Heresy in Christianity
Orthodoxy has been in the process of self-definition for centuries, defining itself in terms of its faith by clarifying beliefs in opposition to people or doctrines that are perceived as incorrect.
[13] According to H. E. W. Turner, responding to Bauer's thesis in 1954, "what became official orthodoxy was taught early on by the majority of church teachers, albeit not in fully developed form.
"[14] According to Darrell Bock, a Christian apologist,[15] Bauer's theory does not show an equality between the established church and outsiders including Simon Magus.
The earliest controversies in Late Antiquity were generally Christological in nature, concerning the interpretation of Jesus' (eternal) divinity and humanity.
In the 4th century, Arius and Arianism held that Jesus, while not merely mortal, was not eternally divine and was, therefore, of lesser status than God the Father.
Arianism was condemned at the Council of Nicea (325), but nevertheless dominated most of the church for the greater part of the 4th century, often with the aid of Roman emperors who favoured them.
The Euchites, a 4th-century antinomian sect from Macedonia held that the Threefold God transformed himself into a single hypostasis in order to unite with the souls of the perfect.
[18] Many groups held dualistic beliefs, maintaining that reality was composed into two radically opposing parts: matter, usually seen as evil, and spirit, seen as good.
Others held that both the material and spiritual worlds were created by God and were therefore both good, and that this was represented in the unified divine and human natures of Christ.
The question of how heresy should be suppressed was not resolved, and there was initially substantial clerical resistance to the use of physical force by secular authorities to correct spiritual deviance.
The last person to be burned alive at the stake on orders from Rome was Giordano Bruno, executed in 1600 for a collection of heretical beliefs including Copernicanism, belief of an unlimited universe with innumerable inhabited worlds, opinions contrary to the Catholic faith about the Trinity, divinity of Christ, and Incarnation.
Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, who played an instrumental part in the formation of the Lutheran Churches condemned Johannes Agricola and his doctrine of antinomianism—the belief that Christians were free from the moral law contained in the Ten Commandments—as a heresy.
This phrase was the name given to summarized version of his comments that were included in Exsurge Domine, a 1520 papal bull[24][25] that listed his anti-heretic killing sympathies along with 40 other positions Luther had taken in his writings that were allegedly heretical, and which he was ordered to recant.
[31] In Testem benevolentiae nostrae, issued on 22 January 1899, Pope Leo XIII condemned as heresy, Americanism, "the rejection of external spiritual direction as no longer necessary, the extolling of natural over supernatural virtues, the preference of active over passive virtues, the rejection of religious vows as not compatible with Christian liberty, and the adoption of a new method of apologetics and approach to non-Catholics.
"[32] Cardinal James Gibbons responded to Pope Leo XIII that no educated Catholic Christian in the United States subscribed to these condemned doctrines.
[33] Some of the doctrines of Protestantism that the Catholic Church considers heretical are the belief that the Bible is the only supremely authoritative source and rule of faith and practice in Christianity (sola scriptura), that only by faith alone can anyone ever accept the grace of salvation and not by following God's commandments (sola fide), and that the only Christian priesthood can be a universal priesthood of all believers.
