False teaching and how to fight it


When you tell other people that God is saying something he is not, your degree of culpability depends on how much you really knew. The worst level of the transgression is intentionally false teaching: Someone out of false motives gives God's authority to words not from God. That must stand as a worse thing than garbling God's actual message with suppositions that are yours not his. Of a still lower order of blameworthiness, because it is not clear just where the blame lies, is to uphold a received doctrine that is off the mark. Perhaps you received, in good faith, an error from someone who should have known better, and you repeated it thinking it the real deal.

Christians who misstate things are, I think, far more often mistaken than wicked. You do, though, have a responsibility toward the truth when it becomes plain to you that a mistake is being made.

A frequent cause of conflict in the church, and the source of many a schism, and a source also of strength and needed reform, is to discover that a particular idea is wrong, or to discover that you think it is, and try to set it right. (Almost) everyone thinks Athanasius was a hero when he did that, but only Lutherans are sure Luther was.

A difference that stands out is that Athanasius concentrated on just one question of doctrine--a central one to be sure--and doing so gave him the advantage of making his enemies bunch up, like forcing an opposing army to advance through a narrow pass. He kept the battle focused on a single point, like the Spartans at the Battle of Thermopylae. Those opposing Athanasius did so because they did not support (or did not understand) the idea that God is trinity in unity, but there were all sorts of reasons to oppose Luther. In contrast to Athanasius, Luther's many and far-reaching reformist impulses formed too ambitious a program because each point raised someone or other's objections.

It is interesting to speculate. If Luther had restricted his focus to opposing his era's prevailing theology of works, saints' merits and indulgences, and if he had really won his point there, it might well have led everyone, by the implications, even the bishops at Trent, to reexamine how we are justified.

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