Protestant Christians normally see the Church as comprised of individuals--all the individuals who are Christians add up to this thing called the Body of Christ. Protestants necessarily deny that any one group of Chrisitans can claim to be the one Church. "Churchiness" if you will does not extend to congregations or denominations except by way of the individual Christians in those congregations or denominations--if it does at all. In other words, for Protestant Christians, the Church is coterminus with individual Christians.
And, to be fair, when one looks at the New Testament there is no other option presented: If one were a Christian one necessarily was a member of the Church. The two realities were (and are) one act of salvation. In the New Testament there is no talk of a visible versus an invisible Church. One did not speak of spiritual unity over against visible divisions. There was no program to make the Church visibly unified so that the world could be evangelized. In the New Testament there was no ecumenism or ecumenical bodies like the World Council of Churches. In the New Testament, the Church's visible unity and its spiritual or divine foundation of Trinitarian unity were bound together.
But Satan sowed discord. And the ecclesial situation 2000 years later does not resemble the New Testament very much. There are now thousands upon thousands of Protestant schisms. And if Protestants are going to claim to be part of the New Testament Church, they are going to have to significantly alter the simple New Testament ecclesiology. So now we have talk of a visible unity over against a spiritual unity. We have the invisible Church which is the true Church. And none of this, ironically, is New Testament ecclesiology.
So (he says after that long windup) to say that the one true Church is by definition the Orthodox Church is to say that Protestants and Roman Catholics are not visibly part of the Church. And for Protestants especially, that's the equivalent of saying they're not Christians.
In light of the modern situation of innumerable schisms among various Christian bodies, the Orthodox, as I understand it--and any time I use the phrase "as I understand it" check with your local Orthodox parish priest--have affirmed that the nature of the Church has been dogmatized but not the situation of those who come to faith in Christ outside the visible boundaries of the Orthodox Church. Thus, while Protestants are not, according to the Orthodox, visibly part of the one Church of God, it is not the case, according to Orthodox, that Protestants are not going to be saved. (Indeed, neither is it the case that all Orthodox will be saved. Sadly, some will be damned.)
So, after yet more long winding up I come to the point of this post--or rather the question with which I've often been confronted by interlocutors:
If it is possible to be saved outside the visible boundaries of the Orthodox Church, then why become Orthodox?
It's a fair question and a good one. From Protestant evangelical eyes, if one is going to be saved without having to become Orthodox, then, really, what sort of urgency is there? It would be different if one came to believe one's own salvation was predicated upon becoming Orthodox specifically. By all means, damn the torpedoes, full steam ahead! But if no real salvific crisis hinges upon becoming Orthodox, isn't it then just simply a matter of pragmatics and preferences? If A will get you to C by its own, why go by way of B?
And this is a fairly typical Protestant minimalism, with functionality at the forefront.
But . . .
Let's look at it from a different perspective. Let's look at it from the standpoint of marriage. If doing A means that my marriage will be good and that my spouse and I will not get a divorce, wouldn't that be good enough? But if doing B in addition to doing A means that my marriage will be great and that far from getting a divorce, my relationship with my spouse will be such that it inspires, encourages and builds up other couples and ensures healthy development of our children, and so on, would anyone balk at saying one should do both A and B?
Now, let's look at that Protestant question about becoming Orthodox again, this time translated into our marriage hypothesis.
If doing A gets me to C (good marriage, no divorce), why add B (great marriage, inspires, encourages, edifies others, results in well-developed children)?
Does it really make sense to ask that question now?
For those of us Protestants who are on the way to Orthodoxy, this is what that Protestant question looks like. I know I'm one of those seemingly genetically wired to look at the arguments for Orthodoxy, and to go with the facts and the Truth. And I do not want to deny the importance of the truth of the Orthodox claims. But I am also trying to make sense for my Protestant friends and readers why anyone would be willing to do such a strange thing as become Orthodox and bring his family with him if he can? Especially if it's possible to attain the goal without all the extras.
Doing A is minimalism, functionalism. Focus on my individual relationship with Jesus. Study the Bible, stick with Bible-oriented preaching and teaching. No sacraments. No liturgy. No spiritual disciplines.
Sure one gets saved, but it's like munching on a rice cake (without any added flavorings).
Doing B is all that A is plus sacraments, liturgy, the disciplines, saints' days and feast days, the union of soul and body in salvation, a Church with a biography that goes all the way back.
One gets saved, and one feasts on the tastiest of steaks (or for you herbivores, the best spinach lasagna ever).
Why Orthodoxy?
Because for some of us, being a Christian isn't just about getting saved or getting by. We want a faith that is full and rich and has all the bells and smoke and history and romance and tragedy and adventure. For some of us, greedy spiritual beggars that we are, we want it all.
Andrew, one of the commenters on the em church post I critiqued earlier yesterday, tagged me with being scornful of em churchers (and presumably other such folk). It is often remarked by em churchers against those of us who criticize the em church phenomena and its attendent structures and presuppositions that we somehow fail to understand them. We are, it is implied if not outright alleged, to be rigidly modernist and binary. And we also fail, so goes the claim, to see that God is at work in this postmodern milieu, and come very nearly close to denying the work of the Holy Spirit--an unforgivable blasphemy one might recall.
Well, this may well be true of other critics of the em church, but if I may be so bold: it is not true of me. I offer as evidence two examples of my love-affair, however brief and fittingly provisional, with postmodernism, both papers I wrote in seminary. The first paper, Deconstruction: Derrida, Theology, and John of the Cross, written in all my tenderness as a first year, indeed first semester, graduate student in seminary, is surely proof enough. A man who quotes Depeche Mode and St. John of the Cross alongside an examination of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology, if he hasn't earned the right to call himself postmodern is very near so as to be indistinguishable! The other paper, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Postmodernity and Christ the Center, written the following semester may not be so obvious, but since it concludes with "Therefore, I recommend Bonhoeffer and his theology as seedbed for postmodern theology and faith" I think it counts.
Having come from a conservative Restoration Movement Bible college education, one can imagine how I went through my modern/anti-modern stages, and, as I recount elsewhere, the realization of the weaknesses and failures of modernism (under an anti-modernist critique) helped me to see the failures of both. My only option, intellectually, then was to examine postmodern thought. I did. And I espoused it for several years.
But as happened with the previous two "modernisms" I had consciously owned, I quickly came to see the emptiness and uselessness of postmodernism. I saw its pretensions, its blindspots and its fascist inclinations. Although my first blush of infatuation with postmodernism led me to strongly believe in its usefulness as a tool for propagating the faith, I realized one does not use a tool and remain unaffected by its purpose. Despite its protestations otherwise, postmodernism has a teleology, and one who attempts to wield it, even with the best of intentions, cannot but be dragged along in time to its ultimate nihilistic end.
