Why are arguments about the meaning of texts so common and so intractable? A large part of the reason is the problem of context. Those who may be judged as heretics, which means someone who holds deliberately schismatic views about texts and their meanings, often show the same sort of defective approach to texts whether we are talking about religion, literature, or constitutional texts. Therefore we may deal with all such heretics in the same way by looking at the ways they use (and abuse) texts for evil purposes, even though we must be aware that these heretics can find themselves perverting and corrupting many different types of texts, of varying degrees of seriousness.
One of the main aspects of a heretic is the fact that they have an agenda. Everyone has as perspective on important texts, and there is nothing objectionable about that, so long as we recognize that we will be drawn to some elements of these texts and not others, and that our knowledge will be incomplete because of our inherent bias. To admit one’s bias to one’s self and others, by explaining your background and your perspective, is the sign of an honest seeker of truth. Pretending to be without bias and pretending to understand everything is the surest sign that someone understands next to nothing, except perhaps “one big idea” that supposedly explains everything but in reality corrupts everything in a text to fit misguided and mistaken preconceived notions. A genuine scholar will admit partiality of focus and presentation, while a heretic will pretend that everything can be understood with a few simple rules that solve all problems and difficulties, and which inevitably lead to massive errors.
An error that comes along with the hidden agenda in discussions with heretics is a complete lack of contextual understanding. One of the surest ways to end up as a heretic is to look at a given text from an anachronistic standpoint without any understanding of historical, cultural, or literary context. Examples of this error are legion, such as not understanding the difference between the oral traditions and the written law of God in Paul’s epistles, or recognizing the Christian background of the US Constitution because of its reference to “in the year of our Lord 1787,” referring of course to Jesus Christ, as well as recognizing that 19th century men were far more effusive emotionally with other men due to the cult of Romantic sensibility than men are today as a general rule. Taking statements in a text, be it a Bible passage or a law or a letter, and judging it by today’s debased sensibilities without sensitivity to its place and time and genre is a certain road to heresy and textual corruption.
A special type of contextual error in judging texts is the failure to recognize the role of institutions that nourished and cherished those texts. And this is where the heretic has special trouble. Texts come from the hands of people, and generally not people who work in isolation, but people who have certain ideological, occupational, institutional, or political commitments. The heretic cares little for these commitments, which may be disparaged or used to disparage elements of the text, as the heretic forces the text into his or her own contextual viewpoint, making it say what the text does not. Worse yet, the heretic often cannot recognize that the incompleteness of texts often comes from the fact that the text has certain assumptions built in that may not be shared by all readers, and that have to be recovered if one is to have the same understanding as was originally the case. A genuine student of a text can recover this worldview of the text, and allow the worldview to influence how they see the world, but a heretic is only interested in justifying their own (usually wicked) worldview by violating the text and denying the importance of extra-textual influences in determining the meaning of a given text.
One of the chief ways that a heretic behaves toward text that demonstrates their heretical motives is that they come as a judge of the text rather than a student. A student of a text tries to find out what a given text means and apply it to the circumstances of their time, aware that this requires speaking in different words and ways, and that it involves the necessity of interpretation, an issue that is taken seriously and with considerable sensitivity. A heretic, on the other hand, comes from the point of view as a judge, seeking to use prooftexts to justify or bolster a given position, especially by disregarding other elements of the text that would counteract their own mistaken viewpoint. While a student seeks to find harmony, unity, and coherence within a text, a heretic will seek to deliberately create dissonance through a mistaken view of a given text that then trumps all evidence to the contrary that can be found in the remainder of the text. A student is interested in the totality of the text as providing a frame of meaning, while a heretic is only looking for any piece or scrap of a text that can be made to support a given worldview. To make matters worse, a heretic will often deny that they are interpreting a text at all, and may actually believe that the text says exactly what they think it is, and in fact their interpretive scheme leads often to avoid interpretation, since that would reveal the workings of their corrupt and debased minds, whereas presenting a prooftext without commentary gives the illusion of textual fidelity without the reality.
