Christian heresy in the modern era

Although less common than in the medieval period, formal charges of heresy within Christian churches still occur. Key issues in the Protestant churches have included modern biblical criticism, the nature of God, and the acceptability of homosexual clergy. The Catholic Church, through the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, appears to be particularly concerned with academic theology.

In modern times, formal heresy has become largely an internal, professional issue for most Christian churches. Before and during the English Reformation, actions for heresy could be brought against both clergy and laity, and could be brought by the national established church against a minority faction or new sect. Since the late seventeenth century, active persecution of one denomination by another has largely ceased, and dissenting groups have been free to split off from the mother church and establish new denominations. Different denominations are free to craft their own interpretation of Christianity, and although each may consider itself to be the "one true faith", they usually avoid open criticism of one another. Doctrinal discipline has become a matter internal to each denomination, and has increasingly focused on the pastoral and academic clergy, as the professional spokespersons for the denomination. Within the Anglican and Methodist traditions, cases of heresy, formal discipline or dismissal on grounds of theological doctrine have tended to focus on parish clergy. In the Presbyterian, Southern Baptist and Lutheran traditions, most cases have involved professors of theology at denominational seminaries.

The subject matter of such actions has changed considerably over the past century. Cases between 1900 and 1970 generally focused on the conflict between modern biblical criticism and the "fundamentals" of the faith; dissidents were most often accused of rejecting the inerrancy of the Bible, the virgin birth, the resurrection, and other doctrines. Thus, in the first three decades of the 1900s, there were a number of such cases in the Presbyterian Church which led to its eventual split into fundamentalist and liberal branches. In the 1950s and 1960s, similar battles were fought in the seminaries of the Southern Baptist Church in the United States. Since the 1970s, cases of formal discipline or dismissal have been infrequent and there has been a noticeable shift in the type of issue that attracts attention: cases now tend to focus on questions concerning the nature of God and the divinity of Christ (Ray Billington in 1971, Anthony Freeman in 1994, Andrew Furlong in 2002) or the acceptability of gay clergy (Righter in 1996, Stroud in 2001).

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