Bad ideas are like the many-headed hydra. When one head is cut off, two more spring up. Just when Arianism is getting cured, Nestorianism boils over, and when that pimple is taken care of, Monophysitism appears on the body of Christ, and when the ointment for that is applied, a side effect called Monothelitism develops. And even after resolving these things, they come back, but at least the Church has a cure on the shelf for each of these conditions. They come back in odd and interesting ways, and some heresies like Arianism or sola scriptura take many centuries to fade out. Sorry, did I say fade out? They never fully disappear. Arianism was addressed in 325 at the Council of Nicaea, and a modern version of it is visible in humanism. Sola scriptura was addressed in the Council of Trent in the 1500s, yet the circular logic of that idea keeps every dog chasing its tail.

Today, a person could spend every waking minute refuting heresies because it’s all over in the language of believers and non-believers. Arguing over these errors make little impact, since those who openly reject official Church teaching have adopted their own authority, either in scriptural interpretations, or in their own mind. The old errors are so commonly held and pronounced, that I can’t listen to modern music for an hour without recognizing at least one heresy. I think Luke Bryan is the Pelagius of Country Music, but he is just one of many. A good series would be doing a close-reading of errors in Luke Bryan’s greatest hits, because you can find so many heresies passed off as wisdom or truth in his lyrics. It’s not just him, so I don’t mean to single him out. But we live in an age of various common errors, most commonly, Protestantism, Gnosticism and Pelagianism, which are big words, but with basic problems when we examine them as practiced in the real world.

This is why the word “Christian” is so smashed up, misused, and abused that it now looks like the car in Planes, Trains, and Automobiles at the end of the movie. If you think this is false, check out /r/Christianity on reddit.com. It is chaos. That subreddit should be changed to /r/tohu-wa-bohu, which is the Hebrew word for chaos before God created order in the universe.

Pope Pius X famously called modernism “the synthesis of all heresies,” and the Protestants posting on social media does us the favor of proving it beyond the shadow of a doubt. You could play Heresy Bingo and have a winner before finishing the first post’s comment section. Reddit’s generic /r/Christianity feed is like a slop bucket. It’s remarkable to read comments there from self-professed Christians, because few seem aware of the first fifteen centuries after Christ’s death, and it’s not clear they realize that there was a Church operating before the year 2020.

So there are many bizarre versions of Christianity floating around, and I used to think that nothing could outdo the “snakes and orgies” crowd that 60 Minutes did a show on many years ago, but I’ve been proved wrong repeatedly in recent years, as the heresies have erupted in denominations that once seemed to have a reasonable grip on doctrine. But churches like the ELCA and Methodists and even the “cool” Catholic churches have been caught up in the spirit of the times, and thus they will die like dandelions when the autumn of this culture comes, which is always sooner than we think. You cannot get to liturgies featuring drag queens or celebrating the worst sin of Pride without first abandoning Christ and the faith of the apostles. However, the long labor of creating and carrying the church through the gauntlet of time has happened, and for the Church that sticks to those teachings, it will outlast this current chaotic summer, and in the autumn and into winter, the redwood will outlast them all once again and arrive in spring stronger still.

So while this makes a lot of people feel worried and lost, or scared that the Catholic Church will fall into error, it should actually give much hope. Because the only Church that will last is the one which remains in full orthodoxy with Sacred Tradition and Sacred Scripture. The only Church that is interesting or compelling is the one that keeps the Deposit of Faith and rejects all doctrinal errors from 33 A.D. until today, because it is the only Church led by the Holy Spirit.

When the breathless apostles first came to Jesus and reported error being used in Jesus’ name, he said, “It’s ok.” Well, he actually said:

John said to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” But Jesus said, “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us. For truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose the reward. (Mark 9:38-41)

To break that down a bit, Jesus was telling the apostles that the others may cast out demons in Jesus’ name. That’s wonderful. He didn’t say, “Go out and club them until they stop.” The Church has occasionally errored in that. But Jesus also didn’t say, “Terrific, bring in these outsiders as the new teachers.” They did not become apostles. Jesus didn’t adapt his teaching to the outsiders. The thing about Jesus is that you don’t get to tell him what to do (unless you are Mary), you come to him on his terms and surrender to him. Pride need not apply. Jesus didn’t declare one of these other healers to be “the rock” on which he founded his church. He didn’t make these others the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. He allowed other interpretations, but he didn’t say they were correct. All directions and corrections are provided to the apostles, which is why they were the chosen ones and the leaders.

