The Gift of Apostates and Heretics

When I was sixteen, I met my first apostate. He wasn’t one then, but it wouldn’t take long before he became one. He was a former pastor and state-side missionary who had just lost two sons. Through an unlikely set of circumstances, we became friends, and I watched as he went from believing the Bible to going on a quest for “truth” and then to becoming an atheist.

It was the first time I had to come face-to-face with issues of eternal security and what apostasy really meant. I’ve always been a thinker, a philosopher, a theologian. I believe the Bible is true, and I want to understand all the ins and outs of how what it says works out in real life, as far as I can. This event and others kindled to a strong flame my desire to root out heresy and help people see why the Bible and classical Christianity works as a belief system, how it answers every question there is with not just a satisfactory answer but a life-giving one.

As a teenager and young adult, this fire often came across as harsh. I dismissed anyone who preached anything untrue as not worth listening to at all. I’m sure I offended my fair share of people in my goal of education. Then I learned that truth is best communicated through relationship rather than confrontation. But that’s a story for another time.

More recently, I’ve been thinking about the heresy of Andy Stanley and the apostasy of Joshua Harris. Neither are people that I ever had huge respect for in the first place, but they were always there on the periphery. In one of the internships I did, we had to read a book by Andy Stanley. It was not my favorite, but it wasn’t heretical, and it made good points that have stuck with me to this day. Joshua Harris' books were in my house growing up, though it was more my brother who read them than I did. Being a homeschooled kid on the fringe of fundamentalism, I felt a connection with him and his message.

Seeing what these two men now believe, my first response is to throw out everything they ever wrote or said. Why waste time studying the work of someone who ends up going off the deep end later in life? And I certainly can’t recommend anything by someone I know is heretical at points to anyone else to read or watch. What if they don’t have the same level of discernment and end up believing something that isn’t true?

But then we watched a video of Andy Stanley in my Adult Bible Fellowship (read “Sunday School with a cool name”). No heresy. And people found it helpful. Then I got to thinking again. Obviously, God can use anyone, right? Obviously, God does use people who are not totally in line with Him for all sorts of things. Just look at King Saul, Balaam, King Nebuchadnezzar, Pharaoh, and so many more! So how does that translate to God using people who end up either turning their backs on Him entirely or placing their own opinions about scripture over what God actually says?

I realized a couple of things. First, we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. If a teacher who ends up not finishing the race well has some good points in his or her earlier career, there should be no reason why we can’t use those same analogies or point people to their work. Even as I realized this, though, I still had this nagging feeling that told me it would be dangerous to send people willy-nilly to teachers I knew had issues.

That’s when I realized a second thing. We shouldn’t send anyone willy-nilly to listen to or watch any teacher, not really. Jesus said in Matthew 10 to “be as shrewd as serpents and as harmless as doves.” Like the Bereans in Acts 17, we should test everything we hear against scripture. We should also teach others to test everything and have open dialogue about anything we point them toward.

This led me to a third thing and fourth thought. No one is above heresy, at least unintentional heresy. No one teacher is going to get every single thing about Christianity right all the time. Not even me. It’s humbling to be honest with myself and acknowledge that, try as I might, I am almost certainly getting something wrong. And that’s a blessing. Heretics are a blessing. Apostates are a blessing. That fact that every bible teacher is probably wrong about something is a blessing. Because each one of those things reminds us where our focus and our faith should be.

It is easy to put people we respect on a pedestal. It’s easy to flick the switch in our minds and stop filtering what people say through the Word of God because we trust them and they’ve never let us down or said anything we disagreed with. Every time someone who we thought could be trusted comes out and says they don’t believe the Bible anymore is a reminder that we can’t allow ourselves to do that. We must continue (or start) to test every single thing we hear against what we know to be true, lest we be led away—either willing or unwittingly—from the truth.

Do learn what you can from heretics and apostates. Even more importantly, learn that the Bible is the backbone of our faith and learn what it says. We as American Christians have spent far too much time listening to teachers and traditions without confirming that what we hear is really in the Bible the way it was presented to us. We have to know the Word personally. We have to study on our own. We have to fact-check our pastors and podcasters. We are responsible for our own beliefs and knowledge. It's time we acted like it.