray at the mosque.
2. Slavery is permissible if slaves are treated well.
3. Polygamy is adultery, therefore a sin.
4. Forbid teaching from the Koran or other holy books.
5. A Christian should not engage in any Hindu or Muslim festivals.

At some point I recount the story of my old hermeneutics professor who said at the end of the term, “Gentlemen, recognize that in your ministry all of you will teach some heresy.”

“Great.” I thought, “I’ve spent a semester learning how to properly interpret the text, and he concludes telling us we are going to teach heresy!”

Nearly 40 years since those college days and nearly the same period of time in ministry, I have come to the conclusion that the old professor was right. We all gain our knowledge through a prism defined by culture, our time and what information we will allow into our minds. Do we read secular philosophy or the writings of other religious scholars? For the first twenty-five years of my ministry I never read anything but evangelical material. Up to that time I had never visited a Catholic Church, read anything by Marx or had any idea what a Hindu believed. Why? FEAR.

The greatest threat to intellectual or spiritual growth is the fear that somehow, if we expose ourselves to anything that is not within the framework of what we believe is truth, we will become an apostate, end up a drunken atheist. While I understand the dangers of false teaching, error is often the result of limited or filtered knowledge. Paul stated that we see (understand) through a glass darkly, i.e. have an obscure or imperfect vision of reality. Heresy is indeed a result of faulty hermeneutics and part of our flawed interpretation is due to self-induced bias.

But of course, heresy is not just an evangelical Christian problem. Every religious zealot in the world holds to a belief system born more out of cultural conditioning than in an honest pursuit of truth. Even science, which for some is the final answer to everything, is bound by parallaxes of vision. In the movie, EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed, it is interesting that Darwinism, which itself is always evolving, is bigoted in their opinion and have no tolerance for intellectual debate.



As a postmodernist follower of Christ, who holds to his absolutes absolutely, I realize that the search for truth is part of my working out my own salvation. In the process, I hope I am and not teaching heresy, but know that I probably am (and so are you).