Why Heresies Must Exist

The times we live in force even this warning out of us: we ought not to be amazed at these heresies. There is no reason to be startled that they exist, since it was foretold that they would come; and no reason to be startled that they overturn the faith of some people, since the whole purpose they serve is to put faith on trial and so give it the chance to be approved. So the offense taken by so many — who are scandalized by the sheer fact that heresies have grown this strong — is baseless and thoughtless. How much greater the offense would have been if there had been none! Once it has been settled that a thing must exist, it is given the purpose for which it exists; and that purpose secures the power by which it exists, in such a way that it cannot possibly fail to be there. [a]

Take the parallel case of a fever. It has its assigned place among all the other deadly and agonizing things that exist to destroy a person, and we are not surprised either that it exists — there it is — or that it wears a man away, since that is what it exists to do. It is the same with heresies. They are produced to weaken faith and put it out. We feel dread because they have that power; we ought first to dread the plain fact that they exist. As long as they exist they have their power, and as long as they have their power they exist.

Still, a fever is an evil both in what it is for and in what it can do — everyone knows that — and so we loathe it rather than marvel at it, and we guard against it as best we can, since stamping it out is beyond us. But heresies bring eternal death and the heat of a fiercer fire, and some people would rather marvel that heresies have such power than get out of the way of that power while the way out is open. Heresies would have no power at all if people would stop marveling that they have it. Either a man is caught in the trap while he marvels, or, being caught, he nurses his astonishment, as though heresies were this strong because some truth belonged to them.

It would certainly be astonishing for evil to have any force of its own — except that heresies are strong in people who are not strong in faith. In a fight between boxers or gladiators, as a rule a man does not win because he is strong, or lose because he is not; he wins because the man he beat had no strength in him. Match that same winner afterwards against a genuinely powerful opponent and he retires from the contest crestfallen. It works exactly the same way with heresies. Whatever strength they have they draw from the weakness of individual people, and they have none at all whenever they run into a faith that is really strong.

It is common enough for people of weaker character to be so built up in confidence by certain individuals who get caught by a heresy that they topple over into ruin themselves. They ask: “How does it happen that this woman, or that man, who were the most faithful, the most level-headed, the most experienced people in the church, have gone over to the other side?” Anyone who asks that question surely answers it himself: people whom heresies were able to pervert should never have been reckoned level-headed, or faithful, or experienced in the first place. [f]

And is it really so extraordinary that someone who has been approved should afterwards fall away? Saul, who was better than anyone else, is later undone by envy. David, a good man “after the Lord’s own heart,” is afterwards guilty of murder and adultery. Solomon, given every kind of grace and wisdom by the Lord, is led into idolatry by women. It was reserved for the Son of God alone to hold out to the end without sin.

But suppose an overseer falls from the rule of faith, or a deacon, or a widow, or a virgin, or a teacher, or even a man who has borne witness under arrest — will heresies look as if they have the truth on that account? Do we test the faith by the people, or the people by the faith? No one is wise, no one is faithful, no one is greater than anyone else, except the Christian; and no one is a Christian except the person who holds out to the end. You are only human, so you know another man from the outside. You think as far as you see, and you see only as far as your eyes reach. But scripture says, “the eyes of the Lord are lofty.” “Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart.” “The Lord knows those who are his.” “The plant my heavenly Father has not planted, he pulls up by the roots.” “The first,” as he shows, “will be last.” And he carries “his winnowing fork in his hand, to clean out his threshing floor.” Let the chaff of a flighty faith blow off as much as it likes at every gust of trial; the heap of grain stored in the Lord’s barn will only be the purer for it.

Did not some of the disciples turn back from the Lord himself when they took offense? Yet the rest did not conclude from that that they had to stop following him. Because they knew he was the Word of Life and had come from God, they stayed in his company right to the end, after he had gently asked them whether they too wanted to leave. It is a small thing that men like Phygelus and Hermogenes and Philetus and Hymenaeus deserted his apostle: the man who betrayed Christ was himself one of the apostles. And we are surprised when some people abandon his churches — although the very things we suffer, after Christ’s own example, are what show us to be Christians. “They went out from us,” John says, “but they were not of us. If they had been of us, they would certainly have stayed with us.”

