In two previous articles I’ve brought up the question of whether or why it is right to separate from, or remain within, a church body that is anti-white. In order to answer that question, I’ve touched on the tensions faithful Christians feel while in a decaying fellowship, and on the historical precedent of the Church devising marks to distinguish the true Church from a false one. In this article, I’d like to discuss the relationship of heresy to orthodoxy and its evolution across Church history.
The relationship between heresy and orthodoxy is interesting. We presume that orthodoxy came first, per the statement in Jude 3, “Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for me to write unto you, and exhort you that ye should earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” This verse teaches us that the Faith (the complete set of doctrines, worship, morality, etc. that comprises Christianity) has already been revealed, i.e., “delivered” to God’s people in the Church, i.e. “the saints.” The Faith was revealed progressively over the millennia stretching from Adam to St. John, but once the apostolic era ended, so did that revelation.
It is thus that Christian reformers are always arguing that the Church (as individual members and as a corporate body) should create a future in which Christians return to the old paths already revealed to them and forsaken over the intervening years. This story should sound familiar to any faithful reader of the Bible, as it is the narrative of much of the Bible’s prophetic and historical books. We will make progress in the future by retreading the ancient paths.
It would not be true to say, however, that the Faith was added to during the years. Rather, like a flower entirely contained within its yet-unopened bud, the Faith was opened more fully to our understanding. For example, Genesis 3:15 contains the seed promise of the Gospel — that a man with a human mother but no human father would suffer pain because of Satan, but Himself would crush Satan completely. That fact was more fully explained in Matthew’s famous Nativity story and in the epistles. Again, the Messiah was always going to be a Heaven-sent, divine Incarnation who would suffer for our sins and rise again — but those facts laid out in the Old Testament prophets and psalms went unheeded by Christ’s contemporaries until He rose from the grave. Even the workings of God’s racial economy are an example. Consider that God’s kingdom was always open to both Jews and Gentiles — the Old Testament explicitly calls Gentiles into His fellowship — but that fact was more fully enunciated in the New Testament.
Therefore, we look to the 66 canonical books of the Old and New Testaments for inerrant, infallible teaching. The entire Faith is contained within those pages. While the sacred canon of Scripture ended with the apostles, though, human nature and God’s dealings with His people did not. Unless we are going to argue that God deals with the Church today in a different way than He did in the days of the apostles, we can learn lessons from how the Church worked in Scripture and apply them to the days following the closing of the canon. (While most Church-related matters in the New Testament are unchanged and directly applicable to post-apostolic days, there are at least a few things that are different about the post-apostolic Church than the Church in the days of the apostles — namely the revelation of God’s inerrant Word and the exercise of supernatural gifts by church officers [apostles, prophets] who ceased to exist after the apostolic era.)
What does this have to do with us who are standing in defense of Christianity and our ethnic survival today? Well, when we look at the Bible we see the same dynamic at work regarding heresy and the Faith (i.e., orthodoxy) that we see in Church history after the apostolic era. We see a constant tension between our compulsive desire to abandon God on the one hand, and a return to faithfulness on the other hand. We also see that just as God’s people were allured to abandon God in a multitude of ways over the millennia addressed by Scripture (returning to Egypt, Baal worship, anti-Gentile zealotry, Gnosticism, Pharisaism, etc.) the Church has also been drawn away from the Faith in a never-ending variety of ways over the centuries.
For example, in the early Church the dividing line between heresy and orthodoxy was defined in large part by the tenets of the Nicene Creed. That creed was created in response to several major attacks on the basic tenets of the Faith that the saints had believed from the beginning: the divinity of Christ, His full humanity, His imminent physical return to judge all mankind, and so on. The definition of orthodoxy always follows the establishment of heresy. Orthodoxy is simply the enunciation of a doctrine that was always believed and practiced, but taken for granted by the faithful and therefore not explicitly articulated. The rise of heresy, and its rise to power in the Church and society, kick-starts a remnant of the faithful to push back against it, usually against great odds. Athanasius fought for Christ’s divinity against nearly all the other bishops when the Arians had taken power and held sway with the empire. Thus the phrase, “Athanasius contra mundum,” or “Athanasius against the world.”
Heresy does not stand still though because the world, our flesh, and the devil have no raison d’etre besides drawing us away from giving glory to God. Ergo, the devil never stops seeking how to steal, rob, and destroy us. Once faithful men set up a bulwark against the heresies of the early Church era, new forms of heresy began to spring up. Heresies are simply newer forms of older heresies. There are only so many sins that can be committed, and only so many ways in which to draw souls from God. For example, the heresy of the serpent in the Garden — “did God say?” — is the theological liberalism that undermines the inerrancy of Scripture today.
