Heresy Hunter or Heresy Healer?

As a young pastor straight out of Bible college with a degree in biblical studies and a minor in biblical languages, I was a heresy hunter par excellence. I was almost giddy when my senior pastor asked me to respond to some error-ridden email.

I commented on “exegetical fallacies” with glee. Finding and naming everyone’s theological positions and errors was my God-given responsibility and right. I never stopped to ask why my superior logic and doctrine seldom effected lasting life change.

I never stopped to ask why my superior logic and doctrine seldom effected lasting life change.

Take dear old Mabel, for instance. She treated prayer more like a magic trick than interaction with a loving Father. Whenever her prayers didn’t “work,” she thought it was because she hadn’t done the incantation quite right. Her bad theology of prayer was behind her insistence that I put my hands directly on her corns when I prayed for them. It didn’t matter how many verses I showed her or how many Greek words I used, I couldn’t change her mind.

Now a little older and wiser (and more loving), here’s how I can best describe why my heresy hunting was so ineffective:

Imagine a sharp, young doctor walking into a refugee camp. He sees an old man, half-naked, shivering and struggling to keep warm under a threadbare blanket. The doctor looks closer at the blanket and sees that it is filthy, smeared with feces and probably disease-ridden. In horror the doctor rips the blanket off of the old man and says, “Don’t you know that blanket will make you sick?” Then he walks off, saying, “My job is done here.” But had he done anything for the old man? Can we blame the old man for picking up the blanket as soon as the doctor walks away?

The problem with heresy hunting is that it is a job only half-done. It does little good to attack false theology if we do not also replace it with something better.

Simply explaining the facts of good theology doesn’t do the job either. To the average church member, that is as useful as a giving the old man a lecture on blanket manufacturing (complete with handouts). Our goal, as communicators who love the truth, is not to hunt down bad theology but to heal it, to mend it, and to wrap our “patients” in the warmth of true theology. (By the way, if you can’t feel the warmth of theology, perhaps you don’t truly understand it.)

Our goal, as communicators who love the truth, is not to hunt down bad theology but to heal it, to mend it…

C. S. Lewis told us that all sin’s pleasures began as good desires corrupted. Likewise, bad theology (at least the sort held by most church members) usually springs from a genuine need addressed incorrectly. Poor Mabel, for instance, lived in constant chaos. Her family was one big ball of dysfunction, and she desperately wanted a world where happy endings were guaranteed.

All the TV preachers she watched promised Mabel a happy ending if she would only pray just right. When her prayers didn’t “work,” she couldn’t bear the thought that God’s idea of a happy ending might be radically different from hers. Instead, she’d try some new trick to make her prayers work. Looking back, I shouldn’t have been attacking her theology of prayer; I should have been enlarging her view of God as a good and loving father who cares for her in the midst of brokenness.

So far, I’ve only talked about Mabel’s dysfunction. But what about mine? My enjoyment of heresy hunting says something about me. I love the sense of superiority it gives me. Note that I say “gives”—I still battle that and probably always will.

A passion for the truth is a two-edged sword. I can either use it to puff myself up or to serve others. False doctrine must be addressed, just as the old man in the refugee camp must be saved from the disease-ridden blanket. But I know the difference in my own heart when I am trying to feel smart and when I’m ministering to someone bound in deception. I know when I am being a heresy hunter and when I am being a heresy healer.

Josh Kelley is a speaker and the author of Radically Normal: You Don’t Have to Live Crazy to Follow Jesus (Harvest House) who, with his family, is traveling around the country. www.RadicallyNormal.com.