Subtle Modern Heresies
by Caleb Knox, Juicy Ecumenism:
We no longer battle explicit Gnostics. Gone are the Arians. Manicheism, Donatism, and Marcionism have passed. Each of these were heresies of a fanatical age, when men sought, in 20th Century author Whittaker Chambers’ words, something to live for and something to die for. Each of these doctrines was wrong, but they were genuine attempts to find and understand God. In combat against these falsehoods, the energetic wisdom of the church met men of equal conviction. The heretics they faced were horribly wrong, and they were terribly brilliant. Their creeds were codified, and their conclusions were definite. They were learned. Their doctrines were perverse but clear, wrong but articulate. They were wolves and fierce as such. They had conviction—true conviction. The Church was writing against fanatics, but these fanatics were not simplistic. Their spirituality pointed to darkness, against the Church’s light.
A different spirit characterizes our age. Both virtue and doctrine seem less important. We are slow to think of ourselves as primarily moral beings. The explosion of commerce in the last three centuries (for which we ought to be grateful) has trained us to think that humans can, in fact, live on bread alone. We see homo economicus not homo religiosus. And when occasional pings of conscience do arrive, therapy is the remedy, where guilt is explained without sin, and peace is sought without repentance. We no longer think on a moral landscape, and great character becomes more difficult to develop.
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