Learn why the early Christians grew in holiness: a supportive church, cross-centered discipleship, and obedience with God’s help. Rediscover leadership by example and an eternal mindset.
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This free audiobook course presents David Bercot’s Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up, a chapter-by-chapter comparison of early Christianity with later and modern Christian beliefs. Bercot defines “early Christians” mainly as believers from the period after the apostles through the pre-Constantine church, then lets writers such as Polycarp, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Origen, Cyprian, and Lactantius speak at length.
The course explores why early Christians were known for separation from the world, love for enemies, mutual care, moral distinctiveness, and willingness to suffer. It then considers disputed questions about salvation, free will, baptism, wealth, New Testament ethics, war, and the death penalty. Later chapters trace Bercot’s account of how Constantine, church councils, Augustine, the Reformation, and restoration movements affected Christian doctrine and practice.
The final lessons ask students to respond with humility, honesty, and renewed attention to simple holiness, love, and cross-bearing.
Bercot introduces the book and notes that it was written for Bible-believing conservative evangelicals in 1988, while the recording reflects his later reading of it. The chapter recounts Polycarp’s arrest, refusal to curse Christ, and martyrdom as an opening picture of early Christian conviction.
This chapter defines the early Christians mainly as believers from about AD 80-90 to 199, while also using later pre-Constantine writers when their teaching agrees with the earlier period. Bercot introduces key writers, explains why he avoids calling them “church fathers,” and says he wants readers to hear them in their own words.
Bercot describes early Christians as a people marked by separation from the world, unconditional love, and obedient trust. He emphasizes their care for the needy, love across ethnic lines, refusal to preserve the church by violence, and confidence in God during persecution.
This chapter argues that early Christianity was not merely a reflection of Roman culture but a countercultural movement. Bercot contrasts early Christian practice with Roman norms in areas such as divorce, sexual morality, entertainment, violence, and the church’s tendency to absorb surrounding cultural attitudes.
Bercot explains three reasons he believes early Christians lived with such spiritual power: the supportive role of the church, the message of the cross, and the belief that holiness involves both human obedience and God’s help. He contrasts this with softer modern presentations of Christian discipleship.
This chapter examines early Christian teaching on salvation, faith, grace, works, and obedience. Bercot argues that they saw salvation as God’s gift while also teaching that the gift is conditioned on faith expressed in obedient love.
Bercot contrasts Reformation predestination with early Christian teaching on free will and God’s foreknowledge. The chapter presents early Christian explanations that distinguish God’s ability to foresee the future from arbitrary predestination.
Bercot explains that early Christians connected baptism with remission of sins, new birth, and spiritual illumination, while also insisting that baptism was not an empty ritual separated from faith and repentance. He contrasts baptism with later evangelical altar-call practices.
The supplied transcript does not include this chapter, so only the title is available. From the title, the lesson appears to consider whether prosperity should be viewed as a blessing, a spiritual danger, or both.
Bercot argues that early Christians believed Christ’s moral teachings surpassed the Old Testament standard because they belong to a heavenly kingdom. The chapter focuses especially on literal obedience to Jesus’ teachings, including early Christian views on war, killing, abortion, and capital punishment.
This chapter asks whether early Christians or modern Christians are more likely to understand the apostles correctly. Bercot points to the early Christians’ nearness in time, shared language and culture, access to apostolic oral teaching, and connection to churches founded by apostles.
Bercot argues that if early Christianity departed radically from the apostles, the change would have had to be deliberate, not accidental. He says the early church rejected new special revelation, honored apostolic authority, lived consistently with Jesus’ teachings, and was not rebuked by Christ in Revelation for false theology.
Bercot describes four protective walls that he believes preserved apostolic Christianity: rejection of new revelation, separation from the world, referral of questions to apostolic churches, and congregational independence. He argues that Constantine’s favor weakened these protections by making change seem beneficial and by drawing the church toward worldly methods.
