The Heretic Hunters: A Parable for Our Time

When Church Becomes a Blood Sport, Can Even Love Survive?

When small-town pastor Otto Haller weaponizes the Bible and social media, he rises to power in the once-quiet, right-of-center Confessional Lutheran Church in America. His crusade for doctrinal purity using smear campaigns, power politics, and authoritarian governance fractures congregations, topples institutions, and threatens to unravel the very fabric of the denomination he claims to defend.

At Oberhausen University, theology professor Hillman Gehrke becomes Haller's main target. He challenges the church's descent into fundamentalism and authoritarianism and risks everything to preserve the spirit of inquiry and compassion. As the denomination spirals into chaos, Gehrke's journey intersects with Haller's wife, Martha, a woman seeking freedom from a marriage defined by control and silence. Together, they forge a path toward healing, justice, and love.

Spanning boardrooms, pulpits, classrooms, and quiet moments of grace, The Heretic Hunters is a parable for our time--an emotionally resonant novel that explores the tension between faith and ideology, tradition and transformation. With piercing insight and moral courage, it asks: What happens when pure doctrine becomes a weapon? And can love survive the wreckage of a church at war with itself?

Peter Faur, a native St. Louisan, was the religion editor of The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, where he worked from 1977 to 1982. He spent most of his career in public relations, working in telecommunications, chemical manufacturing, brewing, and copper mining. His work won several Gold Quills from the International Association of Business Communicators and a Silver Anvil from the Public Relations Society of America.Faur holds a bachelor of arts degree in education with minors in theology and psychology from Concordia University, Chicago; a master's degree in journalism from Kansas State University; and master's degrees in business administration and management from Fontbonne University in St. Louis.