I came out of postmodernism--if that is an accurate way to describe such things--by falling in love with something else. I rather suppose that's the only way one ever makes any lasting committed changes, whether they be marital, spiritual, or fanatical. It is not the love, per se, but the object of one's love. One is not, as per the Romantics, transfigured by love but by the object of that love. And not all transfigurations are ones of glory and beauty. We may be made cruel and capricious by loving the wrong person or thing just as much as we may be made humble and meek.
I fell in love, to state it baldly, with the New Testament Church. Not the legendary idol of my upbringing in the Restoration Movement churches, but with the real, live, blood-pulsing incarnate New Testament Church. Only such a love, located outside the context of the fights of modernism and its stepchildren, coudl accomplish this. And as with all loves, I did not then know Her for what She was. She was to me a mixture of my own fantasy, mistaken opinions and judgments, and real life. But the more time I spent getting to know Her--admittedly at first in a distant, detached way--the more real She became. And the more desirable.
If I spell out to you the ultimate teleology of the postmodernism the em churches imbibe, I will be--I know because I have been--dismissed with prejudice. It will not matter that what I say is true, nor that I have experienced it personally myself. I at least have this advantage: I have been there and back. Many, perhaps most, em churchers have not. My arguments, if they carry any effectivness, only do so because they are coupled with authentic experience. I can argue against postmodernism because I have lived it.
Thankfully, I need not do so. Nor do I need argue over exclusive ecclesiology--though I do, and too too often. I need not argue for the legitimacy of Orthodoxy's claims. I need only to keep pressing one thing: come and see.
I have spoken at some length of my meandering journey from my heritage churches of the Restoration Movement, to the Anglican churches, and finally to my long, lingering look at Orthodoxy. And there is an ever growing number of reasons as to why I should, need to, become Orthodox.
But last night on the way home from teaching, I was trying to identify the single motivating impulse that started me on this journey. Clearly one of the early desires was a search after the historic New Testament Church, with a more full and stable body of doctrine and discipline.
Still, if I can think with any clarity about this, it seems to me that long before I even knew the Orthodox Church existed, before I encountered Anglicanism, before all of this, the first step of the journey began with a simple wish.
I wanted to pray better.
I had pretty much grown up with the Protestant evangelical paradigm of Bible reading, prayer, going to worship and giving offerings. Ever since I was a junior in high school (and even intermittently prior to that), I woke up each day, read a chapter or two from the Scriptures, said a prayer, and went about my day. I went to church and tried to give. To this day, I still do these things. These are the fundamentals.
But aside from this structure, my prayers were formless, my thoughts simply bounced off my own skull. And anyway, for who knows whatever reason, I wanted more. By the mid-point of my Bible college education, I was struggling for help. Something different.
I'd already made the acquaintance of Richard Foster's book, The Celebration of Discipline. But it ended up being more of the same: I was the standard by which such things were measured. If I fasted or not, it was up to me. Any rationale for such activity was whatever I needed or wanted it to be.
Somehow, and the particulars are no longer clear to my memory, I became acquainted with medieval Benedictine monasticism. I was here introduced to the daily office. Later I would encounter St. Benedict himself and his holy Rule. I also was introduced to the Carmelites, St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila. I read St. Ignatius' Spiritual Exercises. Here were entire lives devoted to nothing but the praise and worship of God. And to this I was irrevocably drawn.
From there the two primary catylsts for my journey--the seeking out of the historic New Testament Church, and the search for a liturgy-theology grounded in that Church--were set and guided me into and back out of Anglicanism, and finally to Orthodoxy.
Along the way, I discovered prayerbook worship, the quotidian practice of the office, and the way liturgy is meant to shape and form one's spirit, soul, mind and body. I went from my own sense of lack and emptiness, through ever-greater fulfillment, until I arrived at what I know is my home and final destiny.
To this day, my continuing paradigm of Orthodox experience remains one of the first images I retain from one of the first worship services I attended. It was a "deacon's mass" at All Saints, where I now attend with my family. The undending refrain of praise, glorification and worship of the All-Holy Trinity told me at long last that I had found that toward which my heart had set me some seventeen or eighteen years before.
[Previous posts: Part I and Part II]
As a Restoration Movement Protestant Christian, I had a history-less Church. I had doctrine that was incomplete. But most importantly, I had no way to live an embodied faith.
It is really difficult to capture that for Protestant readers. The ready reply is that acting on one's faith is an embodied faith. And while some charitable Protestant readers might grant me the points on history and minimalist doctrine, the ascription to my Protestant background of an incapacity to embody one's faith might seem the beam talking to the speck.
But there is an ineffable difference between a faith that is turned into a code of conduct and a faith that is incarnate. As a Restoration Movement Protestant, the only sacrament I accepted was baptism. And even then, my Restorationist brothers and sisters and I resisted calling it a sacrament. Such a label was too Catholic. We did not believe, for the most part, that material things carried grace. We intuitively understood that baptism was an exception to our anti-sacramental stance, but we did not know precisely why.
So, we did not have much of a place for the body in our doctrinal understandings. Sexual sins were not so much a violation of the sanctity of the Holy Spirit's home (the Christian's body) as they were a violation of a code of conduct. Our understanding of forgiveness was the removal of debt, or the restoration of a relationship. And because we did not have a place for the body in our doctrine, we did not have a place for askesis in our living.
Ours was a faith to be believed, with obligatory conduct codes, but we did not understand that faith and its obligatory conduct as something we did with our bodies. We confessed the Cross, but we did not sign ourselves with it. We confessed the Incarnation, but we did not venerate icons. We confessed the Lord's Supper, but we did not consume Christ's Body and Blood.
So, lacking this understanding of a fully embodied faith, rejecting the Mysteries, or Sacraments (except for baptism), divorcing our doctrine from the living tangible Church, we had propositions and codes of conduct. Our “embodiment” of our faith, was simply the logical and moral conclusions to our doctrinal syllogisms. We had behavior. But we did not have the body.
On coming to Orthodoxy, then, it was a stark contrast as to how material the Faith really is. There is incense, oil, bread, wine, water, wood, gold and silver, icons, vestments. In fact, there are the saints themselves in all their bodily theosis. The Faith is not only touched and tasted, it is ingested. The Incarnation happened once for all in Palestine. But the Incarnation continues where Christ sits at the right hand of God. It continues in the visible, tangible existence of the Church, the Body of Christ. And it continues when the Holy Spirit is called down upon the elements and Christ's brothers and sisters eat His flesh and drink His blood, just as he commanded. It is the body that connects faith and doing. It is the Body that connects Christian with Christ. We are saved in the Body and saved in a body. Here is the missing link of my Christian heritage.
And it's fulfillment.
