Heresy

Heresy

“Heresy has become fashionable,” writes author Alister McGrath, describing the modern surge of interest in repressed and forbidden Christian ideas. And so in Heresy, McGrath tells the history of the centuries-long struggle between religious orthodoxy and the beliefs and ideas that were considered too dangerous to be tolerated.

Who decided what was definitive and what was dangerous? And how were such decisions made? McGrath explores the emergence of the opposition between heresy and orthodoxy in the second century, which he sees emerging naturally out of a necessary process of theological exploration that occurred during the first five centuries of the Christian faith, known as the patristic age.

He outlines the early classical heresies that emerged during that era. Adherents of Marcionism, for example, sought to have Christianity make a clean and complete break from Judaism, while believers in Ebotionism saw Jesus as a merely human prophet squarely in the Jewish tradition. Docetism regarded Jesus as a wholly divine being who only appeared to be human; Valentinism, also known as Gnosticism, advocated secret knowledge as the key to eternal salvation.

McGrath also discusses a second set of later classical heresies that emerged after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire in the fourth century, including Arianism, which maintained that Jesus was a created being, without the same essence as God the Father; Donatism, which clashed with the Roman Church over the issue of corruption in the Church hierarchy; and Pelaginaism, which raised crucial questions regarding the concept of original sin.

McGrath explains how the early Church had quickly developed a universal desire for orthodoxy that was shared by the believers of these various doctrines, who viewed them not as subversive, but as correct belief. McGrath acknowledges that in the Middle Ages heresy became a tool for the elimination of those who posed a threat to papal authority. But during the classical period, he argues, various doctrines came to be regarded as heresies as the result of an emerging consensus within the Church, and not as an attempt by those in power to suppress ideas and impose an unpopular orthodoxy on an unwilling body of believers.

Today, in books by scholars like Elaine Pagels and novels like The Da Vinci Code, heretics are romanticized as brave challengers of authority and bringers of freedom. While McGrath points out that many of the heresies described in these books were at least as authoritarian as their orthodox rivals, he ultimately acknowledges that, as long as we are lured by secret knowledge and tempted to eat forbidden fruit, we are likely to continue what he calls “our love affair with heresy.”

Hardcover: 288 pages

Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers ( November 01, 2009 )

Item #: 36-4566

ISBN: 9780060822149

Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 x 0.706 inches

Product Weight: 15.0 ounces