Know the Heretics

What a wonderful short book about the main Heresies that arose in the early times of the developing Christian Church. I have read many different books on this subject over the years but found that this was one that I could quickly devour and then recommend to the many students and congregation members that I know would love to learn about this subject.

I think the "Know" series of books is a great way for small groups to go through a topic together and learn. After having read through this I'm going to get 10 copies for our small group and we are going to make this as our first study this fall. Some of the heresies that he writes about are well known and some not so much. But what is interesting is that all of these heresies started long ago but if you start to understand them you can see that they are still present in our culture today. Many people are being swayed away from the Bible and the true Gospel Message because they at times feel God is harsh. They just don't fully understand His nature.

But when you think God is harsh or cruel or mean then you have a tendency to try and soften the message or the text of scripture and that leads to false teaching and leading people astray.

If you have never read anything about the Heretics that confused the early church members then this wonderful little book is perfect for your primer on the topic.

Enjoy!

This book could be retitled, ‘The bluffer’s guide to early church history.’ Despite the slightly sensationalist title, this book doesn’t have a witch-hunting or hysterical tone, and points out that ‘most of those dubbed heretics were usually asking legitimate and important questions’. It goes through each of the main systems of thought in the early church that challenged orthodoxy, and particularly the doctrine of the Trinity – Judaisers, Gnostics, Marcion, Docetists, Mani, Sabellius, Arius, Apollinarius, Pelagius, Eutyches, Nestorius, Socinus – summarises their argument, tells a little of the story surrounding their movement, the orthodox response to the respective heresy, and some implications for today. The genius of this book lies in its conciseness – it manages to communicate some very complex and confusing philosophies in memorable phrases and relatively few words, and is a great book for anyone wanting to quickly get a handle on the core issues of doctrine in early church history. Highly recommended.

This book is not an exhaustive listing of all of the heresies out there, it is a sampling of the more major ones, with an explanation of the heresy, the history and the main person behind it, the orthodoxy response, the importance of the heresy and the response today and a list for further reading after each section.

The book was laid out in a very reader-friendly way.  Religious non-fiction can be dry, lengthy and boring.  This book managed to easily dodge each of those pitfalls.  

This was going to be a 4.5 star book, rounded down, BUT I realized that it earned a full five stars because it not only caused me to learn something, it ALSO led me down the rabbit hole of "I don't know anything about this thing, now I need to learn about it!".  So now I'm going to try to find out more about Original Sin.  It's not something that was focused on much when I was in Sunday School (not Catholic, so all I know is it's cause Adam and Eve fell by disobeying God.  Maybe that's all it is, but I don't know.)  Original Sin is a subject that was one of the contentions in a heresy and was the only heresy that I didn't fully understand the issue at hand.  So something requiring more study by me to be sure.  

So this book gave me what I was looking for, I learned more about something I didn't know that much about and it led me to further study.  

My thanks to NetGalley and Zondervan Academic for an eARC copy of this book to read and review.