Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up? A New Look at Today’s Evangelical Church in the Light of Early Christianity

by David W. Bercot

In this volume, Bercot seeks to return to the second and third century writings of the early Christians in an effort to better understand the message of the Bible. (Throughout the book, he quotes extensively from Polycarp, Iranaeus, Clement, Origen, Tertullian and others.) Essentially, his question is: are modern evangelical churches following the Bible the same way that the earliest Christians did? His answer may be surprising to some among those denominations.

The first half of the book doesn’t get into doctrinal specifics as much as it shows how differently the church interrelated with the world in the past than it does today—and the point he makes here will probably be a slap in the face of nearly anyone, evangelical or not. He says, for example, “’No one can serve two masters,’ declared Jesus to his disciples (Matt 6:24). However, Christians have spent the greater portion of the past two millenniums (sic) apparently trying to prove Jesus wrong. We have told ourselves that we can indeed have both—the things of God and the things of this world. Many of us live our lives no differently than do conservative non-Christians, except for the fact that we attend church regularly each week. We watch the same entertainment. We share the same concerns about problems of this world. And we are frequently as involved in the world’s commercial and materialistic pursuits. Often, our being ‘not of this world’ exists in theory more than in practice” (24).

After spending some 60 pages discussing how the early Christians lived as citizens of another kingdom and as people of another culture, he turns his focus to what the early church believed. In this last section, he addresses many of the major tenets of Calvinism, Luther’s approach to translating the Bible, Constantine’s approach to “Christianity,” and Augustine’s overreaction to the errors of Pelagius. In the end, he offers an alternative to modern evangelicalism: the Anabaptists (not surprisingly, his own religion).

This book is at once enjoyable, thought-provoking, challenging and frustrating. I found myself enjoying the book, largely because he was writing what I already believed about many things (a weakness that most book-readers share, I imagine). I was surprised, however, to find some things in the early Christian writings that I had not heard before. And I was even more surprised by something that seems to clearly be contradicted in the Bible (Bercot’s assertion that the church “always considered it heretical to pay salaries to overseers and elders,” 134).

The greatest downfall to Heretics is the weight he puts on the early Christian writings. While Bercot certainly would not equate their writings and beliefs with the Word of God, he quotes so extensively and hangs his points so entirely on them, it almost seems so. Of course, the point of the book is to compare what they did with what “we” do, so it is natural that it focuses more on their writings than on the Bible itself; at the same time, one simply cannot prove beyond a doubt points of Biblical truth from early Christian writings—whether the authors were disciples of the apostles or not.

Overall, you’ll find this book to be worth your read. It’s a relatively quick read, and it will give you plenty to think about.