My Favorite Heretics

At first glance it might seem a strange topic for a Sunday sermon: My Favorite Heretics. But in truth, we who bear the proud title of Unitarian Universalists are eminently qualified to address the subject of heresy. A perusal of our history, after all, shows that we Unitarian Universalists bear the unique distinction of being one of the few groups who were actually persecuted and burned at the stake by both Catholics and Protestants during the Reformation.

Indeed, the very title, “Unitarian” was first applied to us by the Trinitarian majority in Sixteenth Century Europe as an identification of our original heresy in questioning the Trinity of God. In time, the term Unitarian came to be synonymous with the word “heretic” and indeed covered a wide range of heretical offenses, whether or not related to the dogma of the Trinity.

The word “Universalist” referred to the heresy of believing in Universal Salvation, that is, the notion that Christ died to save all people, not just an elect few. So untrustworthy were the Universalists seen to be, that in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for more than sixty years Universalists were not allowed to serve jury duty. The reasoning was that anyone who did not believe in eternal damnation could not be trusted to mete out proper punishment to offenders of the civil order either.

So we Unitarian Universalists know from our institutional history what it means to be labeled and libeled as heretics. And we say with some pride that in over 400 years as an organized religious movement, that there has never been a heresy trial in any Unitarian or Universalist church. No one has ever been expelled or driven out or shunned from a Unitarian Universalist church for exercising the freedom of thought and the freedom of individual belief that we hold as everyone’s God-given right.

Perhaps this is the reason the Unitarian Universalist church has sometimes been called “a haven for heretics.” This is meant to be a slur upon our tradition; we claim it as a salute to free thought and the open-minded pursuit of truth that has ever been the hallmark of our religious community.

Exactly when my personal interest in heretics began, I’m not certain. I suspect it began with an incident when I was a student in a Jesuit college when someone in my theology class called me a heretic. I was, as the courtroom lawyers like to say, shocked and appalled.

We had been arguing some fine point of Catholic theology at the time, and I was certain that I stood on firm doctrinal ground, but when that word was flung at me – HERETIC! – I was stunned, amused, and highly insulted all at the same time. Somehow the word doesn’t seem to fit in the twentieth century. Does anyone actually think in such archaic terms anymore, I wondered.

Visions of Joan of Arc tied to the stake, of Inquisitional judges in Spanish dungeons, of accusatorial fingers pointing at the witches of Salem, all danced before my eyes. HERETIC! I had never thought of myself in such grandiose terms.

The incident started me thinking: just what is a heretic, and what is so dangerous about heretics? Who are these marginal and eccentric types who have been labeled heretics down through the centuries? I thought it might be interesting to learn about some of the great heretics of history and take a look at exactly what these dangerous people said and did that earned them such nefarious reputations. After all, if I was going to be called a heretic, I wanted to know just what kind of company I would be keeping.

Actually, heresy is a much overlooked and much maligned topic in theological studies. While serious students of theology spend a fair amount of time learning how to defend the faith against the most common kinds of heretical attack, it is usually taken for granted that heresy is always a bad thing, something negative, something to be avoided at all cost as being an offense against God.

But as Peter Berger, the pre-eminent sociologist of religion, points out in his book The Heretical Imperative, the etymology of the word “heresy” is sharply illuminating. The word “heresy” comes from the Greek verb “hairein” which means “to choose.” Berger points out that a “hairesis” originally meant, quite simply, “the taking of a choice.” Thus, those truly deserving of the title heretic are those who have insisted on their human right to choose those beliefs upon which their lives would be ordered.

So why all the historical and hysterical hullabaloo and persecutions for heresies? The early church leaders, of course, were correct in identifying these heretics, these “choosers” as potentially subversive to Christianity. For if Christianity is the Divine Revelation of God’s Truth on earth, mere human beings have no choice but to prostrate themselves before the authority of the church and its revealed Word in the Bible. To insist on the human right of choice, as Descartes argued in behalf of Free Will, is to question the authority of Divine Revelation itself, the very premise of Christian religion. And so began, as early as the Council of Nicaea in the 4th Century, the time-honored practice of expelling and then persecuting heretics as the enemies of faith and underminers of Christian society. Choosers are always dangerous to the established order.