So, given this, how does one argue with heretics? It is clear that arguments between heretics and genuine students of texts cannot take place merely on the level of the texts themselves. That is because the texts do not mean the same thing to a student of the text who values coherence and harmony and context to the heretic who is merely engaging in pretexts and seeking justification for their heretical viewpoint. Furthermore, a heretic who rejects the institutions and commitments that formed the text has no right at all to use a text, being a mere thief and a liar who has no legitimacy in dealing with a text that is alien and hostile to his or her way of thinking.
Therefore, an argument with a heretic must focus on those areas where the heretic is defective. As these are many, these present many avenues for debate and rebuke. The absence of contextual understanding is generally fruitful, as is the defective prooftexting that the heretic engages in in the absence of a belief in the overall coherence of a text. Therefore arguments with heretics will generally exist in worldview grounds and not on narrow textual grounds, except where the text (especially in a larger context) demonstrates the larger worldview error and contradictions in the mind of the heretic. Often these arguments will not convince or sway the heretic, but they will demonstrate to a fair-minded observer the nature of the errors of the heretic, so that they will avoid listening to the glib and seemingly powerful solutions provided by the heretic to difficulties. As a genuine student of a text can only promise hard work of study and difficult balancing of tensions, one cannot let the promise of an easy answer to such tensions be given by a heretic without a clear demonstration of how those easy solutions are in fact false simplifications. Since the road of a genuine student of any text is difficult, one must show that only the hard work of genuine study with the aim of being shaped by a worthwhile text will earn one genuine knowledge and understanding. And this is a worthy task, should you decide to engage in the battle with heretics.
Edge Induced Cohesion 
Today anyone with an inquiring mind can be viewed as a Gnostic or a heretic, without ever knowing it, and merely by investigating claims of others and institutions, seeking the truth could possibly even get them killed in today’s world the same as in history. Where does the problem lie? It appears as though there are only two types who seem to get pleasure or make a name for themselves and enjoy doing it and they are the fundamentalist theologian and the atheist intellectual. David Hume once said that “Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.” and, “Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.” Is David Hume a fool and are many, most, or all of them whom we esteem as great thinkers mere fools and Gnostic heretics?
Heresy (from Greek αἵρεσις, which originally meant “choice”, also referred to that process whereby a young person would examine various philosophies to determine how to live one’s life).
It can also mean “free to think for ones self” and if done well intentioned, could lead to maturity. However, where there is rigid dogma and persecution and condemnation, the most sensitive are the ones most likely to scatter and find a softer voice. The voice of reason comes to mind whenever I am left alone long enough to calm down and figure things out.
The concern should not be about who is a Gnostic or a heretic but about rigid systems and how they scatter the sensitive, the meek, and the lowly. In today’s world, the meek have a lawful right to say what they think, but still there are many who live in fear and are afraid to express themselves openly. This leads to frustration as you are well aware and frustration leads to destructive thinking leading to destructive behavior.
The word “gospel” is rooted in definition and in meaning as “good news, glad tidings, and good message”. The gospel or good news we hear about the kingdom of God is indeed a good message and to hear it and understand it is certainly glad tidings. Does this make me a Gnostic or a heretic when I hear someone telling me to spread the good news, and I hear them to mean always spread “good news” and bring with you everywhere you go “glad tidings”, and when I can, pass on a “good message”.
Sometimes we forget that all of us humans are “sensitive’, and we don’t realize it when we are scattering the meek and driving them underground or into seclusion to tremble and dread ever speaking their mind. Two things that consistently terrified me when I was a child were school and church. The two types of people that frightened me most were the teacher, and the priest, and, in my personal experience and the experience of many that I am aware of, it was as David Hume said, ““Scholastic learning and polemical divinity retarded the growth of all true knowledge.” By fear, they sunk me deep, and only by the grace and loving kindness of God, and understanding the good news of forgiveness, I am not resentful or begrudging.
Please do not consider this an argument because I agree with you that we need to be armed to protect ourselves from foolish thinking and that we must remind each other that it is never a good thing to quarrel over such matters as faith and doctrine (polemic divinity) or creation or evolution (scholastic learning). When I am truly thirsty I drink pure water, when I see no joy in a man, I buy him a beer. 🙂
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The problem is that Hulme was deeply ignorant in his philosophy, largely on account of his rejection of God. Mind you, those with particularly rigid and oversimplifying systems of thought are heretics too, of a different kind. My use of the term, as is so often the case, is a rather technical one, not to describe whether someone opposes the common status quo, but to decide whether they come to a text seeking wisdom or come seeking support for their own theory, whatever it is.
