What society considers blasphemy - a verbal assault against the sacred - is a litmus test of the standards it believes to be necessary to preserve unity, order, and morality. Society has always condemned as blasphemy what it regards as an abuse of liberty

This book offers a unique approach to Calvin by introducing the individuals and groups who, through their opposition to Calvin's theology and politics, helped shape the Reformer, his theology, and his historical and religious legacy. Respected church historian Gary Jenkins shows how Calvin had to defend or rethink his theology in light of his tormentors' challenges, giving readers a more nuanced view of Calvin's life and thought. The book highlights the central theological ideas of the Swiss Reformation and introduces figures and movements often excluded from standard texts.

Untangling Polish, Transylvanian and English Unitarianism is a challenge even for the serious student. Charles Howe's lucid account reclaims for modern readers the heroic martyrdom of Michael Servetus, the humane leadership of Faustus Socinus, the eloquent conviction of Francis David and the literary genius of Harriet Martineau.

A lively examination of the heretics who helped Christianity become the world’s most powerful religion. From Arius, a fourth-century Libyan cleric who doubted the very divinity of Christ, to more successful heretics like Martin Luther and John Calvin, this book charts the history of dissent in the Christian Church. As the author traces the Church’s attempts at enforcing orthodoxy, from the days of Constantine to the modern Catholic Church’s lingering conflicts, he argues that heresy—by forcing the Church to continually refine and impose its beliefs—actually helped Christianity to blossom into one of the world’s most formidable religions. Today, all believers owe it to themselves to grapple with the questions raised by heresy. Can you be a Christian without denouncing heretics? Is it possible that new ideas challenging Church doctrine are destined to become as popular as Luther’s once-outrageous suggestions of clerical marriage and a priesthood of all believers? A delightfully readable and deeply learned new history, Heretics overturns our assumptions about the role of heresy in a faith that still shapes the world. “Wright emphasizes the ‘extraordinarily creative role’ that heresy has played in the evolution of Christianity by helping to ‘define, enliven, and complicate’ it in dialectical fashion. Among the world’s great religions, Christianity has been uniquely rich in dissent, Wright argues—especially in its early days, when there was so little agreement among its adherents that one critic compared them to a marsh full of frogs croaking in discord.” —The New Yorker

When, early in the seventeenth century, the puritan pastor Anthony Wotton started to circulate manuscript statements of his theological revision, he was courting danger. Wotton was at once bold and subtle, a provocation to clerical brethren yet a skilled exponent of their technical disciplines. He addressed matters of fundamental importance: Christ's redemptive suffering and the imputation of justifying righteousness, God's saving grace and the moral law, faith and works, the gracious covenant and the legal covenant. Crucially important, for Wotton, was the interpretation of St. Paul's epistles in relation to the justification of sinners. This book examines Wotton's revisionary writings and the bitter doctrinal controversy that they stimulated, and traces the Wottonian complexion of the theology of John Goodwin, who became, over the course of a period of thirty years, a prolific exponent of unorthodox notions -- perhaps the most provocative of England's learned "heretics" and "blasphemers" in the age of the Long Parliament and the Interregnum. Contemporary responses to Wotton and Goodwin reveal how fixed were the core positions of orthodoxy and how worrisome were the challenges posed to them. Wotton and Goodwin trespassed -- often in the name of John Calvin -- upon some of the borderlands at which unusual uses of technical language became intolerable to the custodians of Calvinist truth. At these points, the contingency of theological language was uncomfortably exposed, and interlocutors discovered how rubbery were the signifiers of doctrine and how unstable the communication of "truth" could be.