After the days of the early Church, the definition of orthodoxy expanded to include the five solas of the Reformation, because strong new heresies had cropped up over the intervening centuries. These heresies could be listed simply as the antitheses of the five solas — that Scripture is not sufficient for our understanding of the Faith, that faith in Christ’s death and resurrection is not sufficient for a man to be saved, that a man must perform meritorious acts in order to be saved, and that a man who thus merits part of his redemption shares some of the glory that God would otherwise get for the man’s salvation. As in the days of the early Church, the ways in which these heresies have arisen over the years have taken many forms over the last 500 years.
Over those 500 years, our world has changed a lot due to new forms of old heresies resurrected in the Enlightenment and Communism. Any churchgoer since the late 1800s knows that the Church has been assailed with a vigor and subtlety equal to that of the two eras previously discussed above. This is not surprising since, as I said, every new form of heresy and subterfuge is merely the resurrected spirit of an old heresy incarnate in a new body. For example, the old Arianism that made Jesus a really great moral teacher but not God in the flesh resurfaced as Islam in the seventh century, as Unitarianism in the Enlightenment era, and continues today in the form of New Age religion, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and liberal Christian denominations.
I wonder if it’s not at all unreasonable to suppose that the definitions of orthodoxy and heresy may once again need to expand to meet the needs of present generations. We are in the midst of a new (form of an old) heresy consolidating power in the Church and society. We suffer from the death grip of multiple heresies with which our readers are likely familiar regarding sexual morality, the authority of Scripture, the uniqueness of Christ, and more.
The fact is that one of the things being killed in the Church by heresy today is our definition of man. What is a man? Is he a homo sapiens only, or can he be combined with inanimate objects such as nanotechnologies and made into a cyborg? Is man male or female only, or can he be both or neither? Can a male become a female? Can a male marry a male? When does human life begin and end? Moreover — is man a lone individual or does he belong to a larger unit? Is that unit limited to his immediate family, or does it include his extended family? If so, to what distance does that family unit extend? Do they extend to comprise what previous generations called nations and races? What are his duties and rights with regard to those units? Does he bear equal allegiance and access to all such units everywhere, or are his duties and rights regarding one unit exclusive of, or take priority over, other units? Can man own property, or is all property communal? Does man own himself, or is he owned by the community or State? Can anyone or any family unit own a piece of land and put up borders to keep others out of it? Can marriage, adoption, voting rights, and other powers be restricted to the exclusion of other people?
These and many other questions are ways in which the simple, previously-assumed biblical definition of man is being destroyed. This definition was assumed across the Bible, for example in Galatians 3:28. Pro-white Christians know Galatians 3:28 as the passage most often thrown in our faces by the advocates of today’s heretical views on man, race, gender, and property. In this passage, the apostle explicitly taught that people of all races, both genders, and all classes could share in the riches of God’s grace just as Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob did. This passage taught nothing more and nothing less. In order to make his claim, St. Paul assumed a few things about man that today are being radically undone, such as the blamelessness of man’s different social stations, the identifiability and definability of those different stations (male, female, Jew, Greek, slave, free), and the permanence of those stations. When church leaders denied these assumptions, and tore down the definition of man in Galatians 3:28 to suit their anti-white purposes, they attacked a truth that every biblical writer (and thus the Holy Spirit) had taught for millennia. Those church leaders also tore down the definition of man to suit feminist, gay, trans, and other abominable purposes. Same root, same fruit.
While Faith and Heritage is primarily concerned with racial issues, the fruit of multiculturalism and miscegenation in the Church was nourished by the same sap that nourishes the fruit of feminism, transgenderism, gay marriage, socialism, and Communism.
White genocide. Open borders. Globalism. Transgenderism, interracial sex, and transhumanism. Our fathers in the faith could never have imagined that their descendants would have to deal with some of these things. Yet here we are. Are we to leave ourselves defenseless against the present-day attacks on us and on our Faith? I believe that Athanasius and Martin Luther would have told us to “earnestly contend for the faith which was once delivered unto the saints.” We face a new threat, and thus need to define what the old orthodoxy was, what the new heresy is, and push for reforms and a purification of the Church along those lines. We also need to be honest with ourselves and realize that the battle to reform the Church won’t be painless or neat. In every struggle for church reform there are winners and losers, those who win control of the organization and those who don’t. The question of staying or separating arises in the context of that messy, real-world dynamic. We’ll address it further in a future article.
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