How did you get to be heterodox??
*I'm* orthodox; it's everyone else who's out of line...
Sounds arrogant, but I actually do think that way. Certainly, it is "right-thinking" to think differently (hetero) from condemnatory, law-based religion. The following is a bit rambly, so feel free to ask for clarification, assuming of course that anyone even makes it to the end.
I was raised like Van, in an entirely secular household with no religious praxis *at* *all*. No creche at Christmas, not even a star or angel at the top of the tree. Easter was the Easter-bunny, period; Sunday was indistinguishable from Saturday except the shops were closed. At bedtime we went to bed -- no prayers; at mealtime we sat down and ate -- no tablegrace. There was one bible in the house -- the one my mother was awarded at her confirmation (after which she never went to church again except to be married) and she kept it in a cupboard with some other clutter and keepsakes. In Ontario where I went to school for two years, we recited the Lord's prayer and the pledge to the flag, and sang a hymn and O Canada before school. I could rattle off the words of the Lord's Prayer as easily as I could rattle off "Peter Peter Pumpkin Eater" -- and it made the same amount of sense -- and I thought "Wenny Kometh" was the name of somebody who could make jewels.
My imagination was starving. When we moved back to Alberta leaving behind my gifted Ed. program (they didn't call it that back then), and sticking me in a mainstream public school with children who were a year older than me and more than an academic year behind me, my spirit starved even more. I began to think about death and suicide. I was 8.
Pascal's wager a la an 8-year-old: "If I die tonight, I won't have to go to school tomorrow. I won't be harassed, bored, and resented. By definition, that will be heaven, whether the Christians are right or wrong. Given that heaven therefor exists, it is reasonable to consider the existence of God, too. Thinking about -- dwelling in the childish awareness of -- that God comforts me so I can face the next day." Jesus was irrelevant, but God bore me from angst to angst on the palm of his hand.
I read every fantasy, science fiction, and historical novel I could get my hands on. Didn't matter if it was Christian or not (obviously). I read copiously about Wiccan ideas (nearly everything Andre Norton wrote is a Wiccan metaphor at some level), Thomas Costain, Omar Khayyam, the life of Siddharta, Mallory, Tennyson's Arthurian cycle, Marvel and DC comics, McCaffrey, Tolkein. I filled my mind with colour, texture, ritual, adventure and poetry. I knew I could get those things for real in church, but I physically couldn't get there, even if I could have faced my mother's contempt for the idea.
We moved to a small bedroom-community outside of Vancouver, I met Baptist schoolfriends who told me I was going to hell because I didn't believe in the bible. They knew the bible was truth because the bible says it's the word of God. Well, I didn't know Jesus, but I did know circular reasoning when I saw it, so I put a mental checkmark beside the Christian=Idiot equation in my head; and went on casting spells, illuminating detailed maps of Middle-Earth, and reading Teilhard de Chardin.
The day after I graduated from highschool I grew up enough to step out from under mother's thumb. I started going to Church to get my smells & bells, chanting and ritual. I read the BCP cover to cover including all the rubrics and prefaces. After a couple years, I bought a Bible (the Oxford Study Edition of the New English Bible with Apocrypha -- still the best translation I've experienced) and started reading *it* cover to cover (starting at Genesis). Do you have any idea how many things "everybody knows" the bible says -- that just aren't in there? I read scraps of the Fathers, too, and took the church catechism from the cathedral Dean and Archdeacon (a former and a future dean of our Anglican Seminary -- both *very* well-educated religious scholars). They never tried to cram anything illogical into my head, either.
This was the time when the Church was facing up to women's call to the priesthood. Liberation theology -- Gustavo Gutierez and Mary Daly -- was the issue of the day; again I read copiously. Liberation theology challenges the worldly authority of church hierarchies, popular interpretations of scripture, and the misuse of scripture in cultural imperialism. But it presents those challenges from a responsible grounding of Scripture, Reason and Tradition. Wherever scholarship is valued, that approach must be considered "orthodox".
I spent so much time with God and the Church, that I caught "Jesus". This is the reason that the RD board arguments of "can you prove it" bore me. I can't prove that any of *you* are real, especially since I know you only through an encoding of high and low voltages coming in through my ethernet port. You could all be figments of software, or Dogbert's 'net personae. I know Jesus/God the same way I know you -- as an utterly subjective set of experiences. Yes, I sometimes wonder if God is real -- but I much more frequently wonder if the people I meet on the 'net are real.
Bottom line: My "heterodox" ideas come primarily from the Bible, the Tradition of the Church, and a daily participation in the living faith. Not one of the religious scholars I dealt with ever called my ideas heretical or found them to conflict with the fundamental tenets of the faith. As I understand them, those tenets are:
A personal relationship with God...
-----------------------------------and no-one else gets to define for me what that relationship looks like -- it's *personal*). By definition, since Jesus is the Person of God that *relates*, a personal relationship with God equates to a relationship with Jesus whether you call Him by that name or not. This is my understanding of the phrase "No man cometh unto the Father, but by me." One can't force a relationship one doesn't feel, so there's no way one can "choose to believe", and no way to hold the non-believer culpable. This is my understanding of "Sola Gratia" -- which is a perfectly orthodox tenet.
Membership in the universal community of all believers
--------------------------------------------------with heavy emphasis on *universal*, meaning NO drawing lines around who's in and who's out, 'cause belief is *personal*, remember? This universality is the essence of Catholicism, which is why I *don't* acknowledge the Roman Church's right to co-opt that term unto itself. It's also why I won't "join" my local Lutheran church -- there's only One Church to join, and I've joinedit. This is also why I value "doctrine" (the growing understanding of the body as a whole), over "dogma" (the official formulation of doctrine by the bishops of the church). Doctrine is process and consensus: God continuously guides the body to improve it. Dogma is static, and therefor calcifies whatever error prevailed in the Doctrine at the time the dogma was formulated. This is how I accept the orthodox doctrine of "the Communion of the Saints".
The adequacy of Scripture
-------------------------*not* meaning that Scripture is literal and infallible, or that it obviates revelation through tradition and reason, but that it stands independent of its interpretations and assumptions. Meaning that I *don't* need to buy in to some culturallyaccepted interpretation that's not explicitely mandated by the text, and certainly *not* because "Pastor (or the Magisterium) said so". This is my understanding of Sola Scriptura -- again, very orthodox.
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