Various forms of Gnosticism are heretical not because Christian faith has nothing to do with the intellect or knowledge, but because they fail to recognize that authentic Christianity is not reducible to knowledge - let alone "secret knowledge" reserved for a select few - and that the created world is indeed good and was lovingly brought into existence by the one God.Īs Pope Francis noted in the second chapter of his 2018 apostolic exhortation Gaudete et Exsultate, "On the Call to Holiness in Today's World," the specters of Pelagianism and Gnosticism continue to haunt the church, albeit in new forms. Pelagianism is heretical not because it gets human freedom wrong, but because it fails to adequately factor in the reality and consequence of original sin that deleteriously affects the exercise of human freedom. Eventually ideological camps form and history reveals that it's often the oversimplified and reductionist side that falls in error. In each case, well-meaning and faithful Christians debate the definition of beliefs, seeking to understand their faith better. Most classical Christian heresies condemned by church councils follow this sort of pattern. Heresies are always partly correct, but in the absence of the necessary nuance and complexity that Christian theology requires, a heretic unwittingly fails to accept the totality of the orthodox position.
This description generously reveals what is so appealing about heresies and why so many Christians inevitably fall for them. From 1609 to 1615, 150,000 Muslims who had converted to Catholicism were forced out of Spain.īy the mid-1600s the Inquisition and Catholic dominance had become such an oppressive fact of daily life in Spanish territories that Protestants avoided those places altogether.One of the best definitions of heresy I've heard over the years describes it as the experience of mistaking part of the truth for the whole truth in a matter of faith or doctrine.
Philip II died in 1598 and his son, Philip III, dealt with the Muslim uprising by banishing them. Philip II also renewed hostilities against the Moors, who revolted and found themselves either killed or sold into slavery. In 1580 Spain and Portugal ruled jointly by the Spanish crown and began rounding up and slaughtering Jews that had fled Spain. In 1574, Lutherans were burned at the stake there, and the Inquisition came to Peru, where Protestants were likewise tortured and burned alive.
Inquisition in the New WorldĪs Spain expanded into the Americas, so did the Inquisition, established in Mexico in 1570. He had previously brought the Roman Inquisition to the Netherlands, where Lutherans were hunted down and burned at the stake. In 1556, Philip II ascended the Spanish throne. In other nods to Rome’s concerns, the Spanish Inquisition focused on the rising population of Spanish Protestants in the 1550s. In 1545, the Spanish Index was created, a list of European books considered heretical and forbidden in Spain, based on the Roman Inquisition’s own Index Librorum Prohibitorum.