[Previous post: Part I]
There is an oversimplification of Orthodox doctrine which runs something like this: Orthodox hold to the ancient, unchanged doctrine of the apostles without addition (Roman Catholicism) or subtraction (Protestantism). Orthodox claim that with purgatory, the immaculate conception (based on the dogma of original sin as original guilt), and, preeminently, the filioque, among others, the Roman see has added unauthorized dogma to the Faith. Orthodox also claim that Protestant rejection of the sacraments, icons, apostolic succession, among others, the Protestants have committed unauthorized subtractions from the whole of the apostolic faith. These additions and subtractions, according to Orthodox, result in a distortion of the faith and in schism from the Church who holds to that faith in its entirety.
As I said, this is an oversimplification. But like such generalizations it does hold germs of truth. And, in point of fact, when I first came to Orthodoxy and began to investigate what it is and its claims and arguments for those claims, I began to realize that far from radically altering what it was I believed, I would have to flesh it out.
I had a faith contained more or less in a body of propositions and codes of conduct. I'm not sure when I began to believe that I should go back to the historic Church to really determine what the Bible meant, but it was a couple years prior to coming into contact with Orthodoxy in the summer of 2000. It began with a book of daily readings from the Church Fathers, which I used in my daily devotionals beginning in autumn 1996. But it didn't reach conscious fruition until late 1999 when I began conscientiously to seek the mind of the Fathers.
At first my method was to try to understand what the Fathers said, and then to justify that within the framework of (what I interpreted from) Scripture. Infant baptism? Sure, since Scripture could plausibly be said to have instances of it. Sacramental Lord's Supper? Sure, since I already had such an understanding of baptism, and I'd long been bothered by the hermeneutical inconsistencies of affirming what I did about baptism, but rejecting the same hermeneutical base for what I believed about the Lord's Supper. Bishops? Sure, since the word itself is all over the New Testament and the historical data made sense in light of the New Testament. And so it went.
While I should note that this approach—conforming the Tradition to my own biblical interpretations—is dangerously wrongheaded, for Protestant converts like myself, it is, perhaps, almost inevitable. We Restoration Movement Protestants are, or used to be, raised with a propositional faith, and our transition to the Faith of the Ancient Church will be by propositional stages. One ought normally to be suspicious of those Protestant converts who are ready to accept the dogmae of Orthodoxy wholesale without investigation. I say normally, because God saves us where we're at. But he can also bring us, in his grace, to where we need to be. It's a matter of the heart more than it is of the mind, and once one's heart is ready, the intellect can follow. Some of us have hearts that are much more stony than others.
So, for a time, my movement toward Orthodoxy was a matter of adding propositional content to my faith. I quite literally did not believe enough, I had to fill up what was lacking in my faith. In this sense, Orthodoxy was a direct fulfillment of my already deeply held beliefs. I did not need to come to a more serious conviction about the place and authority of the Scriptures. But I did have to understand that place and authority as one manifestation of the singular Tradition. I did not have to come to an understanding of the person and role of Jesus as the fully human and fully divine Mediator. But I did have to come to understand why that was important in my salvation. It was not merely that Jesus' death as the God-man was God taking his own medicine, turning away the wrath of God from sinful humanity. It was precisely the means by which we would be united to God, body and soul.
But not merely a filling up of a lack, Orthodoxy is the fulfillment of my Protestant doctrinal beliefs in that they require a move from proposition to disposition. My Protestant faith had a most difficult time moving from propositional truths to living application. These most often could not get past being simply new codes of conduct. Belief A resulted in an obligation to Conduct B. But I was quite literally without any knowledge or recourse as to how to move from A to B. I knew that I was saved by grace through faith, and not through my own works. I knew that God worked in me both to will and to do his good pleasure. But day after day I could not find a way to move from head belief to a heart that willed the code of conduct that my belief demanded. Ironically, for one who would have argued wholeheartedly against works-based salvation, the only thing I knew was to place yet another burden of laws upon my “grace-filled” faith. I could not go the way of antinomianism, for I had read St. Paul's condemnation of such in Romans 6. But the alternative was just as impossible.
In Orthodoxy, however, I have seen the fulfillment of my Protestant doctrine. I am, in part, called to certain propositional beliefs. I also am, in part, called to specific acts and behaviors. And I know, as I did in my Protestant doctrine, that God works the transformation within me. But now I know that he does so through his life as manifested in his Son through his Church and, in part, in and through the Mysteries of his energetic grace, especially the Eucharist.
As a history-less Protestant, I needed the historical Life of the Church. As a biblical reductionist Protestant, I needed the Tradition of the Church. And as a Protestant seeking the fulfillment of his faith and conduct, I need the holy and life-giving askesis that the Church offers via her union with the holy and life-giving Spirit proceeding from the Father and sent by the Son, one holy and ineffably perfect Trinity in whose energies is my only salvation.
[Next: the fulfillment of a living askesis.]
I have recorded my peregrine spiritual journey elsewhere (see also here and here), so I will not attempt to recreate yet another account of my Orthodox journey. Rather, I want to simply speak to some of the things that Orthodoxy means to me, who am still as yet just outside the doors. I've expressed these ideas before, but I want to revisit them again today.
I grew up in history-less churches. Intent as we were about restoring the beliefs and practices of the New Testament Church, we ignored the seventeen hundred years between the close of the New Testament era/first century and the rise of the Restoration Movement churches at the beginning of the nineteenth. We didn't even pay too much attention to our own history. What was important was doctrine, interpreting the Bible correctly. History primarily served as a foil to prove our contention that we were correcting the errors of the historic Church.
Ironically, it was through a Church history class taught at one of my heritage churches' Bible colleges, that I awoke to the supreme problem with this view: the notion that we could ever really know what the New Testament Church believed and practiced without consulting that New Testament Church. That is to say, the view that the New Testament Church was wholly contained in the New Testament did extreme violence to Jesus' promise of the prevalence of the Church over the gates of hell and his promise to be with Her always till the end of the age. Contrary to the “Constantinian-apostasy” and “trail-of-blood” ecclesiastical history that I'd grown up with, the Church, I discovered in my class, did not, actually, apostasize after the last of the apostles died, nor during Constantine's reign. Nor did Jesus' promise fail. The Church has continued to this day. This, of course, was something I obviously had to believe if I wanted to believe myself part of that Church. But the full implications of it—that there was a flesh-and-blood group of people whose history and doctrine could be traced directly back to the Apostle Paul (such as the Church at Thessaloniki)—would take some time to sink in.
Still, to even acknowledge that there was a living, breathing New Testament Church in our day—and not just some doctrinal, theoretical construct built on particular interpretations of the Scriptures—led to the only logical question I could ask: Where is that Church?
