Quote 2506
Jude classifies the heretics as "people . . . relying on their dreams" (v. 8), that is, mystics who claimed to enjoy privileged access to esoteric knowledge.
Andreas Kostenberger
The Heresy of Orthodoxy1.2K
Other Quotes from the Author & Topic
If heresies did not have some pretty paint to cause them to stand out they would be condemned and detested by everyone.
The debate over heresy is a struggle to specify the legitimate boundaries of the worshiping community. That it is a necessary struggle is widely acknowledged: even tolerationists who rule the word heresy out of bounds (as if it were alien to polite discourse) are themselves asserting a boundary. Absurdly, they are implicitly ascknowledging the need for boundary-definition in ruling boundary-making out of bounds!The Rebirth of Orthodoxy, 131
Gnosticism, in essence, was demonstrably diverse and only loosely connected by an overall philosophical framework. As a result, or perhaps because, of this diversity, Gnosticism never formed its own church or groups of churches.
The Heresy of Orthodoxy
The Bauer-Ehrman thesis is invalid. Earliest Christianity was not infested with a plethora of competing heresies (or "Christianities," as Ehrman and other Bauer paragons prefer to call them); it was a largely unified movement that had coalesced around the conviction that Jesus was the Messiah and exalted Lord predicted in the Old Testament. Consequently, the apostles preached Jesus crucified, buried, and risen on the third day according to the Scriptures. There were heretics, for sure, but the trajectory spanning from the Old Testament to Jesus and to the apostles provided a clear and compelling infrastructure and mechanism by which the earliest Christians could judge whether a given teaching conformed to its doctrinal christological core or whether it deviated from it.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
Thus, the Muratorian Fragment does not appear to be establishing or "creating" a canon but is expressly affirming what has already been the case within the early church.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
Thus, any suggestion that the church creates the canon, or that the canon is simply and solely the outcome of a long period of "choosing" by the established church, would not only unduly reverse the biblical and historical order but would have been an idea foreign to the earliest Christians.50 This is why the early church fathers speak consistently of "recognizing"51 or "receiving"52 the books of the New Testament, not creating or picking them.53 In their minds, scriptural authority was not something they could give to these documents but was something that was (they believed) already present in these documents—they were simply receiving what had been "handed down" to them.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
In the end, the New Testament canon is not so much a collection of writings by apostles, but rather a collection of apostolic writings—writings that bear the authoritative message of the apostles and derive from the foundational apostolic era (even if not directly from their hand). The authority of the New Testament books, therefore, is not so much about the "who" as it is about the "when." It is about the place of a particular book within the scope of redemptive history.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
Heresy is not so much rejecting as selecting. The heretic simply selects the parts of the Scripture he wants to emphasize and lets the rest go. This is shown by the etymology of the word heresy and by the practice of the heretic. "Beware," an editorial scribe of the fourteenth century warned his readers in the preface to a book. "Beware thou take not one thing after thy affection and liking, and leave another: for that is the condition of an heretique. But take everything with other." The old scribe knew well how prone we are to take to ourselves those parts of the truth that please us and ignore the other parts. And that is heresy.We Travel An Appointed Way
the "Bauer thesis": the view that close study of the major urban centers at the end of the first and early second centuries reveals that early Christianity was characterized by significant doctrinal diversity, so that there was no "orthodoxy" or "heresy" at the inception of Christianity but only diversity-heresy preceded orthodoxy.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
What used to be regarded as heresy is the new orthodoxy of the day, and the only heresy that remains is orthodoxy itself.The Heresy of Orthodoxy
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2. J.C. Ryle (111)
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5. John Piper (82)
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