What did it mean when the Catholic Church declared heretics "anathema"?
Once upon a time the Catholic Church had a rite for the excommunication of heretics that involved ringing a bell, closing a book, and snuffing a candle. It’s where we get the expression “bell, book, and candle.” Very few Catholics were ever excommunicated under this rite, fewer as century succeeded century, and so in 1983, John Paul II abrogated it when he revised the Code of Canon Law. No one is getting excommunicated by bell, book, and candle anymore. In any case, whenever you see the expression in Church documents “If anyone should say x, let him be anathema,” it’s a reference to this rite.1 (You can find the rite, with an English translation of the key part, here.)
What an anathema does not mean is that the excommunicated person is damned. The Church has no power, and never claimed the power, to make any such judgment. Damnation, in Catholic teaching, can only happen after you die and comes of one’s free choice not to repent (cf. CCC 1033, 1037). The Church has never claimed to know who is in Hell. But the view that “anathema” means “damnation” is especially strong, and the influential Calvinist pastor Dr. John MacArthur expresses it especially strongly:
The Council of Trent said if anyone says the blessed apostle Peter was not constituted by Christ our Lord, prince of all apostles and visible head of the church, a primacy of honor and true jurisdiction, let him be anathema. So you’re damned if you assault the priesthood and you’re damned if you assault the papacy of Peter. … [T]he Council of Trent pronounced a hundred or more damnations on anybody who questioned anything about the Catholic Church.
Part of the trouble is a misunderstanding of the Greek word ἀνάθεμα — particularly in Galatians 1:8, although it appears multiple times in the New Testament and the Septuagint.2 The usual translation is “accursed.”
Rom. 9:3. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race.
1 Cor 12:3. Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says “Jesus be cursed!” and no one can say “Jesus is Lord” except by the Holy Spirit.
1 Cor. 16:22. If any one has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed.
Gal. 1:8. But even if we, or an angel from heaven, should preach to you a gospel contrary to that which we preached to you, let him be accursed.
When the Catholic Church pronounces an anathema, it borrows the formula directly from Gal. 1:8. But does it mean that you have been damned? Not at all. In fact, the definition of ἀνάθεμα in Strong’s Greek Concordance (Strong’s 331) expressly states that it is a form of excommunication. ἀνάθεμα, Strong’s says, is “a (religious) ban or (concretely) excommunicated (thing or person).” The Catholic Encyclopedia3 reiterates:
In the New Testament anathema no longer entails death, but the loss of goods or exclusion from the society of the faithful. … At an early date the Church adopted the word anathema to signify the exclusion of a sinner from the society of the faithful; but the anathema was pronounced chiefly against heretics.
So how does someone like Dr. MacArthur end up making this mistake? Partly it’s a false assumption that the word accursed always means damned. But it doesn’t. According to Baker’s Evangelical Dictionary of Biblical Theology, “the root word [of cherem]4 meant ‘to separate,’ ‘shut off.’ ” You can be separated in different senses and degrees. You can be separated from the Church (excommunication), or you can be separated from salvation (damnation). Jesus clearly uses the word “accursed” in Matt. 25:41 to mean “damned” (“Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire”), but the Greek word here is κατηραμένοι, kateramenoi — not anathema.
It doesn’t help that some translations of the Bible botch ἀνάθεμα. For example, the NIV renders Gal. 1:8 “Let them be under God’s curse,” which would certainly make a person imagine Hellfire and brimstone. The Amplified Bible reads “Let him be condemned to destruction.” “We or he would be damned” says the Aramaic Bible in Plain English. God’s Word Translation and the NET say “condemned to Hell.”
That is a highly questionable rendering of what St. Paul had in mind:
According to the Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (Cross & Livingston, 1983, p. 50): “St. Paul uses the word to denote separation from the Christian community inflicted for sins such as preaching a gospel other than his (Gal. 1.8 f.) or for not loving the Lord (1 Cor. 16.22), whereas in other passages it simply means malediction (e.g. 1 Cor. 12.3).”
According to the New International Dictionary of the Christian Church (Douglas, 1974, p. 39): “The NT use of the word implies exclusion, being banned, rather than complete extinction (Rom. 9:3; 1 Cor. 16:22, lect. vid.; Gal. 1:8f.; cf. 1 Cor. 12:3; Acts 23:14). The early church expanded the biblical meaning to make it synonymous with excommunication.”
According to Protestant theologian John Gill, in his Exposition of the Entire Bible, the proper sense of “anathema” is “excommunication out of the Church.”
It’s true that some Protestant commentators think that any sense of the word other than “damnation” is foreign to the New Testament. Let’s stipulate that for the sake of argument. However one understands the biblical text, the Catholic Church’s use of the word “anathema” is always descriptive of excommunication and nothing more. It can’t mean “damned” if the person using it doesn’t mean “damned” by it.
Addis’s Catholic Dictionary (1887) says: “The Church has used the phrase ‘anathema sit’ from the earliest times with reference to those whom she excludes from her communion either because of moral offences or because they persist in heresy. … Neither St. Paul nor the Church of God ever wished a soul to be damned. In pronouncing anathema against willful heretics, the Church [merely] declare[s] that they are excluded from her communion.”
Hunter’s Outlines of Dogmatic Theology (vol. 2, 1896, p. 400, ff.) says: “In the language of the Church, the phrase, ‘Let him be Anathema,’ is used in the same manner by St. Paul, and is a form of assigning the penalty of excommunication for an offense. … [But N]o anathema or other act of a human judge can take away the grace of God from the soul, if by any error the judgment has been pronounced against an innocent man.”
Fr. John Hardon’s Modern Catholic Dictionary (Doubleday, 1980, p. 24) defines anathema as “An ecclesiastical censure by which one is more or less excluded from communication with the faithful.”
An enterprising person may say at this point: But Alt! The rite of excommunication, which you yourself link to, expressly says: “[W]e judge him condemned to eternal fire with Satan and his angels and all the reprobate.” That’s damnation, even if the Church says otherwise!
I say such an objection isn’t enterprising enough, since it leaves out the rest of the sentence:
…all the reprobate so long as he will not burst the fetters of the demon, do penance, and satisfy the Church.
The “so long as” is important. So long as you are alive, repentance is possible. You can’t be damned unless you persist obstinately in sin until the end. And then it’s your own free will that damns you, not the Church. This passage does no more than recognize the reality of where sin unrepented of will lead.
We forget, in the pluralist world we live in, how grave heresy is. Heresy is the obstinate rejection of a truth revealed by God. To reject revelation is inevitably to separate yourself from the God who revealed it. Even non-Catholics are obligated to seek the truth to the best of their ability.
At the same time, the Catholic Church can only bind its own members to what it teaches, and it can only excommunicate its own members. The Catholic Church can’t excommunicate John MacArthur, since it has no jurisdiction over John MacArthur. He is far more offended than he ought to be with a decree that (1) is not what he claims it is; (2) no longer exists in canon law; (3) does not apply to him anyway.
You can find the rite, with an English translation of the key part, here. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, this rite of excommunication was instituted by Pope Zachary in the eighth century.
The Septuagint is a 3rd/2nd c. B.C. translation of the Old Testament into Greek and was a standard version during the early centuries of Christianity.
Note that the Catholic Encyclopedia was published in 1907, before the current revision to Canon Law abolished excommunication under anathema. Its statement that “Anathema remains a major excommunication which is to be promulgated with great solemnity” is therefore out of date.
“Cherem” is the Hebrew word which is translated “anathema” in the Septuagint.