Heretics and Reform

W. Carl Ketcherside

[Page 185]

     Papal Rome has been guilty of many grievous errors. Among them, none is of greater consequence than the equating with heresy, of unorthodox opinions persistently held. Men have been burned at the stake or forced to endure indescribable torture for no other crime than a refusal to submit their minds and thoughts to the herd mentality dominated by a hierarchy laboring to enforce the false concept of human infallibility.

     As we have repeatedly shown in the past, this is utterly foreign to the scriptural concept, which regards a heresy as a sect, and a heretic as a schismatic. To seek to regulate men's opinions by threat, or to alter them by force or coercion is to make hypocrites of the weak and martyrs of the strong. It is also to provide effectively against any correction from within the institution by purging out the reformers, for all reformation must be promoted from within and will only be undertaken by those who think for themselves.

     Any group which has imbibed the spirit of Rome and has suckled at the breast of the "Old Mother on the Tiber," will inevitably rid itself of the thoughtful and perceptive while cherishing the ignorant and the conformists. The smaller the brain and the longer the tongue, the better partisan does one make. The man who can repeat monotonously the old cliches and parrot the traditional position unthinkingly will be elevated as an example of "the faithful," while the one who breaks the chains and fetters is branded as "dangerous."

     Every faction skims off the brains from the top and retains the mass of the unthinking below. The most hazardous thing that can happen to one is to rise above the narrow and intolerant spirit, and to outgrow the sectarian nest in which he was hatched. All sectarianism seeks constantly to push the fledgling back into the egg and prevent him from using his wings, and ends up by throwing him overboard and thus forcing him into the very state which it sought valiantly to prevent him from entering.

     It is amazing to the student of history to see that every protest movement began as a rebellion against intolerance and ends by becoming more intolerant than that which it abandoned. The persecuted one of yesterday becomes the persecutor of today. Those who react against the power structure act differently when they create a power structure of their own. When Christianity was oppressed Tertullian wrote, "It is a fundamental human right, a privilege of nature, that every man should worship according to his own convictions." He nobly asserted, "One man's religion neither helps nor harms another person." But later, when Christians began to gain the ascendancy, he affirmed, "Heretics may properly be compelled, not enticed to duty. Obstinacy must be corrected, not coaxed."

     Martin Luther, the reformer, was vocal in his plea for the right to think and was branded a heretic and hounded into seclusion to protect his life. But Luther, as the leader of a sect, wrote, "Heretics are not to be disputed with, but to be condemned unheard, and whilst they perish by fire, the faithful ought to pursue the evil to its source and bathe their hands in blood."

[Page 186]

     No reformation has ever been wrought without exacting its payment of tears and sweat and blood. The jeering mob, the false accusers, the character assassins, these are the accompanists of every revolution of thought as certainly as the one who bears the cross. The compensation comes in the thought that all the heroes of today were the heretics of yesterday. No generation ever recognizes its own prophets. It is the grandchildren who pile up the stones which their ancestors flung, and make a monument to the memory of one whom their fathers murdered.

     There are two persons humanity can never tolerate--a man who lives too far below their standard, and one who lives too far above it. The first they cast into prison, the second they nail to a cross. The one brings reproach upon them by his sins, the life of the other reproaches them for their own sins. Neither a sinful world nor a "sinless sect" wants to face up to its sins. The first has created its own hell, the other its own heaven, and neither one wants to face the judgment that will come! And all the nails that ever fastened men to a cross came from a box labeled "Heresy."