I get accused of heresy a lot, simply because I don’t believe in a lot of what ‘mainline’ Evangelical Christianity believes in. This of course depends entirely upon my accusers’ presupposition that they are in fact right, and anyone who disagrees with them is wrong. But when you’re talking about an infinite, intrinsically unknowable Being, it stands to reason that anyone who claims to have all their ducks neatly in a row is by definition wrong.
But the biggest heresy of all is the huge slur on the character of God that is perpetrated by that same group. Here’s a far better take on it, from Kevin Carter:
I truly think the great heresy of the church is the attack on the character of God that began with Augustine, continued with Anselm, and was finalized with Calvin.
God became a tyrant, who saw humanity only as worthless rags, worthy of destruction… God’s holiness wasn’t something to love, but something to fear because we could never live up to it, and it’s not our fault, because God created us with that flaw, but we’re the ones to be accountable.
God, in a moment of regret, recognizes the flaw and decides to give us an escape route, but He does so by requiring the greatest, most painful and bloody death possible, then fragments the story in numerous ways, fills it with some myth, and requires you to believe a great number of ridiculous claims that work against the fabric of what we’ve come to understand to know about the Universe. And if we simply aren’t convinced by one particular sect of people who call themselves His followers, then He torments us gleefully in Hell for infinity?
I’m sorry, but that God is not Holy, Righteous, or Pure. That God is more evil than Thanos.
Luckily, that’s not who God is, nor is that what the church believed for the first 400 years or so… There is a more ancient truth of God’s love for all humanity, Gods suffering because of the sin condition, God’s desire to conquer the sin condition and offer us a way out of that system while we live, but with complete plans to fully reconcile ALL of it eventually.
That’s a God worth loving… The first is something to be feared and reviled.
– Kevin Carter, shared with his kind permission.
Header image shows three of the Monty Python team (left to right: Terry Jones, Michael Palin, Terry Gilliam) in their well-known and oft-quoted sketch ‘The Spanish Inquisition’. No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition, of course 😉 But unfortunately the reality was nowhere near as funny: The real Spanish inquisition were a bunch of church-approved heresy hunters who began their work in the late fifteenth century and continuing for some 300 years. Nasty people they were, and of course their heirs are still in existence today. Seriously, they were horrible. Here’s a link to the the Wikipedia article on them.
I hope Kevin won’t mind me sharing this on Facebook. It’s very good. I love his comments.
I’m sure he won’t mind, Jem. He was very clear that his ‘heresy’ is well out in the open!