Heretics: From Constantine to the Modern Church

Heretics takes readers on a three thousand year journey through the Christian Church as experienced by some of its most outspoken rebels. How did Christianity arrive at is modern state, and why was it so prone to fracture in the first place? This book answers these questions by examing the lives of the Pope's most famous challengers such as Martin Luther and John Calvin, and groups such as the seemingly benign Waldestianians of seventeenth-century Italy (who simply promoted a life of apostolic austerity) who were massacred by Catholic troops, and the leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who banished Anne Hutchinson for supporting an arguably more correct version of Calvinism. Wright also illustrates how challenges to orthodoxy actually strengthened the Church by forcing it to continually refine and enforce its beliefs, helping Christianity become the world's most widely practiced religion. The result is a provocative book that shows how authentic Christianity has always been an elusive notion. Is it possible that new ideas challenging Church doctrine are destined to become mainstream, as Luther's once outrageous suggestions of clerical marriage and vernacular Bibles now are?