HOW TO BE A HERETIC

       What if you were to discover that there was a secret group of heretics in your church?

       Worse still, what if they weren’t even secret?  What if they lived right out in the open with their heresies, tempting your Christian brothers and sisters to join them in their profane heterodoxy?

       Worst of all: What if you discovered that you were the heretic?

 

THE BLOG POST THAT NEVER WAS

       I’ve always had sympathy for the author of the Bible’s epistle of Jude.  This past month, though, that sympathy has evolved into downright empathy.   He’d planned, he says early in his letter, to write about the glorious salvation he shares with the members of his audience.  Instead, he was forced to address the threats faced by that audience.  He had to change his writing plans.  His group, his audience, probably covered a number of churches under the author’s influence – churches he knew well, people he knew personally given the outpouring of wrath Jude directs at those threatening the faith of the believers.

       Invaders.  Heretics who’d snuck into the church to take it over from the inside out.

       Like Jude, I sat down with a firm idea of what I’d write about this month.  I was going to compose “Jude’s Got ‘Tude,” an in-depth examination of the nature of heretics.  I mean, Jude gave me so much material to work with there!  He goes off on heretics, literally spews forth condemnation after condemnation, accusation after accusation.  In a couple dozen scant verses, he showed me that heretics:

• Respond to challenges with violent uprising, falling into the error of Cain
• Pursue profit over piety, falling into the error of Baalam
• Tolerate immorality in their own leadership structure, mimicking the error of Gomorrah
• Pollute their bodies, forgetting they're the temples of the Spirit
• Reject any authority God has placed over them
• Say rude, nasty, disparaging things about their betters
• Cause their own destruction, like those fleeing Egypt with no true belief
• See themselves as subject to no laws, like angels fleeing their places in heaven
• Whip up insurrections like the rebels of Korah
• Cause divisions, splintering churches and even nations

 

  Oh, yeah, that blog post I imagined I would write was going to be a doozy, an exemplar of exegesis!  Half of you would say, “Wait, is she really writing about Donald Trump?” and the other half would say “She must be writing about Joe Biden!” and the third half would say “No, this is definitely just about church heretics” and the fourth half would ask “How many halves are packed in here anyway?”  Go me! 

        Spoiler alert: That isn’t happening.

 

HERESY, AND A LITTLE HISTORY

        I am the heretic.  I chose a different path for the blog.

        Let me clarify.  The word “heretic” came to us through Middle English, bouncing in from French, where it had wriggled in from Latin as a conduit from the ancient Greek hairetikos.  Heretic, hairetikos.  Not so different, right?  Except that hairetikos did not originally mean “person believing ideas contrary to orthodox Christian doctrine.”

        It meant “able to choose.”  No more, no less.

        In the early years of the church, there was a lot to choose from.  Valentinianism, Marcionism, Montanism, Adoptionism, Docetism, and every mystical-woo variation of Gnosticism that you can imagine.  Christianity spent several centuries fine-tuning what would one day be called “orthodoxy.”  It was by means of defining orthodoxy that Christianity invented heresy.

        Don’t be thrown by those last three words.  By the new definition it was being given, heresy no longer meant choosing anything   In his 1934 book Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, Walter Bauer makes a persuasive argument that many regions’ first establishments of Christianity were founded on ideas that would now be viewed as heretical, "heterodoxy."  Those churches came around in time, although we shouldn’t forget the vast differences between western and eastern Christian faiths that remain to this day.  Most western hemisphere believers, in fact, remain mostly unaware of the variety of Christian doctrines found east of Moldova and north of the Caucasus (and unaware of the locations of Moldova and the Caucasus, for that matter.  ‘Murica.)

        Heresy didn't exist in paganism.  Prior to the spread of Christianity’s monotheism, having different doctrines within the vast expanse of polytheism didn’t mean you were wrong.  It meant you decided to follow a different god.  All gods were legit, even if they didn’t always get along with one another.  If you followed the mystery cults of Isis over the emperor’s preferred, traditional Jupiter following, you were simply picking differently.  Hairetikos.  You were able to choose.

        Not so in Rome’s new Christianity.  If you chose a different path, a different god, you were completely off track.  That wasn’t a choice you could make any longer.  The church father Irenaeus took that distinction a step further in the century after Jesus’ death, writing that even differences of opinion in ideas about Jesus should no longer be a matter of choice.  There were four gospels, no more, and no other trustworthy sayings of the apostles.  The apostles crafted successors by the laying on of hands, and no earthly authority could claim supremacy over them or claim alternate facts.  As time rolled on, the lists of doctrines firmed up more, and in 325 C.E. the council of Nicaea—a tool of the Roman Empire which during the 300s was being taken over from inside by Christendom—firmed up the basics of orthodoxy in what is still called the Nicaean (or sometimes the Apostles’) Creed.