Even when I was fallen away and considered myself atheist, I knew that if I ever returned it would only be to the Catholic Church (with Greek Orthodoxy as a dark horse in that race), because the only Church that made sense historically, logically, physically, or spiritually was the one that Jesus founded on the rock of Peter, because it was the only one that had fought and outlasted the intellectual, physical, and spiritual march of empires and ideas, and it was clearly different from all other Johnny-come-lately denominations. The non-Catholic denominations may heal people and cast out demons, and that is truly wonderful, but they are wildly prone to poor theology, teaching, and lack the all-important taproot of Tradition to the person of Jesus himself.

The original, the real deal, actually still exists if you look for it. I was quite surprised to find holy people still striving for holiness. It may have been the biggest shock of my life when I returned. The first time I saw a grown man kneel for communion and receive it like his life depended on it, I knew I’d been missing the point. When I started meeting with people that studied and strived for holiness, I realized that the lukewarm representations that I had held as standard was a very low standard indeed.

Like General Motors, modern Christianity built a lot of models that didn’t last. We had spinoffs of spinoffs so that most of those claiming the label “Christian” today would confuse the heck out of Peter, Paul and the apostles. Dostoyevsky famously wrote in the Grand Inquisitor that if Jesus came back to life, the Catholic Church would kill him again to retain its power. But as the Church lacks the power today that Dostoyevsky imagined, the story has not aged well, despite being a terrific read. It’s more likely that if Jesus returned as Dostoyevsky imagined (which didn’t match anything that Jesus actually said), Jesus would see that most of Christianity outside of the Catholic Church has turned into Imagination Land from Disney’s movie Inside Out, starring Bing Bong, the pink elephant, as the high priest.

Fortunately, the original model is still in storage and is ready to roll. It has some dents in it, for sure, but it runs fine and those scratches can be repaired. The apostolic Church, the body of Christ, that has had plenty of fallen leaders and brokenness over the years, but the heart is alive. The deposit of faith remains, and as long as the head is Christ, it cannot bless sin, because he did not bless sin. He said to “Go and sin no more.” The faithful cannot elevate the self or feelings in replacement of God. The denial of sin is a no-go in the driver’s manual on how to go to heaven.

Embracing orthodox belief is how we answer the question, “What is truth?” It is also how communities and individuals get restored to health. From the Body of Christ, life springs forth, age after age.

We will not find salvation in heresy any more than we will in our youth sports teams or in a Tinder tryst or in an online mob or in our endless entertainment options. Restoration and the path to salvation will come back from where it began, through the Real Presence in the Eucharist, in gatherings of prayer, in speakers witnessing their conversion stories, in Bible studies, in adoration chapels, in Mass, in retreats, in recovery meetings, and anything that forges community away from the false gods propped up by modernism.

To be awakened, we need a massive Ezra moment of deprogramming and teaching, where someone breaks open the scrolls to remind the lost people of a past they know nothing about. In Nehemiah, the people hear the word and understand, and know their sins, and know how they fell into the state of sin, little by little, by departing from orthodoxy.

Ezra opened the scroll so that all the people might see it, for he was standing higher than any of the people. When he opened it, all the people stood. Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God, and all the people, their hands raised high, answered, “Amen, amen!” Then they knelt down and bowed before the LORD, their faces to the ground. (Neh 8:5-6)

When the people bow their faces to the ground, they have surrendered. But we have not done so yet. We are still in full competition, both with one another, and even more so with God. And this is what every heresy in history does: it competes with God. Most heresies, from Simon Magus to Nestorius to Henry VIII, had a person with a large ego, often a king, who wanted to hammer the Church into his image and likeness, instead of making the Body of Christ in the image and likeness of God.

How are we going to solve this competition problem? How can a culture built on competition, capitalism, winning, and getting whatever we want possibly break that addiction? How can we possibly turn away from serving our desires?

That’s the easy part.

You win that game by not playing. You win in the same way Jesus won it the first time. You win by living in the culture while still being set apart from it. You win by being “called out” of the culture. You go to the desert. You pray, fast, and help the poor, like Jesus. You leave the place of idolatry, like Abraham. You exit the corruption, like St. Anthony to the desert. Like St. Benedict, you reset, apart from the world in the wilderness. Like St. Cyprian, like St. Augustine, like St. Ignatius, like St. Francis, like St. Theresa Benedicta of the Cross - you swim against the current, because the current is taking you the wrong way. You reset and then re-enter the fray, washed anew in the blood of Christ.

