Can Christians Promote Heresy?

Dear Ken Ham,

I got confused reading your latest blog post on Peter Enns (4/20/13). You claim that he promotes heresy, yet in your last paragraph you claim that you're not calling him a heretic. How do you promote heresy without being a heretic?

– T.K., Connecticut

Hello, T.K., and thank you for writing to Answers in Genesis. You raise an interesting question: Can a Christian sin and even sometimes spout heresy without being a heretic? It appears that Scripture answers this query in the affirmative.

Did not Paul condemn Peter (and Barnabas) of hypocrisy and teaching by example a works-based salvation, which was a form of heresy? Yet they obviously were not heretics but Christians—and Peter was appointed as an apostle.

Now when Peter had come to Antioch, I withstood him to his face, because he was to be blamed; for before certain men came from James, he would eat with the Gentiles; but when they came, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing those who were of the circumcision. And the rest of the Jews also played the hypocrite with him, so that even Barnabas was carried away with their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not straightforward about the truth of the gospel, I said to Peter before them all, “If you, being a Jew, live in the manner of Gentiles and not as the Jews, why do you compel Gentiles to live as Jews? We who are Jews by nature, and not sinners of the Gentiles, knowing that a man is not justified by the works of the law but by faith in Jesus Christ, even we have believed in Christ Jesus, that we might be justified by faith in Christ and not by the works of the law; for by the works of the law no flesh shall be justified. But if, while we seek to be justified by Christ, we ourselves also are found sinners, is Christ therefore a minister of sin? Certainly not! For if I build again those things which I destroyed, I make myself a transgressor.” (Galatians 2:11–18)    Continue at Ken Ham