That question led me, ultimately, to the Incarnation. Ecclesiology is Christology. If God himself thought it important to take on human history as intrinsic to the Person of the Son, if God did not think it too great a thing to wrap all his divinity in the weakness of human flesh and blood, then who was I to ignore the history, the flesh and blood reality, of the Church? I began to realize that the absence of personal history is the absence of real identity. I could not claim to be part of the Church if I cut off from my faith and practice the history that was essential to that Church. Then, like an adopted child seeking his origins, there was awakened in me a deep hunger for that real identity that could only be fulfilled by the Church that was not only doctrinally but, as importantly, historically connected to the New Testament Church. I began to realize that my identity as a “New Testament Christian” was a construct. It was an empty frame with only bits and pieces inside. That relative emptiness needed to be filled, that identity needed to be made real.
And like many adopted children, I found myself not disparaging or disrespecting my adopted mother, the Restoration Movement churches, but nonetheless dealing with the truth: my adopted mother had raised me well and given me great and lasting gifts. But my origins as a Christian must necessarily lie elsewhere. I needed to shift the incomplete picture of who I thought myself to be to the reality of what I needed to be: a child of Mother Church.
For most of my life, I was a Christian cut off from the rest of the Church. Our group of churches largely did not acknowledge other denominations since we viewed much of their doctrine and practice as not in conformity with the New Testament. This changed quite a bit as I became an adult and our churches began to cooperate more often and more widely with other church groups. But I was also cut off from the Church of history. There was this vast emptiness between myself and my churches and that New Testament Church we believed once existed in purity, and which purity we now sought to restore.
But such a church was still primarily a doctrine, an idea. We often referred to the New Testament as a “blueprint” for our faith and practice. The Church, in my understanding, was not so much a real, live entity as it was a propositional standard. This, of course, was precisely how we could “restore” it. Ideas can always be “restored.” This well-meant, if anemic, understanding of the Church served me well for much of my life. But it could not teach me to pray. It could not teach me how to live and to struggle. It could not in fact, live such prayer and such struggle for me. It could not lead me by example. It was, after all, an idea.
In my discovery of Mother Church, however, I have found not an idea, not a doctrine, but the warm maternal love of a home, the household of faith. Here there is a family related by blood. Over there is the “eccentric grandmother,” fool-for-Christ Xenia. There are the family doctors, Cosmas and Damian. There is the plucky Great Martyr Katherine. And there is the brilliant Confessor, Maximus. But there are plenty of children about, just like in a real home: the children martyrs of the Boxer Rebellion, Lucy of Sicily, the Holy Innocents. And just like the homes we know, there is always Good Food about.
The restoration of my ecclesial maternal ties has not yet been completed. But I have met my Ecclesial Mother. And I am forever grateful to my adopted Restoration Movement mother who raised me to seek Her. I must now devote the rest of my life getting to know Her.
[Next: the fulfillment of doctrine.]
One does not normally associate theoretical or intellectual rigor with Orthodoxy. By that I don't mean that Orthodoxy is incoherent, or doesn't stand up to rigorous philosophical inquiry. After all, among the most brilliant of thinkers in the history of the Church are the Cappadocians, St. Maximus, and St. Gregory Palamas (who, I hasten to say aren't Orthodoxy's unique property, but are nonetheless integral to Orthodoxy in the way St. Augustine is to the West). But Orthodoxy is not a tight, architectonic system like Calvinism, nor does it have the sort of Aristotelian philosophical grid that Roman Catholicism post-Aquinas has. Orthodoxy's greatest thinkers share no such system or grid.
No, in fact, Orthodoxy has, as Vladimir Lossky's book title puts it, a “mystical theology.” Which simply means that Orthodoxy thinks in terms of her experience of the revelation of God in Christ. Orthodoxy is quintessentially an experiential religion. She thinks with her mind, but with a mind that has descended into her heart.
This is why, when I have spoken about my reasons for attraction to the Orthodox Church in the past, those reasons derived from the experience of the Faith. In December 2003, I finished up a nine-part post on the reasons I was attracted to Orthodoxy. The Orthodox Church honors the past, respects the present, has a consistent theology, has the fullness of the Christian faith, has both an existential and objective worship and askesis, makes claims that are historically and objectively verifiable and theologically valid, and unites the home and family in the Church. Six months later, I added an additional post on my relief that Orthodoxy not only tells me what salvation is, but shows me how to acquire it. Today, nearly a year after that last post, and more than a year and a half since the last post of the original series, I want to add yet one more post answering, “Why Orthodoxy?” And today I want to talk about Orthodoxy in terms of intellectual consistency.
Let me say it clearly and starkly: Orthodoxy has a purity of thought unmatched by the Roman Catholic Church and by all of Protestantism. I don't mean Orthodoxy has never had heretics. No, in fact, some of Orthodoxy's heretics were the most highly-placed of her hierarchy. Rather, I mean that if one conforms one's mind to Orthodoxy one will quite literally never go wrong.
Of course, this might seem tautological. After all, Orthodoxy is “right belief.” It also might seem to beg the question. After all, if one assumes Orthodoxy to be true, then of course anything that doesn't match up is false. But then: Is Orthodoxy true? That's the question being begged.
Although I won't offer an apologetic for the Orthodox Church here, let me say that such an apologetic is not hard to come by on the net, and there are a plethora of books one can consult. One will find that Orthodoxy's claims are historically verifiable and logically valid. Furthermore, experience will also bear out the claims of the Orthodox Church to be the Church.
But one can also think through some of Orthdoxy's claims and show their internal consistency and coherence, and also show how the opposing beliefs of other churches are internally inconsistent and/or logically invalid. A couple of examples should suffice.
Take the filioque of the Western churches' Creed. Applied to the essential nature of the Godhead, the filioque falls apart. If, for the Son to be of one essence with the Father, it is necessary that He share in the eternal procession of the Spirit, then the Spirit cannot be of the same essence of the Father and the Son. Nor does this work if one posits that the Spirit is the hypostatic love between Father and Son, for this also fails to establish “one essence” of the Holy Spirit with the Father. In other words, the filioque fails to properly establish the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit. In all configurations, the Holy Spirit must be of a composite nature of that of the Father and the Son, and different than that of both of Them. In short, the Holy Spirit becomes an attenuated appendage to the bi-unity of the Father and the Son.
Now don't misunderstand me. I do recognize that Western churches who have adopted the filioque explicitly reject these entailments. Indeed, they must do so if they would continue to claim the name of Christ. But it doesn't erase the fact that their adoption of the filioque places their theology in a fundamentally compromised light. Indeed, for the reasons noted above (as well as because the filioque was never accepted by the whole Church), the filioque itself is heresy. And if one admits heresy into one's theology, one will continually be shoring up that theology to keep the heresy from rotting things out from the inside. And one can't get any more “inside” Christianity's core beliefs than the Trinity.
The Orthodox Church avoids these problems by teaching that the unity of the Trinity is preserved in the monarche of the Father. In that the Father causes the Son and causes the Holy Spirit, both Son and Holy Spirit share in the nature of the Father and are of the same essence. Orthodoxy never had a Pentecostal or Charismatic movement as the West did, because for more than fifteen hundred years it had a robust theology of the Holy Spirit, having rejected the filioque.
