Heresy

“But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction.”

— 2 Peter 2:1 (ESV)

Heresy is a teaching that denies or fundamentally distorts an essential doctrine of the Christian faith, judged by the wider church, not one tradition alone, to fall outside Christian orthodoxy itself. The word translates the Greek hairesis, literally a “choice,” used in the New Testament both neutrally, for a sect like the Pharisees (Acts 15:5), and pointedly, for a self-chosen, divisive teaching that brings swift destruction (2 Pet. 2:1) and excludes its practitioners from inheriting God’s kingdom (Gal. 5:19-21). What separates heresy from ordinary doctrinal error is severity: it denies what Scripture makes essential, not what remains disputable.

Confessional Witness

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession has no chapter of its own devoted to heresy. Its one explicit use of the word appears in the chapter on marriage, warning believers against being “unequally yoked, by marrying with such as are wicked in their life, or maintain damnable heresy.”¹ Its chapter on the church states the same sober realism found throughout this confession about the visible church’s imperfection: “the purest churches under heaven are subject to mixture and error,” and some have “so degenerated as to become no churches of Christ, but synagogues of Satan.”²

A comparison with the Westminster Confession shows a real, deliberate difference rather than a shared position stated in different words. Westminster’s own chapter on Christian liberty authorizes both the church’s censures and “the power of the Civil Magistrate” against those “publishing of such opinions, or maintaining of such practices” as are destructive to the church’s peace and order.³ The 1689’s parallel chapter carries only three of Westminster’s four paragraphs and omits this clause entirely,⁴ just as its own chapter on the civil magistrate stays limited to the ruler’s ordinary duty to protect and punish, with nothing corresponding to Westminster’s grant of religious enforcement power. Heresy remains a real category for the confession; civil coercion against it does not.

Biblical Basis

Scripture uses hairesis across a spectrum from neutral description to direct warning. Luke calls the Sadducees (Acts 5:17) and the Pharisees (Acts 15:5; 26:5) each a “sect,” and reports that outsiders in Rome knew Christianity itself by the same word, as “this sect” that “is spoken against everywhere” (Acts 28:22). Paul warns the Corinthians that “factions” (haireseis) must arise among them so that the genuine may be revealed (1 Cor. 11:19), and lists the same word among the works of the flesh in Galatians, alongside enmity and strife, warning that those who practice such things “will not inherit the kingdom of God” (Gal. 5:19-21). Peter names “destructive heresies” outright, teachings that “secretly” enter the church and deny “the Master who bought them” (2 Pet. 2:1). Paul instructs Titus to have nothing more to do with “a person who stirs up division,” after a first and second warning, since such a person is “warped and sinful” and “self-condemned” (Titus 3:10-11). John gives the test by which such teaching is to be judged: it denies that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh, and any spirit making that denial “is the spirit of the antichrist” (1 John 4:1-3; 2 John 1:7-11).

Historical Development

The rule of faith against heresy

From the second century, the early church answered heresy with what it called the regula fidei, the “rule of faith,” a brief, oral summary of apostolic teaching. Michael Kruger describes it as “a key weapon in the early church’s battle against heresy,” attested in the writings of Dionysius of Corinth, Hippolytus, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen.⁵ Irenaeus, writing against the Gnostic teachers of his own day, did not present the rule as the church’s own invention but as a possession received directly from the apostles: “We refer [the heretics] to that tradition from the apostles which is preserved through the succession of presbyters in the churches.”⁵ Because the rule was oral, brief, and already widespread, it functioned as a standard nearly every church could apply without waiting for a later, formal canon of Scripture.⁵

Councils and their limits

The historic pattern for settling a heresy formally was a council of bishops. John Calvin traces the sequence by name: “when Arius arose, the Council of Nice was convened, and by its authority both crushed the wicked attempts of this impious man… and asserted the eternal divinity of Christ.” The same remedy answered Eunomius and Macedonius at the Council of Constantinople, and Nestorius at the Council of Ephesus.⁶ Calvin does not treat a council’s vote as automatically reliable, though. He points to the second Council of Ephesus in 449, where “the Eutychian heresy prevailed” under Dioscorus, “a factious man, of a very bad disposition,” and pious men who opposed him were driven into exile.⁷ A council can itself protect a heresy rather than condemn one; for Calvin, that is a reason to test every council’s ruling against Scripture, not a reason to stop convening them.