This lesson focuses on the Council of Nicaea and its aftermath in Bercot’s account. He argues that church-wide councils, imperial involvement, creedal language, and claims of Spirit-guided conciliar authority weakened congregational independence and opened the way for later doctrinal developments.
Bercot identifies Augustine as the most influential teacher in Western Christianity because the West often read the apostles through Augustine’s lens. The chapter describes Augustine’s departures from earlier Christian teaching, especially in relation to predestination, grace, free will, holy war, and the response to Pelagianism.
Bercot evaluates the Reformation as a partial but not complete return to early Christianity. He discusses indulgences, Luther’s reliance on Augustine, Luther’s doctrine of predestination, his statements during the Peasants’ War, and Bercot’s claim that sola Scriptura often functioned through Luther’s interpretation of Scripture.
This chapter surveys movements that tried to restore primitive Christianity after the Reformation. Bercot discusses the Wesleyan movement, the Campbell-Stone movement, the Oxford movement, and broader efforts to recover early Christian faith, holiness, Scripture reading, and practice.
Bercot presents the Anabaptists as a restoration movement that came especially close to the early Christian ethos of the two kingdoms. He emphasizes their literal reading of Scripture, separation from worldly power, refusal of violence and oaths, simple living, suffering under persecution, and stress on obedience as part of salvation.
The final chapter calls modern Christians to face the witness of the early Christians rather than ignore it. Bercot urges doctrinal humility, honest use of early Christian sources, unity on essentials, and a return to holiness, love, cross-bearing, and separation from worldly methods.
A New Look at Today's Evangelical Church in the Light of Early Christianity
Sex and money scandals. An exploding divorce rate. Drug-addicted youths. And an ever-growing worldliness. Today's evangelical church confronts these issues — but is it equipped to fight them? In this book, attorney-turned-historian David Bercot takes the reader on an engrossing journey back to the end of the first century, into the lives of the Christians who lived in the immediate generations after the apostles.
What emerges is startling. The early Christians believed and practiced things that most modern evangelicals would consider extreme: salvation conditioned on obedience, baptism tied to the new birth, free will rather than predestination, total nonresistance to violence, lifelong commitment to one spouse, simplicity in dress, and a willingness to suffer rather than fight. They lived under empire-wide persecution and turned the Roman world upside down without political power, military force, or wealth.
Penned in a free-flowing readable style combined with sound scholarship, this eye-opening book challenges Christians today to return to the simple holiness, unfailing love, and patient cross-bearing of the early Christians. It includes a candid comparison between the early Christians and today's evangelicals — a comparison that has changed lives for over 35 years.
What readers and reviewers have said about Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up. These are short, attributed quotes from public reviews on Goodreads, Amazon, the publisher's site, and independent book reviewers.
Most convicting book I've read in a while. Covering the beliefs and lifestyle of the early church and how modern Christianity compares.
— Taylor Vegge, Goodreads (5 stars)
This book changed my outlook on the Christian faith. While reading I realized that my faith had been only two dimensional. This work added a third dimension — depth — to my faith. Outside the Bible, it is the most profound work that I have ever read, and I have recommended it to hundreds of people over the years.
— A Christian Pilgrim, Scroll Publishing customer review
Straight off, this book will challenge you in your thinking and quite possibly in your practice and outworking of life as a Christian — especially if you are from an evangelical, Baptist, or non-denominational background.
— Goodreads reader review, Goodreads
I consider this book seminal in both its topics and scope. The early Christian writers… left a record that will challenge you as perhaps no other book can or will.
— J. R. Neumiller (Greensboro, NC), Scroll Publishing review
Perhaps the single most important thing the book did for me was to introduce me in an unforgettable way to the early Christian writings.
— Family Life magazine, Editorial review, October 1989
This book shows the sharp contrast between what many denominations today teach and what the early Christians taught. It contains some challenging and thought-provoking material.
— Plain Bible Teaching, Book review
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