A Sunday Depth Class: The Cruelty of Heresy

Dorothy Sayers once observed that "there was never anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy, nothing so sane and so thrilling."  I would guess, however, that most folks would beg to disagree with Sayers.  Heresy is the thing that's exciting, edgy, interesting, and perilous.  Just the word "orthodoxy," meaning right belief, seems a heavy-handed word that entails dullness, boredom, and exclusion.  Or perhaps all this talk about belief and orthodoxy and heresy just seems antiquated.  Instead we should focus on action and let beliefs be a private matter.  Relativism, that giving up of thinking truth can be found, is certainly en vogue.

Yet if we are to live and proclaim gospel we must know how the god of Jesus differs from the gods that compete for our loyalty and belief.  And if the early church thought that what we believed about Jesus had real consequences of how we follow him then it's worth investigating the issues they deliberated over.  If, in fact, heresy is not just wrong belief but something that harms us when we begin to live it out, it's worth our examination.

That's why, come January, we're going to start a new depth class that will be meeting on Sundays from 11:15-12:15 that looks at how the classic heresies are not just ideas, but ways of living that are always attractive because they appeal to some part of our fallen human nature.  We'll spend time each week examining everything from the Scriptures that influenced a heresy, why it was opposed by the early church, to how it bubbles up today in the songs, movies, and conversations.  If you're interested in attending RSVP by emailing jason@seattlequest.org