But it's not just the filioque. The Western understanding of original sin brings the same heretical entailments. Orthodoxy, of course, believes in original sin--but not the sort that arose out of Augustinianism in the West. In the West, through the development of St. Augustine's teachings, original sin is not just understood in the corruptibility and mortality to which human nature was subjected via Adam's sin, but is understood as the moral guilt and sin which is inherited with that corruptibility and mortality through the concupiscence of the sexual act of procreation. This results in a view of human nature, willing and personhood which entails that all human willing must ultimately be sinful (since the very nature from which that will operates is itself sinful, and a will cannot become something that it's nature is not), and that necessitates an identification of person with nature. This results in a soft determinism (compatibilism) in which humans always choose their strongest inclination at the moment of willing, which for sinful humanity will always entail sin, since the strongest inclination of human natures is always sin. Even good acts--giving alms, prayer--are ultimately suffused with sin, since pride and the self are at the core of their intentions.
There are a host of problems with this. First and foremost, the Western understanding of original sin fails to account for how Adam, who was created with a sinless nature, but capable of sin, did, in fact, sin. For even if sin was possible to Adam, it was not necessary, and given Adam's uncorrupt nature at the moment of his willing to sin, his greatest inclination, according to his nature, should have been for God. But it wasn't. This soft determinism doesn't explain Adam's sin.
To explain that sin, under the Western rubric, free will can only be actualized in a choice involving opposition (good vs. evil). Adam, from a sinless nature, indeterminately chose sin (since there would have been no necessary cause in his nature that would have moved his will to sin), in which case, free will is predicated upon a relation of opposition thus making free will the necessary cause for evil. Indeed, it also requires that there necessarily not be free will in the eschaton, for if there were, then God, to make possible free will's actuality, will necessarily have to make possible a choice between good and evil, and this will ultimately result in an endless chain of potential Falls. So the only way to guard against sin in the eschaton is to take away any opportunity for the exercise in free will, which is the same thing as eliminating free will.
Compatibilists will argue that free will is compatible with natural determination of the will, that is to say, the will always freely wills in the direction of its strongest inclination; but this only strengthens the problems in Christology. For if Christ's human nature was free of original sin for Christ to be sinless (which it would have to be, according to the Western understanding of original sin), then for Christ's will to be truly free, he would have to be given the opportunity to choose between good and evil, else he could never have been tempted in all way such as we are. But since such free will must be indeterminate, then either we have the case that it will always remain possible for Christ's human will to sin (which means that Christ's human nature is not fixed in virtue), or Christ did not have human free will (in the libertarian sense that Adam had free will), or Christ's divine will subsumed his human will (in the compatibilist sense of human free will). The first option is a problem, because this calls into question the union of the human and divine natures in Christ's person. The second option is a problem because Christ could not have undone the consequences of Adam's Fall apart from free will. And the third option results in the heresy of monothelitism.
In fact, under the Western rubric of original sin, eternal destinies are decided by God alone in his inscrutable decrees. The logical entailment is as stark as it is intuitively horrifying: God creates some persons for heaven and some persons for hell.
Orthodoxy, however, avoids these problems altogether, by understanding that all that God creates is good, including human nature and free will. Though postlapsarian humans are born with original sin, this original sin is the capacity for corruption and mortality that is part of unredeemed human nature. Though human nature has been compromised by Adam's fall, that nature in no way necessitates that we sin. That humans do sin, then, is not directly a result of their fallen human nature, but is rather the direct result of the failure of their deliberative will. That is to say, as a result of deliberation humans take an apparent good for a real good, and mistakenly choose the apparent good. Free will, then, does not necessitate a relation of opposition, but only a deliberation among multiple goods. In a fallen world, apparent goods ultimately entail sin, since they are a rejection of the real good. But in the eschaton all goods will be real, and there will be no need for deliberation. So, in orthodoxy, free will is good, but the deliberative use of that will can be either good or evil--the use being completely up to the person so willing.
Christ, however, did not need the deliberative will. Like all humans, he had a human nature and a human will, and like all humans, his will was free to choose among different acts. The difference however, which results from his mode of existence as the incarnate God-man, is that Christ's human nature and will were deified in the union with his divine nature and will and he had no need to deliberate between apparent and real goods. His personal choice to act made use of his human will such that he always chose the real goods available to him. Unlike Adam and unlike humans prior to the eschaton, in his Person, Christ was fixed in virtue: all his thoughts and acts were good. His divine nature had deified his human nature. But like Christ, regenerated humans in the eschaton will be fixed in virtue, we will be deified through our hypostatic union with God in Christ. Thus all our willing will be according to our natures, which natures are divinized, and our wills will freely choose among multiple goods, about which there will be no need of deliberation.
In other words, in Orthodoxy, the deliberative will is the mode of willing peculiar to the un-deified mode of existence unique to humans prior to the eschaton. Such a deliberative mode of willing is not, in itself, evil, since it was the mode of willing given to Adam in the garden, and through which mode Adam, had he so chosen freely, would have been fixed in virtue and been deified in Christ. Indeed, it is precisely this use of the deliberative will prior to the eschaton which fixes either in virtue or in vice, the humans who make use of it. This explains both why it is possible to fall away from God after regeneration and why it is possible to reach a point in which repentance is no longer possible; i. e., why humans choose hell and remain fixed in that choice for all eternity.
Thus, in Orthodoxy, the cause of sin is properly placed not in God, for all his gifts are good, but in the creatures He has created who use that good gift to reject God, not for another objective evil but for another apparent good. It is also places the responsibility for our personal eternal destinies in our hands, for all our accumulated choices arising from our countless deliberative moments in this life, are ultimately our own authorship of our character and and fate.
These are only two examples--and though it may not seem like it, only the most summarized of examples at that--among many that could be noted. For instance, the consistency in the West on the insistence of the absolute simplicity of God, the doctrine of created grace, and the overemphasis on forensic justification necessitated by original sin.
This is not to say that Orthodoxy smooths out all intellectual difficulties. After all, theodicy is a recalcitrant matter which does not admit of easy resolution. But Orthodox theodicy is able to honestly admit the difficulties without implicating God in them. That, in itself, is a huge advance over the logical entailments of original sin. But it is to say that the difficulties one encounters in Orthodoxy are difficulties that result from the finiteness of human reason in its attempt to understand the divine and not from the arguments of human reason itself.
And this is one more reason why I am attracted to Orthodoxy.
A Continuation
Back in December, I wrapped up a series of posts reflecting on why it was that Orthodoxy drew me. I listed several reasons: from the Orthodox Church's honoring of the past and her respecting the present to the historical validity of her claims, from the unity of Church and home in her belief and practice to the fullness of her faith, and her consistency of theology and objective and existential worship and askesis. In continuing to reflect on why it is that the Orthodox Church is now what I consider to be the end of my spiritual pilgrimage, as well as its beginning, I have decided to add another post on the theme "Why Orthodoxy?"
