Brian's comment – I read the original book, the Heretics, in 1970. I have long forgotten the publisher’s and author’s details. But, some of what the author wrote was of great help to me during the 1970’s as I struggled to come to terms with belonging to, and participating in the leadership (even though at a junior level) a Pentecostal religious cult. I took some handwritten extracts, and these appear below. Looking back nearly 40 years later, I am grateful to God for letting this book fall into my hands (shades of Umberto Eco’s point in his amazing book, “the Name of the Rose”!). The questions it raised at the time helped me get free of the authoritarian and quite evil organisation I belonged to, one that all the way along until the present day (2008) – and even after a probing investigation by a highly-respected Australian investigative TV program – has doggedly refused to acknowledge in any way its abusive doctrines and leadership structure, or the tragic consequences on those caught in the dysfunctional social structure spawned by the Organisation (or as we called ourselves, “the Move”). During those years, I willingly (and later, less willingly) participated in the Organisation’s / Move’s goals. Until in the late 1970’s, my doubts and questioning of the recurring ethical base (or rather, lack of ethics) got internally louder and louder. Finally, I became a true “heretic” - and was summarily executed / anathematised / dispatched / cut off from (some) family, friends, and ministry colleagues in October 1980. This book helped me not to become bitter and twisted afterwards. May it serve to help you – wherever your journey is currently at….
In the Judaistic tradition, on the whole, the prophets are revolutionary, and the priests reactionary. The priests, ideological spokesmen for the governing class, were in daily administration both of public affairs and private behaviour. The prophets sprang from the lower social ranks, especially from the peasantry, and won leadership by their eloquence, with which they proclaimed existing social facts and mandatory social values. To them we owe the gallant, and ineradicable habit of protest that informs our whole culture tradition. It is doubtful how far we would have advanced if we had possessed only the philosophical analysis of the Greeks, unmixed with the prophetic passion of the Jews!
Thus Paul intended to lift the moral life (especially among ordinary people) to a new level - to introduce a certain ease into righteousness, and familiarity into virtue - to do, in short, a number of amiable things, which his dour Protestant descendants have largely forgot!
What is orthodoxy? Vincent connects what is termed orthodoxy with organisational success. Tradition needed to act as the authority on ecclesiastical interpretation. Although the text of Scripture was perfectly public, it seemed to yield as many meanings as there were readers! Every heresy was based on Scripture! There had, therefore, to be a canon of scriptural interpretation along with the canon of scriptural text, so that the believing Christian might be assured which of the various suggested meanings he was to believe!
The
basis for acceptance was…. Acceptance, Antiquity, Consent.
If a belief met these and was still questionable.... Compare
with the writings of the Church Fathers.
All this was opposite to private insight, personal inspiration – it was completely organisational. Personal inspiration can no more constitute orthodoxy than anarchy could order!
He typified the intellectual - familiar enough to us now - who knows how much the organisation limits him, but who cannot bear to give up membership. That is to say, he had enough of the heretic in him to tinker with doctrine, but not enough to fight for corrections. And so he ended up being no heretic at all.
Strange to say, love - the ultimate unifier - is seldom to be found within the ligaments of organisations. If it were there, it would, and when it is, it does, make orthodoxy less stubborn and heresy less sharp!
He looked for certainty in a time when little was certain. Rival popes and contentious clerics had blurred the image of authority. Corruption of all sorts, and all intensities, had torn the institution from its divine and evangelical base. Surely God could not have been so baffling as to leave unclear the descent of sovereignty, or to leave degenerate the exercise of it. There must be somewhere the unbreakable, unshakeable rock. There was such a rock - SCRIPTURE!
In the development of the church, from its beginning to the Middle Ages, the Scriptures never had the supremacy that Protestants later accorded them. They were part of general Tradition; separated from this by application of the Canon, they then held equal rank with what was left - namely Tradition with a capital "T"! Interpretation by the various Councils had obvious importance; so also the commentaries of the Fathers, and pronouncements by the Popes.
If the members have nothing but a book, they tend to fall into dispute concerning what text is applicable, and what interpretation of the text is authentic. This is incipient anarchy! A leadership is therefore likely to feel that it can best maintain unity by asserting its own interpretation to be as authoritative as the traditional ground.
Hence, the Catholic Church prefers to decide the content of doctrine by more than one criterion - by Scripture, Tradition, findings of Councils, and papal bulls.
Wyclif's development followed the usual path of heresy towards schism; first the identification of gross evils; then the wish to correct them; then the search for help among the membership.
Ordinarily, the true state of organisations is that leaders are not as knowledgeable as they seem, nor members as ignorant as they are thought (Brian comments - Dilbert humour is based on this!). The things that leaders know are limited by a fear of knowing other things disadvantageous to the organisation. This fear is less likely among the membership, and therefore a member may go on to explore the real world, which reveals to him its true nature by experience, if not by formal education. These facts being assumed, superior insight in the members, and inferior awareness among the leaders, becomes not only possible but even likely….
If survival is (as it appears to be) the aim of every organisation; if unity and devotion within the membership are necessary to that survival, and if a certain description of the world is essential to that unity, then what is required of that description is not correspondence to fact, but persuasiveness to the membership. Organisations thus feel the same need to distort reality that lunatics feel - even more strongly, indeed. The history and practice of organisational lying alone suffice to make this clear. For in organisational lying the moral deterrent has been removed - the liar affects his lie, not from self-interest, but from loyalty to the group.
Three things in life attract everyone - wealth, prestige, and the pleasures of sense. The power of organisations, as usually exerted, lies precisely in granting or withholding these goods. Yet the clash between organisational demands and personal integrity of members puts the fundamental question - how valuable, after all, are these values which everybody wants?
In Marx's view, capitalism is a society which can produce, but not distribute - a society in which the productive forces constantly struggle against the relationships of production. He concluded that if the strife between capitalists and workers were definitely resolved in the workers' favour, there would come into existence a "classless" society (i.e. a society without antagonistic classes) - which could distribute and use everything it produced. Such a society would be expected to develop new skills, accomplishments, and a new sort of human being. Marx's humanism never deserted him, and he purposed nothing less than the terrestrial redemption of mankind.
It becomes evident that production grows more readily when it is for use than when it is for profit, and that use-economics can absorb without dislocation all that technology affords. (Marx believed that) the day when socialist production begins to exceed capitalist production will see much alteration in men's minds of what is to be believed.
There is a tendency for radical people and parties to disappear, or turn conservative (which is another form of disappearance!).