Reformed orthodoxy’s catalogue of heresy

By the mid-seventeenth century, Reformed systematic theology treated heresy as its own settled topic. Edward Leigh devoted a chapter section to it, opening with a borrowed definition: heresy is “a pertinacious defending of any thing which overthrows the Fundamentall Doctrine of faith contained in the Word of God: an obstinate errour against the foundation.”⁸ Leigh then catalogued the heresies his own age still had to answer: the Socinians, who denied “the Deity of the Lord Jesus Christ, the Deity of the holy Ghost, the Trinity of Persons,” which he called “a complication of many ancient heresies condemned by ancient Councels”; the Gnostics, who claimed a superior, hidden knowledge; and the Pelagians, who denied that Adam’s sin left any “hereditary stain” on his descendants.⁹

Opposing Views

The Bauer thesis. Walter Bauer’s Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity argued that “orthodoxy could not have been a reliable guide in the development of the canon because there was no uniform standard for orthodoxy until the fourth century.” On this view, earliest Christianity was not one faith with heretical deviations from it but a set of competing “Christianities,” and the eventual “winners” simply called their own version orthodox and everyone else’s heretical.¹⁰ Heresy, on this account, is not a category the earliest church itself had reliable grounds to use; it is a label written back onto history by whoever happened to prevail.

Objections and Responses

Didn’t the earliest Christians lack any reliable standard for telling heresy from orthodoxy, making “heresy” just a retroactive label the eventual winners applied to the losers? Kruger grants that Bauer is right about the diversity itself: doctrinal error surfaced very early, as the New Testament’s own writings against it show (Gal. 6:12; Col. 2:11-13; 2 Pet. 2:1; 1 John 2:19; Jude 4-8; Rev. 2:6, 15). But he argues the earliest church had three real, contemporaneous standards, not a standard invented after the fact: the Old Testament, already received as authoritative Scripture, which by itself excluded any Marcionite or gnostic teaching that denied the Old Testament’s God was the true God; the “core” New Testament books, especially Paul’s major letters and the Gospels, recognized as apostolic from a very early date; and the oral rule of faith described above, which Irenaeus himself traced to the apostles rather than to the church’s own later decisions.¹⁰ On this reckoning, the earliest church did not wait for a finished canon before it could tell a Gnostic teacher he had departed from the faith.

If the church has authority to name something heresy, doesn’t that authority amount to coercion, forcing conformity rather than persuading it? Herman Bavinck argues that a church does possess real authority “to confess the truth it believes, to maintain it as confession in its midst, and to ask its office-bearers to subscribe to its rule of faith,” grounded in Scripture’s own charge to be “a pillar and foundation of the truth” and to “avoid those who deviate from the doctrine of the truth.” He is careful about the kind of authority this is, though: “the rule of faith is not a standard of coercion but of persuasion and voluntary submission.”¹¹ The 1689’s own confession embodies the same distinction in what it omits: unlike Westminster, it grants the church no civil sword to enforce its verdict on heresy, only the authority to state and maintain the truth within its own fellowship.

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 25, “Of Marriage,” para. 3. ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 26, “Of the Church,” para. 3. ↩
The Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), chap. 20, “Of Christian Liberty, and Liberty of Conscience,” para. 4: “And for their publishing of such opinions, or maintaining of such practices, as are contrary to the light of nature, or to the known principles of Christianity… or such erroneous opinions or practices as, either in their own nature, or in the manner of publishing or maintaining them, are destructive to the external peace and order which Christ hath established in the Church; they may lawfully be called to account, and proceeded against by the censures of the Church, and by the power of the Civil Magistrate.” ↩
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 21, “Of Christian Liberty and Liberty of Conscience.” ↩
Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 4, “The Divine Qualities of the Canon”: “the early church’s battle against heresy is evident in the works of Dionysius of Corinth, Hippolytus, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, and Origen.” ↩ ↩² ↩³
John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1845-1846), book 4, chap. 9, sec. 13, 409-410. ↩
Calvin, book 4, chap. 9, sec. 13, 411. ↩
Joseph Hall, Cases of Conscience, case 5, quoted in Edward Leigh, A Systeme or Body of Divinity (London: A. M. for William Lee, 1654), bk. 4, chap. 19, 361. ↩
Edward Leigh, A Systeme or Body of Divinity (London: A. M. for William Lee, 1654), bk. 4, chap. 19, 361-362. ↩
Kruger, chap. 4: “In Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, Bauer argued that orthodoxy could not have been a reliable guide in the development of the canon because there was no uniform standard for orthodoxy until the fourth century.” ↩ ↩²
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 21, “The Church as a Spiritual Reality.” ↩