20.

 Why are heresies considered dangerous?

            The doctrinal teaching of Christ's Church was composed and ratified by the Seven Ecumenical Councils. These Councils, representing the voice of the whole Church, represent the voice of Truth, for the Church is “the pillar and ground of the Truth” (1 Tim 3:15), and the Church as a whole cannot err. If the whole Church were to fall into error, it would mean that the gates of hell had prevailed against it, something Christ promised could not happen (Mt 16:18).

            In order to enter into communion with God and be saved (and the goal of our life is the attainment of eternal blessedness), we must come to know God in some measure. “This is life eternal, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, Whom Thou hast sent” (Jn 17:3). God is Truth (Jn 14:6), and one must worship Him “in spirit and in truth” (Jn 4:23-24). Every falsehood is contrary to truth, and a person who has a wrong understanding about God does not know Him. The acceptance of a false teaching about God also deprives people of oneness of mind with other Christians and causes a spiritual separation from them. Obedience to the Church requires that we hold the true dogmas, like other Christians. If a person is disobedient by holding false beliefs, he is separated from the Church and from Christ Himself, Who is its Head. As Christ said, “If a man neglect to hear the Church, let him be unto thee as a heathen and a publican” (Mt 18:17). Moreover, with the acceptance of falsehood, a person is unnoticeably led into subjection by the devil, who is falsehood and the father of lies (Jn 8:44). A stubborn persistence in falsehood ultimately makes people its slave, and if they remain stubborn and unrepentant, they are deprived of eternal salvation. Therefore, in questions of doctrine, the importance of holding the Church's correct teachings, and the danger of accepting the false teachings of heretics, were so great that there are countless examples of true Christians who preferred exile, cruel torture and death, rather than renouncing the Church's Truth through the acceptance of some kind of false teaching.

            The word heresy comes from the Greek hairoumai, to choose. A heretic is one who chooses his own beliefs over the Church's divinely revealed Truth. Heresies are dangerous and require condemnation because they deny God's revelation, and through the use of philosophy and conjecture, they use the words of the Holy Spirit against the Holy Spirit.

            This human reason misled by the devil is deadly. As Fr. Kyril Zaits explains in this connection, the primordial enemy, the devil, does not lead people astray by presenting them with grossly blatant falsehoods or with an initial rejection of Christianity. Instead, he begins with a shred of truth, labels it “Christian,” and then, attracting their attention, presents them with just enough truth to entice them to follow him. Afterwards, by ever graduating degrees, the devil introduces open falsehoods while nurturing the pride which leads deceived people to create their own false teaching. As Fr. Paul Volmensky goes on to add, if right belief saves a man, then disbelief is the lethal weapon of the devil. He spreads his deadly poison through heresies and moral depravity, fabricating lies with utter cunning, almost indomitable, psychology. The devil has continuously waged war against Christ's Church through this means, through heresies. He especially used them, though, after he was unable to defeat Christianity from without, from persecution on the part of the pagan Roman authorities.

            All heresies twist the truth of the revelation of the Church and impair the teaching of the New Testament, and all of them distort ecclesiology. Since the Church is the Body of Christ (Eph. 1:22-23), every alteration in the teaching about Christ, about the Holy Spirit, about the way of man's salvation, also has ecclesiastical consequences. The blasphemous wisdom of heresies causes great damage for the Christian world because falling into heresy separates people from God, it severs them from the Holy Church, and it has been the reason for spiritual and moral falls. Moreover, as Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos explains, heresies reverse the way of man's cure for reaching deification, and they setup a barrier between man and God, leaving people permanently without a cure, without hope of cure or salvation. And ultimately, heresies cause the eternal death of the souls of those who follow heretics.

            In his book The River of Fire, Dr. Alexander Kalomiros poses the questions, What was the instrument of the devil's slandering God? What means did the devil use in order to convince humanity, in order to pervert human thought? The author answers:

[The devil] used theology. He first introduced a slight alteration in theology which, once it was accepted, he managed to increase more and more to the degree that [Western] Christianity became completely unrecognizable. This is what we call Western theology [Emphasis added].

Dr. Kalomiros correctly discerns that Western theology's “principal characteristic is that it considers God as the real cause of evil.”

            He notes that “Catholics and most Protestants consider death as a punishment from God.” He goes on to state that:

Some Protestants consider death not as punishment but as something natural. But is not God the Creator of all natural things? So in both cases, God — for them — is the real cause of death.

            /.../ The “God” of the West is an offended and angry God, full of wrath for the disobedience of men, Who desires in His destructive passion to torment all humanity into eternity for their sins, unless He received an infinite satisfaction for His offended pride.

            What is the Western dogma of salvation? Did not God kill God in order to satisfy His pride, which the Westerners euphemistically call justice? [Emphasis added].

