Translated from the original by Chris
Tsilikas
Assembly of Jehovah’s Witnesses
We have been dealing with religious matters for some years now and we
have encountered hundreds of questions regarding what heresies are and what
they believe in. Due to the fact that these questions are more or less
identical and they have been asked over and over again, we thought it would be
better to answer them in the form of an article. In order to make this article
more conceivable we gave it the following question-answer form...
Question: What is a heresy?
Answer: The word heresy derives from the ancient Greek word αιρέω –ώ (pronounced /haereo/) which in Greek means select or
prefer. Therefore, some Christians αίρεσαν (the past tense of the word αιρέω), meaning, they selected
to leave the proper teaching of our Church and create their own teaching. They
believed that the Church had gone far away from the right teaching of Christ
and the Apostles, so they had to say the teaching which according to them was the right one. They were also called heretics
because they selected extracts from
the Bible – the extracts that were in favor of them of course – to prove that
they were the ones who were right and not the Church.
Question: A lot of people claim that heresies are a
general phenomenon of our era which shows atheism and unfaithfulness. Is that right?
Answer: Of course not. Heresies are as old as Christianity. In fact, they
co-exist with Christianity. Even the books of the New Testament refer to them.
For example, the 1st Epistle to Timothy, chapter 1, verses 3-4 “As I besought
thee to abide still at Ephesus, when I went into Macedonia, (That is Paul) that
thou mightest charge some that they
teach no other doctrine, Neither
give heed to fables and endless genealogies”, the Epistle to Titus,
chapter 1, verse 14 “Wherefore rebuke them sharply
(meaning Titus), that they may be sound
in the faith; Not giving heed to
Jewish fables, and commandments of men, that turn from the truth”, and chapter 3, verse 9 “But avoid foolish questions,
and genealogies, and contentions, and strivings about the law; for they are
unprofitable and vain” and elsewhere as
well. These are the so called Jewish
or Gnostic heresies.
Question: Why is the Church against heresies?
Answer: First and foremost the Church is trying to defend itself because
heresies attack its foundations. Sometimes this attack becomes cowardly since it
uses insults against the Church. For instance Jehovah’s Witnesses and
Millenarians call our Temples
Question: Who resorts to heresies and why?
Answer: Most of the times it is people who have
problems that resort to heresies because they hope and believe that they will
find a solution to their problems. In other cases it is people with flimsy
religious beliefs that resort to heresies because they get furious with some
priests who are heard to have caused existent or non-existent problems, which
problems in most cases are inflated by the press or the TV. However, by general
consent of psychologists who have dealt with ex-heretics, the reason
why most of them resort to various heresies is their fear of freedom. The greatest gift given to us by God is the
freedom to think of anything we want, the freedom to say anything we want, the
freedom to do anything we want; and these people have considered this gift to
be a curse because they are afraid of doing one thing or another for fear of
remorse; so they’ve found the solution. They have delivered their thoughts,
their wishes, and their whole selves to some religious Organisation or to the
leader of this Organisation and they think they have sorted everything out once
and for all. Now it’s the Organisation or its leader who thinks for them and
desires for them. They just perform their duties. And they are overly satisfied
with this because they have been convinced that they do all
these for some divine purpose.
Question: Is everything in heresies negative?
Answer: No, of course not. Due to the fact that
heresies usually consist of very few people, the
person who joins them feels the family warmth he might have been deprived of in his/her
family or in the society. Moreover, almost without exception all these heresies
claim that within their borders one can find moral cleanness and perfection –
something hard to find outside them since the world is rife with sin and
corruption – therefore the person who enrolls on them
feels justified and saved. Apart from that a lot of people who suffer an inferiority complex feel
upgraded through heresies because they are given the chance to preach and save the sinful world.
Assembly of Pentecostals
who “babble” while “in trance”
Question: Why do we say that the heretics tell lies
since they use the Bible which we know it’s true?
Answer: This is a case of HOW you use the Bible and not of using it.
Unfortunately the heretics use it erroneously and in the way it suits them.
More
specifically: 1. They either
add or remove something from it so that its meaning is totally altered. For instance, in the 52nd psalm of David in the book of Psalms we read, “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God”. If we remove – just as
the heretics do – the first part of the sentence “The fool hath said in his
heart”, what remains is the second part “There is no God”. In this way we can
claim that the Bible teaches that there is no God!!! 2. They combine extracts from the
Bible which are not connected to each other. For example they take an extract from the Apocalypse, one from the Epistles to the Jews and a third from Luke’s Gospel, they join the three extracts
together and they draw the conclusion that only 144,000 distinguished people
will get into Heaven. Let’s do something similar to see where we will be led
to. We take the 5th verse of chapter 27
of Matthew’s gospel which says (talking about Judas) “And he cast down
the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself”
and we connect it to verse 37 of chapter 19 of Luke’s
gospel which says, “Go and do the same”, then we can draw the amazing
conclusion that the Bible teaches us to hung ourselves! 3. And some other times when they give the meaning of an extract from the
Bible they give an allegorical meaning to part of it – in other words what is
written is not what is meant exactly – and they take the rest of the extract
literally. For instance in the extract from the Apocalypse that refers to the “144,000 sealed of
all tribes of the children of Israel
Question: How come we are the ones who are right? Why
is it impossible for the heretics to be right?
Answer: We are right because we have something that
the heretics do not have; the so-called Apostolic Teaching
and Succession. The
Apostles delivered everything they heard from Christ to their pupils, who were
ordained Bishops to various Churches (Ignatius the God bringing, Polycarpus of
Smyrna, etc.) These Apostles’ pupils delivered what they had heard to their
pupils and so on so forth. This way everything believed and taught 2000
ago are believed and taught nowadays as well. And as proof to what we have been saying we
give the following information. In every Orthodox Bishopric around the world
“Diptychs” are kept, which are lists with all the names of the Bishops from the
very first to the very last one. Due to the weakness of the heresies to present
anything similar to that – needless to say, the oldest heresy can only span 200
years of existence – they claim that their founder was inspired by the Holy
Spirit. However
this argument is too feeble to pertain because anyone – deranged or not – can
claim for himself that he was inspired by the Holy Spirit and in this case,
please tell me…. How can you prove otherwise?
Writer Christos Pal
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