The Construction of Orthodoxy and Heresy: Neo-Confucian, Islamic, Jewish, and Early Christian Patterns

by John B. Henderson

This book presents the first systematic and cross-cultural exploration of ideas of heresy, as well as orthodoxy, in a group of major religious traditions, including Neo-Confucianism, Sunni Islam, rabbinic Judaism, and early Christianity. It shows how authorities in all four of these traditions used common strategies to distinguish orthodox truth from heretical error. These same strategies often appear in modern ideological polemics and studies of deviance as well as in traditional religious controversies. The party that most effectively uses these strategies often gains a decisive advantage in the struggle among competing claimants to orthodoxy. The author also shows how orthodoxy depends on heresy. Without heresy, or at least ideas of heresy, orthodoxy could not establish or perpetuate itself. In fact, in all four traditions orthodoxy constructed itself by creating an inversion of the heretical other. By highlighting the common patterns in constructions of orthodoxy and heresy in four major religious traditions, this book also sets in relief subtler variations that give each tradition a special character. In this way this study strikes a balance between the universal and the it illuminates a general pattern in world intellectual history, but also shows how the traditions that illustrate this pattern are distinctive.

Genres: Religion, Islam, Christianity

265 pages, Hardcover

First published April 1, 1998

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

For the U.S. Senator, see John B. Henderson
For his son, the U.S. diplomat and malacologist, see John Brooks Henderson Jr.

Reviews

[Tiana Robinson]

Read for a Witchcraft+heresy paper - very helpful in providing examples of heresy establishment patterns.