I’m planning a sermon series on heresy. I was inspired by the Haurewas edited book Heresies and How to Avoid Them. The Hendrickson site has a free chapter download on Arianism & Intro to book along with TOC. In that book (which I’m yet to receive from The Book Depository) the following are tackled:

What don’t Christians believe?
Is Jesus really divine?
Is Jesus really human?
Can God suffer?
Can people be saved by their own efforts?

Adoptionism–did Jesus become the Son of God at his baptism?
Docetism–was Jesus really human or did he just appear to be so?
Nestorianism–was Christ one Person or a hybrid with a divine dimension and a human dimension?
Arianism–was Christ divine and eternal or was there a time when he did not exist?
Marcionism–is the God of the New Testament the same as the God of the Old?
Theopaschitism–is it possible for God to suffer in His divine nature?
Destroying the Trinity–does God have a simple or a complex nature?
Pelagianism–can people save themselves by their own efforts?
`The Free Spirit’–are there two kinds of Church membership, one for the elite and one for the rest?
Donatism–do Christian ministers need to be faultless for their ministrations to be effective?

Help me! What heresy would you pick? (No defamation or nastiness please)

I’m after 4 or 5 heresies – what they are? who taught/teaches them? why they are attractive? why they are wrong? what is the truth? what modern guise do they come in?

It is too easy to be naiive about heresy – imagine it could never here and think it is only of arcane interest to theological interest. Most heresy seems to spring out of a desire to simplify something the bible holds in tension – asserting one truth against another.

Conor (who has just had a son – congratulations Conor & Sarah!) wants to do Pelagius – the 5th Century British theologian who denied original sin – “sin really isn’t as serious as that dour Augustine teaches, just pull up your bootstraps and be good”

G.K. Chesteron reminds us here why heresy matters:

It is foolish, generally speaking, for a philosopher to set fire to another philosopher in Smithfield Market because they do not agree in their theory of the universe.  That was done very frequently in the last decadence of the Middle Ages, and it failed altogether in its object.  But there is one thing that is infinitely more absurd and unpractical than burning a man for his philosophy. This is the habit of saying that his philosophy does not matter, and this is done universally in the twentieth century, in the decadence of the great revolutionary period… We will have no generalizations.  Mr. Bernard Shaw has put the view in a perfect epigram:  “The golden rule is that there is no golden rule.” We are more and more to discuss details in art,politics, literature. A man’s opinion on tramcars matters; his opinion on Botticelli matters; his opinion on all things does not matter.  He may turn over and explore a million objects, but he must not find that strange object, the universe; for if he does he will have a religion, and be lost. Everything matters–except everything.