The Orthodox Heretic Analysis

People make mistakes. In every area of life, individuals make poor decisions, fail to properly execute actions, and have the wrong perspectives. This litany of errors extends to faith and beliefs as well. Whether likeable or not, the fact is that every person will possess religious beliefs that are incorrect. In his book The Orthodox Heretic, Peter Rollins searches for the best way to live out flawed beliefs. The term flawed beliefs can be inflammatory, and many Christians would quickly tune out anyone who referred to their beliefs as flawed. However, it takes an incredible amount of confidence, maybe even arrogance, to argue that all of your beliefs are true and anyone that disagrees with you is incorrect. Rollins explores a number …show more content…
The heretics of orthodoxy make Christianity into something that it was never intended to be, a religion. Heretics of orthodoxy take the teachings of Jesus and turn them into list after list of things that followers of Christ should and should not do. Dogmatic legalists would be the prime example of heretics of orthodoxy. Throughout the book Peter Rollins writes every chapter as a parable. One of these parables addresses those who are prone to heresy of orthodox. The parable tells of an enormous skyscraper filled to the brim with books and manuscripts. Every page was full of the teachings of God, and things that a follower of Christ should know. Some scholars spent time in this building, but the ordinary individual never did more than gawk at its immense size of the tower. God realized that his teachings were being lost in the massiveness of this library so he consolidated it down into one large encyclopedia of the most important thing to know, yet still the people were caught up in the verbiage and were missing the point. God continued to hack away at the book and redrafted it as a small booklet that was more manageable, but still the scholars were fascinated with studying it and were not grasping the foundational truth of the book. So after taking away the enormous library, the mighty encyclopedia and even the manageable booklet, God had one final attempt to reveal his truths to the academically