Alister McGrath sets out to do two things in his Heresy: A History of Defending the Truth. The first is to explain the origins and significance of heresy. The second is to defend the notion of orthodoxy from the postmodern infatuation with heretical ideas. Along the way, he corrects many popular misunderstandings and busts a fair number of myths.
The prevalent notion of early Christianity--thanks only in part to Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, and the Gospel of Judas--is of a plurality if competing "Christianities" which were eventually subsumed and stamped out by the Catholic Christianity, as practiced in Rome and championed by the emperor Constantine and set in stone at the Council of Nicaea. Heretical groups and leaders were ostracized and condemned and their ideas and writings suppressed by straight-laced, rigid groups that, by chance, had "access to power" and could therefore impose their version of Christianity upon the others.
The truth, McGrath points out, is far different. First of all, no Christian group of the first several centuries of the Church could be said to have any form of power, coercive or otherwise. It was simply beyond possibility for one Christian church to force its views upon another. And while McGrath concedes that, yes, the early Church was a much looser, less theologically policed entity than it was to become, orthodox ideas were already present and generally agreed upon. It was as the church solidified that heresy originated.
Heresy, McGrath says, is a set of ideas--or even a single idea--that maintains the form of orthodox Christianity while inadvertently undermining it. The church fathers who spent enormous energy in combating heresy characterized heresy as the intrusion of damaging outside ideas into orthodoxy, McGrath demonstrates that most heresy originated within the church as Christianity gradually found its footing and attempted to articulate precisely what it believed, especially on important or unclear issues. Of all the early heresies that confronted the Church, McGrath says, "Not one of them can conceivably be considered as the outcome of malice, egotism, or some kind of personal theological depravity. . . . all rest on serious attempts to engage major points of religious and spiritual importance" (p.171).
A case in point is Arianism, a heresy involving the identity and deity of Jesus Christ that began as an earnest effort by the Alexandrian Bishop Arius to make Christianity and Greek ideas--especially Neoplatonism--mutually intelligible. Greco-Roman thought held matter to be the creation of a lesser deity and therefore irredeemably bad. Christian orthodoxy held that God, in the form of Jesus Christ, became flesh and suffered as a physically real human being. In reconciling these ideas, Arius held Jesus to be physically human by not divine, since true divinity, that of the superior god rather than the lesser creator, could not be corrupted by flesh. Arius did not, however, decry the worship or adoration of Jesus or the belief that Jesus could grant salvation. Arius's detractors quickly pointed out that, if Jesus is not God, to worship him and believe that he could grant salvation were irreconcilable inconsistencies with the idea that only God can receive worship or grant salvation.
Heresy, then, is a sincere but misguided attempt to articulate something about Christianity that ends up being anything but Christian. The motives behind heresy, as listed by McGrath, include the desire to make Christianity relevant to prevailing social norms, to make Christianity more amendable to secular "rationality," and to shape a Christianity that is either more or less "morally restrictive." The motivations behind ideas that eventually become heretical are typically sincere, but say more about the time in which they develop than about Christianity itself. The implication is that even the most sincere Christian can do damage of their motivations, methods, or both are incorrect.
McGrath's book is very good, but not perfect. A section on postmodern ideas of heresy and its relation to "power," that omnipresent postmodern bogeyman, is muddled. I reread some passages but still didn't fully comprehend his argument. And while he deftly handles early Church history with beautiful concision, he trips lightly over the Middle Ages, stopping only to note that the definition of "heresy" seemed to shift to anything the Pope found threatening. Such a shortcut is disappointing, especially considering the very good chapters on the early Church which precede it.
One of the best things about McGrath's book is the "mythbusting" that I mentioned above. In addition to correcting the fuzzy history of the Church as peddled by Gnostic scholars and Dan Brown, McGrath also points out that Constantine had significant Arian leanings, early heretics were not condemned or executed, and the supposedly stifling orthodoxy decried by modern advocates of heresy was, in fact, more radical, more imaginative, and more liberating than the heresies it had to confront.
Highly recommended.
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