Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church

While it has often been recognised that the development of Christian orthodoxy was stimulated by the speculations of those who are now called heretics, it is still widely assumed that their contribution was merely catalytic, that they called forth the exposition of what the main church already believed but had not yet been required to formulate. This book maintains that scholars have underrated the constructive role of these "heretical" speculations in the evolution of dogma, showing that salien