Epilogue
Epilogue
The Legacy of Heresiology
This concluding chapter explains that heresiology was an endeavor created not simply through competition—as much between heretics and heresiologists as among the heresiologists themselves—but through contradiction and limitation. Since the foundation on which heresiology rested was never secure, it unwittingly contained and created the seeds of its own obsolescence and destruction. The history of heresy, as understood by the heresiologists, was perpetuated by heresiological inquiry: heresy was an inescapable aspect of a now-theologically defined world. To study heresy was, at best, to destroy orthodoxy and, at worst, to reveal heresy and orthodoxy to be one and the same. The chapter reiterates that to describe heresiology is to identify a form of theological ethnography marked by competing rhetoric. Reading heresiology as ethnography emphasizes the epistemological fractures and self-reflection within the genre, and among those who viewed themselves as its practitioners.
Keywords: heresiology, heresy, heretics, heresiologists, orthodoxy, theological ethnography
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