Theme: Reform movements are both essential and dangerous.
Reform movements are essential in that the Church is always in need of spiritual revival. The Church is always prone to falling into a routine existence in which Christianity is merely cultural and Christian ministry merely professional. Routine Christianity needs to be disturbed by enthusiastic Christianity, that enthusiasm arising from encountering the Gospel, the Sacraments, Christian Faith and Christian Morals, as something new and bracingly different.
With reform movements come two dangers.
On the one hand, the rest of the Church may respond to the reform movement with hostility, resenting its implied criticism of the way the rest of the Church has been doing things, even taking action to suppress the reform movement.
On the other hand, the people in the reform movement may grow impatient with the rest of the church, especially with the established leadership, even breaking off from the rest of the Church.
I do not propose a history of heresies, but a history of reform movements. Some reform movements produced revival in the Church. Some produced a new heresy in the Church. Most produced both.
Not all heresies in the Church arose from frustrated or out of control reform movements. I distinguish among three types of heresy in the Church.
Those that attempt to smuggle essentially alien ideas into Christianity
Those that, attempting to simplify, distort Christian doctrine.
Those that began as reform movements, but that were either driven into heresy by resentful opposition from the established Church (which emphatically does include the “people in the pews”, who often perceive revivalist movements as annoyingly elitist), or that leaped into heresy through sheer impatience, wanting to remake the Church in an instant, and growing angry when the rest of the Church did not seem cooperative.
Sometimes all three forms of heresy arise with each other, but I contend that the distinction can be made and is an important distinction.
Tonight, as an introduction to this theme, I present the figure of Tertullian.
Tertullian was a powerful spokesman for Christianity and the first Christian writer in Latin. A native of Roman Africa, his writings, which start in 196, began with spirited defenses of Christianity against pagan criticisms, and with an equally spirited counterattack against paganism’s destructive morality. Tertullian is best known, however, for his theological writings in which he attacked Christians heretics of the first and second sorts. In “Against Hermogones”, “On the Soul”, and “On the Resurrection of the Dead” he argued against the so-called “Gnostic” heretics, who were attempting to smuggle Platonic and pagan Syrian ideas into Christianity, arguing for the basic Christian doctrines of Creation of the universe out of nothing, for the created nature of the soul and its unique bond to one particular body, and of true bodily Resurrection. In “On the Flesh of Christ” and “Against Praxeas”, on the other hand, he argued against simplifying heresies, like Docetism and Monarchism, which contended that Christ only appeared to be in the flesh and that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are only names for the same, one Divine Person. In “Against Praxeas” Tertullian gave the Church the language she uses to this day to describe her Faith in the Holy Trinity, One Divine Nature but three distinct Persons within that one Nature.
Yet Tertullian is remembered as a heretic, not a saint.
This is because he became a leader in a reform movement that half left and half got pushed out of the Church. This has been called the “Montanist Heresy” It began as a critic of the low moral standards that existed within Christianity, and of the dull careerism of the Christian clergy. The critique had merit. In every age, Christians find Christian morality difficult, and therefore stop attempting to live it. In every age Christian clergy fall into careerism, doing their job competently or incompetently, but not seeing it as a commission of burning faith and love, compelling them to give their lives for Christ. Many ordinary Christians and clergy pushed back against the Montanist critique, in some cases pushing Montanists out of the Church. The Montanists responded by escalating their critique, and eventually abandoning the Church altogether.
This development can be seen in the writings of Tertullian. His writings of 197-206 show a zealous, highly intelligent and contented Catholic. His writings of 206-212 show a zealous, highly intelligent and discontented Catholic. His writings of 212-220 show a zealous and highly intelligent ex Catholic. In the second period he was aware of the failure of some Christians to take Christian morality seriously, and the failure of some clergy to take Christian ministry seriously. He was an orthodox, Catholic revivalist. In the third period he was a Montanist heretic, proposing Christian morality in an extreme form, and bitterly repudiating the need for priests and bishops to lead and govern the Church.
Tertullian seems not to have written after 220, though his memory was so revered by the North African Montanists that they became known as Tertullianists. As a separate Church, they lasted in Roman Africa into St. Augustine’s time, around 400. St. Augustine brought some of the last of them into the Church.
One of the Church’s finest intellects and spirits, to whom the Church’s theology remains indebted ended up in bitter heresy. I take the story of Tertullian as a first illustration of my theme that reform movements are always needed in the Church but are always perilous. They attract the finest minds and spirits of their time but can be led by their participants and badly handled by the rest of the Church, with truly tragic results.