Heresies: the image of Christ in the mirror of heresy and orthodoxy from the apostles to the present.

AN ALLY OF Luther's named johann Brenz computed the distance from earth to heaven to be 16,338,562 German miles. Harold O. J. Brown tells us: "Given the speed of Jesus' ascent from the Mount of Olives, as Brenz estimated it, Brenz concluded that the body of Jesus could not yet have reached heaven by the sixteenth century." Thus did Brenz refute Zwingli's insistence that Christ is literally at the right hand of God.

You have to be up on the history of theology to know a thing like that, and Dr. Brown certainly is. At one level, Heresies is as useful as a reference book in running down all the varieties of belief and partial belief you can never quite keep straight in your mind: docetism, Arminianism, homoiousianism, monophysitism, Nestorianism, Socinianism, Catharism, and a dozen or so more, even unto Sabellianism, Bogomilism, and patripassianism. Brown outlines them all with energy and clarity.

What's more, Heresies is a narrative, a history of Christianity from a certain angle. It reads like a novel, so purposefully is it arranged, so lively and sympathetic are the portraits of all the sects. A Protestant, Brown finds extenuations for the severities of the nquisition. I read nearly three hundred pages before I realized that this fairminded book has its own axe to grind. That the author is so careful not to twist the evidence to his own advantage makes his thesis all the more challenging. You discover that all the time he seemed to be giving straight-foward expositions of discrete theological controversies he was simultaneously limning a vision of history. As he says, orthodoxy is often defined and even elicited by the challenge of heresy. Sometimes, as with Arianism, heresy is prevalent and articulate before orthodoxy can discover itself.

The Arian precedent is important to him, for, as a Protestant, he feels a certain embarrassment in using the terms "orthodoxy" and "heresy." After all, Catholic readers will consider him a heretic himself. Protestantism, moreover, seems to be more geographically localized than Catholicism, and was apparently characterized at its inception by "particularity, nationalism, and frequent doctrinal onesidedness." He admits all this. But he is not deterred. Let God be truce, and every man a liar.

It was, in Brown's view, "the medieval Church itself that had moved away from the center. . . . Reformation Protestantism . . . could credibly claim to have recovered vital elements of the Gospel and thus to be more in accord with the New Testament and its message than Catholicism." The Reforniers were reluctant to call the Catholic faith a heresy, though of course they called it far worse things. A heretic, after all, is usually one who rejects rather than superadds certain doctrines. But the Reformers thought that relatively minor changes in Catholic practice reflected "a fundamental transformation of the nature of the church and its message from a company of believers to an institution administering grace. This transformation is symbolized in the change from the Lord's Supper as communion into the Mass as mystic sacrifice."

Brown stresses the "dramatic innovation" of the doctrine of transubstantiation. He pinpoints the moment of corruption (a word he avoids) in the eucharistic controversy of the ninth century, when a Frankish monk named Paschasius Radbertus argued for the corporeal presence of Christ under the mere form of bread and wine. "The bodily presence of Christ provided the rationale for a shift in Christian piety from its original basis as founded on the Word and on faith; instead, the religious life came to center on the reality offered in the sacrament." regarding present-day Catholic theologians like kung and Schillebeechx, he remarks: "Roman Catholic theology, no less than Protestant, is moving so far from the questions and concerns that shaped the ecumenical creeds that it is hard to use them to categorize it as orthodox or heretical. It may soon be necessary to say of mainstream roman Catholic theology that it, like most Protestantism, is neither orthodox nor heretical, but another religion."

Now of course the real question is whether the doctrine of transubstantiation is an "innovation" or a development. St. Paul, after all, says in his first epistle to the Corinthians that the bread and wine are indeed the body and blood of Christ, and that whoever drinks or eats unworthily at this meal incurs damnation. It seems to me that he implies pretty clearly what is expressed more fully in the metaphysical idiom of "substance." Why is it implausible that the doctrine should have gone undefined for eight centuries, when Protestant doctrines look fifteen?

Brown's opinion of the doctrines of Kung and Schillebeechx is probably no lower than mine. But it seems odd to call them "mainstream" Catholic theologians, when both men are notoriously held in suspicion by the Holy See. If their views had been promulgated by the Church as her own, a far more damning book than this one would be in order, and I would be glad to write it.

In the meantime, the salient fact is that we know their views aren't the Catholic faith. Even a layman, unsophisticated in these arcane controversies, can know that. The God who chooses the foolish things of this world to confound the wise doen't ask extraordinary wisdom and scholarship of the folks in the pews. Who shall decide when doctors disagree? Ordinary foolish people need authority, just as laymen with legal problems need to have a Supreme Court to settle important questions beyond their own competence. It is possible that the vast majority of professing Christians should be wrong about doctrine; and yet somehow I can't believe that God would allow the earnest simple believer to be so totally without means of finding truth, so completely at the mercy of the chance of belonging to the right sect, as the absence of visible authority would leave him. The Pope's authority exists for the sake of the peasant. Imagine having to depend on men like Johann Brenz in order to understand God's word!

Hilaire Belloc constantly pointed out that during the early centuries of Christianity, men referred not to "Christianity" but to the Church, to be a Christian was to be a member of which. Christ made promises about and to this body, not a book. The Church is our ultimate safeguard against theologians. And somebody must have the last word within the Church.

Nevertheless, Heresies is a stimulating survey, and people who disagree with it as strongly as I do at critical points will be grateful for its learning, its intelligence, and its charitable tone. How often do you feel personal warmth for a polemicist who attacks your own position?