Your email address will not be published. How should we make the case for Christianity? Is one approach better than another? What is the strength of the cumulative case approach? But are there real, practical advantages to being a Warner often gets asked for advice on how to start making the case for Jesus or the truth of the Christian worldview.
In the nearly years since the death of Christ several religious ideas have emerged about Jesus. Many religious movements include competing beliefs about Home About J. Connect with us. Hi, what are you looking for? Written By J. Warner Wallace. Spencer Morrison February 5, at am. I think most people think of heresy as : a Damnable Error. Leave a Reply. Trending Latest. Christianity Should Christians Judge Others? Heresy by its nature will tend to either subtract or delete from the core doctrines and take doctrines of less importance and make them central teachings.
In Heresy, the qualities of a teacher will take the place of the Bible in defining the experiences of future followers. Orthodoxy is accountable to history; Heresy thrives on only being "new" Though biblical doctrine uses the Bible as its standard and source, it is essential to know whether or not a teaching or doctrine has been consistently held by Bible believing Christians down through the ages.
The list of "core doctrines" listed above have been held by every major branch of Christianity in every age, and have been articulated and defended by godly, reliable Christian teachers and preachers appealing to scripture alone.
Though Church History is not equal to the Bible, yet it helps those of us who preach or teach to check our "orthodoxy".
Heresy on the other hand will typically disregard the testimony of Christians through the ages. If its "new" or "has never been taught" in the history of the church, it is a good chance that one is dealing with heresy. It is true that the Spirit of God will shed clarifying light to sharpen understanding on already well established doctrines.
However to propose an idea that has not been considered by any Christian in the 2, years of church history is quite another matter.
Furthermore, today's heresy's are often yesterday's heresy's repeating themselves. Just as an example, Jehovah's Witnesses deny the deity of Jesus Christ and claimed He is an exalted creature with some aspects of divinity. A fourth century heretic by the name of Arius taught similar error, denying the Bible's clear identity of Jesus Christ as fully God as well as being fully man. The Fruit of Orthodoxy will be different from that of Heresy Jesus said in Matthew that in effect, good trees bear good fruit and bad trees bear bad fruit.
Orthodoxy should and will yield right practice and right attitudes. We should expect to see humility, thus the reason for historical accountability. We should also see concern for the truth above popularity and care for the eternal welfare of people over against self promotion.
When faced with persecution, orthodoxy produces a greater, more robust faith. Writing to his helper Timothy, he said that those writings, coupled with faith in Jesus Christ, were the means by which people could have salvation 2 Timothy — In other words, the letter is in harmony with the rest of the New Testament in highlighting the dependence of the early followers of Jesus on those Scriptures.
According to the conclusion of scholars, we have a scenario of a Pauline community at the end of the first century still using the Hebrew Scriptures as the basis of their teaching, belief and action. The world uses the terms Christian and Christianity with little thought to origins. Where did the terms come from, and what did they mean?
The church was defined by its behavior, and its behavior demonstrated its underlying beliefs—all of which were firmly established in the Old Testament. Yet as we read the writers and apologists throughout church history, we find increasing reinterpretation and, as a result, a decreasing reliance on the Old Testament.
The Hebrew Scriptures were rerendered to present the progressively more gentile church as the Israel of God. This is known as Replacement Theology or Supersessionism: promoting the gentile church and leaving the descendants of Jacob, or Israel, out of the picture.
That the Scriptures Old and New Testaments relate to both Israelites and gentiles—a feature of Hebraic thinking—was beyond the understanding of Hellenistic society, which tended to see the world in terms of either-or. Because they saw much of the Old Testament as relating to the history of the Israelite and Jewish peoples, it held little interest for them. Certainly the parts that spoke about the coming Messiah could be used as proof texts, but otherwise there was little reason to use the Hebrew Scriptures.
Thus orthodoxy came to be defined in terms of the New Testament. Paradoxically, though perhaps predictably, even the Jewish context of those who wrote its books was ignored. If the concept of orthodoxy was foreign to the writers of the New Testament, then what about heresy? The Jews themselves defined their various sects as heresies Greek hairesis. In the first century, this was not a negative term.
Thus, in the first century, the term heresy defined the teaching of a particular school. The word had been used this way in the Greek-speaking world since the time of Plato. In the New Testament, the followers of Christ clearly fit within the Jewish milieu of the first century.
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