You win by accepting this sinful world as it is, and while still living in that world, but not being a player in its game. You win by entering into the suffering of others, with love, not affirming their sin, but by witnessing another way. Stop honoring and envying what other people hold as worthwhile. Money, houses, luxuries, sex, entertainment, food, alcohol, cars, boats, drugs, vacations. Stop wanting what the world wants. The entire problem is that you want the wrong things, and this is what leads to every error.

How do you step out of this culture? How do you stop wanting garbage in favor of the Bread of Life? We follow the advice of the Truth himself. Jesus said, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off…And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” (Mk 9:42-47)

The good news for us about this brutal metaphor is that we have something we can rid ourselves of without actual amputation.

What causes our sin in most cases today is what sits between our hands and our eyes. The phone. Our culture is the phone, and envy, lust, pride, sloth, greed, and wrath all reach out to your throat through that device. We can cut off the source of at least half of our most common ways of straying with not a single drop of blood spilled. But few of us will choose this, because hugging our sin is the easier path. Narcissus dies by staring into the mirror, forever, in love with himself.

The easier path is always the one that doesn’t pay off with interest. The easy path is that chosen by Lot, it is the path chosen by those Israelites wanting to return to Egypt in the desert, it is the path chosen by Peter when he denies Jesus, the path chosen by Judas in betraying him, it is the path today of affirming sin rather than fighting it. It is the path chosen by Marcion and Arius and Nestorius and Luther and Calvin and Henry VIII and Joel Osteen. The easier path is always the road to ruin. And who wants to be part of a religion that demands nothing of us, that demands too little, when Jesus has given all to his bride, the Church?

We must surrender to win. You certainly do not win by joining the side that appears to winning, or that you think will win, because even if you win, you are still stuck in the game. In fact, if you win, you may be more stuck in the game than before, like how the proverbial quicksand pulls you deeper the more you struggle. How many aspiring employees who climb to Vice President suddenly find that their wealth and prestige now “require” a bigger house and a finer car and better schools for their kids? How many French and Germans and Russians traded in the humble truths of Jesus Christ for the toxic truths of a political party? How many Democrats and Republicans are doing the same in America right now exactly as they were in Dante’s Florence so many centuries ago, or in Rome during the glory days of Caesar, or in the last days when the collapse of the Bronze Age? All of these past peoples have turned to dust, but the living God remains, and the Holy Spirit carried the Church along in this final Messianic Age.

You do not win by surrendering to the bulldozer of earthly power, on either side. You win by surrendering to the power of Jesus. He is the real ruler over all things. Your way of life will need to change. Your life itself may need to be given up in professing the Truth. But the only way to win at this most important thing is to surrender everything. Ego, pride, self-elevation. Let it go. Otherwise, if your game is here on this earth, whatever you win today, you will need to defend tomorrow, and someday in the future after long years of fighting, you will turn around and see that you have been defending a pile of rubble. When you reach that moment, know that the one Truth is waiting for you to turn your face all the way to look at his sacrifice on the Cross.

Rather than dishearten you, this should ignite you. You have been wanting the wrong things. Desires that you had, items that you wanted to own, experiences that you sought to remember - these were the distractions from the real answer to the one test question. How strange I thought it was for Jesus to say, “Rejoice, for the kingdom is among you.” But it is here. It’s here, but it’s the opposite of the competitive nonsense and little trophies we have been seeking all our lives. This is an incredibly exciting time to be alive, because once again, the world has regressed into the same shape as in the first century, when the apostles lit the fuse for the dynamite of the Gospel. The fuse is once again just waiting to be lit with the fire of the Holy Spirit. The kingdom is here among us, and it is the Catholic Church, with all its flaws. The Church: founded on a rock called Peter, the sinner and the saint, the fallen one transformed into a bold healer. The same answer to “Why did Peter sink?” for an individual is the same answer for the Church founded on the rock called Peter: taking the focus off of Christ and the fullness of him is to sink. To look at him constantly in trust is to experience the unending miracle of walking with God. The kingdom is here, the Church - in the world but not of the world - defending the faith from errors until he comes again.

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