The Cruelty of Heresy: An Affirmation of Christian Orthodoxy

Needed for a class. Interesting read.

In this short book, Bishop Allison gives the meaningful clarity that today's Christians need to discern whether or not certain popular trends in our churches are congruent or incongruent with the historic gospel of Jesus Christ. So many of us take for granted the traditions from which we come. Yet, even our "good" churches have toyed with these "incorrect beliefs" and we too often embrace them because we have not deliberated on our theology. We live in our embeded theology (that which we have been taught) and do not see the ultimate consequences of wrong belief.The reality of the Incarnation and its significant in a world that knows much suffering impacted me personally a great deal. One of the many deriviative heresies that result from not living in light of this spiritual truth is the abysmal lack of the theology of suffering by Christians for those who preach a "prosperity gospel". Allison also brings to light many other such important realities.His explanation of how heresy is closely allied with truth, but actually a counterfit of it is very helpful. It is also helpful to see how much of wrong belief stems from a few simple premises that when accepted lead us into many practices and traditions that ignore what Jesus taught and what God had long revealed through his scriptures.I commend this scholarly work to all who wish to sharpen their discernemnt of their own Christian camp to make certain that they have not bought into practices that quickly at their heart take us away from a relationship with they one true God. This is not a book that you will read only one time and put in your library. You will come back again and again to keep learning. Every page is filled with significant insight which is as relevant to our 21st century churches as it was to those in the first and second century. I have to rate it with five stars.

Bishop Allison writes of the cruelty of heresies with the emphasis that they continue to brew and cause trouble today among contemporary theologians and religious people. This is not a mere historical look at the heresies and the defense of orthodox Christianity. Bishop Allison shows how Christians can slip into heretical thinking and teaching today, as many have done.Allison examines the early heresies of Docetism and Adoptionism and then elaborates on the many later heresies that fall under these larger headings. He thoroughly explains the intricacies and nuances of the heresies. For each heresy, he explains the orthodox Christian Fathers' responses and the estabishment of councils and creeds to combat the heresies.Included in his discussion are Docetism, Ebionism, Socinianism, Adoptionism, Marcionism, Arianism, Montanism, Gnosticism, Manicheaism, Monarchianism (Sabellianism), Appollinarianism, Nestorianism, Pelagianism and Eutychianism. He examines the historicity of these and their present danger.Allison does not go into great detail of the prevelance of the heresies among Christians and religions today. A much longer book would be required for that type of discussion or for a more in depth look at the early writings among the church Fathers regarding the heresies. He does however provide enough discussion on each of the above heresies for readers to gain an adequate understanding of each.

The book met all the words of praise given by a friend who put me on its trail when I asked about resources that provide historical circumstances surrounding creeds and confessions in Christian church history. Many books approach the subject as an aspect of historical theology. I wanted to know about the people and times that produced those affirmations. Allison takes a tour up to about the sixth century as orthodoxy was becoming more and more the measure of authenticity of those who endorsed the several statements of belief that arose in those years. He points out how most of the creeds or declarations build on ones that preceded the one being examined. The author's thesis is presented in chapter 1, but he acknowledges that both those upholding what became the orthodox position could be equally cruel to those who held alternative views. He also admits that many of the ancient heresies are still at work in today's world. Thus, he pulls the reader from chapter to chapter in search of why those first general councils were so important.

The short story is that theology has pastoral implications, as the title suggests.While "The Cruelty of Heresy" examines the Early Church debates over the identity of Jesus and the nature of the Trinity, its highlights for me were:* Heresies tend to foster 1) a desire to be rescued from this world (Docetism), or 2) a propensity toward human self-sufficiency (Adoptionism),* Early Church heresies swung like a pendulum back and forth between 1) and 2), moving through Christology and then Trinitarian debates,* Complex heresies tend to borrow the worst of both 1) and 2),* Ironically, Orthodoxy was defended by "heretics", as the 1)s opposed the 2)s and vice versa,* Modern philosophers, who have rejected "Christianity", such as Hume (and Feuerbach), were not rejecting Orthodoxy but Heresy type 2),* Modern liberalism is essentially a 2), and* Christians must guard against the pendulum swinging through Orthodoxy into Heresy type 1) - Docetism.

