In opposition to those who would claim that Christian faith embraces God at the expense of the suffering world, Rollins shows how the true believer embraces God only inasmuch as he fully embraces a needy world.

Rollins has already established himself as a major voice and an astute, generative force within the emergence Christianity. The Orthodox Heretic is his most accessible and engaging work to date." - Phyllis Tickle In this bold new book Peter Rollins presents a vision of faith that has little regard for the institutions of Christendom. His uncompromising critique of religion, while often unsettline, is infused with a deep and abiding love for what it means to genuinely follow Christ. Pete Rollins writes with clarity and compelling conviction." - Frank Schaeffer "I remember driving around Belfast with Pete, sitting in the front seat listening to him tell these parables that he'd written—thinking, ‘Everybody needs to hear these.' And now you can." —Rob Bell, author of Jesus Wants to Save Christians

Pete Rollins is inspired by the fact that all language fails when it comes to describing God. This, he says, is what nourishes poets and pilgrims alike as they try to capture, enact and incarnate truth. Such truth can only be lived - it cannot be reduced to mere words. From this starting point, he revisits the parables of Jesus - odd and unexpected stories that set hearers and readers spinning off course from what is safe and familiar towards some completely new kind of understanding. Parables are subversive; they never attempt to make faith simplistic. A parable does not primarily provide information about our world. Rather, if we allow it to do its work within us, it will change our world-breaking it - and us - open to wholly new possibilities. In the spirit of Jesus' parables, Peter offers some transformative stories of his own.

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

Beginning with Walter Bauer in 1934, the denial of clear orthodoxy in early Christianity has shaped and largely defined modern New Testament criticism, recently given new life through the work of spokesmen like Bart Ehrman. Spreading from academia into mainstream media, the suggestion that diversity of doctrine in the early church led to many competing orthodoxies is indicative of today's postmodern relativism. Authors Köstenberger and Kruger engage Ehrman and others in this polemic against a dogged adherence to popular ideals of diversity. Köstenberger and Kruger's accessible and careful scholarship not only counters the "Bauer Thesis" using its own terms, but also engages overlooked evidence from the New Testament. Their conclusions are drawn from analysis of the evidence of unity in the New Testament, the formation and closing of the canon, and the methodology and integrity of the recording and distribution of religious texts within the early church.