Western theology concludes that “salvation... is to be saved from the hands of God!” Dr. Kalomiros writes.

            Fr. George Macris explains that in Orthodox theology, the Cross was not a necessity imposed upon God, nor was the blood of the Only-Begotten Son a source of satisfaction to God the Father, as the Latin scholastics teach. The matter of “satisfying the justice of God” is a phrase nowhere to be found in Scriptures nor in the writings of the Holy Fathers; instead, it was a fabrication of Anselm of Canterbury (c. 1100) that appeared after the Latin Church severed itself from Christ's Church in 1054. This false doctrine was later developed by Thomas Aquinas to become the official soteriological doctrine of the Latin West.

            Explaining how most Westerners anthropomorphize God, or project sinful qualities in fallen men onto God, Dr. Kalomiros adds:

This juridical conception of God, this completely distorted interpretation of God's justice, was nothing else than the projection of human passions on theology. It was a return to the pagan process of humanizing God and deifying man. Men are vexed and angered when not taken seriously and consider it a humiliation which only vengeance can remove, whether it is by crime or by duel. This was the worldly, passionate conception of justice....

Western Christians thought about God's justice in the same way also; God, the infinite Being, was infinitely insulted by Adam's disobedience. He decided that the guilt of Adam's disobedience descended equally to all His children, and that all were to be sentenced to death for Adam's sin, which they did not commit. God's justice for Westerners operated like a vendetta. Not only the man who insulted you, but also all his family, must die. And what was tragic for men, to the point of helplessness, was that no man, not even all humanity, could appease God's insulted dignity, even if all men in history were to be sacrificed. God's dignity could be saved only if He could punish someone of the same dignity as He. So in order to save both God's dignity and mankind, there was no other solution than the incarnation of His Son, so that a man of Godly dignity could be sacrificed to save God's honor [Emphasis added].

            The Western theological concept of God's justice is not Christian; rather it is a pagan concept that makes God the source of all our misfortunes. Such a justice is not justice at all, for it punishes people who are completely innocent of the sin of their forefathers. Dr. Kalomiros therefore concludes:

What Westerners call justice ought rather to be called resentment and vengeance of the worst kind. Even Christ's love and sacrifice lose their significance and logic in this schizoid notion of a God Who kills God in order to satisfy the so-called justice of God [Emphasis added].

In his book The Mind of the Orthodox Church, Metropolitan Hierotheos of Nafpaktos likewise gives a careful and elaborate explanation of the Western concept of God. He writes that:

It is sinful to ascribe to God the characteristic features of fallen man, such as that God is angry and vengeful and therefore He must be propitiated and appeased. Such an attitude wants to make it appear that it is God Who needs curing and not man. But this is sacrilegious. The sinful man who is characterized by egoism and arrogance is offended. St. John Chrysostom says characteristically: “It is not He Who is at enmity, but we; for God is never at enmity.” We cannot say that God is man's enemy, but that man, by the sin which he has committed, has become an enemy of God. Consequently, sin is not an offense to God, Who must be cured, but our own illness, and therefore we have need of a cure [p. 170; emphasis added].

The metropolitan continues:

By His sacrifice on the Cross, Christ did not propitiate the Father, but He cured the ailing nature of man. And this is said not solely about the sacrifice on the Cross, but about the whole work of the divine economia.... It is blasphemous for us to maintain that God the Father would be pleased to have the blood of His Only-Begotten Son. What is unthinkable even on the human level is much more unthinkable for God.... St. Gregory [the Theologian] says that the Father neither asked nor needed the blood of His Only-Begotten Son. But Christ offered it in order to cure man and to sanctify him [pp. 171-72; emphasis added].

The metropolitan sums up his explanation with the notion that:

The [Latin] teaching... about the propitiation of divine justice has direct consequences in the spiritual life, because the whole ascetic effort is to cure God and not man, to satisfy God's justice.... The Latins' whole effort is towards justifying themselves, appeasing God, and not toward their own cure [pp. 172-73]. /.../ The legalistic view is alien to the Orthodox mind. When we think that God has been offended by the sin which we commit and that we must therefore do everything to appease Him, when our relationship with God is put on a business basis, then we are living in the legalistic spirit [p. 175; emphasis added].

The Western tendency to ascribe fallen, sinful qualities to God is anthropomorphic. It is a human projection, a human invention. In no way is such a “God” the God of revelation, the God Who revealed Himself to the prophets, Apostles and Fathers. (Thus, many in the West have not actually thrown God out of their lives, for they have never known Him. Instead, they have discarded only the Western “God,” a non-existent “God.”)

            Given the utterly disastrous falsehood that Satan engendered in the Latino-Protestant world through heresies, the danger of false teachings is all the more obvious.