In the interests, therefore, of revisionist theology, and in keeping with the highest traditions of the scholarly ministry of Unitarian Universalism, I have recently invented a brand new branch of theological studies. I call this science, “Heresiology,” that is, the study of heresy from the viewpoint of the heretic. Now, please bear in mind that this is still a fledgling science, still largely theoretical and speculative, but I am pleased to present you this morning with the opening lecture notes of Heresiology 101. I trust you all have your pencils and notebooks ready.

The best and most interesting part of Heresiology is the cast of characters. The list of people branded as heretics down through history includes, after all, some of the great choosers and shakers of our world, not to mention some of the most colorful characters ever to grace the gallows. They include people whose intellect and writings and personal courage in promoting radical ideas have reshaped the course of West Civilization itself, and who in the process have made it possible for minor heretics such as we to enjoy the fruits of religious and intellectual freedom.

As I describe some of the categories of heretical though and nominate my own list of heretical champions, you will no doubt form your own list of favorite heretics.

The first principle of Heresiology to keep in mind is that, for the heretic, timing is everything. An idea which merited only a mild social rebuke in the first century might be punishable by execution in the sixteenth century. For example, take the dogma of the Trinity. Origen, a second century bishop, wrote that the notion of the Trinity was a mistaken interpretation of the New Testament. When Augustine argued him down at the Council of Nicaea, Origen was declared a heretic, but his actual punishment amounted to little more than a slandered reputation. Some fourteen hundred years later in Calvin’s Geneva, a Spanish physician and part-time theologian named Miguel Servetus paid the ultimate penalty of being burned at the stake for publishing a book in agreement with Origen. The book was called, “De Erroribus Trinitatis” (“On the Errors of the Trinity”) and all known copies of the book were thrown into the fire with Servetus. He was the first and most famous Unitarian martyr.

Or take the more famous example of Galileo, whose teaching of the correct order of the solar system affirmed the Copernican Theory and directly challenged the Biblical account that places the Earth at the center of the universe and has the Sun physically traveling East to West each day. Galileo was first censured by the Catholic authorities in Rome in 1613, again in 1622, and finally, after he was persistent enough to publish a book on the subject, Galileo was formally Condemned by a court of the Inquisition in 1632. When faced with the threat of Inquisitional exile and imprisonment, poor Galileo exercised the better part of valor and desisted in his heretical teaching, even though he knew time would bear out the accuracy of his theory. Galileo’s health broke the year following the trial, and he died five years later.

Two centuries later, however, Charles Darwin, coming forth with yet another theory challenging Biblical cosmology, could stick to his scientific guns through considerable controversy, at least without fear of becoming another burnt offering in the cause of free thought.

Which leads us to the second principle of Heresiology, (I hope you’re taking notes) heresy is by definition a threat to standing authority. Those who assume that heresy applies only to the field of pure theology are woefully misled. In fact, my study of Heresiology has turned up at least four general categories by which true heretics may be classified.

There is, first, the Pure Theological Heretic. This category includes all those people who wrestled and wrangled over purely dogmatic questions, like how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and what kind of dance would they do. Arius and Origen and Servetus are prime examples of Pure Theological Heretics. Luther and Calvin are heretics of this category in the eyes of the Catholic Church. (In the eyes of Protestants, of course, they are not heretics at all, but rather Founding Fathers of Great Christian Traditions. So heresy, too, is in the eye of the beholder.) Later on, of course, Luther and Calvin started burning a fair number of heretics who disagreed with them.