         There was no longer a need to choose.  Being hairetikos was off the table.  In fact, it became dangerous to choose a variant Christian belief.  Downright deadly, praise the Lord.

 

THE HISTORY OF HERESY UPENDED YOUR BLOG?

        But it wasn’t that history that made me veer off course from the blog I intended to write.  It was Jude himself who thwarted me.  I read his epistle.  I read it again.  I played with a number of the (very accomplished) Greek phrases he uses.  I read a few commentaries and listened to a couple audio commentaries.  I read Jude again.

        Then I read a commentary that used a single word that jammed my gears.  The word was “triplet.”  It didn’t mean “a child with two siblings of the same birthing.” It meant “the literary device of tripling a word or concept to drive the idea home.”

        My next read through Jude made my jaw drop.

        Triplets. 

        When I teach students how to write argument essays, I impress upon them the idea of a Rule of Three.  Arguments are either true or false, one thing or another thing – a “couplet” of contention, if you will, a dichotomy.  Are you trying to convince me of your side of the couplet?  Then go beyond single arguments, beyond couplets, and into triplets.  One example alone won’t sway me; for all I know, the one lonely fact you provide as your proof could be a fluke, a quirk, an outlier.  You need a second example of the argument or point you’re making … but even then, a second piece of verification could just be a coincidence.  When you layer on a third supporting claim, you’re closing the sale.  Now you’ve established a trend, and you’re making good use of the Rule of Three.  I might buy your argument.  In threes, it sounds like evidence.

        When I read through the epistle of Jude with the word triplet bouncing in my brain, I begin to see things I haven’t seen before.

        Were my assumptions about the text right?  I thought his arguments against “heretics” in the congregation were a vitriolic volleying of vindictives against the enemies within, like an unhinged jeremiad.  I perceived them as disconnected, the way individual mashal sayings in the book of Proverbs are singular and stand-alone.  I assumed his attacks were a stream of consciousness akin to Qoheleth’s wandering waves of whimsy in Ecclesiastes.

         Look how I wrote the above paragraph.  I gave you a couplet situation (am I right about Jude or am I wrong?)  Then I gave you a triplet of verbs (I thought, I perceived, I assumed) with a triplet of Biblical allusions (Jeremiah, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes) to make it look like I was working hard, thinking really hard, studying insanely, inordinately hard to get things right about Jude.

        (Geek side note: And I just used a tripled anaphora with climactic parallelism borrowed from Hebraic style in that last sentence explaining the previous paragraph.  I also did an apophasis at the start of the post, raising an issue by claiming not to be mentioning it.  I’ll stop now.  But if you’re a blog writer, an argument maker, or a sermon deliverer (Rule of Three there!), it never hurts to review rhetorical techniques.  As you’ll see below, Jude certainly used them.)

 

THE BRILLIANCE OF JUDE

            One-two-three, one-two-three,

            Read the Book of Jude with me!

            Then we’ll see (thee and me!)

            Everything turns triple-y!

 

       There.  I dropped my academic pretense by remembering I’m a mom with a tyke who reads Dr. Seuss to me.  Let’s take a simple look at Jude.  I was wrong.  He’s not spewing.  He’s not frothing at the mouth.  I should have suspected it from the quality of Jude’s Greek, but I missed something in my first few dozen reads: Jude’s letter is a carefully crafted essay whose power comes from its form as much as its content.

       I’ll clip back my prose here and let Jude’s format do the talking.  Follow his flow, even if the outline form throws you a bit.

       Jude opens with a triplet of triplets – three lines of three –

1.   FROM: Jude’s name, his role in Christ, his tie to James
2.   TO: those called, those loved, those kept
3.   HIS PRAYER FOR READERS: mercy, peace, and love

       Then a dastardly couplet: The enemy within (1) perverts grace [by wrong behaviors] and (2) denies Christ [by wrong belief].  Double trouble.

Next comes a major triplet of triples:

A: THE ANCIENTS ARE A WARNING SIMILAR TO THESE ENEMIES:

1.   Those destroyed who’d been freed from Egypt (disbelief)
2.   The now-punished angels who left their place (disobedience)
3.   Sodom and Gomorrah who lost their cities due to immorality (carnality)

B: LIKEWISE, these enemies within:

1.   Pollute their bodies
2.   Reject authority
3.   Heap abuse on their betters

C: THEY’RE LIKE OTHER BAD EXAMPLES

1.   Cain’s murderous ways (violence)
2.   Baalam’s error of pursuing profit (greed)
3.   Korah's rebels who fell to destruction (anti-authority)

       This movement of the letter closes with another couplet: These enemies (1) mock what they don’t understand and (2) are destroyed by the impulsive passions they do understand.  To this point, we’ve seen a couplet of couplets encasing a triplet of triplets.

