Well we still some to have some "Anglicans" who believe that Scripture is the rule of all things simply and not the rule of all things necessary for salvation.

I would suggest that TULIP Calvinism is also a dead end.

I am looking for wrong scientific beliefs that we've already learned were wrong, rather than those the respondent is predicting will be wrong

By the "Queen of Sciences" (theology, or more broadly, Christian religion), same-sex behavior was judged a moral failing, or sin (though some Christians held to demon-possession, and still do).

Then Freud came along, and "scientifically" proclaimed the Invert Hypothesis (some sort of nurture failing---too much and/or too little---by one or both parents) was responsible for "deviant preference."

Wrong and Wrong.

Still building up the empirical data, but the evidence for a prenatal (if not genetic) orientation gets stronger and stronger.

[Personally, I'm most interested to see the teasing out, of the data, of the similarities and differences between gay and Trans people---as well as the interplay of Intersex conditions (and the way that various hormonal/morphological differences play out, more broadly, between XX and XY people). I know these lines of study have barely BEGUN, but I hope to live to see a lot of discoveries! :-)]

JC Fisher

I'm going to go with "it isn't a sensible question." We can all pick our pet causes where some large chunk of Christendom was persuaded to get its act together and agree with our personal views, but standing over and against all of this is the failure of the churches as a whole to establish a consensus since, oh, Chalcedon or so. And even then Arianism is still with us down at the local Kingdom Hall.

I'm personally convinced that church infallibility is demonstrably wrong and that scriptural inerrancy is untenable. I think I can give solid arguments for both positions which I suspect most people here would accept as reasonable and perhaps even convincing. But the fact that we cannot also convince the majority of Christendom is telling. And it's reasonable to assume that the same forces preventing a consensus on those issues afflict us as well.

"Is there theological stuff we have gotten wrong for long periods of time? Or is that simply not a sensible question?" No, I think this is a very sensible question. I don't think we've gotten the Big Items wrong (the Trinity, the Incarnation, etc.) but I do think we need constantly to seek a deeper understanding, and not just to parrot old formularies.

A moral-theological question that may need better re-examination and re-articulation is our theology of marriage and its "indissolubility." (This has de facto undergone a major shift in the last half-century or so, but for pastoral reasons not always articulated very well theologically.) For nineteen hundred years the Church took for granted -- or so it seemed -- a theology and a discipline about marriage to which we more recently have said, "Hey, wait a moment!" (And we are currently wrestling over a related issue of human relationships that we have "always" taken for granted. Hmm. I wonder what that might be?)

A further comment (related to a comment a couple of days ago about the Puritans and the Plymouth settlement, in which I referred to Charles Mann's "1491," which I am having fun reading): Scientists appear to fall into dogmatic traps almost as much as theologians! History suggests that the scientific world copes about as well with new hypotheses and discoveries as the theological world does with new approaches to biblical interpretation. None of us seem to like hard evidence very well....

Bill Moorhead, I must take issue with the assertion that the indissolubility was taken for granted. It was actively argued from scripture, an argument that one can certainly take issue with but which was and is defended in the face of its great personal and political inconvenience. The presenting issue about marriage at the moment isn't its permanence, but its evanescence; a woman is, I think, far more likely to be set aside than to be trapped, in which case the passage in which "let no one put asunder" appears is far more timely than the campaign against any misapplication of it.

Also, it's highly arguable how well we are doing in retaining agreement on the big things. As a mainline Protestant church we are still prone to producing clerics who do get the big things wrong; we are prone to the excess of interpreting "seeking deeper understanding" as calling for a kind of formulary iconoclasm, in which a sort of automatic apostasy is bred out of a rejection of the the old formulas for being formulaic.

And those very rejections are prone to being formulaic in themselves. It's interesting to read the responses to Thaler's call for ideas, if only for the very many people pointing out that the "flat earth" riff is itself a persistent wrong idea about the history of science. The biggest genuinely wrong idea, one which pops up throughout the responses, is the Aristotelian framework that dominated all western thought up into the Renaissance. And it should be worrying to us to the degree that we are touched by this framework-- not just because we are prone to being held captive to it, but because we are also prone to claiming that the supernatural isn't "like that" by analogy to natural order, when the truth is that without revelation we cannot tell one way or the other.

C. Wingate, I think your point is well taken -- in Biblical (as well as in most post-Biblical) times, the dismissal of a wife was clearly a great evil, particularly since a divorced woman would be almost completely without resources unless she had some family who would take her in. Divorce can still be a great evil today -- for men as well as for women. But we have a different understanding of and expectations for the marriage relationship, and abuse and misery are rarely if ever a lesser evil than divorce.

As for the "big things," of course there are people around who espouse what the tradition would identify as heresy; and so there always have been. But I hang out, in person and online, with folks who for the most part are "liberals" or "progressives," and as far as I can tell they all, like me, recite the Nicene Creed without crossed fingers.

Good point too about the "flat earth" riff. (I hear that, to save travel expenses and because of security, the International Flat Earth Society is planning to hold their next conference by satellite uplink.)

The other day I watched the movie "Agora," an interesting take on turn-of-the-fifth-century Alexandria. Hypatia is depicted as hypothesizing that the earth moves around the sun in an elliptical orbit -- though we'll never know, since none of her writings survived. (St. Cyril is depicted as a rotter, which he probably was, though a theologically orthodox rotter. Or not; it isn't clear that he would have accepted the Definition of Chalcedon had he lived that long.)

Have a good weekend and a blessed Advent!