Let us keep in mind instead the sayings of the Lord and the letters of the apostles. They told us in advance that there would be heresies, and they gave us warnings ahead of time to avoid them; and just as we are not alarmed that heresies exist, so we should not be amazed that they can do the very thing that makes them worth avoiding. The Lord teaches us that many “ravening wolves will come in sheep’s clothing.” Now what is this sheep’s clothing but the outward surface of the Christian profession? Who are the ravening wolves but the treacherous notions and spirits lurking inside to lay waste Christ’s flock? Who are the false prophets but men who predict the future falsely? Who are the false apostles but preachers of a counterfeit good news? And who are the antichrists, now and always, but the men who set themselves against Christ? [m]

Heresies today will tear the church apart by twisting her teaching just as surely as Antichrist will persecute her on that day by the cruelty of his attacks — except that persecution makes even martyrs, and heresy makes only apostates. And that is why “there must be heresies, so that those who are approved may be made plain”: both those who stood firm under persecution, and those who did not wander off into heresy. The apostle does not mean that people who trade their faith for a heresy are to be counted approved — however much they twist his words to their own side when he says elsewhere, “Test everything; hold on to what is good,” as if a man who had tested everything badly could not go wrong and deliberately settle on something evil.

What is more, when he blames quarrels and splits — which are plainly evils — he adds heresies to them in the same breath. Something he attaches to a list of evils he is obviously admitting to be an evil itself, and a greater one, since he tells us that he believed the reports of their splits and quarrels precisely because he knew that “there must be heresies too.” He shows that it was the prospect of the greater evil that made him quick to believe in the lighter ones. So far was he from thinking that heresies, among evils of that kind, were a good thing, that his object was to warn us in advance not to be surprised at trials of an even worse stamp, since, as he said, they served “to make plain everyone who is approved” — that is, the people the heresies were unable to pervert. In short, since the whole passage is about holding to unity and putting a stop to divisions, and heresies cut men off from unity no less than splits and quarrels do, there is no doubt that he puts heresies under the same head of blame as splits and quarrels. And by doing that he makes the people who have fallen into heresies “not approved” — all the more so when he rebukes them and presses them to turn away from such things, teaching them that they should “all say and think the same thing,” the very thing heresies will not allow. [p]

There is no need to labor the point, since it is the same Paul who, in his letter to the Galatians, counts “heresies” among the sins of the flesh, and who tells Titus that “a man who is a heretic” is to be “rejected after a first warning,” on the ground that “a man like that is turned inside out and is sinning, self-condemned.” In fact in almost every letter, where he presses on us the duty of avoiding false teaching, he condemns heresies sharply. What heresies produce in practice is false teachings — in Greek, haireseis, a word for the choice a man makes when he either sets such teachings up for other people or takes them up for himself. That is why Paul calls the heretic self-condemned: he himself chose the thing he is condemned for. [q]

We, on the other hand, are not permitted to bring in anything at our own pleasure, nor to make a choice of something another man has introduced out of his private fancy. In the Lord’s apostles we have our authority; and even they did not choose anything of their own to bring in, but faithfully handed on to the nations the teaching they had received from Christ. So if even “an angel from heaven should preach a different good news” from theirs, we would call him accursed. The Holy Spirit had foreseen even then that there would be, in a certain virgin named Philumene, an angel of deceit “transformed into an angel of light,” and that his tricks and illusions would lead Apelles to bring in his new heresy.

These are the teachings “of men” and “of demons,” born for itching ears out of the cleverness of this world’s wisdom. This is what the Lord called foolishness, and he “chose the foolish things of the world” to put even philosophy itself to shame. For philosophy is the raw material of the world’s wisdom, the reckless interpreter of God’s nature and God’s arrangement of things. In fact the heresies themselves are put up to it by philosophy. This is where the aeons came from, and I do not know what endless “forms,” and the three kinds of human being in the system of Valentinus, who came out of Plato’s school. From the same source came Marcion’s better god with all his calm: he came out of the Stoics. The opinion that the soul dies is held by the Epicureans; the denial that the body is restored is taken from the whole company of philosophers together; when matter is made God’s equal, that is Zeno’s teaching; and when anything is said about a god of fire, Heraclitus has walked in. [u]

