| Summary: | After tracing the evolution in meaning of the Greek word hairesis from ‘choice’ to ‘false belief’, this entry examines the criteria according to which a belief was judged to be heretical, either by particular controversialists or by bodies which purported to legislate on behalf of the Christian world. It argues that early appeals to scriptural warrant, tradition, and universal consensus were inevitably circular, while the edicts of ecumenical councils in the post-Constantinian era often leave much undetermined. The role of individual theologians in shaping modern notions of orthodoxy and its heretical antitypes is therefore examined, as is the use of legal coercion to solidify ecclesiastical boundaries. Nevertheless, it will be shown that there were numerous questions on which no ecumenical decisions had been reached before the eighth century, when consensus became inconceivable because of the growing estrangement between the Eastern and Western traditions.
To say of professing Christians that they are heretics is not to say merely that they hold erroneous opinions (as a Scotist might say of a Thomist, for example), but to say that their opinions are so inconsistent with the fundamental teachings of the church as to imperil their salvation. It can be argued that no other religion has a concept perfectly corresponding to this, or at least that none has drawn the line between heresy and orthodoxy with such punitive and enduring rigour; certainly the church found no model for this in the cults and philosophies from which it drew its earliest neophytes. Even the Greek term hairesis, as we shall see, is not used of false doctrine either in the classical world or in the New Testament. In modern times, some scholars have leapt to the inference that the first churches were intellectual democracies, in which no teaching, so long as it spoke of Jesus, was deemed more Christian than another; the contrary, and once more familiar, claim that there has always been one recognized church catholic, which has always upheld the same orthodoxy and proscribed the same aberrations, is now more characteristic of popular than academic literature. The present inquiry is offered as a corrective to both positions, which will show on the one hand that even before the noun ‘heresy’ had acquired its modern sense, to hold one doctrine was to denounce another, and on the other hand that there may never have been a time when the clergy, let alone the laity, were of one mind in the identification of heresy, or even of the criteria by which a belief could be found to be inconsistent with membership of the body of Christ.
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