4. Fullness of the Faith (Part V of IX)
By now it will have been clear that not only do I believe that the Restoration Movement churches in which I grew up and the Episcopal Church which I joined as an adult both have theological and ecclesial deficiencies, but that I also believe that the Orthodox Church fills up the lack. Indeed, it is something of an Orthodox proverb that the Orthodox Church holds the Faith in its purity (without adding to it as the Roman Catholic Church has done) and in its totality (without taking away from it as the Protestant churches have done). The Orthodox Church rejects additions to the Faith such as papal primacy and infallibility and the Immaculate Conception, and abhors the denial of important teachings of the Faith such as the Mysteries (Sacraments), theosis (or deification), and the visible unity of the Body of Christ. It is precisely this fullness of Faith that Orthodox claims and reveals that draws me to the Orthodox Church.
As I've already mentioned, my heritage churches did not accept the sacramentality of the Lord's Supper (or Eucharist). For the Restorationist churches, the Eucharist is nothing more than a memorial. The elements remain bread and wine (or small squares of cracker-like bread and a thimble-full of grape juice); they do not become the Body and Blood of Christ. Granted, although it is only a memorial, in Restorationist belief, it is still a very important observance. We observed it every week. During the observance we were taught to confess our sins to God, and to meditate deeply on the meaning of the death and resurrection of our Lord. We observed it with all solemnity. And the practice was a very meaningful one for us all.
But meaningful though it was, I soon began to sense something lacking. By the time I was in my next-to-last year at Bible college, while serving two churches as a student pastor, I began to desire something more. Trained as I was in biblical exegesis, I began finally to admit to myself that the Scriptural texts which spoke of the Lord's Supper had something more in mind than Zwinglian memorial. After many years, I began to realize that the Lord's Supper is just as salvifically efficacious as the baptism I believed in.
I've also mentioned that my inquiry and later confirmation in the Episcopal Church was due to a sense of a lack of real connection to the historic Church. When I started attending the Episcopal Church I was thrilled. The liturgical forms and sacramental beliefs that I had eventually found myself drawn to were here. It was a little maddening not to have a single, definitive Anglican askesis (I could as easily have found low-church Protestant as high-church Catholic), but being one longing for the historic Church--and also entering the Episcopal Church through a traditionally Anglo-Catholic diocese and parish--I soon found my way to more Catholic askeses and doctrines.
But though the forms were more full than in my heritage churches, in some ways the content of those forms were less full. I soon began to realize that a creeping nominalism invaded the Episcopal Church I had come into. I learned that two parishioners could stand side by side at the communion rail, both having recited the Nicene Creed together, yet one accepting the Creed as it had been handed down through the centuries by the Church, with the other rejecting every single tenet as traditionally taught (no Virgin Birth, no Resurrection, so Trinity) for some modernist interpretation which fit his personal sensibilities. One person believed the elements to be the Body and Blood of Christ, another believed it was the Zwinglian memorial I had grown up with.
Then there was the experience in various liturgies which denied the basic and non-negotiable tenets of the Christian Faith: the Fatherhood of God, the two Persons of Jesus of Nazareth, the Trinity, the reality of sin, etc. Here was ritual without substance. I had thought I had found what I was looking for in the Episcopal Church, but discovered that I had chased a fantasy.
When I first began seriously looking at Orthodoxy, I was drawn to the liturgy. Being a "smells and bells" Anglo-Catholic, the rich festal beauty of the Divine Liturgy fed me like no Anglican liturgy ever had--despite the almost total foreignness to me of the Liturgy. I recognized the Gloria (which actually ends the service of Orthros or Matins), the Nicene Creed (sans filioque), the Sursam Corda, the Lord's Prayer, and the Great Ekteina (or Great Litany). But the vast majority of the service was totally new.
Still, from the start it filled me in ways I had not experienced before. Here was form with substance; substance wrapped in ancient form. The first thing I noticed, for example, was the ubiquitous presence of the invocation of the Holy Trinity. The Orthodox Church would never be accused of being crypto-Unitarian (as has the Episcopal Church).
My heritage churches grounded me in the essentials of the Faith, though leaving out some of the important ones. I was taught the centrality of and respect for the written Word of God, the Scriptures. I was taught the sacramentality of baptism and the necessity of weekly observance of the Lord's Supper. I was taught the necessity of holiness of life, and the importance of prayer. I was taught the essential nature of discipleship to Christ as Lord, to daily take up my cross and follow him. But I lacked a real connection to the New Testament Church which I was taught to revere and to work to make a reality in my day.
The Episcopal Church held out to me the historic connections I was seeking, through the prayerbook liturgies and daily office, through the Sacraments and through the historic tracing of the apostolic succession. I was given the Anglo-Catholic askesis of Eucharist, daily office and private prayers. I was shaped by the liturgies toward more mature and grounded prayer. The Episcopal Church encouraged, though did not give me, devotion to my patron saint, Benedict of Nursia, and gave me access to a Benedictine abbey through which I could pursue prayer, vocation, and, indeed, God. But the Episcopal Church lacked grounding in the Tradition. Having sold itself to the modernist mindset, it gave itself over to refashioning the Faith in its own image. What had once been the norm, and which had drawn me to it, soon became the exception. Laying claim to apostolic succession, the Episcopal Church became as congregationalist as the churches in which I had been raised.
But all the gifts I had been given by my heritage churches and the Episcopal Church I have found whole and entire in Orthodoxy. And all the deficiencies and emptiness has been filled by the ancient Faith and Life of the Body of Christ. Here is a Church anchored in the past, but living fully in the present. It does not succumb to present day fashions of belief, but having a rich store of two millennia of pastoral care, knows how best to minister to and care for those who are wounded and disfigured by the chaos and self-justification of our present age.
I have had it said to me that the Orthodox Church is like any other denomination and may find itself caught in the same heresies. My seeking after a Church which "has it all" is a chasing of a chimera. But while it is true that the Church has had leaders and laypersons who have succumbed to heresy, and even times when the heretics outnumbered the faithful, the Orthodox Church has the best track record going. While I believe the Orthodox Church's claims to be the Body of Christ, and thus sustained by Christ's promise that the gates of Hades will not prevail against his Church, even granting the premise of my skeptics, the historical facts weigh heavily in favor of Orthodoxy. Protestantism keeps dividing, until one finds oneself a lonely twig on an overlong branch. Roman Catholicism in America cannot keep modernist heresies at bay (witness the oxymoronic "dissenting Catholic" phenomenon). Only the Orthodox Church can provide the long, two thousand year evidence of faithfulness and adherence to the entire Faith (nothing more, nothing less) given to the Church by Christ through his Apostles.
[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: 5. Objective and Existential Worship and Askesis