Competitive Inhibition

So I’ve been thinking about orthodoxy recently. Actually I’ve been thinking about the opposite of orthodoxy, heterodoxy. A blogger-friend recently posted about the need to repress bad theology, and while I agree that bad theology, or heterodoxy, is destructive to people and the church, I’m not sure that silencing them is the best solution.

The problem is that the church tends to value right doctrine over right practice, and when someone challenges the doctrine of the church, the church responds with rather poor practice. Here I’m thinking of John Calvin, who had a tendency of burning his nay-sayers at the stake. Even when we don’t strike up a match at the mention of a questionable doctrine, we often respond by either haranguing with unkind words or by closing them off from the conversation. At worse, we actively work to silence the questionable by disfellowshipping or not allowing their voice to be heard. These overt methods of dealing with what we consider wrong doctrines or ethical stances are problematic because they don’t allow for 1) the possibility of multiple interpretations, and 2) the subjective role of the interpreter.

Alexander Campbell in his plea for unity proposed that churches could unite over the “facts” of faith. For him, these facts would include things like the existence of God, the virgin birth of Jesus, and the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. He considered every other doctrine more subject and therefore a matter of interpretation. Thus, he thought churches could unite around the facts and be graceful to each other concerning the interpretive doctrines. These “facts” that were so important for Campbell are remarkably similar to the “rule of faith” of the church fathers which was later canonized in the Nicene Creed. I think that Campbell is correct that the heart of Christianity is centered around the facts, or the regula fidei of the church fathers. Other doctrines of the church are derivative from these central teachings.

So here’s my proposal. I would like to offer a metaphor for the way we should conceive of church doctrine and how to respond to heterodoxy.

In microbiology, I learned that there are natural bacteria that live on our bodies. They feed on the various oils and substances we excrete from our skin, as well as reside in the gut and consume the food that our bodies don’t use. These bacteria are good for us. The proliferation of these nonharmful bacteria crowd out the bad bacteria. For instance, this is why it is recommended to load up on acidophilus before taking a trip to Mexico; the acidophilus bacteria proliferate and help prevent more harmful bacteria from taking up residence in your gut and producing rather unpleasant effects. Anyhow, this concept of good bacteria preventing the residence of the harmful is called competitive inhibition.

Now for the metaphoric turn. If we conceive of the church as a body (I think that metaphor has been used before) then I think we can also conceive of Campbell’s “facts” as the food of the body. It is from the food of the central teachings that we have life as a church. Our interpretive traditions feed off of this food as well and while they don’t feed us as the central teachings do, they give us a certain odor and help prevent bad teaching from proliferating and possibly harming the body.

Okay, so no metaphor is perfect, but I think this metaphor does have particular use in the case of heterodox interpretations. Rather than silencing or condemning those interpretive stances which we don’t like, we should proliferate the good interpretations in order that the bad don’t have room to grow.