Anne Hutchinson's "No in Thunder."

    "Heresy is the eternal dawn, the morning star, the glittering herald of the day. … It is the perpetual New World, the unknown sea, toward which the brave all sail. It is the eternal horizon of progress. …Heresy is a cradle; orthodoxy, a coffin."—Robert Green Ingersoll

In the perpetually new world that is America, orthodoxy is never more than a temporary consensus. Yesterday's heresy is today's revelation—and today's revelation is tomorrow's worn out creed. Most great religious movements begin as heresies; when they cease to inspire, they are either revivified or supplanted by new heresies.

However reviled and despised their ideas might be, heretics—important historical ones like Pelagius, Martin Luther, and Giordano Bruno, and obscure contemporary sectarians like Marie-Paule Giguère, the self-styled reincarnation of the Virgin Mary and the founder of The Community of the Lady of All Nations, aka the Army of Mary—aren't nihilists or wishy-washy relativists; they are believers par excellence. "In former days the heretic was proud of not being a heretic," G.K. Chesterton wrote in his book Heretics. "It was the kingdoms of the world and the police and the judges who were heretics. He was orthodox."...

"Consider Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), whose arguments with mainstream Puritanism made her, at one time, the most hated woman in America. "Your opinions fret like a gangrene and spread like a leprosy, and infect far and near, and will eat out the very bowels of religion," her erstwhile teacher Minister John Cotton admonished her, as she was excommunicated from the Church of Boston and consigned to the mercies of the wilderness. The Puritans celebrated when they received word of her death seven years later; its grisly circumstances—she and more than a dozen members of her household, including six of her fifteen children, were scalped by an Indian war party—were regarded as wondrous evidence of divine providence.

American history textbooks usually describe Anne Hutchinson as a martyr to Puritan narrow-mindedness, as an early—perhaps the first—American feminist, and a courageous champion of civil liberty and religious tolerance. There is a germ of truth in this description of her, but it does justice neither to her nor her persecutors.

The controversy that brought about Anne Hutchinson's expulsion from Boston revolved around questions that had been roiling Christianity since its beginnings: Did good works play any role in one's salvation, or was salvation something unmerited and unearned, a gift freely bestowed by God through Christ? If human beings are so steeped in sin that only Christ can redeem them, do they cease to be human when and if they're saved? Since obedience to the law doesn't earn one grace, does breaking the law cause grace to be forfeited?

Those who answer this last question in the negative are called Antinomians. The word (which means "against the law") was coined by Martin Luther to describe the errors of his student Johannes Agricola, who argued that believing Christians might abandon every scruple without any risk to their souls. "Art thou steeped in sin, an adulterer or a thief?" he asked. "If thou believest, thou art in salvation. All who follow Moses must go to the Devil."

Most of the particulars of Hutchinson's alleged doctrinal errors, wrapped as they are in obscurities, are difficult for modern readers to grasp. "Theological controversies are as a rule among the most barren of the many barren fields of historic research," Charles Francis Adams wrote in his classic Three Episodes of Massachusetts History (1892), "and the literature of which they were so fruitful may, so far as the reader of to-day is concerned, best be described by the single word impossible." With offhand condescension, Adams portrayed Hutchinson as an irritatingly superior busybody, a bored housewife who took a dislike to her ministers and got in over her head. "She knew much," he sniffed, "But she talked out of all proportion to her knowledge. She had thought a good deal, and by no means clearly; having not infrequently mistaken words for ideas."...

From Killing the Buddha.