Excalibre says re Orthodoxy and heresy: A parable involving pigs : Please do tell, though, exactly what significance things like the monophysite heresy have...is Jesus gonna deny entrance into Heaven if you don't have exactly the right comprehension of how his divinity and humanity interact? i don't mean to be sarcastic, just a bit cheeky - a recent writeup I did entailed learning some about the heresies argued about in the early church, and the things that resulted in schism between Christian groups don't seem to be meaningless issues as much as semantic fighting. and given that we can't (for example) understand the nature of the Trinity perfectly, excommunicating one another over matters like whether the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father or from the Father and the Son is kinda incomprehensible to me.
I have to imagine that - assuming that Christianity is correct, of course, believers would not be shunned for having incorrectly concluded about the nature of the godhead. so this still doesn't really explain to me why such matters were enough to divide the church.
Thanks for the msg, Excalibre! You address a whole slew of issues in those few lines, so I;'m afraid my reply is going to be on the long side. Ironically, much longer than my node.
Yes, the node is inadequate. Truth is, I've come to believe that no node can fully address or explain any but the simplest of issues; and this is a very complex issue. It's flawed, and no amount of tinkering on my part is going to fix it. Plus I've given up tinkering with my old nodes.
It's not intended as a comprehensive look at the issue of orthodoxy and heresy, and certainly not an explanation of why individual heresies are grounds for excommunication or schism. The first task rightly belongs to the heresy node, and the second belongs to the nodes for individual heresies. I'm just trying to give the whole situation a different perspective for someone who can't understand why orthodoxy can be so important to the Church. (I say "can be" because my own denomination increasingly seems to not care.) It's not meant to wrap it all up, but maybe add to someone's understanding in a small way.
I honestly don't know if Jesus will deny someone entrance into Heaven for incorrect belief about the nature of the Godhead. I am convinced that Jesus will lead those who follow Him to God. But following Him at the very least requires us to believe that there's a reason for doing so, that He can and will save us. If you don't agree with me, we don't have to set each other on fire; but if we tried to work and worship together in a church, we'd soon find our beliefs incompatible.
Quick example: A few years ago, a priest at my then-church organized a meeting for anyone interested in teaching Sunday school. It ended in confusion and irritation because the priest insisted that we not teach the church's children and teens Christian doctrine. He didn't want to be "dogmatic", he explained. We were under the impression that one of the essential jobs Christians have is telling people about the Gospel; and while none of us were door-knocking evangelists, we felt that Sunday school was pretty obviously the one place where it was not only appropriate but required.
Orthodoxy and heresy, right there. (Though which is which is the question, eh?) You can see the conflict between definitions of who we are, who Jesus is, how Scripture is to be read, and how we are to respond. We could co-exist, sure, but we couldn't create a Sunday school program. Just in that one aspect, the church was crippled.
Bear in mind that excommunication doesn't ban someone from Heaven. It means the excommunicated person can't receive Communion from the Church. This is a big deal if you're a Christian, but it doesn't mean damnation. It means that certain key beliefs of ours are so different, and have become such an issue in our spiritual lives together, and you and I are no longer in communion with one another. We aren't eating at the same table anymore.
The significane of each heresy is particular to each. Some of them are pretty obvious, while others are extremely obscure. There are a lot of heresies I didn't understand at first, but eventually came to see how they would disrupt the life of the Church if they were accepted. I suspect that a lot of others that baffle me would become clear if, like the people who typically debate such things, I spend years poring over them using manuscripts written in Latin, Greek, and Aramaic, and Coptic. I also suspect that some of them are just semantics. But then again, sometimes a lot depends on how you word things.
Monophysitism, though - that's easy. In its strict form it claims that Christ was not human, but completely divine. Either He was divine-only from the beginning, and His humanity was an illusion, or His human nature was obliterated later in life. If true, it means that Jesus was not one of us. He wasn't tempted as we're tempted, He didn't laugh or grieve or become irritable the way we do, He didn't suffer and die as we do. When He rose again in the flesh, it wasn't the first instance of something that'll happen to all of us, but something unique to Him. When He ascended into Heaven to sit at the Father's right hand, He didn't take human nature with Him. It was a return of the divine to the divine.
All of the things I mentioned are teachings of orthodox Christianity. As a Christian, I follow Christ as God, but also as a brother human being. I look for His presence in other human beings, something that seems strange if He never truly shared our nature. Orthodoxy proclaims firmly that in Christ, God and Man are no longer strangers, with God "up there" and unapproachable. Something has genuinely changed about the way we're related. Monophysitism undoes this. It says that God did something, maybe something great; but whatever it was, it didn't bridge that gap.
A single church that proclaimed both doctrines simply would not work. The foundations of our beliefs would always be at issue.
Thanks again for writing me. I don't normally engage in interweb religious discussion anymore (it eats up an incredible amount of time if you let it), but I thought this was a really good question. And this is a subject I find really fascinating.