When is enough Enough

Michael Ovey, principal of Oak Hill College (Anglican Seminary) in London, responds to a question regarding error in the church:

Question: What are some of the consequences of a church, seminary or denomination tolerating false teachers?

Answer: This is a hard one to answer. Any church, seminary or denomination will have a range of views. Some of those views will be wrong. Nevertheless there are some views which are so wrong that tolerating them takes the church, seminary or denomination beyond a critical mass, so to speak. When that happens, I think it's clear that error multiplies and will not be confined simply to the original mistake, and at a more fundamental level the tendency is for the organization in question to stop seeking truth and answers but to rest content with the existence of conflicting opinions. In that way the search for truth is a casualty and I feel that that leads to an exponential growth in problems.

Question: Hilary of Poitiers said that 'Heresy lies in the sense assigned, not in the word written. The guilt is that of the expositor, not of the text.' What are the danger signs of this very thing happening in a minister's ministry?

Answer: I think the Hilary quote is brilliant. He also makes the point that a heretic uses the texts of Scripture but connects them in a way that the Scripture does not. Heretics do have an order, says Hilary (in respect of the Arian heresy), but the order is one that is imposed and is the heretic's own...."

p 180, 181 Risking the Truth by Martin Downes, 2009