All of the factors I reflected on through last autumn still remain true. These are things about Orthodoxy that got me turned toward her beauty, and which still keep me focused on her. One of those was the objectivity of Orthodox worship. By that, I meant (and mean) that the focus of worship in the Orthodox Church is the Holy Trinity, not me. No one is going to ask me if I'm comfortable with the service. The Liturgy is not going to be tailored to me predilections. Rather than the obsequiousness of "relevancy" Orthodoxy offers instead the pearl of great price. The Orthodox Church offers Christianity straight. The Orthodox Church says, in effect, "You're dying. You have a choice. Here is life if you want it."
But the effect of this seeming indifference to my "needs" serves a greater end. It serves first to wean me of self-interest. And it is on this end that I want to focus today.
In the last several months, especially through this Great Lent just ended, the difference of the Orthodox Church compared to the Restoration Movement churches of my heritage and the Episcopal Church in which I was confirmed, has become ever more clear to me, on just this very point. The Orthodox Church tells me where is eternal life--just as did the Restoration Movement churches and the Episcopal parishes of which I've been a part. The Orthodox Church tells me what it is I must know about eternal life--so, too, did the Restoration Movement churches and those Anglican parishes I experienced. But the Orthodox Church also tells me how to get there and of what use are the things I know.
Let me try to put it this way. In the Restoration Movement churches, I was told the Gospel. Holiness of life was demanded of me. I was given the Truth to know and a model and paradigm, in Jesus, for living a life of faithful holiness. But that was it. I was not told how to become holy. It was emphasized again and again that my being made holy was an act of grace with which I must cooperate (as per Philippians 2:12-13). But how to resist the urges of lust, hate, anger, jealousy and envy, and all the fruit of sin in my life was not a part of my learning.
In the Episcopal Church, I heard similar messages of truth and grace. And the Episcopal Church offered me further clues. There were the sacraments, especially that of Confession and the Eucharist. I was told that these mysteries were essential for growth in Christian virtue. But not only was I not told how to resist the flesh, nor how to connect the Mysteries with this ascetical struggle, but save for the sacraments of Baptism and Holy Communion, there was no consistent practice, no necessity, among the whole of the parish regarding these matters, nor was any demand made on the parish as a whole relative to the use of the "lesser mysteries." In short, my struggle against the flesh, though it was grounded in the mysteries of the Church as a whole, was a single, solitary one, unsupported by the wider parish life.
In short, my exeperience among the Christian churches of my past is that Faith is mostly about the intellect and the assent we give to right doctrine, and the struggle against the flesh was essentially moralistic, a set of guidelines and principles to follow in general.
Orthodoxy, I have discovered, offers the fulfillment of what I have been missing from my previous experiences. There is Truth, right doctrine, principes and moral guidelines, to be sure. There is the exhortation to struggle and to rely wholly on God's grace. But what Orthodoxy has that the others lack, is a "science," as it were, of warfare against the flesh.
Through the writings of St. Theophan the Recluse (The Spiritual Life and How to Be Attuned to It, which I've been reading with several of the men of our parish, and The Path to Salvation, which has been my Lenten reading), who himself passed on the Church's two-thousand-year-old wisdom, I have come to a greater understanding of how the sinful nature works, and the temptations wrought in and through it, as well as how to fight against the temptations it brings and which come through it. I better understand how it is that I am attacked first in the realm of thoughts--and thus the necessity for ortho (right) doxy (thinking)--but also that due to habitual sins, the path from thought to desire to intention is so well worn that many times the temptation must be attacked right at the cusp of the action of the will.
I better know how it is that the life of Orthodox Faith must be lived in the heart, and how to pray from the heart. All my praying, or most of it at any rate, has been either located in my skull, or wholly seated in the emotions. I have never, or at least only extremely rarely, known what it is to pray from the center of my being, where are joined head, body, emotions and will. But since pursuing Orthodoxy, this prayer of the heart, though still rare due to my stubborn refusal to let go of myself, is more often experienced.
And none of this is done in a corner. All of this warfare is one communal event. It is evident in the Liturgy and the hymnody of the Church. It is evident in the fasting of the Church--and today we start the Apostles' Fast lasting till the 29th of this month when we celebrate the feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. It is evident in the semi-public nature of Confession, as at each Vespers service, a handful of parishioners, both before and after the service, stand with the priest before the icon of Christ, in full view of the worshippers (though not within their hearing).
I have longed all my Christian life for a time-tested way to grow in the Christian virtues, the fruit of the Spirit. God, in his grace, has blessed my bumbling efforst. But how frustrating it has been to always be so hit and miss. I now have two weapons with which to fight the world, the flesh and the devil: a "manual" as it were of the writings of the Fathers and the wisdom of a spiritual father, and a community who knows that the struggle is lifelong and that we all are warriors in this fight.
I am now at a point of great responsibility. With greater knowledge comes greater obligation. But I welcome the higher standard, because with it comes greater hope of victory, and the promise of fulfillment in that Day.
Conclusion: What Remains; or, Why I Haven't Yet Been Chrismated (Part IX of IX)
[Note: The entire series can be found here, with the first entry at the bottom, and this last entry at the top.]
I have tried to describe, as summarily as possible, those aspects of Orthodoxy which have drawn me to seek the Orthodox Church. Being the sort of person that I am, the original force of my inquiry was largely historical and doctrinal. (I have described this aspect of the journey elsewhere.) But once I'd been intellectually satisfied--and for me, an important quest must have intellectual validity--it soon became clear that the journey had only just begun. For it is now incumbent upon me to turn that intellectual gain to lived experience.
This aspect of my journey became more clear to me during the Nativity Fast last year (precipitated by news of Anna's pregnancy with Sofie), but really came to the fore during Great Lent of this year. Heeding the counsel of my priest, I attempted to keep the fast of the first week of Lent, and I read daily from Unseen Warfare. In the combination of success and failure of my struggle with the askesis of the start of Lenten fasting, and with that my contemplation of the texts of Unseen Warfare, I made the slow beginnings of the transition from mere thinking about the life of Faith, to more thoughtful living of the Faith.
Back in July 2000, when I first began to seriously inquire about Orthodoxy, I had been attracted to the idea of the Orthodox Church. But I was still too plugged into my own preferrences. By this same time last year I knew Orthodoxy to be what it claimed. And in the ensuring year I have in small ways experienced the most scintillant of glimpses into the reality of that Truth.
However, before I can be fully illumined, I have had to put my own house in order.
