Barth knows that heresy is important to dialogue with and for the church; it serves a useful function to help the church discriminate what is true in faith. Heresy is something very different from pure unbelief. Barth says "heresy is for faith an important factor -- which is not the case when it [faith] is present as pure unbelief. Because in heresy it [unbelief] is present as a form of faith, it must be taken seriously at this point, and there can and must be serious conflict between faith and heresy" (CD 1.1, p. 32). I'd like to argue that the ontology of the "Deism" in Moral Therapeutic Deism is the precise place where the heresy occurs, a heresy that ironically often presents itself as a "conservative Christianity".

Smith writes, "Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is about belief in a particular kind of God: one who exists, created the world, and defines our general moral order, but not one who is particularly personally involved in one’s affairs – especially affairs in which one would prefer not to have God involved. Most of the time, the God of this faith keeps a safe distance. . . . . God sometimes does get involved in people’s lives, but usually only when they call on him, mostly when they have some trouble or problem or bad feeling that they want resolved. In this sense, the Deism here is revised from its classical eighteenth-century version by the therapeutic qualifier, making the distant God selectively available for taking are of needs" (pp. 164-5).

Smith's choice of the word "deism" is unfortunate. In Deism God winds up the world and lets it go without any interaction. This is not what Smith describes. Rather than Deism, the God of MTD is a "relational God" who seeks to enter "relationship" with creation, especially individuals who are struggling with the physical and psychological demands of life. In this conception, God and creation share one together in one realm of Being. God is conceived as a "Really Big Powerful being" and we are comparatively weak, broken beings. But since God is a being like us (except infinitely bigger and better), God can interact with us when both God's will and our will allow the interaction to take place because we share the same medium.

It's like being able to talk on the telephone with someone else because a common network connects the two people talking. God becomes the "Loving Will" on the other side of the phone, always waiting for us to pick up our end of the line, and connect to God by so willing. If you care, Radical Orthodoxy calls this a "Univocity (One Voice) of Being", and traces it to shifts in medieval thought in Duns Scotus. Ultimately, it posits the Being that is shared between God and humanity as a particular understanding of Will, the will as "rational self-determination." Freedom, understood as the ability for rational self-determination, becomes very important for both God and humanity to share, as a precondition for ensuring that Being remains "authentically". Thus, we can see how liberal nation-state that supposedly protects such "freedom" (separated from the good except as individuals chose, as Kevin noted) presents itself as the true protector of Being -- ours and God's. The church becomes removed to a private realm of individual choice, and our bodies get handed over to the state.

Where is the heresy? Two very simple but profound shifts occur from Christian convictions: (1) God's will becomes separated from God's Triune nature. For Christians, God is not a powerful Will that can do whatever God decides that lies behind God as Father, Son, and Spirit. God IS Triune. As Triune, God's Will is found in the desire that the Father finds in the Son by the Spirit; that the Son finds in the Father by the Spirit; and that the Spirit finds in the Father and the Son. God's Will does not love; God's Will is Love, found in the pleasure of Eternal Giving and Receiving, the Eternal Difference that is God. God cannot not love, for as Eternally Triune, God is Love, a Love that always operates as Gift because it is never in response to any Lack. Only God is Necessary Being in the fact that God, as Triune, is Love. The True, Good, and Beautiful are seen as One in the simplicity of the Triune Love that is God. (2) Because of this, as beings we depend completely on this Love, but not as necessary, but as accidents, contingencies. Our being is not necessary -- only God IS. We only have being as we are in God. The being that we have, then, is not of the same "kind" as God's -- there is no medium that we share with God that allows us to "relate" to God, no common denominator that ties us together with God. This is what Christians have always asserted in understanding that God created all that is from nothing. We are only because first God IS, and therefore, we exist only as gift, pure gratuitous gift.

Of course, this means that we can't escape God, we can't get out of "relationship" with God. We can not be who we really are in God, but that's different. Nor can we escape the fact that God is Love. Freedom then is not rational self-determination, but the ability to be drawn in desire to our Source of Being, our Creator, to God in whom what is True, Good, and Beautiful are One, the One revealed to us sent by God the Father in Jesus Christ, God the Son, by the power of God the Spirit, One God. In our sin, God draws us into God's very Life in the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ, and thus, the people of God that is the church. It is here in Christ's body that we discover what is good, and what is beautiful, because both the Good and the Beautiful are revealed to us in the One who is the Truth. The Christian ontology thus supports the life of the church, that operates amidst but not of the misconstruals of reality that support the modern liberal nation-state. Only by rejecting heresy can we live truly.

Therefore, there is no way to recover a genuine sense of morality nor therapy (salvation) without being immersed in the Life that is God. It is only in the Love of God that we will discover the love of neighbor, and only in the love of neighbor that we can actualize that for which and by which we were created, Love of God.