The Uses and Abuses of Heresy
Heresy is inevitable—and useful to religious traditions.
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Endnotes
These include Arland J. Hultgren and Steven A. Haggmark, eds., The Earliest Christian Heretics: Readings from Their Opponents (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996); Everett Ferguson, ed., Orthodoxy, Heresy and Schism in Early Christianity (New York: Garland, 1993); and Charles S. Clifton, Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1992). The inevitability of heresy is traced in Maurice F. Wiles (Archetypal Heresy: Arianism Through the Centuries [Oxford/New York: Clarendon, 1996]); Robert M. Grant (Heresy and Criticism: The Search for Authenticity in Early Christian Literature [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1993]); and Malcolm Greenshields and Thomas Robinson, eds. (Orthodoxy and Heresy in Religious Movements: Discipline and Dissent [Lewiston: Mellen, 1992]). Hultgren (The Rise of Normative Christianity [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1994]) and C. FitzSimons Allison (The Cruelty of Heresy: An Affirmation of Christian Orthodoxy [London: SPCK, 1994]) affirm the normativity of traditional Christian teaching, while Gerd Lüdemann (Heretics: The Other Side of Christianity [Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1996]) and Alastair H.B. Logan (Gnostic Truth and Christian Heresy: A Study in the History of Gnosticism [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996]) take the side of those who lost out in the struggle with orthodoxy.