My spiritual pilgrimage from my heritage churches to the Episcopal Church was not handled very well in terms of my relationship with my wife. I was chasing the "big idea" I saw with regard to historical connectedness to the Church, and the power of the sacraments and liturgical worship. My wife wanted me to put on the brakes. I refused, albeit as politely as I could. And in that refusal I incurred a huge deficit in terms of my spiritual headship in the home. After a few years, Anna was more willing to allow me my continued journey in the Episcopal Church, so much so that she acquiesced to my attending seminary. Throughout it all, however, she steadfastly refused to become a member of the Episcopal Church. Then, with our experience at an Episcopal seminary, her willingness to allow me my opportunity to journey the Anglican way was more severely tested than either of us could ever have imagined. That she did not abandon our marriage--though seminary put the most desparate of strains on our relationship--is a testimony to her love and faithfulness. Since it was during all this that I began to turn from Anglicanism as a dead end in my search to the Orthodox Church as something of a last gasp, it is little wonder that Anna was sceptical about it. I had forfeited her trust in my spiritual leadership when I failed to give serious considerations to her objections to the Episcopal Church. That legitimacy of that forfeiture, for her, was hammered home again and again as we confronted each and every problem the Episcopal Church presented.
So, in July 2002, after two years of inquiry into Orthodoxy, and some six months after having left the Episcopal Church, it was hardly any surprise that Anna's reaction to my seriousness about the Orthodox Chuch was warmly opposed. In the ensuing year and a half, it has been my task to rebuild the trust in my headship of the home, and, more specifically, in matters spiritual.
While on retreat at an Episcopal Benedictine monastery in October last fall, I began to pray quite specifically about the common journey of our household into the Orthodox Church (my prayers had been much more generic to that point), as well as to take on a new devotion to the Mother of God. It was during that autumn weekend that I first prayed the Akathist to the Theotokos, and sought her intercessions specifically for my wife. About a month and a half later we discovered that Anna was pregnant.
It was then that I was more fully aware than I'd ever been before, that the sort of changes I needed to make in myself involved much more than making sure my family and I prayed at mealtimes, read Scripture together and went to church. I'm still a long ways from being the husband I need to be, but Sofie's advent, by God's grace and the intercessions of the Mother of God, has helped me to be the sort of husband Anna needs.
And it is just here that I have come to see how pervasively the Orthodox Faith transforms all of our existence. It's not just about ideas. It's not merely about political activism. It's not about mere good deeds. It's a change of heart, soul, mind and body. Even during sleep, the Orthodox pray for protection from impure thoughts and from the wiles of the Enemy. It is an absolute life change.
I think once Anna began to see the ever so slight changes in me, she began to consider that the search I was on with regard to the Orthodox Church was much more legitimate than she might previously have thought. Then, too, she was encountering the frustration of her own expectations about the Church being continually disappointed by the churches here with which we've had contact. She acquiesced on Mother's Day to go with me to All Saints. As it happened, the sermon was on the Orthodox view of women. That could not but win over my wife, since Orthodoxy avoids the denigration of women in some fundamentalist sects, and the heresy of personhood in some of the liberal sects. She returned again on my birthday. And each time the love and attention of the parishioners broke through. Here, she saw, were those who really lived what they believed.
We are now at the point that All Saints is our common place of worship. This is a most major step. We have not had a common church home since our move to Chicago (since Anna refused to take part in what she saw going on in the Episcopal churches here). That was nearly four years ago.
Is Anna on her own journey to Orthodoxy? I cannot tell. Nor is it a matter of urgency at the moment. We have made significant steps in the last four months. These things have only happened through patience and persistent prayer.
I am more hopeful than ever, however, that by God's grace and our personal repentance and transformation, we will eventually find ourselves chrismated in the Orthodox Church. We will have finally found the home we have sought each in our own way, and our daughter will be the first cradle Orthodox in either of our families.
But there is much to do between now and then. Much patience and love to exercise. Much prayer to undertake.
Still and all, our God is good and loves mankind. That we have come this far is a testimony to his particular care and attention. On this day the Lord has acted, let us rejoice and give thanks.
7. Unity of Home and Family in the Faith (Part VIII of IX)
When I first began this series of reflections on why I was attracted to Orthodoxy, I did not intentionally leave this topic for last. It was an accident that I ordered the topics in the way that I did. Yet this topic is, in many ways, the one closest to my heart. And as it so happens, there have been in the last few weeks events that have made this among the most exciting of any of these topics. (I'll reflect on some of those in the next--and last--reflection.)
In his Ephesians homilies, St John Chrysostom calls the home "a little church." This had had an immense impact on my life and thought.
Apart from the Orthodox Church, it was my heritage churches that provided me with the concept of the Christian home. We were taught that theology and practice of such texts as Ephesians 5.21ff, Proverbs 31, and 1 Peter 3.1ff. Prayer was to be central to the Christian home. A Christian home was one in which all the members participated in the worship and teaching of the church, in mission and evangelistic work, and sought to live a life of Christian character.
But what was lacking was, in a real sense, familial union. Indeed, rejecting infant baptism, there was the odd setting in which one or more of the children might not have been in real union with the family by way of the Gospel. In fact, lacking any real sacramental theology, the struggle of faith in my churches' understanding, was moral exertion as radically individual. My family might acept the same doctrines theoretically, and go to the same fellowship, but the sort of Christian union which bound us was more intellectual than it was ontological.
I came into the Episcopal Church as an adult. In the Episcopal Church I could discern no overt teaching on the Christian home. Although the Episcopal Church lays claim to sacramental theology, any moral exertion was either almost exclusively through political activist causes or through the lense of individual piety. So while a family might conceivably find an important and real union at the altar rail, there was no other teaching or example in my experience of what the Christian home was to be except that of individuals promoting causes or engaging in pious practices alone. (Indeed, in my own limited experience, most of the teaching in the Episcopal Church on the Christian home were efforts at explaining why it is the case that husbands are not the head of the Christian household in the traditional sense.)
In Orthodoxy, my expeirence has been strikingly different to my past. Even more so than was the case in my heritage churches, the Orthodox affirm the Christian husband as the head of the household, whose ministry is sacrificial love and faithful leadership. Although a husband who is a layman may not, for example, pronounce absolution of his family's sins, in a very real way, his leadership is a priesthood. One of the roles of the Christian husband and father is to bless. And so every night I pray over Sofie and anoint her with holy water. The Christian husband and father leads the family in the faith. And so by example primarily, though also by teaching, I have affirmed the doctrines of the Church (as well as the truth of the claims of the Orthodox Church), not the least of which is the role of public worship. The family, in the Orthodox Church, is united by Baptism and Chrismation and by their common communion in the Body and Blood of Christ.
The Orthodox Church is like my heritage churches in that it affirms the husband as head of the home and his role in teaching the faith, prayer and example of life, and leading in worship. But Orthodoxy differs in that it provides a real ontological union in Christ in a way that surpasses that of my more intellectualized and individualized heritage churches.
