Tyler Johnson, MDiv
Tyler is a pastor, a teacher, and a former NASA engineer. He loves to explore truth through God’s word and God’s works. He lives in Kansas with his wife and four children and spends what little free-time he has pondering the mysteries of light.
Back in the day, while I was in seminary, one of my professors was talking about early Christianity and the heresies that arose in those early centuries. And he had an interesting definition of heresy. He didn’t describe heresy as a lie, or as a false idea. He said that heresy is what happens when you elevate one truth above another. And certainly in the early church this is true.
One heresy said that Jesus Christ was fully God and that he only appeared to be human. Another said that Christ was fully human and only claimed to be divine. Both of these positions were deemed wrong. One heresy claimed that you could fully earn your salvation on your own. Another claimed that God’s grace was such that everyone would be saved. Again, both of these positions were deemed wrong.
The tricky thing is that none of these positions are inherently false. Jesus is fully God. It’s just that he is also fully human. Likewise, what we do matters. Our actions are connected to our salvation in some way. The New Testament is clear about that. But no salvation is possible without God’s grace.
There is an old saying in my tradition that says, “Truth is found in the tension.” The truest thing we can say about Jesus is that he is both fully God and fully human. The truest thing we can say about salvation is that it is up to us and it is up to God. Move to either extreme and you are approaching a heresy. The greatest truth is always found in the tension between two truths.
When you really dig down into the Christian faith, you find that at the absolute center of Christianity is a series of mysteries, or paradoxes: Jesus Christ who is fully God and fully man; Jesus who was with God in the beginning, who created the universe, who maintains the universe in existence, and who also became a creature within that universe; Jesus who died and yet now lives; a single God who exists in three persons. These doctrines are at the center of Christianity. They are our best articulations of mysteries beyond our comprehension. They are sufficient, but incomplete. If we were enveloped in the full presence of God all our best theology would seem as nonsense. But just because we can’t say everything about God, doesn’t mean that we can’t say anything. The core beliefs of Christianity, the fundamental mysteries took centuries to develop. Every alternative was explored. Every extreme was considered. And the Church Fathers found that the best articulation of Christianity was in the tension of a series of paradoxes. This is what orthodoxy is.
In our polarized society I can’t help but think that there is great wisdom to be found in trying to find the truth in the tension. I simply can’t believe that the liberal theologians have it all right, or that the conservative theologians do. More importantly as Christians, whose faith is rooted in a paradox, shouldn’t we have a theological allergy to extremes? Shouldn’t we always be looking for the more faithful position in the tension between the extremes around us? Sadly this is not true and far too many Christians and churches seem to make it their goal to rest in one extreme or another, but considering the nature of our faith shouldn’t we see this as a form of heresy?
It would seem to me that a faithful position in these polarized times would be one that sought the truth in the tension. What if we learned from the early church and rejected such terms as Liberal and Conservative as heresy in the same way that they rejected Marcionism or Pelagianism? The issues may look a bit different today but it seems to me that whenever we identify ourselves with one extreme over the other we are misrepresenting the mystery of our faith, Jesus Christ. Isn’t this heresy?