Philosophical Heretics comprise a second category. These heretics are traditionally the most intellectual and abstract and clever. They are the mental athletes of heresy. Prime examples include characters like Voltaire and Descartes and Spinoza and Neitzche. Their approach is coldly logical and devastatingly efficient. These thinkers simply refuse to allow the first premises of theology. Philosophical heretics are also the rarest – most of them seem to have been born between 1600 and 1900. Bertrand Russell was probably the last of the breed. The trouble with philosophical heretics is that usually they can be understood only by other philosophers.

The third category of heretic, and I suspect, the favorite category among UU’s, is the Scientific Heretic. These include the sub-category of the Discoverers, like Galileo, and the Theoreticians, like Darwin. Scientists work under the disturbing tendency to believe that the world is actually interested in facts and figures, and so, sincere scientific heretics always seem surprised when their great breakthroughs have been seen as threatening to the social order. They sometimes forget that all of science was once seen as heretical for this reason. Galileo’s solar system, Darwin’s Theory of Evolution, Freud’s theory of personality were all as threatening in their day as genetic research and manipulation is in our own time. Indeed, Science has probably given us more heretics than any other human endeavor.

The last category of heretic is the Social Heretic. This is at once the largest and most potent type of heretic. Social heresy is capable of producing mass movements. The Mennonites and the Amish groups and the Shakers, with their intentional retreat from secular society, belong in this category even more than in the theological category. So do the Quakers, who had the temerity to propose that Christianity and militarism are always incompatible in principle.

Margaret Sanger was a Social Heretic of the first rank when she championed the Planned Parenthood movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony and the long line of proponents of the Women’s Movement worldwide are certainly Social Heretics challenging the standing order of patriarchy. The Latin American Christian proponents of Liberation Theology are likewise Social Heretics, as were Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Berrigan brothers and Benjamin Spock and Joan Baez during the heyday of social heresies in this country in the 1960’s and 70’s. We cheered them or booed them to the extent that they challenged or threatened our social orthodoxy and security.

One person’s heretic is another person’s hero, and this is perhaps the most important lesson to be gleaned from Heresiology. For the prophet and the iconoclast bear this in common: they disturb our inertia. They give voice to our doubts. They refuse to revere our intellectual comfort and our moral complacency.

The plight of the heretic today is what it has ever been. Amid the ashes of history’s heretics you will find scattered the relics and bones of some of humankind’s greatest saints and prophets. There amid the banned books and forbidden writings you will discover some of humanity’s noblest thoughts, most creative ideas, most poetic preaching. There among the banished, the outcast, the shunned, and the condemned – you will find shadows of heroes and footprints of giants. Galileo and King, Bonhoeffer and Sanger, Stanton and Berrigan, Gandhi and Socrates and Jesus of Nazareth – all of them at one time or another jailed by civil authorities for their heresies challenging the standing theological, philosophical, scientific, or social paradigms of their day, some of them actually put to death for their beliefs. Heretics all.

The fact of the matter is that the history of human advancement has been written in no small degree by a relative handful of rebels, men and women who at crucial points in history have been seized by a particular and personal vision of truth, and who then had the tenacity and courage to insist on their human right to choose.

Most of us, thank goodness, will never be called upon to perform great acts of courage or witness in the name of truth as we know it. The great majority of us hold our heretical impulses in less dramatic style; most of us take our place in the great supporting cast of history. But we should never forget that what freedoms we have – to think and believe and worship as we would – are freedoms hard won for us.

I close with these words from a poem by a Unitarian colleague, the Rev. Carl Nelson, from his book Eternity Can Wait (Rib Mountain Publications, Wausau, Wisconsin, 1987):

There are many well-paved roads in life -

smooth and easily traveled -

and multitudes may throng upon them.

Yet for every road we walk upon,

Some seeming fool

has struggled though a wilderness…

And freedom,

the woof of my society,

was woven by heretics

and bought with the blood of rebels.

I am thankful for the fools

who left the helping push of multitudes

and struggled on a solitary way.

I am thankful for the heretics

who have suffered censure, rebuke, and slander

to find their own paths,

and to light their own lights.

But for these fools,

I would still be but a brute,

dimly conscious in the dark of primeval forests.