The Heresy Itch

I went to school with a girl named Sarah Hinlicky. She wrote an article called “The Heresy Itch” awhile back for Christianity Today.


In the article, Sarah tells the story of a conversation she had recently with a man who unloaded on her an entire catalog of grievances he had against religion and religious people. He objected to institutional religion, claiming that he didn’t like to be told what to believe. He wanted to investigate his doctrines before believing in them. He thought for himself.


Now these are pretty typical objections, really. But then the conversation got interesting.

“What I’d really like is to get my hands on those scrolls,” he said.

“Scrolls? You mean the Dead Sea Scrolls?”

“Naw, those were discovered in 1947. I’m talking about the scrolls that were discovered in 1991.”

“Scrolls discovered in 1991?” I said, confused.

“Yeah, these scrolls were written by Christ himself! You know, the Roman Catholic Church is trying to cover them up and say they’re heresy. But I’d sure like to see them for myself. They say there’s totally different things in there!”

I was a little suspicious. “How did you find out about these scrolls?” I inquired as casually as possible.

“Well, I read about them on a Christian website. They say the forensic evidence dates them back to the time of Christ and to the very town he lived in before he died. Also,” he added, “they’re written in Christ’s own handwriting.”

I narrowed my eyes a bit. “How can they tell it’s Christ’s own handwriting?”

“Well,” he said lightly, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “they cross-referenced it.”

Okay, that guy is a weirdo. But we may have more in common with him than we'd like to admit. Somewhere deep down, most of us are attracted to conspiracy theories. We’re suckers for this kind of thing. We’re hungering to be on the inside of some secret circle, to have secret knowledge. This desire in us is what makes ridiculous books like The DaVinci Code a bestseller. Dan Brown makes ridiculous claims based on whack-job scholarship, and yet, we’re tempted to believe it because we love the idea of unraveled mysteries, uncovered secrets, buried treasure.


The heresies in the first few centuries of the church were based on this same concept. The term Gnostic comes from the root word, gnosis, meaning secret wisdom or knowledge. Some people claimed they had tapped into a deeper knowledge that only an elite few could have. The average person can read the Bible, but only a special few can lay claim to the deeper, spiritual meaning.


This kind of thing still exists today. Mormonism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Scientology – they all claim to know secrets that you can’t get at on your own, and as you develop through the ranks, gradually you are trusted with the secrets. The new-Age movement and a lot of the interest in Eastern religions appeals to the same instinct. Truth and spiritual knowledge, these people claim, are only open to a select few and can only be achieved through certain spiritual practices or study. Only the elite can really reach spiritual truth, enlightenment. The rest of us are left out in the cold.


Only Christianity is different. Sarah Hinlicky says it right. “Gnosis flatters human vanity and polishes it with the luster of spiritual authority…But the Christian faith does not deal in secrets. All nations are to be baptized and made into disciples, not a privileged few. The faith is not the purview of sages and mages alone. If anything, it’s quite the opposite: Jesus said to his Father, ‘You have hidden these things from the wise and intelligent and have revealed them to infants’ (Matt. 11:25). The tomb is empty and the Scripture is in print: all are welcome to behold and adore.”