The heresiography (or heresiology) is something of a dying genre among Christians today.
For centuries, though, heresiography was a staple of Christian literature, as those who contended for their understanding of orthodoxy theology catalogued the theological sins of others. To give a recent example, through at least most of the twentieth century, conservative Protestants in the United States (and some elsewhere) wrote heresiographies about what they termed “heresies,” “isms,” and — increasingly the preferred term — “cults.” Walter Martin, perhaps the most influential of such countercult authors, defined “cultism” as “the adherence to doctrines which are pointedly contradictory to orthodox Christianity and which yet claim the distinction of tracing their origin to orthodox sources.” For many evangelicals, of course, orthodoxy meant evangelical theology. Heresiology remains important within the evangelical world, but I would argue — as has my colleague Philip Jenkins — that it does not have the quite same salience that it did during the twentieth century, especially during the last great “cult scare” that began in the 1970s.
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