What Does "Heretic" Actually Mean? (You're Probably One Too)

If you've ever been afraid to think something different because of the pressure, the guilt, and the shame that comes from pastors standing on a stage telling you "you're a heretic, you shouldn't believe this," I want to offer you something. They're a heretic too. Because they think differently than the people down the street. And once you see how this word actually works, I think it loses a lot of its sting.

I've been seeing this word thrown around a lot lately, especially in the reels and response videos that flood social media. You know the format. A pastor, usually someone fairly well known in conservative circles, watches a clip of someone else's take, makes a face, and responds. And more often than not, what they're responding to gets labeled a heresy. I think that's a problem. Anytime someone calls another person a heretic, I think we've entered dangerous territory, both historically and practically. So I wanted to dig into where this word actually comes from, how it's been used through history, and how we ended up using it the way we do today.

Let's start with the word itself. The Greek word behind "heresy" has a simple meaning. It means to choose, or to make a choice. That's it. Something chosen. A heresy, in its most basic sense, is a choice someone makes, a direction they decide to go.

The clearest place to see this neutral usage is in the writing of Josephus, a Jewish historian writing during the Roman Empire who gives us a lot of our understanding of Jewish life in the first century. In his work The Jewish War (Book 2), he writes that there are three philosophical sects among the Jews: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. The word translated "sects" there is heresies. Josephus isn't attacking anyone. He's simply saying these are groups people have chosen to belong to. Three different heresies, three different choices, no judgment attached.

So right out of the gate, heresy is not a bad word. It's a simple word for a choice that's been made. The question that develops over time, especially in Christian writing, becomes: what choice are you making, and toward what?

Paul is where the word starts to take on a negative shade. In Galatians, he's writing to a community that's struggling to hold onto what he taught them, with other voices coming in and adding extra requirements to the gospel. Paul pushes back hard, and toward the end of the letter he lists the "works of the flesh," the outworking of choosing self over the way of Jesus: sexual immorality, impurity, hostility, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish rivalries, dissensions, and so on. Buried in that list (Galatians 5:19-21) is a word our English Bibles translate as "factions." In Greek, that word is heresy. Just like translators used “sect” in place of the greek word, heresy our New Testament translators shifted it to "factions". Paul is saying that the choice to divide is itself a work of the flesh, something destructive, something that doesn't belong in the body of Christ.

The other key passage is 1 Corinthians 11:17-19, in the section on the Lord's Supper. Paul has heard there are divisions in the church at Corinth during their shared meals, people splitting along social and economic lines instead of eating together as one body. He writes that when they come together, he hears there are divisions among them, and in part he believes it, because there must in fact be divisions among them so that those who are approved may be evident. It's easy to read that as Paul saying division reveals who's right. But flip it around. In context, the division is the problem. The people being "made evident" aren't the heroes of the story, they're the ones causing the harm Paul is correcting. And the word translated "division" in both verses, again, is heresy.

So Paul takes a neutral word, a choice, and narrows it to mean a choice that causes division within the body. That makes sense given how much of Paul's writing is consumed with unity. He prays for these churches to be one in Christ, the same prayer Jesus prayed for his followers. If Paul could see the church today, fractured into countless camps, each one convinced their theology is the correct one and everyone else is outside the fold, I think that division, not any particular doctrine, is what would break his heart. Corinthians and Romans exist because there were real divisions and real theological disagreements in the first century too, and Paul's response again and again is essentially: stop it. You need to be one, because that's what Jesus wanted for his people.

Think about how many movements have formed throughout church history around an us-versus-them posture. Calvinism, Lutheranism, the Baptist tradition, the Brethren movement, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, Pentecostals, and on and on. By Paul's definition, every camp that forms around division is its own heresy. Not because the theology itself is wrong, but because of what the division does to the body.

The next big shift comes with Irenaeus, a Christian apologist writing in the second century. He wrote an entire work called Against Heresies, and in it he uses "heretic" to describe people, not just a choice. He's responding to Gnosticism, a belief system that was gaining ground and that fundamentally undercut who Jesus was, particularly by denying the physical resurrection and treating the body as bad and the spirit as the only thing that mattered. That's not just a difference of opinion on a secondary issue. It's a denial of something the New Testament insists on repeatedly: that there will be a physical resurrection, that the body matters. Irenaeus wasn't calling someone a heretic because they disagreed on church polity or how often to take communion. He was calling out a belief that, if followed to its conclusion, undid the core of who Jesus was.

That distinction matters, because it's where I think the modern church has gone off the rails with this word. If you're a Lutheran and your neighbor is Southern Baptist, and you each think the other's theology is a little off, you're both heretics in the Josephus sense. You've both made a choice, joined a camp, a "sect." But that's not the same thing Irenaeus was talking about. And it's definitely not how the word gets used in most online Christian content today, where "heretic" gets slapped on anyone with a different read on same-sex attraction, or the role of women in church leadership, or a hundred other debated questions. Those are real disagreements with real stakes, but disagreeing on them doesn't put someone in Irenaeus's category of denying the resurrection or the deity of Christ.

Here's where I land. If you still hold to Jesus as Lord, you're trying to live out his way in the world, you're walking in community with other believers, and you simply land somewhere different than the church down the street on a contested question, you're a heretic in the most basic, original sense of the word. So is everyone else. We've all made choices. We've all landed in some tradition or camp shaped by those choices. The danger zone isn't disagreement on contested issues, it's denying the core of who Jesus is and what he did. The Apostles' Creed, the Nicene Creed, that territory.

So if you've been carrying around the fear of that word, afraid that thinking differently makes you a heretic in some damning sense, I want to offer you a little relief. The pastor calling you that is just as much a heretic as you are, by the same definition, because he's made choices too, choices that put him in a camp different from the one down the street. Heresy just means a choice. We're all a little heretical. Maybe that's not the terrifying word we've made it out to be.

What would it look like to actually believe that, the next time someone tries to use that word against you?