Typology of heresy

In his recent Brief History of Christianity , Carter Lindberg suggests that “orthodoxy is the language that preserves the promise character of the gospel, that salvation is received from God, not achieved by humans.” By contrast, “heresy is the language that in one way or another vitiates the promise of the gospel by making it contingent on human experience.”

He cites Schleiermacher to give flesh to that skeletal definition. According to Schleiermacher, heresies were either anthropological or soteriological, pertaining to the doctrine of man or to Christology. Anthropological heresies “either conceive of human nature as so intrinsically good that redemption is not necessary or as so intrinsically evil that redemption is impossible.” Soteriological heresies present a Christ who in one way or another cannot save, either because “the nature of Jesus [is] so like that of humankind that he lacks the power to redeem or as so different from that of humankind that there is no point of contact.”