94: What Really Makes Someone a Heretic?

I'm Eddie Lawrence and this is Ready for Eternity, a podcast and blog for inquisitive

Bible students. Have you ever heard someone call another Christian a heretic?

Maybe it was a teacher who changed his mind about the end times. Perhaps it was a theologian who questioned a popular doctrine.

Maybe it was someone in your own church who asked the wrong question out loud.

Christians throw the heretic label around a lot and it lands hard.

It can end ministries, split churches, and leave people wondering if they're even saved.

But what does the word really mean? And more importantly, who gets to decide who is or is not a heretic?

A heretic, in the most basic sense, is someone who holds an unbiblical belief that is so egregious that it undermines their very salvation.

It's not someone who disagrees with your tradition. It's not someone who reads a passage differently than your pastor does.

It is someone whose belief puts them outside the faith entirely.

That sounds serious, and it is. But here's the thing. The New Testament gives us a very specific list of what actually qualifies as heresy.

And that list is a lot shorter than many people may think. In December 2025,

Kirk Cameron, a lifelong evangelical and well -known apologist, said on his podcast that he leans toward annihilationism.

Annihilationism is the view that the lost are ultimately destroyed and burned up in hell rather than consciously tormented forever.

The response was immediate. Prominent leaders called Cameron a heretic.

The controversy went viral across Christian social media within days. But here's what

Cameron actually said. He said, And I believe in hell.

I believe in judgment. I have not denied the authority of Scripture.

He wasn't questioning whether hell exists. He was asking what the

Bible says happens there, and for how long. It's a question Christians have debated for centuries.

Apologist Wes Hough, who personally holds to the traditional eternal conscious torment view, responded on X with a pointed observation.

Hough said, This is, with all due respect, ridiculous.

While the position may be unorthodox, it is not heresy.

Hough is right, and the reason he's right is simple. The New Testament never puts the precise mechanism of hell's punishment on its list of non -negotiables.

Well, what is that list, you may ask? The blog article that accompanies this podcast episode has a table which lists all the categories that the

New Testament says are disqualifying beliefs. We'll call this table 1.

I'm not going to read the entire table. You can take a look at it on the blog. I'll put a link in the episode description.

But let me give you the highlights. The denial of the incarnation is a heresy.

Claiming that Jesus did not come in the flesh identifies one as a deceiver and antichrist.

The denial of Jesus as the Messiah. Denying that Jesus is the

Christ is tantamount to denying the Father as well. Denial of the resurrection.

Failure to confess Jesus as Lord. Belief in or teaching a different gospel.

Anyone who preaches a distorted gospel, including the addition of mosaic law observance for justification, stands accursed.

False teachers promoting such distortions are heretics. Notice what's on that list.

It's all about Jesus, who he is, what he did, and what he requires.

The incarnation, the resurrection, his lordship, and also the gospel itself.

These are the lines that the New Testament draws in the sand. Cross them and you've left the faith.

Stay inside them and you're a Christian, even if you disagree with your denomination on a dozen other things.

But belief is only half the picture. And here's where a lot of modern churches go quiet.

The New Testament doesn't stop at belief. It pairs that Christological core with an equally serious set of behavioral expectations.

Titus chapter 1 verse 16 puts it bluntly, saying that some people profess to know

God, but deny him by the way they live. The New Testament treats persistent, unrepentant behavior as its own form of denial.

It's not just what you believe that matters. It's what your life shows about who your real

Lord is. And that gives us a second table, with a second word to go with it.

Table two is disqualifying lifestyles, behavior, and practical apostasy.

So again, this table can be viewed on the blog, but I'll hit the highlights.

Persistent sexual immorality. The sexually immoral will not inherit the kingdom of God.

Idolatry, sorcery, or occult practice. Idolaters and those who practice sorcery are excluded from the kingdom and face the second death.

Hatred, or murder. Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer, and no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.

Greed, love of the world, materialism. Covetousness is equated with idolatry.

If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. We can't serve both

God and materialism. Divisiveness. A divisive person who persists after a couple of warnings is self -condemned.

Sins of omission, or failure to show mercy. In Matthew 25, we read about the sheep and the goats judgment, and they are condemned not for active evil, but for failure to act.

Not feeding the hungry. Not visiting prisoners. Faith without works of mercy is dead.

So the New Testament gives us two ways to fall outside of saving faith.

The heretic departs at the level of belief. The hypocrite, that's the second word, the hypocrite affirms the right beliefs, but lives in persistent contradiction to them.

Jesus saved his sharpest words for the second category. He said, not everyone who says to me,

Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven. Matthew 7, 21. He wasn't talking about people with bad theology.

In context, he was talking about people whose lives told a different story than their confession.

Two categories, two tables, and both matter equally.

But here's where it gets uncomfortable. The church took this functional set of non -negotiables and spent 15 centuries expanding the belief column while quietly neglecting the behavior column.

After Constantine made Christianity the empire's official religion in the 4th century

AD, heresy stopped being a pastoral concern that was handled at the community level, and it became a political and legal category with imperial teeth.

Leaders called councils, factions maneuvered for power, and the winning side labeled the losers heretical regardless of whether they violated anything the

New Testament considers essential. The story of Athanasius of Alexandria makes the point well.

Athanasius is now celebrated as a hero of orthodoxy. He's the man who defended the full divinity of Christ against Arianism.

But he was exiled repeatedly at the whim of various emperors.

At several points during his lifetime, his position was the declared heresy, and at other times was official orthodoxy.

His theology didn't change. The emperors did. That should make us cautious about treating any council declaration as the final word on who's in and who's out.

Meanwhile, leaders ignored the behavior column whenever it proved inconvenient.

Church councils declared men heretics for using the wrong Greek terminology, while those same councils included bishops living in ways that Table 2 would disqualify entirely.

Medieval papal history makes the point loudly enough that it needs no elaboration.

The pattern is consistent. The church policed belief aggressively and behavior selectively, and usually along whatever lines protected the people currently in power.

Regrettably, the Protestant situation doesn't differ that much. The Reformation asked exactly the right question.

That question was, by what authority does anyone define orthodoxy beyond the

Bible? But it didn't take long for Protestant traditions to rebuild the same machine they had just dismantled.

Only the weapons changed. Instead of exile and property seizure, the tools have become deplatforming, lost speaking invitations, coordinated social media pressure, and seminary blacklists.

The power to destroy a person's livelihood and reputation is real power, even without an emperor's signature.

Disagree with the tribe and you might find yourself on the wrong end of a heresy accusation that the

New Testament doesn't even authorize. The behavior column stays just as neglected as it was in the medieval church.

A pastor can hold all the right tribal positions on secondary issues while living in patterns of behavior that the

Bible treats as kingdom disqualifying, and it attracts far less scrutiny than a scholar who reaches the wrong conclusion, say, about the age of the earth.

The selectivity is not random. It follows the same logic it always has.

Enforce the standards that protect institutional power, and quietly set aside the ones that don't.

Here's the bottom line. The New Testament's standard is both stricter and simpler than what church history has made of it.

Stricter because it takes the behavior column seriously in ways the church has repeatedly failed to.

It's simpler because the belief column is a short practical list, not a deep dive into philosophical hair splitting.

So, heretic or hypocrite? The New Testament has clear criteria for both.

The question worth sitting with is which column your own tradition works hardest to enforce, and whether the