Apostasy is the total and complete denial of the Christian faith. Heresy is more like the wolf in sheep's clothing. It nearly always is a distortion of the revelatory witness, maintaining an appearance of the truth while undercutting its meaning. Heresy distorts, re-interprets to the point of contradiction, or over-emphasizes one aspect of the mosaic to the point of reducing the faith to one dimension of it. Heresy is a caricature of the revealed faith.

All heretical dogmas are partial truths -- true in what they assert, false in what they deny or ignore.