Quotes on Heresy It would be easy to cry ‘heresy!’ but not so easy to answer the question [Billington] poses — ‘Who is the heretic — the man who says there is no God, or the believer who devalues his neighbour by his life-style, his churchmanship and his lack of feeling for other in their need?
David Blatherwick, ‘Review of The Christian Outsider’, The Methodist Recorder, 1971 What sometimes passes as ministerial concern to protect our lay folk from exposure to dangerous ideas is, in reality, unconscious contempt for their intelligence. It implies that they have neither the wit nor maturity to distinguish between truth and error, sense and nonsense.
Colin Morris, The Methodist Recorder, 11 November 1971 Whether a man accepts the historicity of Jesus or not will not, so far as I can see, affect his behaviour if he views the narrative in the Gospels as an expression of the best values we know, and the image of human nature at its best.
Ray Billington, Response to the Committee of Doctrinal Appeal, June 1971 It is appropriate that the wider church should assess and express its mind on any new and divergent teaching that may grow up within it, but such judgments need to be, and to be seen to be, provisional and not absolute in character. There are too many cases from the past of teaching condemned in one generation that has become the orthodoxy of the next. j Article on ‘Heresy’, by Maurice Wiles, in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought It is increasingly recognized that many of the more scholarly precise statements of doctrine insisted upon in the past...were both unnecessary and disastrous. In words borrowed from Vatican II, they were due to a failure to recognize the difference between ‘the truths of faith’ and ‘the manner in which they are formulated’ (Gaudium et spes, 62)...
Article on ‘Orthodoxy’, by Adrian Hastings, in The Oxford Companion to Christian Thought The great prophets of Israel, to whom so much ethical and spiritual advance is due, almost all met persecution and martyrdom, as did the founder of Christianity himself, and this pattern has repeated itself down the ages.
David Christie-Murray, A History of Heresy, 1989 Honest to God said nothing which had not been freely and openly debated in theological circles for twenty years, but said it in language which could be understood by literate laymen, and it accelerated the liberation of a generation from old theological concepts to which many men in the pew had been paying increasingly unwilling lip-service. It was a brave and timely book. Three hundred years ago its author would certainly have been burned in almost every country in Europe.