This, among many other books of this type, are being used in my research on who Christ is. Well written and documented.

This might be described as a review-article. But that’s what Bishop Allison’s lucid engagement with deep issues deserves.I bought this book after seeing online interviews with its author and three other North American, Anglican bishops. (Search on YouTube for "3 Bishops".) I have been a Christian for 41 of my 68 years, and was interested in these interviews because of my dismay at the condition of the Anglican Communion generally, but of the American Episcopal Church in particular. How did things get so bad? That’s the question the three bishops were seeking to answer. So when Bishop Allison mentioned this book in passing, I looked it up. It's out of print, and second-hand copies were mostly more expensive than the original (1994) purchase price. However, I found just one that was cheaper. If I had not, and given the quality of Bishop Allison's talk, I'd readily have paid the high price.The title is immediately engaging; and its subtitle, "An Affirmation of Christian Orthodoxy", gets to the heart of it's author's primary concern -- that orthodoxy matters because its opposite, heresy, has a profound effect on how the believer thinks and therefore acts. By thought, Bishop Allison is not speaking primarily of intellectual issues, but of who and what, to our own minds, are the nature of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Heresy is cruel because it robs us of the fullness of the Gospel because, as it robs us of a proper appreciation of the Godhead it impoverishes our lives as Christians.To demonstrate this, Allison has a wealth of everyday analogies. Take, for example, Sabellianism, an image of Father, Son and Holy Spirit that is gaining ground today, as it sometimes has in the past, and which has been repeatedly condemned by many of the Church Fathers and orthodox teachers. The crux of Sabellianism is that the three persons are seen not as a Trinitarian unity, but as separate modes of operation in time and place — God now works as father, and in another context as Spirit, and so forth. About this Allison says "Worshipping a Sabellian deity would be like having a spouse who only played roles—someone who was a Democrat to Democrats, a Rebublican to Republicans [etc.] . . . Such a person would cease to be, in any real sense, an individual. Any disagreement with or affection for this spouse would be absorbed and swallowed up not in personhood, but in process."Any orthodox believer familiar with some of those present-day (mostly Pentecostal) churches with Sabellian inclinations will recognise the aptness of Allison's analogy, and find in it an explanation for the tendency in these groups to emphasise defined actions as manifestations of the true believer -- for example, a true Christian is someone who speaks in tongues. Here, the cruelty is that the emphasis on defined actions weakens our ability to appreciate, in our everyday life, the breadth and depth of God's love for us; and it undercuts our appreciation that no matter how wrong we might be, there is always a way back via repentance. So we make sure our salvation is secure by relying on legalism: we dress conservatively; we abstain from any kind of alcohol; a small number of us even handle snakes to "prove" that we are filled with the power of the Holy Spirit (cf. Mark 16:18); and, worst of all, perhaps, many of us live in fear of committing the "unpardonable sin" of blaspheming against the Holy Spirit. (Mark 3:28–30)"The Cruelty of Heresy" goes through all the major heretical movements that have sprung up since the Gospel was first preached. It convincingly conveys the truth of the old adage that there are no new heresies, only reworkings of old ones; and while it avoids pointing the finger at specific individuals, its aim at modern manifestations of ancient heresies is unerring, supported by a wide range of quotations from theologians modern and ancient — as all supporters of orthodoxy should, unconcerned about the writers' credentials as catholics, evangelicals or whatever. Implicitly, Allison accepts the paradox that orthodoxy is not a narrow church, but a broad one — notwithstanding Jesus' declarations about the alternatives of the narrow gate that leads to eternal life and the broad one that leads to destruction. (Matthew 7:13–14) Heresies tend to arise out of attempts to "solve" paradoxes. It is heresies that are narrowing.Bishop Allison's bridge-building between the ancient and the modern is especially powerful in his attack on one of the oldest and most persistent of all heresies, Docetism, and its most widespread modern manifestation, Apollinarianism. Docetism is basically the belief