Heresy

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Contents 1 Etymology 2 Religious heresy 2.1 Christianity 2.2 Orthodox Judaism 2.3 Heresy in Islam 3 Contemporary heresy 4 Selected quotations 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

Heresy is a controversial or novel change to a system of beliefs, especially a religion, that conflicts with established dogma.^[1] It is distinct from apostasy, which is the formal denunciation of one's religion, principles or cause,^[2] and blasphemy, which is irreverence toward religion.^[3] The founder or leader of a heretical movement is called a heresiarch, while individuals who espouse heresy are known as heretics. Heresiology is the study of heresy.

[edit] Etymology

The word "heresy" comes from the Greek hairetikos "able to choose" (haireisthai "to choose"). The term heresy is often perceived as a value judgment and the expression of a view from within an established belief system.

According to Merriam-Webster: from Late Latin haeresis, from Late Greek hairesis, from Greek, "action of taking, choice, sect", from hairein "to take".

[edit] Religious heresy

[edit] Christianity

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The use of the word "heresy" in the context of Christianity was given wide currency by Irenaeus in his tract Contra Haereses (Against Heresies) to describe and discredit his opponents in the early Christian Church. He described his own position as orthodox (from ortho- "straight" + doxa "belief") and his position eventually evolved into the position of the early Christian Church.^{[citation needed]}

Heretics usually do not perceive their own beliefs as heretical. For instance, the Catholic Church holds Protestantism as espousing numerous heresies, while some Protestants considered Catholicism the "Great Apostasy". For a heresy to exist there must be an authoritative system of dogma designated as orthodox, such as those proposed by Catholicism.

The first known usage of the term in a civil legal context was in 380 AD by the "Edict of Thessalonica" of Theodosius I. Prior to the issuance of this edict, the Church had no state-sponsored support for any particular legal mechanism to counter what it perceived as 'heresy'. By this edict, in some senses, the State's authority in the Catholic Church's matters became somewhat overlapping. One of the outcomes of this blurring of Church and State was a sharing of State powers of legal enforcement between Church and State authorities. At its most extreme reach, this new secular reinforcement of the Church's authority gave Church leaders the power to, in effect, pronounce the death sentence upon those whom the Church considered heretical.

Within 5 years of the official 'criminalisation' of heresy by the emperor, the first Christian heretic to be prosecuted, Priscillian was executed in 385 by Roman officials. For some years after the reformation, Protestant churches were also known to execute those whom they considered as heretics, including Catholics, and later, in North America, the Salem witch trials. The last known heretic executed by sentence of the Catholic Church was Cayetano Ripoll in 1826. The number of people executed as heretics under the authority of the various 'church authorities' is not known, however it most certainly numbers into the several thousands.

Perhaps due to the many modern negative connotations associated the term 'heretic', such as the Spanish inquisition, the term is used less often today. There are however, some notable exceptions: see for example Rudolf Bultmann and the "character" of debates over ordination of women and gay priests. The subject of Christian heresy opens up broader questions as to who has a monopoly on spiritual truth, as explored by Jorge Luis Borges in the short story "The Theologians" within the compilation Labyrinths.^[4]

[edit] Orthodox Judaism

Orthodox Judaism considers views on the part of Jews which depart from the traditional Jewish principles of faith to be heretical. In addition, the more right-wing groups within Orthodox Judaism hold that all Jews who reject the simple meaning of Maimonides's 13 principles of Jewish faith are heretics.^[5] As such, most of Orthodox Judaism considers Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism to be heretical movements, and regards most of Conservative Judaism as heretical. The liberal wing of Modern Orthodoxy is more tolerant of Conservative Judaism, particularly its right wing, as there is some theological and practical overlap between these groups.

[edit] Heresy in Islam

Many in the two main bodies of Islam—Sunnis and the Shi'as—have regarded the other as heretical. Groups like the Ismailis, the Hurufiya, the Alawis, the Bektashi and even the Sufis have also been regarded as heretical by some^[who?]. Although Sufism is often accepted as valid by Shi'a and many Sunnis, the relatively recent movement of Wahhabism view it as heretical.

[edit] Contemporary heresy

Today, heresy can be without a religious context as the holding of ideas that are in fundamental disagreement with the status quo in any practice and branch of knowledge. Religion is not a necessary component of the term's definition. The revisionist paleontologist Robert T. Bakker, who published his findings as The Dinosaur Heresies, jokingly treated the mainstream view of dinosaurs as dogma.

The term heresy is also used as an ideological pigeonhole for contemporary writers because by definition heresy depends on contrasts with an established orthodoxy. For example, the tongue-in-cheek contemporary usage of heresy, such as to categorize a "Wall Street heresy" a "Democratic heresy" or a "Republican heresy", are metaphors which invariably retain a subtext that links orthodoxies in geology or biology or any other field to religion. These expanded metaphoric senses allude to both the difference between the person's views and the mainstream, and the boldness of such a person in propounding these views.

Variance from orthodox Marxism-Leninism is described as "right" or "left deviationism." The Church of Scientology uses the term "squirreling" to refer to unauthorized alterations of its teachings or methods.

[edit] Selected quotations

• James G. March on the relation between madness, heresy, and genius: "... we sometimes find that such heresies have been the foundation for bold and necessary change, but heresy is usually just new ideas that are foolish or dangerous and appropriately rejected or ignored. So while it may be true that great geniuses are usually heretics, heretics are rarely great geniuses."^[6]

• Isaac Asimov distinguished between two types of scientific heretic: "Endoheretics are appropriately credentialed scientists. If the person is outside the scientific community or at least outside of his specialty, he is an exoheretic. If a person is an endoheretic, he will be considered as eccentric and incompetent, whereas if the person is an exoheretic, he will be regarded as a crackpot, charlatan, or fraud."

[edit] See also

• Apostasy
• Binitarianism
• Cherem, a related concept in Judaism
• Christian anarchism
• Christian theological controversy
• Eclecticism
• Heresy in the 20th century
• Heterodoxy
• History of Christianity
• Infallibility of the Church
• Inquisition
• List of people burned as heretics
• Orthodoxy
• Sabbath Breaking
• Schism
• Status quo

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Look up heresy in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Some quotes and information in this article came from the Catholic Encyclopedia.
• De Fide, a non-profit association which uses Canon Law to defend the Faith and Church from Heresy, through lawsuits in Ecclesiastical Court.
• (French) Cathars of the middle age, Philosophy and History.
• What Is Heresy? by Wilbert R. Gawrisch (Lutheran)