{"id":3152,"date":"2007-01-31T15:55:29","date_gmt":"2007-01-31T15:55:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/who-are-you-calling-a-heretic.html"},"modified":"2007-01-31T15:55:29","modified_gmt":"2007-01-31T15:55:29","slug":"who-are-you-calling-a-heretic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/who-are-you-calling-a-heretic.html","title":{"rendered":"Who are you calling a heretic?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Edward Oakes at First Things about playing fast and loose with terminology:<\/a><\/p>\n

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First of all, I wish to stress that I am not trying to ban the word heresy<\/em> by Catholics when speaking of Protestants out of some wishy-washy ecumenical latitudinarianism, as if dogmas are merely matters of opinion without objective truth value of their own. Nor I am denying that there are genuine doctrinal disputes that have become church-dividing. I have no doubt that the prospect of eventual ecclesial unity can only be achieved when, among other milestones, consensus is reached about the dogmas that separate Christians.<\/p>\n

So, in a way, heresy<\/em> can be the appropriate word to use to describe dogmatic disputation but only provided one first gives priority to its etymological meaning, which comes from the Greek word for \u201cchoice.\u201d But of whom does that not apply? As Peter Berger observed in his fine book The Heretical Imperative<\/u><\/a>, not many people in this multicultural setting of ours can keep to the religion they were born into without a lot of conscious choices being made along the way. Even orthodoxy is, in that sense, a choice, a \u201cheresy.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that (essentially sociological) observation of Berger\u2019s doesn\u2019t really get at my point either. After all, in ordinary language heresy<\/em> does not mean just any old choice but usually denotes doctrinal error. But that doesn\u2019t get us too far either. For if that\u2019s all the word means, then we\u2019ll never find anyone who has declared himself a heretic. To do so would be as nonsensical as someone saying, \u201cIn my\u2013of course entirely wrong\u2013opinion, I am convinced that\u2026\u201d Lutherans no more call themselves heretics than Catholics do. That means that to call someone else a heretic will be to use, as they say, a \u201cfighting word.\u201d So, naturally enough, in the warm glow of ecumenical good feelings, the H<\/em>-word will be avoided. But, as I said above, that\u2019s not my point, nor why I am calling Catholics of a conservative bent to ease up on the word.<\/p>\n

To see what I am driving at, let me use two extreme examples: docetism and Martin Luther\u2019s views on justification.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

<\/p>\n

ttp<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Edward Oakes at First Things about playing fast and loose with terminology: First of all, I wish to stress that I am not trying to ban the word heresy by Catholics when speaking of Protestants out of some wishy-washy ecumenical latitudinarianism, as if dogmas are merely matters of opinion without objective truth value of their…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3152","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nWho are you calling a heretic? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/01\/who-are-you-calling-a-heretic.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Who are you calling a heretic? 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3152","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3152"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3152\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3152"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3152"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3152"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}