The word “Christianity” may need to go away for a while, like on a desert retreat. It needs to go off to a sweatlodge with St. Anthony of Egypt again so it can figure out what Jesus intended. Few Protestant denominations remain that teach what “Christianity” really entails or demands. The familiarity of it has bred contempt and complacency, which has led to extremely watered-down versions. This is exactly why St. Anthony and the Desert Fathers exited the culture in the third century. Even back then it had been diluted into a cheap BBQ lighter fluid instead of the 100% explosive ethanol it was on Pentecost. Today, it can be restored to be highly flammable once again, but it won’t be done by being “cool” in the culture or by flopping around speaking in tongues or doing fake healings or by affirming sin or denying that the devil exists. It will be restored to it’s original strange potency by the same old proven methods: prayer, fasting, and charity.

But once again, like in the time of the Desert Fathers, the errors that led people away from proper worship and correct doctrine must be re-visited, because they have been allowed back in. All of them. It almost as if a busload of old heresies showed up at the pool, and barged right in without checking their floaties, food, weapons, and drugs at the door. Many of them don’t even bother to wear a swimsuit, as modesty and ideas about sin are old-fashioned. Now the pool is in mayhem. Only a few lifeguards (in red hats) are shouting while others have joined in the orgy. Fortunately, the party is almost over, since it has become a pool no one wants to swim in. The newcomers and families who would like to swim take one look at the chaos and decide to stay home - after all, they can setup their own pool - who needs the community pool? Thus we have many trying to claim the main pool, and millions of little pools where people isolate in their own anti-social backyard. The heresies have stunk up the water to the point that the “Christian” pool is more like a swamp lagoon. Now it will require a lockdown for cleaning. After draining, it needs a full sandblasting before a refill.

The intense, long battle against errors about who Jesus was, what Jesus said, and what he taught, waged over centuries, needs to be waged all over again. Today, it’s not even clear that people understand the word heresy. And to be fair, it is an ugly word. “Heretic” combines two sounds that make Minnesotans like me shiver: “hair” and “tick.” This sounds like a burrowing insect at the base of my hairline. Where I live, ticks raise goosebumps on people more than snakes. Whenever I’ve discovered one engorged on a dog’s belly, or see one climbing my shirt after a walk in the woods, it gives me a case of the heebie-jeebies. But perhaps this strange association is apt. A tick buried in skin kind of fits well with what heresy does. Because a tiny corruption like that caused by a tick lodging in your skin is much like how a heretical idea poisons and corrupts individuals or entire nations. Heresy is not unlike Lyme disease in that it often has a subtle entry point but leads to an insidious devastation of the body as it spreads.

The idea of heresy is something people don’t even like to talk about, but I think it needs to be. I doubt that the average Joe Christian has ever heard of Marcionism, or Pelagianism, or any other heresy, but many certainly speak those heresies openly. Ideas long ago denounced as un-Christian are mentioned as if they were orthodox in casual conversation. But this isn’t surprising, given the past few centuries of rejecting all authority. Almost everyone now is their own Pope, so even if I mentioned the basics of a heresy, my listener would respond, “Who made you the Pope?”

To which I would answer, “Do you see a funny hat on me? Long ago, after a big todo, the Church declared…”

And that’s exactly where the conversation would end, because the appeal to authority beyond the “Self” would outrage the listener.

“The Church has entered the chat.” When that happens, the modern American, Protestant, public school brain exits the chat. It’s over. Authority? Are you claiming authority? Are you kidding me? We have hundreds of years of literature and philosophy and theology crammed between our ears, where the only authority is in national power and the self. America itself is a rejection of old-world “authority.” But this continual march of rejecting authority has put the West in an odd state. Because once the highest authority of God and his Church was thrown out, and the Pope put in his corner in Vatican City, the nations must act as the moral authority. They have been doing this for about three centuries now.

Mentioning the Church’s authority leads to an automatic response. Like a trained bear that can dance, the hearer waltzes off stage on cue. Or, more likely today than ever, this “tamed” bear attacks and mauls the trainer.

What’s most interesting today is that in our rejection of authority, so few today are called to the priesthood, but nearly everyone is called to the pontificate. Worth noting here is that “pontiff” means bridge-builder. But with a billion mini-popes in the world, we end up having a lot of bridges to nowhere, because all of the bridges lead directly back to the self.

This isn’t just an issue among Protestants or agnostics, it’s rampant within the Catholic Church, too. So many people don’t know what the teaching of the Church is that you can hear the echoes of ancient errors every day, even among bishops. Imagine: a bishop that doesn’t understand errors that have existed for thousands of years. You don’t have to imagine it. This is happening all over Europe and the United States. This is the equivalent of an NFL coach not knowing what is a “first down,” or what a “nickel defense” is used for. Could you imagine a coach who worked for thirty years to reach the top, and then have it be revealed that he thought the game was soccer? No. This seems almost impossible, unless somehow you have cronyism or ideology (or both) interfering with the proper promotion of educated and competent bishops.