And it is at times very necessary to quarrel over matters as faith and doctrine (the stakes are immense, whether we are talking about religion or politics in particular), as well as learning. Whether something is true or false is of the highest moment, it is simply that heretics (those with worldview errors) are not generally equipped to view things correctly, and even more to the point, the fight over such matters is not so much for the heretics themselves, but rather for the larger body of people who could be convinced by a heretic because of their own longing for easy answers.
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Do you view me as a gnostic and a heretic?
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I’m not someone who generally views others like that unless they are aggressively hostile toward learning. You don’t strike me as someone who is aggressively hostile to truth, only someone who has an immense curiosity in many areas without necessarily a deep knowledge of them. Since you are not a heretic of that kind, it is a question you must ask yourself: do you seek wisdom or confirmation that you are wise? If the first, you are a student, and may God bless your studies. If you are the second, some humility would be necessary to avoid being a heretic. Let us remember that a heretic is wise in their own eyes, and we are all ignorant in the eyes of God.
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Thank you for that. With David Hume, when I first read that quote it struck a home note with me because it reminded me of my early life where I was really frightened and intimidated by teachers and priests.
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Ministers can be really intimidating, and it’s a subject I have often considered myself. Those people who tend to bully others are often deeply insecure, but because they are trying to project a strength they do not possess, they become overbearing and tyrannical over others, which is especially damaging when we are talking about children (who are easily frightened and terrorized to begin with, generally). I’m not someone who tends to write with very many personal agendas. I take the experiences of my personal life and then make them abstract and intellectual ruminations on larger issues, seeking to draw general truths from particular events.
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It was what they represented in my life (priest and teacher) as authority figures being that I had the impression God was the boss of the priest and he could tell God to send me to hell if I was bad. With every secular adult it seemed telling me I was bad and every preist telling me I was a sinner, I was doomed. I was in awe of the majesty of the church and bedazzled by the mystery of God, but I spent most of my early years terrified by knowing it. Christmas and Easter were a respit and a break from the onslaught. I never got the sense of “love” in my early yerars of hellfire preaching because after the sermon or service, the adults and anyone just older than me would be reminding me of my doom.
The teacher represented the government and everything that I thought I knew about the government was that they were “mafia” and they could kill you too or send you to the childrens aid or reformatory school. Fun?, wow!
I had this put to me early by many if not most of them who were just older than me or an adult. I know now that it was “for my own good”, but there must be another way, and this is why I began to research the human condition. To explain to my own kids why some people could be so cruel and intimidating. This was my agenda, and now it is my one agenda to speak about the physical manifestation of detoxification in reference to hearing “good news”. Everything I discuss I have an agenda to spread this good news to as many people who will lend an ear. If it turns out that this manifestation actually occurs by way of a mere discussion which is gaining an understanding and becoming privy to certain knowledge: What about this making whatever it is a heresy and gnosticism? I don’t understand because from what I hear about gnosticism, I don’t want to be a gnostic and by what I have tripped over somehow can make me out to be one if I speak about it. How can I not speak about something that has shown what this has?
Answer that please and if I am a gnostic should I stop investigating, and if I am a heretic, should I just shut my mouth and sink away?
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I would not not say you are a hardened heretic. As is the case with so many people, you are a wounded soul (something I write about frequently). Sometimes if we are wounded too much by authority we can unwittingly go to the opposite extreme and disparage the proper place of authority and law in general, not out of any sort of heretical desire but out of our own wounds and suffering and disinterest in suffering the same things again.
I therefore have no fire and brimstone for you, only caution. Our goal as beings should be a balanced perspective that allows us to see the need for freedom and order, law and grace, structure and creativity, in the knowledge that one without the other only brings chaos and confusion or sterility and rigidity, neither of which are beneficial. As I see you wrestle with big ideas and their implications, I do not think you are a “heretic” in the sense of someone who is merely trying to convince others of a narrow ideology. I do believe you are passionate about freedom, but my caution to you is the same one I give to myself, and that is not to let one’s love of freedom and one’s deep hatred of tyranny blind one to the need for some order and structure and for the legitimacy of authority with their proper spheres. It is a hard balance to maintain.
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