One of the most dangerous kinds of freedom: freedom in religious thought
This freedom has led many to atheism, or to setting up their own religious movements inside the Church! Or their freedom in interpreting the Bible has led them into heresy. This is especially true when the “ego” gets involved, and the one who has strayed takes pride in his mistaken idea and clings to it, feeling it beneath his dignity to give up his false interpretation and his heresy.
All the many sects that have caused division in the Church are caused by the “ego.” You may argue with some of them, and the verses of the Bible are clear, yet they reject them.
* They do not submit to Scripture; they want to make Scripture submit to their own ideas.
Each one interprets the Bible according to his mood, and moods differ. So interpretations differ, and different sects arise.
Some find fulfilment in offering a strange new interpretation that no one has offered before. They crave this interpretation, thinking it presents them as clever, thoughtful and innovative. The Church then gets busy answering them, and they take pleasure in the fact that the Church is busy with them. It is the “ego” that makes them deviate so as to stand out and become famous in the field of knowledge, which Scripture says “puffs up” (1 Corinthians 8:1).
* Each of them feeds his ego with the idea of being an intellectual leader, the author of a new idea.
He doesn’t have ordinary thinking like everyone else, but new and original thinking, even if it is heresy! And what is heresy if not that its author has invented a new idea outside what is accepted? This innovator, out of love for himself, is pleased when people say he is the author of such-and-such an idea, the founder of a new teaching that some follow! And if you ask him why he doesn’t follow the Church’s accepted teaching, he answers that he is a thinker offering ideas for others to benefit from.
And so, loving himself, he destroys himself. For he resists the Church, and the Church resists him, and it may even cut him off from its membership because of his heresy.
Father Gerard Abi Saab