And this of course is exactly what we have. The creep of heresy gets in like a tic. It’s like Soviet Science or modern American sociology, where ideology has replaced the goal of seeking the Truth, the highest Truth. And it replays over and over in history. It’s Plato versus the Sophists. It’s Athanasius versus Arius. It’s Augustine versus Pelagius. It’s Marx versus Pope Leo XIII. Heresy is ideology that bleeds into faith and skews the right understanding of God, the Trinity, Jesus, the Sacraments, and the whole Church. And it always starts with the rejection of God, in some form, and the elevation of what a person wants. “Blessed are the heretics,” said Stanley Hauerwas. What he meant by this was that without those pushing errors, we wouldn’t see the Truth so clearly. So luckily we have Marcion and Pelagius and Nestorius to illustrate the errors. Their ideas act like bugs on a windshield, where you don’t need to stop until it gets really bad, and then you must pull over at the nearest service station and squeegee like a maniac with elbow grease to get the encrusted scum off. Sin works this way; sin is not a big deal, until it is. Until your sin is going to cause a major accident and maybe even kill you, you don’t take action to fix the disorder.

When you hear a bishop defending an old heresy, often with new words, that was called a heresy long ago, it leads to confusion for the team. Trust in leadership is undermined, especially when the waterboy understands the game better than the coach. You cannot have the offensive coordinator telling the running backs they must run backward from now on. If that ever happened in the NFL, a firing would surely occur. Yet we are not seeing the firings despite wild errors in “coaching” from those in charge in the Church. This is likely because the Church moves slowly, which is good, since they operate like the Ents in Lord of the Rings. Anything worth saying is worth taking a long time to say it. This is one of the great features of the Church so that they don’t jump to conclusions.

There is something called “The Peter Principle,” which has nothing to do with St. Peter or the Church, but simply states that people will be promoted in their career to one level higher than they should be, right to the point where they are incompetent. This doesn’t apply to all bishops, obviously, just a few, but whenever you hear a high-ranking person espouse an idea that was jettisoned as an error many centuries ago, you have to scratch your head and wonder how or why God is working through this.

But rest assured that God is doing just that. Errors about Christianity are ever-present in both the culture and the Church, and I suspect this has been the case since Peter finished his first speech on Pentecost, as surely strange interpretations began immediately. There are many bishops sticking to doctrine and the Truth, with Bishop Barron doing a beautiful job of articulating the faith, following in a long line of great articulators, like Saints Cyril, Maximus, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Damascene, Newman, Sheen, and many, many others.

Teaching Wednesday night religion class recently, a kid raised his hand and told me, “My dad says that Jesus is the good God, and the God of the Old Testament was the one that would squash you.”

“Kid,” I said, “Your dad is a heretic.”

Just kidding. I didn’t say that.

“Kid,” I said, “Have you ever heard of Marcion?”

Just kidding. I didn’t say that either.

How many adults today have heard of Marcion? Who has ever heard of Marcion, or Menander, or the Cathars? Few today have heard of these old names except for geeky Catholics who know about the ecumenical councils where the early Church had to settle these disputes. These old heresies argued for exactly what this kid’s dad was teaching. This idea springs up repeatedly, and if we haven’t heard of Marcion, we’ve certainly heard of Nazi Germany, which was rife with Marcionism as an offshoot of its hatred and ethnic cleansing of the Jews. (Tip: Marcionism always goes hand in hand with anti-Old Testament thinking and makes a beeline toward anti-Jewish thoughts and behavior.) Any time that Catholicism lacks respect for the Jews, it is in error, and this is why the document known as Nostra Aetate was sorely needed, as a reminder that the Church “recalls that the Apostles, the Church's main-stay and pillars, as well as most of the early disciples who proclaimed Christ's Gospel to the world, sprang from the Jewish people.” I also must add here, that if Jesus is God, and you believe that as I do, then he inspired the entire Old Testament, including the parts that are confusing, and Jesus was a devout Jew, as were Mary and Joseph. So for any Catholic to misunderstand the intensely deep meaning of the Jewish roots of Christianity is to be like the sower’s seed on the rocky path. If Jesus is God, and if Scripture is inspired by God, and all of the prophecies of the Messiah were foretold by God, and the story of the chosen people is God winning back the world, then throwing out the Old Testament seems a bad idea.

The kid’s father who taught Marcionism was doing the same thing that a writer like Dan Brown does in his novels (as wildly inaccurate in history and logic as they are). He finds an old heresy and dusts it off as something fresh and new. Then it’s presented as a fact, as a new “orthodoxy” and then believers have to spend lots of time re-arguing what has already been argued and ruled upon. But this is one of the strengths of the Church, actually, in that it has a structure that can do this. We can all see the Protestants lack this authority to rule, which leads to heresy proliferating like a cytokine storm. Truly, if there is one weakness in the Eastern Orthodox churches, it’s that they cannot resolve disputes like the Catholic Church can, because the Bishop of Rome can speak from the Chair of Peter, as Christ gave Peter the keys, which is to say, the authority.

