Unity in Christ: Why Your Heresy Doesn't Define You

You just found out you’re a heretic. Welcome to the club — it includes every Christian who has ever lived.

The quiz you took proved something important: there is no combination of answers that escapes condemnation. Every position on the Trinity, on Christ’s nature, on salvation, on Scripture, on hell — every single one has been condemned or contested by some council, confession, or authoritative body in Christian history.

So what do we do with that?

The Theological Triage Spectrum

Not all disagreements are created equal. Christians have always recognised — even when they’ve been bad at practising it — that some beliefs are closer to the centre than others. Think of it as a spectrum:

• Essential — Core to the gospel. Denial puts you outside the faith entirely.
• Unambiguously right — Affirmed across virtually all traditions and centuries.
• Ambiguously right — Majority position, but serious Christians disagree.
• Silent — Scripture and tradition don’t clearly settle the question.
• Ambiguously wrong — Minority position, but with real scriptural support.
• Unambiguously wrong — Rejected across virtually all traditions and centuries.
• Fatal — Denial of something so central that the NT authors themselves call it out.

Most of the “heresies” this quiz flags fall somewhere in the middle of that spectrum. They’re positions where thoughtful, faithful Christians have landed on different sides for two thousand years.

What Scripture Calls Essential

The New Testament is surprisingly restrained about what it treats as non-negotiable:

“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.” — 1 Corinthians 15:3–4

“If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” — Romans 10:9

“Repent and be baptised every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” — Acts 2:38

“Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” — Acts 16:31

Notice what’s not there. No mention of homoousios. No metaphysics of the Eucharist. No position on predestination vs. free will. No theory of atonement. The earliest Christian confession was three words: Jesus is Lord.

What Scripture Calls Fatal

The NT authors do draw some lines — but they’re broader than most creeds suggest:

“Every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not from God.” — 1 John 4:3

“If anyone is preaching to you a gospel contrary to the one you received, let him be accursed.” — Galatians 1:9

“If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” — 1 Corinthians 15:17

The NT authors cared deeply about the resurrection, the lordship of Jesus, and the reality of the incarnation. They were not particularly interested in the philosophical frameworks that later councils would develop to explain these realities.

The Call to Unity

Here is what the NT authors were intensely interested in — what they wrote about far more than doctrinal precision:

“I appeal to you, brothers, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same judgment.” — 1 Corinthians 1:10

“Make every effort to keep the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace. There is one body and one Spirit — just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call — one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all.” — Ephesians 4:3–6

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” — John 17:20–21

“Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves.” — Philippians 2:3

“Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.” — Colossians 3:13–14

“Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you, in order to bring praise to God.” — Romans 15:7

“Finally, all of you, be like-minded, be sympathetic, love one another, be compassionate and humble.” — 1 Peter 3:8

The sheer volume of “unity” passages in the NT dwarfs the passages about doctrinal correctness. Paul, who could be ferocious about false teaching, also wrote that the greatest thing is love, and that without it, all knowledge is nothing (1 Cor 13:1–3).

The Key Insight

We must not mistake the means for the end.

Doctrine is a means — a way of describing the God we worship, the Christ we follow, the Spirit who empowers us. It matters because truth matters. But truth is the means — God himself is the end. We are not saved by having the right theology. We are saved by the one our theology attempts to describe.

The labels “heretical” and “condemned” describe the consensus of a particular community at a particular time and place. What was orthodox in Constantinople in 381 was heretical in Geneva in 1559. What was condemned at Orange in 529 is the default assumption in most evangelical churches today. If the line keeps moving, perhaps the line was never the point.

This doesn’t mean doctrine doesn’t matter. It means doctrine serves something greater than itself.

Which of Your Fellow Christians…

Think about the people sitting next to you in church. Some of them hold views this quiz flagged as heretical. They worship the same Jesus. They serve the same communities. They read the same Scriptures. They pray to the same God.

Could you worship alongside them? Could you call them brother or sister?

The early church was stunningly diverse. Jewish Christians and Gentile Christians. Those who ate meat sacrificed to idols and those who refused. Those who observed the Sabbath and those who didn’t. Paul’s advice was not “figure out who’s right and excommunicate the others.” It was: “Accept one another, then, just as Christ accepted you” (Romans 15:7).

The Invitation

If we profess to follow Jesus as our Lord, let us put aside our arguments, our arrogance, and our judgment. Let us seek truth with gentleness and humility, in love and unity, as fellow followers of Christ.

The truth has nothing to fear from honest disagreement. The gospel was never a doctrinal exam — it was an invitation into relationship with the living God. And that relationship is big enough to hold all of us: the modalists and the Trinitarians, the Calvinists and the Arminians, the Catholics and the Protestants, the certainty-seekers and the mystery-dwellers.

Everyone who took this quiz got flagged by someone. That’s not a bug — it’s the point. If every Christian is someone else’s heretic, maybe we should hold our labels more lightly and hold each other more tightly.