1. Honoring the Past (Part II of IX)
I come by this "back to the future" look at ecclesiology honestly. The Restoration Movement churches which are my heritage were built on the presupposition that it is our Christian duty to both understand fully what the New Testament Church was, and to restore its beliefs and practices fully in our own day. This presupposition leant itself to a naive if well-intentioned purity of doctrine and polity unmixed by (mostly Prostestant) confessional and denominational loyalties. It also leant itself to a stance of seeking justification for church endeavors from the pages of the New Testament. This is why our churches were governed locally, and by the congregational elders and deacons. This is why we observed the Lord's Supper weekly. And this is why we baptized for the remission of sins and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Were I to have been raised in any other Protestant church (such as the Southern Baptist churches my father had known all his life), I doubt whether my need for this historic connection to the New Testament Church would have been so consciously felt.
But there was a problem with my heritage churches and their presuppositions regarding the New Testament Church. They believed that sometime shortly after the death of the apostles, the Church began to stray from its original dominical and apostolic simplicity and purity. They believed that human traditions soon began to infiltrate and compromise the pure Gospel of the New Testament Church. There were several varieties of this understanding.
The most extreme version was the "trail of blood" history of the Church, in which the larger institutional Church persecuted the faithful remnants that fought to keep pure the Gospel Jesus had preached. This was the history I had grown up with. Unfortunately, this was a terribly naive and ignorant historical understanding. For these "faithful remnants" were the heretics: the Montanists, the Monophysites, the Pneumatmachoi, and so forth. A real historical understanding of their teachings as placed side by side with the Gospel would have shown that to have been the case.
While in training for the ministry at Bible college, however, I was given a much more moderate and educated, albeit still naive, understanding. The Church still went off the rails (almost always associated with Constantine the Great), but despite the great compromises it had made in Church polity and doctrine, still proclaimed the kernel of the Gospel. The promise that Christ had made that the gates of Hades would not prevail against his Church still held. But the Church was in a bad way. The first Reformation with Luther and Calvin did much to bring back the doctrines and polity of the New Testament Church, but it would take a second Reformation (our very own Restoration Movement) to take the task further.
So this heritage which ostensibly gave great doctrinal and ecclesial weight to the New Testament Church, failed to take seriously the ensuing fourteen centuries. We failed to adequately recognize that all our beliefs--ostensibly drawn on our own from the New Testament itself--came directly from the work of the councils of the fourth century: the divine-human nature of Christ, the Trinity, the canon of the Scriptures, etc.
When I encountered the Episcopal Church, I thought that I had overcome some of the deficiencies of my heritage churches. Here was a church which explicitly laid claim to apostolic succession and thus laid claim to the "missing centuries" of my own heritage churches. Yet here, too, was a church which took seriously the Protestant critique: catholicity and reform in the same body. And especially since I came into the Episcopal Church in a diocese with a long history of Anglo-Catholicism, this look to history was strong and normative.
Unfortunately, this local understanding was not matched, in my view, by the denomination's national leadership, nor by General Convention. Homage to history was usually given along the lines of "History informs us, it does not constrain us." But this view was only marginally positive of history. Mostly what was expressed was that we now knew better than Moses, Paul, and even Jesus himself about various present-day concerns (ordination of women, sexuality, divorce), and so could feel free to take these men "under advisement" while we went along with the agenda to which we were committed.
Needless to say, having this longing for some sort of real connection to the historic Church, and having though I had had it only to lose it twice, made for feelings of incipient hopelessness. There were only two other options potentially open for me: Rome and Orthodoxy. Rome wasn't a real possibility since they, too, had departed from the historic purity of the truths of the Church by the promulgation of papal primacy and infallibility, among other matters (not the least of which was the filioque). So I was left with Orthodoxy.
What helped me to enter as fully as I could into Orthodox thought and worship, was the great love I had come to have for liturgy. Growing up in vocally non-liturgical churches, I had later found a suprising and welcome love for liturgy. The Episcopal Church definitely fostered this in spades. And I will ever owe Bp Beckwith and the Springfield diocese, and especially Fr Cravens and Trinity parish, an everlasting debt of gratitude for their role in nurturing this in me. My first worship service in the Orthodox Church was, to speak quite literally, heavenly. Coming as I had, just weeks before, from seminary liturgies which refused to acknowledge the Fatherhood of God, the humanity of Jesus (by denying him his maleness), and the reality of sin (by the consistent omission of the confession), the Orthodox liturgical insistence, by repetition, on the Trinity, God's Fatherhood, the divine-human nature of Christ, and the fact of our sinfulness which serves to highlight even more the mercy and kindness of God--well, let's just say I felt as though I had finally come home.
The more I engaged with Orthodoxy the more I understood how it was that the Orthodox, better than any churches I had had experience with, honor the past. They hold the faith once for all delivered to the saints in its entirety and its purity. They do not deny the Trinity, as some Pentecostal holiness churches do. They do not deny the Fatherhood of God, as many mainline churches do. More fully than do many evangelicals, they affirm the Incarnation by their ecclesiology and the place the Sacraments (Mysteries) play in the life, faith and worship of the Orthodox.
In short, the Orthodox honor the past by keeping it and living it today. This is not some "museum piece" ecclesiology, a mere retention of form for the sake of tradition. Rather, this is the life-giving Faith of the Church. The Wednesday and Friday fasts are kept today as they were two thousand years ago, and with the same sort of pastoral provisions for pregnant and nursing mothers, young children, and those with health concerns (as well as those adults new in the faith). The same Divine Liturgy which the Church had developed in its fullness by the fourth and fifth centuries (the core of which dates from the practices of the New Testament Christians), is still used to guide the theology and living of the faithful today. This is Tradition. And this is an honoring of the past that lives.
This honoring of the past, is perhaps the first existential reason I am drawn to Orthodoxy. But the Orthodox Church is not just mired in the past. Precisely because it so faithfully honors the Church's Tradition, it is in the best possible position to respect the present.
[Please note: Speaking as I must about my previous and present church experiences in light of my attraction to Orthodoxy, I must necessarily and frequently take up a critical stance to many aspects of these experiences. But I have also tried to offer honest and heartfelt positive appraisals where I can.]
Next: 2. Respecting the Present