Will The Real Heretics Please Stand Up

I just finished reading an excellent book by David W. Bercot entitled, "Will The Real Heretics Please Stand Up; A New Look at Today's Evangelical Church in the Light of Early Christianity".

Mr. Bercot, like me, has a big interest in the so-called "Church Fathers" of the 1st and 2nd centuries. His reasoning is that since these Christians had a living link to Jesus and the Apostles that their testimony for how early Christianity operated is highly valuable. What he set out to do is to show just how far removed the modern Christian Evangelical movement is from early Christianity. What we discover is that even those who claim they are "conservative" would be considered spiritually weak in the early church. I particularly enjoyed the section on baptism and what it meant for them to "carry the cross".

Later in the book it discusses how Christianity became corrupted. Really it wasn't so much early apostate sects like the Gnostics or external persecution. The congregation had stood firm against these things for many years. But the church was broken when it disregarded Jesus' advice to be "no part of the world". When it sided with the Roman government it was all over. It was through that means that Satan weakened the congregations and then introduced moral corruption, foreign concepts and unbiblical ideas.

The only criticism I have of this book is that it skirts around the issue of the trinity doctrine. From my reading and research it is apparent that the early Christians believed that though the Father and the Son had the same essence or quality that they were seperate beings. The Father was greater than the Son, as Jesus had expressed. "When Jesus Became God: The Struggle to Define Christianity during the Last Days of Rome" by Richard Rubenstein does good job of showing how the trinity concept became the official doctrine of the Catholic Church.