I posted this on Thinklings the other day, and I thought I'd post it here as well since I haven't posted anything all week. :-)
With a nod from John Calvin, the Geneva city council in 1553 burned Michael Servetus at the stake. Servetus was a heretic who denied the Trinity of persons within the Godhead and denied paedobaptism. While Calvin preferred to give Servetus a quick death via decapitation, he had to compromise with the council who preferred to let Servetus burn to death.
On a related note, a few years earlier, Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli, and his council, persecuted Anabaptists by giving them their "third baptism": a death by drowning. Zwingli would later die by the sword, fighting Catholics in neighboring counties.
Sadly, the history of Christianity is rich with bloodshed. Thankfully, these days we don't kill guys like Joel Osteen and whoever the guy is who wrote The Shack, but I think the history of dealing with heresy should teach us that orthodoxy -- right thinking -- really matters. To be sure, I don't condone certain ways the church has dealt with heresies in the past; in fact, I find many of those ways appalling. While I'm not a pacifist, I tend to think that the Anabaptists had a lot of right ideas when it came to their aversion to violence.
Heresy is serious, and an appropriate response to heresy is something the evangelical church needs to grapple with in this age of pluralism, "tolerance," and sweltering anti-Christianity. As far as an appropriate response goes, violence is not the answer.
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Thanks. I haave now done that. It was odd. In the book itself, I found some things troubling on some levels, uncomfortable on others, but nothing I would consider heretical. I remember a thread on Thinklings on this but didn't go back to look it up, so I don't know how you guys see it.
But back on the subject of which you posted, I would hate to stand before God and be held accountable by the same measure I have dealt to others. God is more than we can understand and certainly more than the Bible portrays. He reveals a sliver of Himself to us in His word so that we might get an inkling of how greatly we have been forgiven. Those who condemn niggling nuances in understandings of the trinity have so missed the mark that they have placed themselves under a much more serious heresy; the very theme that Scripture is designed around. It's why I believe that 1 Corinthians 13 should be fully half, if not more, of our daily meditation. I'm convinced that God would be more pleased if we spent our efforts to understand Him on the depths of His grace more than on His ontological essence.
What is the heresy in "The Shack?"