The heretics and the philosophers keep turning over the same subject matter and getting tangled in the same arguments. Where does evil come from, and why is it allowed? Where does man come from, and how? — besides the question Valentinus has raised only lately: where does God come from? Which he settles with the answer: out of enthymesis and ektroma. Unhappy Aristotle, who invented dialectic for these men! It is the art of building up and pulling down: so slippery in its statements, so far-fetched in its guesses, so rough in its arguments, so good at breeding quarrels; a nuisance even to itself, taking everything back, and in the end settling nothing. Where do those “fables and endless genealogies” come from, and those “unprofitable questions,” and “words that spread like a cancer”? When the apostle wants to hold us back from all of it, he names philosophy by name as the thing to be on guard against. Writing to the Colossians he says, “See that no one takes you in through philosophy and empty deceit, following human tradition, and contrary to the wisdom of the Holy Spirit.”

He had been at Athens, and in his conversations there he had come to know that human wisdom which claims to know the truth while it only corrupts it, and which is itself split into its own many heresies by the number of its mutually contradictory schools. What indeed does Athens have to do with Jerusalem? What agreement is there between the Academy and the church? What between heretics and Christians? Our own teaching comes from the porch of Solomon, who had himself taught that “the Lord is to be sought in simplicity of heart.” Away with every attempt to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic and Platonic and dialectical composition! Now that we have Christ Jesus we want no clever disputing; now that we enjoy the good news we want no inquiry. With our faith, we want no further belief. For this is what we believe first of all: that there is nothing else we ought to believe.

I come now to the point that our own brothers press and the heretics insist on. Our brothers bring it up as a pretext for going off into curious inquiries, and the heretics use it to smuggle in their hair-splitting. It is written, they say: “Seek, and you will find.” Let us remember at what time the Lord said this. I think it was at the very outset of his teaching, when everyone was still in doubt whether he was the Christ, when Peter had not yet declared him the Son of God, and when even John had stopped feeling sure about him. So it was said with good reason then — “Seek, and you will find” — when the one who was not yet known still had to be inquired after. Besides, it was said with reference to the Jews. The whole of this reproof belongs to them, since they were the ones who had somewhere to look for Christ. [ab]

“They have Moses and Elijah,” he says — in other words, the law and the prophets, which preach Christ. In another place he says the same thing plainly: “Search the scriptures, in which you expect to find salvation, for they testify about me.” That is what “Seek, and you will find” means. And it is clear that the words that come next also apply to the Jews: “Knock, and it will be opened to you.” The Jews had once been with God, and were afterwards cast off for their sins and began to be without God. The Gentiles, on the contrary, had never been with God. They were only “a drop from a bucket” and “dust from the threshing floor,” and they were always outside the door. Now how is a man who was always outside going to knock at a place he has never been? What door does he know of, when he has passed through none, either coming in or being thrown out? Is it not rather the man who is aware that he once lived inside and was pushed out who could find the door and knock at it?

In the same way, “Ask, and you will receive” fits a man who knew whom he ought to ask, and to whom some promise had been made — that is, “the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob.” The Gentiles knew nothing either of him or of any of his promises. So it was to Israel that he spoke when he said, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Not yet had he “thrown the children’s bread to the dogs”; not yet did he charge them to “go into the road of the nations.” Only at the very end does he instruct them to “go and teach all nations, and baptize them,” when they were so soon to receive “the Holy Spirit, the Helper, who would guide them into all the truth.”

And this points the same way. If the apostles, who were appointed to be teachers of the Gentiles, were themselves to have the Helper for their teacher, then it was far less to the point to say to us, “Seek, and you will find” — to us, whose teaching was to come to us without any searching, from the apostles, and to the apostles themselves from the Holy Spirit. All the Lord’s sayings, of course, are set out for everyone; they have passed through Jewish ears to reach us. Still, most of them were addressed to particular Jewish people, and so they were not instruction aimed specifically at us, but rather an example for us.