Heretics have always had a bad press.
Their writings banned, their bodies burned at the stake and their souls consigned to the justice of God, the rebels of Christianity have usually been reported to history through the prejudiced accounts of their vigilant, orthodox suppressors. Historian Walter Nigg, a Swiss Reformed pastor and former professor at the University of Zurich, believes that heretics were not necessarily bad men, and their doctrines not necessarily perversions of God's truth. In The Heretics (Knopf; $6.95). a vivid survey of the church's theological underground, he argues that Christianity owes much to its rebel sons, and has freely adapted ideas that first came to light in heretical guise.
The first recorded heretic, a converted Jew named Simon Magus, tried to convince St. Peter that Christ's message could be welded to the wisdom of the Greeks.
The idea was too radical for the early church, but a century or two later it was accepted by many quite orthodox Christian theologians. A 2nd century heretic named Marcion was the first Christian to make a compilation of authentic gospels and epistles into a single testament that excluded the many apocryphal writings about Christ. Marcion's version of the scriptural canon was rejected by the church, but he nonetheless deserves to be remembered as the founder of New Testament textual criticism.
Father of the Middle Ages. Probably no heretic had a more pervasive influence on the thinking of the church than the witty, 9th century Irish scholar-monk, John Scotus Erigena. "A humanist ahead of his time," as Nigg calls him. Erigena taught at the short-lived but brilliant Palace Academy of France's King Charles the Bald, and developed a highly individual theology that often sounds like an amalgam of intellectual strains from the best current Protestant thinking. He thought of God as "overtruth" and "the overwisdom"—phrases that would not be out of place in the Systematic Theology of Paul Tillich.* In the manner of a Biblical demythologist like Rudolf Bultmann, he regarded Adam as the idea of man,rather than as a historical human being, and interpreted the Last Judgment not as a physical return to earth by Christ but as each man's own inner examination of conscience.