Sometimes heretics (especially those emerging from orthodox quarters of Christianity) misrepresent the Christian attitude toward heresy. This should surprise no one, but it does call for clarification and rebuttal. A couple men I'd consider mentors in the early stages of my intellectual pilgrimage have recently revealed themselves as heretics (forthrightly, as it happens), and have made the same mistake many others have made in trying to guess why Christians eschew their teaching.
The misrpesentation is this: Christians are characterized as believing it is doctrinal knowledge alone that leads to salvation, that without doctrinal knowledge an individual is eternally damned, and that lack of such knowledge makes one an enemy and an outsider. The difficulty, I believe, is that heresy is always a lack of, or distortion of, orthodox Christian propositions, and therefore its formulators see everything in terms of the intellect.
Orthodox Christian doctrine is often hard to swallow, even for the most devout. How can Jesus have two natures? How can God be three persons yet indivisible? How can man be responsible for his actions even while his every action is foreordained by God? In what way precisely does the atonement take away our sins? These are all difficult questions (difficult is really too soft a word), and no one has ever answered them adequately.
The reason for this should be obvious to anyone. These doctrines are truths about an infinite, transcendent God, recorded for us asystematically in a book that defies genre and categorization in any meaningful sense except as the Word of that same transcendent God. That Scripture is God's own self-revelation is the only reason we are able to understand anything about Him; even so, we are finite and sinful human beings, and the only resolution we can offer for many of the doctrines we find between Genesis and Revelation is to plead for mystery.
If the Bible states two things that seem to be in opposition (God is three persons yet one God, for instance), we accept both of these concepts as truth and assume that they are deeper and more glorious than we can comprehend. As Christians, our immediate response should not be to dismiss one or the other (or both) of these concepts, but to plead ignorance as to their fulness. Any other response is blasphemous in its arrogance and pride.
Heretics assume that, when they encounter a doctrine they don't understand, it is the doctrine rather than the reader that must yield. Human reason, for them, can be bound by nothing, least of all by propositional concepts. So, they attempt to make sense of every part of Scripture, using as guide only their reason and casting aside all reliance on past saints, the wisdom of the ancients, or the received/traditional/orthodox interpretations.
This is because heretics misunderstand true spirituality and the necessity of pure doctrine. Good doctrine isn't so essential simply because it's knowledge; it's essential because it helps us identify the God we serve and worship. Likewise, true spirituality isn't a purely rational or intellectual matter; it's the transformation of the heart, soul, mind and body through the healing agency of the Triune God, the reclamation of what was lost to salvation and goodness.
It's ironic that heretics so often blame the orthodox for overemphasizing knowledge when that's exactly what they're doing. It's also strange that anyone could think the Holy Spirit would have so abandoned His people as to allow them to wallow for two millennia in false doctrine, and that one or two people would be the lone voices in the wilderness proferring the truth. Such ideas are sad in their arrogance and ludicrous in their absurdity.
Does the Bible ever use the word Trinity? Of course not, and no true Christian supposes it does, or that the doctrine is laid out anywhere in anything close to a systematic form. But the Bible does present an organic picture of God that reveals insofar as we can understand who He is, who we are, and what our relationship with Him is and should be. Why does the Bible go on to reveal paradoxes concerning Him? Because He is the transcendent God, and we aren't meant to understand everything about Him, nor would we survive the ordeal were such knowledge given to us mere mortals.
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