What’s old is new, but none of the heresies are actually new. You can go read St. Irenaeus who wrote Against Heresies in the second century, and most heresies today were already in play. Over time, new errors have come about, and over the centuries others have written books to define these errors, and why they are errors, like St. Alphonsus Liguori with the History of Heresies. There are many. St. Hippolytus of Rome. Denzinger. Belloc. Fortunately, we don’t have to go read all of these, we can just read the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It’s the Reader’s Digest condensed version of about a million pages and scrolls from Adam to Pope Francis.

There’s a reason these ideas come back to life, and it’s because we default toward doubt, not faith. And faith is a gift. With the eyes of faith, the heresies are clear, as the scales fall away from our vision once we see Christ for who he really is, and that is God. Once you can see Jesus and hear the word of God, then it’s clear why none of the heresies work in practice. This is why they don’t stick. They come and go like an Old Navy shirt - sure, it feels good for a bit, but you can tell how cheap it is, and you’ll throw it out after a few years.

The heresies sound good when you first discover them. They seem to make sense. This is why it took me a while to figure out that everything that Dan Brown writes is actually a spoof comedy, not a drama. Because his send-ups of heresy as truth and adventures in bad history lessons made me re-arrange my video shelf so that The Da Vinci Code sits right next to Dumb and Dumber. When I need a light-hearted night to let loose, I can choose either movie.

The reason heresy is declared and marked as incorrect is not about power and control. It’s about what heresies do, and what they don’t do. It’s about how they misunderstand Jesus and salvation history. It’s about a false way to know God. The reason heresies are declared is simple: they do not work. They do not work logically or spiritually. They do not work in the mind, in the soul, or in the body.

This is the thing I’ve been saying in this entire series in talking about sales and practical application. There are many shiny things that seem real, but like advertising for bad products, those things wind up being a mirage in the desert. What works is not just that which sells. Consumers and voters may select bad choices. Mistakes play out over time, long after the sale was made. What becomes heresy is not based on popular opinion, but based on what happens when an error is chosen. There is perhaps nothing more vindicating in the Church’s slowness than in its rejection of birth control and abortion, as both of these “cure-all” remedies of the techno-utopian evangelists have blown up spectacularly. What was supposed to solve divorce, unhappiness, and family issues has exploded in divorce, unhappiness, and family issues.

What works is that which lasts and endures through the ages. What works isn’t always what seems easy, but what works satisfies the intellect, the will, the body, and the soul. Virtue works. Chastity works. Humility works. Faith works. Hooking up with random sex partners and pretending it doesn’t matter? That doesn’t work. Shouting your abortion? That doesn’t work. Believe in yourself instead of something higher? That doesn’t work. Perception is reality? That doesn’t work. All of these ideas run into the rock of life, the true test, where bad ideas run aground.

But we forget this every generation, and we re-learn it in every generation. We forget the Truth because we want to be new and clever, but the bad ideas are always old and warmed-up leftovers. This is why someone like Jean-Paul Sartre can be celebrated for a hundred years for saying, “God is dead,” when he’s just saying the same thing every middle-schooler has said since the beginning of time. But when you do so with a Ph.D. it seems to have weight, despite the long-winded argument being the result of never growing past high school rebellion. What happens then is that everyone else also stuck in that ninth-grade rejection of authority, claps their hands and says, “Brilliant!” because it satisfies their egos and excuses their sin.

This is why the same heresies pop up and die over and over again because heresies are exactly like dandelions. Orthodoxy, however, is like a redwood tree. Hardwoods grow slowly, apparently weak as saplings, while the wild and fast-growing grasses spring up quickly. But what is apparently hale and hearty in spring dies in the autumn. The hardwoods always win in the end, because they are built to last through the seasons of life, and that includes the winter of suffering.

To go back to the sports metaphor, Catholicism is a fourth-quarter faith. It’s not for the first drive down the field, or for the halftime show. It’s built for the last drive that wins the game. It’s for the long haul, made to last, not for showing off and fading away.

So, to bring this back to heresy and Marcion: you have to read about Marcion to understand why his idea of “the Old Testament God is not the same as the New Testament” is an error all by itself, and a very dangerous one at that because it twists scripture into a wildly different shape. In the early church, Tertullian and others took up the battle and won the argument, closing the door on Marcionism forever as an error in what the Church founded by Jesus believes. And it’s not a “because I said so” argument and defense, it is well-reasoned and logical, and worth exploring. Many of the “Jesus as the dude” arguments are a form of Marcionism, just as much as anti-Semitism has a taproot in Marcionism. But if I don’t stop here, this post will turn into a lengthy discussion on this particular heresy, so let’s move forward. More to come in part 2. Perhaps a whole series on heresies is needed, but that may require a more focused mind than my own, like those who have already written books on it.

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