        Now there’s a breather with a barrage of metaphors, each making the same point about the evil of the enemy within.  In rhetoric, this is called an exergasia, a “work out” of the full idea.  Think of it as the drum solo in the middle of an old 1980s song, a rapid ticking off of points.  These enemies are blemishes, they’re self-feeding shepherds, they’re fruitless and rootless trees, they’re wild waves, they’re wandering stars.  It’s intermission in the epistle of Jude until the triplet assault begins anew.

 A: They’re scoffers of these end-times

1.   They divide you
2.   They follow their own natural desires
3.   They do not have the Spirit

B: In contrast, you, believer, have this trinity in your favor:

1.  You pray in the Holy Spirit
2.  You have the love of God
3.  You await the mercy of Jesus

C: As for how to treat this enemy:

1.  Show mercy to the doubters
2.  Snatch some from the fire
3.  Snatch even the worst, but fear them

         The letter closes with a second barrage, a final exergasia drum solo of sentiments.  It’s Jude’s doxology, without doubt the most famous element of the letter.  It’s a graceful step away from the wrathful tone, reminding us point by point by point of how the Lord has saved us and of all the homage God deserves.

         I’ll indulge myself with one final observation.  There are three nonbiblical citations in the Letter of Jude:

1. A story of Michael and Satan arguing over Moses’ body (from The Assumption of Moses)
2. A prophecy of Enoch, seventh from Adam (from The Book of Enoch)
3. A prophecy from the apostles that occurs nowhere else in Scripture (perhaps from a text lost to us)

Obviously, this last triplet is just an amusing (to me) epilogue to the patterns that so awed me in the text.  Jude had no way of knowing whether the Assumption of Moses or the Book of Enoch would wind up in a canon that would be hundreds more years in the making, and he couldn't know that his would be the only letter extant today recording the apostles’ words of prophecy.  But it made me smile, nonetheless, to see that the extra-biblical citations turned out this way, a final, parting triplet of pure chance.

 

SO … HERESY?

       It turns out the word “heretic” doesn’t appear anywhere in Jude.  In fact, it shows up only once … maybe … in the New Testament.  Titus 3:10 gives counsel on how to deal with a “factious” man, our hairetikos, one who causes splits among the brethren.  The word is an offshoot of hairesis, usually translated as a sect (or denomination, if you will), and only considered “heresy” fleetingly in scattered Bible translations.  The word was still growing its negative connotation in the era of New Testament writing.  It wouldn’t get full muscles for at least a couple more centuries.

       But it’s obvious Jude opposes those “blemishes on your love feasts” against whom he rails.  He just didn’t have the right word yet to call them heretics.

       I have to thank you for sticking with me this long and wading through my sheer joy at finding complexity in a work I always falsely assumed was crafted as angry chaos.  I’ll leave you with a final consideration about Jude’s fury at those who had secretly slipped into churches, bringing their ungodly ways.

       He attacked them for behaviors.  He attacked the lusts they brought into the fellowship.  He attacked the money grabbing and greed they embodied.  He attacked their violent tendencies.  He attacked their rejection of God-placed authority.  He attacked their arrogance and their false sense of superiority.  He attacked them for all these immoralities – and it’s probably rather telling that in our era of the church, the word “immoralities” usually refers to sexual behaviors, never immediately conjuring church greed, arrogance, rebelliousness, or even violence.

       Jude attacked them for behaviors, and not for a suite of doctrines they held.  For Jude, heresy—admittedly a word still in formation in his day—was not about wrong dogmas and wrong beliefs, the key meaning of the term in our era.  It was about wrong behaviors within the church, committed by those who needed to be snatched back and kept in the fold, if possible.  We’re to have mercy and grab them back from their bad behaviors.

       There was only one doctrinal error for which Jude despised these enemies: “denying the only master and Lord of us, Jesus Christ” (v. 4).  Denial of His mastery over us is what leads us to presume on his grace and follow the baser instincts of humanity.

       After codifying orthodoxy for post-biblical times, many early Christians turned to the practice of executing heretics, inflicting their own form of persecution on those who chose differently.

       Perhaps we need to consider Jude’s recommendation.  Angry as he was, he still wanted to snatch them away from their bad behaviors and back into fellowship.

       I’ll think of that the next time I consider someone a heretic.  I'll even pause and think of it three times over.

Marana Tha,

Cosmic Parx / YoYo Rez