Fr. Thomas M. Pastorius
March 16, 2014
Spiritual Ponderings
Spiritual Randomness
Heresies About God

Into our third week of Spiritual Randomness and the topic today is different heresies (or bad thinking and beliefs) when it comes to creation and God. These six heresies are addressed in the Catechism paragraph 285. I would like to expound on them a little bit more.

1. Pantheism
The easiest way to define pantheism is to simply put in a mathematical formula god=the universe/creation. People who believe in Pantheism believe that God is not just intimately connected to the universe but is the universe as the world grows so does God. As Catholics we believe that the Holy Trinity holds the universe in being but the Holy Trinity is not the universe. The Blessed Trinity existed before the world began and will exist after the world ends. This is important because it shows us that creation was a free loving act of the will of God and not something that God was forced to do in order to grow. God is so totally self-sufficient that He does not need creation. He chooses however to love us and that is awesome.

2. Emanation from God and returns to God
I am not sure if I exactly know what this heresy is but it sounds like creation is a sort of divine waste product like sweat from an athlete and the further the sweat gets from the source the less pure it becomes. The Church rejects this for at least three reasons. The first is that the world is created out of love, the second is it negates God’s free will saying that God had to create the world as an athlete creates sweat, and finally it could lead to the creation of castes and discriminations based on race and social statutes.

3. Dualism and Manichaeism
Dualists and Manichaests believe that God and another entity are in battle for control of the universe. The earth is like a chest board and we are the pieces. The Church has always rejected this idea of explaining evil and instead evil is the result of free will when someone chooses the lesser of two goods.

4. Gnosticism
People who practice Gnosticism see the world because it is made up of matter to be bad and thus it must be escape. Often the way to escape this world is to possess some sort of secret knowledge. If you know this secret knowledge then you will go to heaven no matter what. The Church has always rejected this because we do not believe matter is bad. In fact John Paul II praises matter because it alone is capable of making the invisible visible and the Church has never believed that having a secret knowledge was the key to heaven but rather God’s grace and living a good life was.

5. Deism
Deists believe that God created the world like a clockmaker makes a clock. The clockmaker can then wind the clock up and set in motion and not worry about the clock anymore. This belief basically declares that God does not care for us and therefore we are on our own. As Catholics we refute this idea because we declare that God so loved the world that He sent His Son to save us (~John 3:16)

6. Materialism
The last of these heresies is materialism and that is the world has no beginning and has existed from all eternity. Even most scientists do not believe this because they are searching for the origin of the universe. The Church once again rejects this belief because we believe God has a loving plan and that plan involved a moment of creation and a moment of re-creation. So this means there was a time when the world did not exist.