Soulguard, do you know what heresy is?
Heresy is to contradict a church dogma.
But whether or not it is a sin was a question i had.
Gradually Learning!
:soapbox:
Heresy can be
implied by ambiguity, and it can be
inferred by presumption. Normally, there is the Church teaching and the Church receiving, but due to corruption, there is the Church being denied (heresy being implied by ambiguity) and the denial being accepted (heresy being inferred by presumption).
The Arian heresy erupted in the fourth century when one letter, the letter "i" was added to the middle of one word, making it ambiguous. Without the "i" the former word meant "of the same substance" or "consubstantial with," meaning the substance of Christ is the same substance of God the Father almighty.
It is a Greek word,
homoousios, and the imposter word was
homoiousios. The former means "of same substance" and the latter means "of like substance."
So, by way of translation into English, having "like" take the place of "same" ended up SAYING that Jesus Christ is similar to God, the extension of which is to believe that Jesus was not God. Saying that is saying a heresy, because, as you say, it contradicts a Church dogma, the dogma that Our Lord Jesus Christ is God.
Saying that Jesus is like God is heresy being implied by ambiguity.
Believing that Jesus is not God is heresy being inferred by presumption.
Notice that whether the intention of the initial vague implication may not be to invoke a heretical act on the part of the listener, the weakness of the ambiguity allows for the heresy to be presumed by the CHURCH RECEIVING, as it were, but since this is talking about ERROR it is more like the would-be faithful accepting a lie and by believing a lie, falling into heresy.
In our own time, the implicit denial of this dogma has erupted again with the NovusOrdo version of the so-called Nicene Creed, the words of which were changed in this NovusOrdo mockery of the Nicene Creed in various places, one of which is to remove the words "consubstantial with the Father" and to replace consubstantial with "one in being," to yield, "one in being with the Father," which is ambiguous. For while it is true that Christ shares a manner of being with the Father, it is not as we would expect it to be by our way of thinking as natural men.
The vagueness and imprecision is the whole problem here. What Christ shares with the Father (and the Holy Ghost, by the way) is the being of substance, yes, but it is not the being of persons. And this is a mystery that we cannot comprehend, but nonetheless, it is in the divine Revelation of God that this is true, and we are given to believe it.
It is a defined dogma. If we dare to disbelieve it and then speak this falsehood as what we believe, then we commit a heresy, and a sin, and it is an objective mortal sin, for which we could then end up spending eternity in hell. Since the ambiguity of
"one in being" spoken aloud inside a church by the entire congregation present (see thread on Dialogue Mass) leads unsuspecting souls into heresy and allows bad-willed souls to remain in their error without correction, it is just as pernicious as that Arian heresy of long ago, which was spread far and wide by the addition of one letter to one word.
Perhaps your question, soulguard, is better expressed with asking whether harboring a belief that is a contradiction to Church dogma carries the same moral culpability as does the act of pronouncing it?
Or, maybe whether it is necessary for someone
to know that believing and/or saying that Christ is not God is a mortal sin, in order for that person
to actually commit this mortal sin by believing and/or speaking this heresy?
These two questions are theological in nature. They come under the topic of moral theology.
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Topic: Theological question - Is sin heresy AND Is heresy sin? (Read 814 times)