that Christ merely seemed to be human and only appeared to be born, to suffer, and to die. As the Catholic Encyclopaedia explains, it is not, strictly speaking, a Christian heresy at all, because it originated outside the church, in various forms of pagan and gnostic thought. Its appeal is potent, and lies mainly in its denial of Jesus' physical suffering, and hence in the necessity of suffering in the life of the Christian — "that I may share in his sufferings" as Paul puts it. (Philippians 3:10) It offers the believer a faith that requires only inner illumination; it denies the Judaeo-Christian link between soul and body; it denies the incarnation; because it says that the material world is something from which we can escape, just as its imagined Christ escaped the suffering and shame of the cross, it seems to solve the mystery that a loving God can allow evil things to happen by evading the issue. The Apostle Paul writes against it in 1 Corinthians 15, even though at that early stage it was not a developed Christological doctrine. So does John in his Gospel, notably in the opening chapter, where he intimately links the eternal nature of the Logos with Jesus' entirely human body and soul. It is one of the most common Islamic views of Christ (though in that case a close variant, because God rescues Jesus); and it pops up, hydra-headed in its power to feed the popular imagination, in Dan Brown's "The DaVinci Code".Docetism was solemnly condemned at the Council of Constantinople in 381; but it has not gone away. Nor has its bed-fellow, Apollinarianism, condemned at the same council. Bishop Allison argues especially persuasively that, especially in the last 150 years or so, Apollinarianism has become a seductive force in thought well outside the boundaries of the church, as well as within it. In most respects Apollinarius was entirely orthodox; but in attempting to address the problems posed by Christ possessing both a human and divine nature, he taught that although Jesus had a human body and a human soul, his mind was not human, but was a manifestation of the Logos.This might seem to be hairsplitting. But as Bishop Allison shows, its consequences are profound and can devastate the truly Christian life. Jesus becomes not a human being who had to make decisions as we do; rather, he becomes a kind of divinely inspired robot. The temptations have no meaning. As believers rightly try to imitate Christ, we wrongly downgrade the importance of the mind, even to the extent that it can be turned off and replaced with . . . what? That's the entire problem.This is one of Allison's most powerful and provocative ideas. As a deeply orthodox Christian he believes not only that orthodoxy matters, but that it's erosion or failure can spread either into the world outside the church or that ideas from outside the church can come inside and lead to erosion. As he puts it (p. 109), "The neatness gained in the face of a real problem—how can the divine and human be united in Christ—was purchased at too great a price. Apollinarius excluded from salvation that whole aspect of fallen human nature which involves pride, self-will and those dangerous sins that Dante set in purgatory closest to hell. An experienced pastor can testify that the most difficult problems he deals with are those that arise from the soul and intellect rather than those from the body and its appetites. . . . Apollinarianism limits the humanity to the physical and excludes soul and psyche from redemptive suffering. It thus treats only the symptoms of sin while neglecting its deeper roots. The body becomes a scapegoat . . ."To this Allison links a vast array of contemporary thinking, all the more dangerous because it is not recognised for what it is. "Nothing that is truly human is lost in redemption." (p. 112) But such loss is exactly what happens when fallen human nature is seduced by the spell of so-called secular humanism and its many fellow-travellers. "Anyone who watches citizens, clients, patients, parishioners, or children wreck their lives for lack of the right answers can feel the tug of an Apollinarian divinity who will save us by replacing our wills with proper directions, thereby sacrificing something essential of mature humanity." (.p. 113)This is deep, sobering stuff. But the way in which Bishop Allison analogises and applies that deep stuff to everyday life makes this book a most thought-provoking and encouraging guide to anyone who desires discernment between truth and falsehood, and who wishes to encourage such discernment within the church — for the church’s own internal life and for its outreach to the world.

Very insightful analysis of the heresies that continue to make their rounds and why they are harmful.