Heresy According to the New Testament
Authors - Whenever we tell people how the
New Testament authors understood the term
“heresy,” they are shocked.
First, heresy wasn't the equivalent of false
doctrine. Heresy was a specific practice, and a
fleshly one at that.

According to Paul of Tarsus, to be a heretic
meant that you formed a schism within a local
body of believers. Thus, what qualified someone
to be considered a heretic wasn't what they
believed, but how they acted with their beliefs.
If a person divided a genuine church, they were
guilty of heresy. Consequently, a person could
be a heretic with the truth!

Thus a heretic is a
person who causes divisions, dissensions, or
factions.
If you think that dividing an authentic church
isn't serious, think again. In 1 Corinthians 1:13a,
Paul used the image of slicing Jesus Christ into
pieces to depict how serious it is to divide an
authentic church.

In Titus 3:10, Paul says to "warn a divisive
person once, and then warn them a second
time. After that, have nothing to do with them."
Paul uses the word hairetikos in this passage
and it means “a heretic.” But it doesn’t refer to
a person who holds wrong beliefs. According to
BDAG (Bauer and Dank’s Greek-English
Lexicon), it “pertains to [one] causing divisions,
factious, division-making, a division-maker.”
As we should expect, modern versions of the
Bible translate it as, “anyone who causes
divisions” (NRSV), “divisive man” (NKJV),
“divisive person” (NIV), “factious man” (ASV;
“NASB), “person who stirs up division” (ESV),
“someone who causes arguments” (NCV), and
“troublemakers” (CEV).
Not surprisingly, Paul lists hairesis (heresies or
factions) as one of the works of the
“flesh” (Galatians 5:20). A person who walks in
the Spirit will always seek to build unity in the
church. But a person who causes division walks
in the flesh. Note that it's not the person’s
belief that is a "work of the flesh." It’s their
divisiveness.

As Ben Witherington notes in his social-
rhetorical commentary on Galatians, hairesis
(heresies) and dichostasiai (dissensions) in
Galatians 5:20 both have in view those who
“sever the body of Christ” and “use differences
as an excuse to create factions.”
So, in the New Testament sense of the word,
“heresy” was the creation of a division, a sect, a
faction, or a party. For this reason, the author
of Acts uses the word to describe the different
sects within Judaism (Acts 5:17; 15:5; 24:5; 14;
26:5; 28:22).

"Heresy” involved the dividing of a local
assembly, not the rightness or wrongness of
what the dividing party believed.
It’s true, of course, that a heresy could be
created by someone pushing a false teaching on
a local assembly, causing it to divide. Peter
alludes to this when he warns that false teachers
will secretly come into the church and introduce
damnable hairesis (2 Peter 2:1).

To understand this verse, it’s important to
remember our earlier point that hairesis refers
not to the rightness or wrongness of a belief,
but to a choice that leads to a division or the
formation of a sect.

This is what false teachers are going to
introduce into the body of Christ, according to
Peter, and they will divide the body. This is why
he says they are “damnable.” Again, division is a
very serious thing to God.

In fact, this meaning is confirmed in the very
next verse when Peter warns that "[m]any will
follow their depraved conduct and will bring the
way of truth into disrepute."
If these false teachers had not introduced a
choice into these congregations that led to
divisions, they would still be false teachers, but
they would not be heretics, according to the
New Testament definition of the term.
In this light, we may say that a person who
embraces a doctrine that we believe is false is
misinformed (at best) or deceived (at worst).
We may even consider them to be a potential
heretic. But unless they use their belief to
divide a body of believers by causing others to
follow them and their false doctrine, they do
not fit the biblical definition of a heretic.
So, if we wish to be biblical in our use of the
word “heresy” or “heretical,” we should not
refer to them as “heretics.”

On the other hand, it’s evident from the biblical
understanding of “heresy” that a person could
be a heretic who wasn’t espousing a doctrine of
any sort. Anyone who divides an authentic
church for any reason would qualify as a
“heretic,” according to the New Testament.

www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Christianity/Articles/Read-This-Before-You-Drop-the-H-Bomb-Heretic-on-a-Fellow-Christian.aspx?p=1

Peddling a Truth Heretically - As we
mentioned earlier, a heretic could even be
someone who espouses something good, but
who does so in a divisive way.* For example,
suppose that a new church is planted. There is
unity among the members. Their single focus is
Jesus Christ. They are busy pursuing, knowing,
loving, and serving Him together.

