McGrath reveals what is an ironic truth about heresy. It is often propagated by those who appear to have good motives. It is advanced by those who think they are doing the Lord’s work by reconciling the Christian faith with some perceived conflict with the age. The problem with such efforts at reconciliation is that they can and often do fail. The history of Christian theology bears this out.

Alister McGrath defines heresy with these words, “A heresy is a failed attempt at orthodoxy, whose fault lies not in its willingness to explore possibilities or press conceptual boundaries, but in its unwillingness to accept that it has in fact failed” (Heresy, p. 31).

McGrath reveals what is an ironic truth about heresy. It is often propagated by those who appear to have good motives. It is advanced by those who think they are doing the Lord’s work by reconciling the Christian faith with some perceived conflict with the age. The problem with such efforts at reconciliation is that they can and often do fail. The history of Christian theology bears this out.

Today Christianity is facing a conflict with the zeitgeist over sexual morality, and there are no shortage of attempts to “reconcile” the faith with a revolution in sexual mores that is inherently incompatible with the faith once for all delivered to the saints (Jude 3).

On the one hand, we have revisionists telling us that the church has simply misunderstood the Bible’s prohibitions on homosexuality. We moderns know better than the entire 2,000-year tradition of the church and can see that homosexuality is perfectly compatible with following Christ. Matthew Vines and James Brownson are examples of this attempt to reconcile Christianity with the spirit of the age, and as of right now neither of them have acknowledged that their attempts at “reconciliation” have failed.

On the other hand, we have progressives telling us that the Bible does in fact teach that homosexuality is a sin. They tell us that the Bible is wrong on this point and that they know better than scripture. It is this version of the heresy that appeared in the pages of The Tennessean just yesterday. In an opinion editorial, a group of Quakers condemn The Nashville Statement not for failing to uphold biblical teaching but for upholding it. They write,

The justifications for the Statement’s positions are Biblical, in that certain Bible passages are narrowly interpreted to condemn homosexual practices. However, other passages of scripture clearly imply that God loves all creation. That is certainly the overwhelming message of the New Testament.

Notice that they don’t deny that the Bible condemns homosexual practices. They simply say that other passages about God’s love nullify passages that teach about sexual morality. They go on:

The Bible reflects the cultural standards of the time the texts originated. Those standards have evolved considerably over the two millennia since… The Bible reflects a society of long ago. It does not forecast the kind of evolution that has occurred. The only expected change is in the event of the second coming and end times.

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