Modern British Heresy

caption: A Trial for Heresy in an English Court during the Eighteenth Century . in  Footprints of the World's History,  William Bryan, Historical Publishing, 1891 Heresy is crime. Heresy is teaching or action within a Christian community which purports to be orthodox but which is formally rejected by competent authority after due process. It is a crime of misrepresentation. The harm that heresy does is comparable to the crimes of fraud or forgery: what had been presented and received as authentic turns out, on examination, to be fake and valueless. Heresy is an offence against the teaching of a church, promulgated within a jurisdiction adjudicated in a court and the offender is subject to punishment on a finding of guilt A court has five functions: to act on behalf of the whole community to encapsulate the issues in terms that are justiciable to determine the culpability of the offender to assign punishment on conviction to legitimate forceful action against a convicted offender

  The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy, John Henderson Henderson, J. B. (1998). The construction of orthodoxy and heresy: Neo-confucian, islamic, jewish and early christian patterns . Albany (N.Y.: State University of New York Press.)  Henderson is the William R. and Letitia Bell Endowed Professor , Co-ordinator of Chinese Studies , Department of History, Louisiana State University This book is a dizzying survey and analysis of orthodoxy and heresy across five religions and twelve hundred years, give or take.  I like the notion that the exercise “may be characterised as ‘the science of the error of others’” (p2) (citing Wasserstrom, Between Muslim and Jew, p.154) , but Henderson’s method is not scientific and is none the worse for it. It is historical, at a high level of abstraction, founded on an extensive and impressive range of reading and command of his materials. I did not see a general or abstract definition of heresy. Perhaps I missed it, but I hope not: I assert that heres