One day, Bob -- a member of the church --
announces, "I just discovered something I had
never seen before. God's really loves the poor.
And He wants us to help the poor more than we
already are." Serving the poor was one of the
ways this congregation served their community,
but Bob, with his new found passion, wanted
the church to be about little else.

Now, there's obviously nothing wrong with
what Bob has said. And if Bob had submitted his
insight to the community for prayerful
discernment and given people time to grow into
it, it might be that God could have used him to
help this new congregation assign a higher
priority to this ministry.
Unfortunately, this is not what Bob does. He
grows frustrated that the community as a whole
isn’t catching his passion quick enough, so he
begins to frequently invite to dinner the dozen
or so in the church who seem more “on board”
with his passion.
Caught in a snare of self-righteousness, he
begins to use these times to sow seeds of
judgment among his guests toward those in the
congregation who “don’t get it.”
Before long, Bob announces that he and his
recruits are leaving the church to start a new
one that will reflect God’s heart for the poor,
according to Bob’s standards. And he
encourages others to join them.
Bob has just created a church split. He thus
qualifies as a “heretic” in the New Testament
sense of the word. Yet he is a heretic with the
truth. Bob used a biblical truth in a fleshly way.
He wielded it to create division among God's
people.**
Heresy Later in Church History - Later in
church history, most of the heretics -- those who
were dividing God's people -- were peddling a
false teaching. And so the word "heretic" came
to be associated with false doctrine, very often
doctrines that distorted the person of Jesus
Christ.
But even in such cases, the label of “heresy” was
only applied to people who not only denied the
foundational doctrines of orthodoxy, but who
actively worked against them.
Traditionally, the Ecumenical Creeds (Nicene,
Apostles, Chalcedon) defined the parameters of
orthodoxy, and therefore, they defined the
parameters of heresy.
In this light, we submit that the word “heretic”
should be applied only to people who work
against the historic orthodox church as
expressed by these creeds. Interestingly enough,
however, these creeds say nothing about the
many topics over which Christians today
liberally drop the H-bomb on their fellow
sisters and brothers in Christ.

The Key Take Away - So what's our point?
Very simply, the way that countless Christians
pull the lever of the H-bomb (heresy) on their
fellow brethren today violates both the way the
first-century Christians understood heresy as
well as the later usage of the term in church
history.

As we noted earlier, instead of reserving the
word “heresy” for those who activity work
against the church, and instead of accepting the
Ecumenical creeds as the ultimate criteria of
orthodoxy, many today set up their own
particular belief systems as the standard of
“orthodoxy” and then drop the H-bomb on any
who merely believe differently.

Sadly, most of those who are wrongly called
"heretics" by some fellow Christians today are
people who are completely orthodox according
to the historic Christian creeds and they are not
dividing local assemblies. But some people have
called them “heretics” simply because they hold
to a particular view of Christ's coming, of
ecclesiology, or of the gifts of the Spirit.
Others have been labeled “heretics” because
they hold to a certain interpretation of Genesis
1, or to a particular understanding of God’s
sovereignty, or of election, free will, or the
nature of the future.

So our argument really boils down to this:
If a person holds to beliefs that are in line with
the historical Christian creeds (Nicene, Apostles,
Chalcedon) and they are not dividing a local
assembly of believers, then to call them a
heretic is a gross and perverted use of the
term. And this kind of dubious branding grieves
the Holy Spirit.
Our call, then, is for sisters and brothers in the
body of Christ to align their use of the word
“heretic” to the definitions of the New
Testament and the early church. In so doing, we
will see a whole lot less H-bomb dropping, and a
whole lot less bloodletting in the body of Christ.
And that would give joy to the Holy Spirit!


Notes
*For example, those who were creating division
in the church in Corinth over their favorite
apostle in 1 Corinthians 1 ("I'm of Peter," "I'm of
Apollos," "I'm of Paul," etc.) were acting
heretically with something that was good and
approved by God (viz. apostles). While Paul
doesn't use the word "heresy" or "heretical" to
describe these specific divisions, he does use the
term schismata in 1 Corinthians 1:10, which
carries the same essential meaning.
**Keep in mind that we aren't saying that
simply leaving a church (especially if it's truly a
sect or is teaching false doctrine) isn't acting
divisely. Nor is it divisive for a church to
excommunicate someone based on unrepentant
continued sin after many attempts have been
made to urge them to repent (see Matt. 18). We
aren't speaking about such situations.