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

Meandering through some heresy links (when I ought to have been concentrating on something else), I came across a significant discussion of heresy linked to the announcement of  The Journal of Controversial Ideas , to be published next year.  I recognise I'm late to notice them though, in mitigation, I've never worked in academia.  And conflict over the acceptability or toleration of ideas in American academia isn't my field or focus. However: The journal describes itself as a forum for careful, rigorous, unpolemical discussion of issues that are widely considered controversial, in the sense that certain views about them might be regarded by many people as morally, socially, or ideologically objectionable or offensive.  The aim of the journal is to enable people to publish ideas that they reasonably expect will be regarded by some as offensive, immoral, or dangerous. Authors may use a pseudonym, if they so choose.  ( here )  See the Heterodox Academy  ( wiki ). Universities

Index to theory pages <previous: Church as an imagined community I wish to tread gingerly here. It may be that Rene Girard's notion of sacrifice can shed some light on some cases of heresy. (Wiki: Rene Girard ) I don't pretend to understand Girard very deeply, though I have read some of his work, but I was taken by (a limited grasp of) his reconstruction of primitive sacrifice as a continuing - occasional - element in social relationships, not least in religion. My sparse summary is that, in circumstances of discontent, people look for someone to blame: a scapegoat ( Wiki ).  At times, in primitive societies, generalised discontent - whatsoever its cause - would become fixed on a particular individual: someone must be to blame for the mess we're in . This someone could be at the top or the periphery of the community, but either way the sense might grow that we'd all be better off without them. In this context, the key elements of sacrifice (as opposed to murder) were

Index to theory pages <Previous:  Criteria for inclusion on this site Each Church, and thence Christianity as a whole, is an imagined community   Imagined community Churches are imagined communities in the sense used in Benedict Anderson’s 1983 book on nationhood , Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism.  [ Wiki ] Just as a nation is imagined as an entity by both its citizens and outsiders so too is a church. Members will never know or even hear of almost all other members and yet consider themselves and those strangers as constitutive parts of the same body. M embers hip implies an expectation of shared  belief, culture, language and understandings . E ach member holds and enacts a mental image of mutual affinity which – however attenuated in practice - is nonetheless greater than the divisions between them. C ommonality is strengthened by internal difference and disputes. Contention and disagreement are only important if all are strugglin

Index to theory pages <previous: defining heresy My test for inclusion in this list of alleged heretics has two parts: (a) that heresy has formally been alleged, and    (b) that formal action has followed This formulation is designed to exclude allegations which were not taken seriously at the time, those which arose in the heat of a disagreement and quickly evaporated, and those that were simply ignored  by the church concerned. Even so,  these criteria do show the triviality and ephemeral character of many cases.  The test does encompass a number of people who were found not guilty of heresy, or whose cases remained unresolved. I include these people to give a richer picture of the phenomenon of heresy in practice than would be presented by focusing solely on those who were convicted. Similarly trivial and peripheral cases are included as part of the picture, not merely those which had historical significance. For the most part this dual test has been  sufficient and straightforwa

My working definition of heresy is: Heresy is a judgement, arrived at after due process, that certain specified teaching which purports to be in accord with the teaching and standards of a particular church is in fact incompatible and unacceptable. Heresy in the Roman Catholic Church has a structure and trajectory wholly distinct from that of protestant churches.  A common narrative of heresy begins with the observation that, in the earliest church, haireseis simply meant choice. This changed f rom  Ireneaus  and Tertullian onwards, when heresy came came to be understood as the assertion of teaching which was opposed to, or which undermined, orthodoxy . On this basis heresy is defined as "(the act of having) an opinion or belief that is the opposite of or against what is the official or popular opinion, or an action that shows that you have no respect for the official opinion."  Cambridge Dictionary However this definition narrative feeds a myth of Christianity and therefore

My working definition of heresy Heresy is a judgement, arrived at after due process, that certain specified teaching which purports to accord with the teaching and standards of a particular church is adjudged incompatible and unacceptable. More...   The two-part test for inclusion in this study That 1) there should have been a public (or publicised) accusation of heresy, however phrased, and that the accusation was followed 2) by some form of formal action.   More...   Each Church, and thence Christianity as a whole, is an imagined community   More...   Heresy and sacrifice   More...  The possibility of heresy is integral to church life Insofar as a church is constituted by its beliefs it is vulnerable to those beliefs being misinterpreted or misrepresented    More...   Heresy is contextual The primary context is the denomination: heresy in a presbyterian church is not the same in substance or process as heresy in an episcopal church. It is not the same in a large denomination as in a