The Orthodox Church is like the Episcopal Church in that there is the assertion of union of the home in the sacraments. But it differs in that it undermines this unity it its silence on, if not outright denial of, the New Testament teaching on the roles of the husband and father in the Christian home.
Or to say it another way, the positive aspects of the teaching on the home found in my heritage churches and in the Episcopal Church are similarly affirmed and surpassed in Orthodoxy. And those deficiencies that exist in these churches are filled up with the fullness of the historic Faith.
In Orthdoxy, the Church does not cease to be at the threshold of the Christian home. Rather it takes up the home and fulfills its true essence in the ordering of the ome under the headship of Christ and the union of each and all family members in his Body and Blood.
[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: Conclusion: What Remains; or, Why I Haven't Yet Been Chrismated
6. Historicity and Validity of the (Orthodox) Church's Claims (Part VII of IX)
When I began my inquiry into Orthodoxy, I was immediately confronted with an alien terrain. Not that the Orthodox Church lacked all the proper evangelical points of theology. There was grace, the Cross and Resurrection, baptism, witness, and so forth. But rather, in Protestantism, I was used to the posture of defense and response. I was used to the idea of giving a reason for why my particular churches were who and what they were, and, indeed, why I was a Protestant as well. But on coming to the Orthodox Church I was shocked that the Church was not all that interested in arguing for its own existence. It just simply was. The Orthodox Church didn't hope that I would feel at home in the Liturgy--though I was told to make myself at home, and did feel at home, during coffee hour and Sunday School. There was no talk of my felt needs. I wasn't promised relevance. There was just the simple invitation: Come and see.
The allusion to Christ's invitation to the first disciples is intentional. For this is precisely what the Orthodox Church claims of itself: that it is in a unique way the one and very Body of Christ.
This claim is, in the present climate, quite controversial. It's controversial to Protestants because the very invitation calls into question their very existence. For if what Orthodoxy claims of itself is true, there was no need for a Reformation, only a reunion. The Orthodox Church's claims are controversial to Roman Catholics, too, not merely because Rome claims for herself that which Orthodoxy claims--to be the one Body of Christ--but because these claims call into question the supremacy of the Roman see, and thereby critiquing Rome's administrative ecclesiology.
The claim is controversial to the non-Christian world as well, at least to the degree that the non-Christian world listens to and takes seriously the claims the Orthodox Church makes. For here is a seemingly merely human body claiming the grace of infallibility on the teachings about life and death, the nature of what it is to be human, the ordering of human relationships, and the nature of authority. The world of Orthodoxy's birth was discomfited enough that it sought to liquidate this rival organization. And this was repeated during the Moslem conquests and the Communist purges. Most of the controversy in the affluent global north and west revolves around Orthodoxy's claims to speak infallibly with regard to human morals.
But there it is: the Orthodox Church says of itself, "We are the Body of Christ." Everyone else says, "Prove it." Orthodoxy merely replies, "Come and see."
I have accepted that invitation, and, remarkably, I have found the "proof" others demand. I use the scare quotes around "proof" not because I think the historical and theological validity of Orthodoxy's claims is not sound and persuasive. Rather I seek to highlight that these things are not about apologetics. No one has become Orthodox by way of a reasoned argument. Those of us who have sought out Orthodoxy, and those who have in time become Orthodox, have only done so because of the demonstration of the powerful grace and mercy of God evidenced by the life lived by the Orthodox Church.
That being said, the historical and doctrinal evidence is all on the side of the Orthodox Church. When one traces the pre-Schism Church, its life and doctrine, especially in the highpoints of the Ecumenical Councils, and then makes comparison to the Orthodox Church, one can do almost nothing else but conclude that this is the same Church. When one traces the history of local Churches like that found in Thessaloniki, and realizes that this very Church has been in existence since the late AD 40s/early AD 50s, another point is added to the truth of Orthodoxy's claims.
My heritage churches and my home parish in the Episcopal Church would claim to have recovered the purity of the apostolic doctrines, purified of the accretions of Roman Catholic abberrations. But where is the twice-weekly fast? Where, in the evangelical church, are the sacraments? Where is the apostolic polity for governing the Church? Where is the teaching on theosis and struggle?
Rome would counter that she has all these things missing from the Protestant churches. But Orthodoxy would ask, where in the ancient councils is the doctrine of the supremacy of the Pope? Of papal infallibility? Of supererogation? Rome may have retained the important teachings and life practices of the ancient faith (though one could ask where is the twice-weekly fast in Rome, as well), but why has Rome added to the deposit of faith? Who gave her this authority?
I cannot do much but outline some of the important points of history and doctrine. In essence the Orthodox claim is she alone has unbroken continuity not only with the historical Church of the New Testament (something Protestants most obviously lack) as well as unbroken fidelity, neither adding to nor taking away from the faith once for all delivered to the saints (something Rome and Protestants both fail in).
But my stating this will not convince you. Even studying important works like Jaroslav Pelikan's The Christian Tradition will not ultimately convince. The only thing that will make a difference is to "Come and see."
[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: 7. Unity of Home and Family in the Faith
5. Objective and Existential Worship and Askesis (Part VI of IX)
My very first experience of worshipping at an Orthodox Church did not take place at my current local parish (All Saints in Chicago), but in Omaha, Nebraska, at St Mary's. Ironically enough St Mary's and All Saints are both part of the Antiochian jurisdiction. That worship at St Mary's was in October 1998, and I was an AngloCatholic Episcopalian. (In fact, during that same trip to Omaha, I attended an AC service of the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.)
My first dip into the Divine Liturgy was mostly observation mixed with confusion. There was little I understood about what happened during the Liturgy (the Hapgood prayerbook they had was tortuous to follow), and a lot I didn't understand about that which I could grasp about what was happening. I very much felt an outsider. Which is not to say that I wasn't welcomed by the parishioners. In fact, the gentleman I stood next to did all he could to offer explanations of what was going on in a sort of running commentary, including the proper way to make the sign of the Cross. I was invited to coffee afterwards. I was given all the room I needed to ask questions. But when it came to the worship service itself, I was an outsider.
The second time I worshipped at an Orthodox Church was during July 2000, and this time was at the parish where I now worship. This time, rather than merely being curious, I was primed by several weeks of study and reading, and an increasingly untenable crisis in the Episcopal Church, intensified at the seminary where I was then studying. This time I did recognize universal parts of the Liturgy: the Sursum Corda, the hymn "Blessed is He Who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the hightest," and so forth. But I crossed myself backwards. (I had forgotten the lesson at St Mary's.) I genuflected when everyone else bowed. I failed to cross myself often enough. The standing was interminable. And, of course, I could not commune with the congregation. I was an outsider.
I was given a taste of that aspect of Orthodox worship which had been lacking in my heritage churches, and, ironically enough, in the Episcopal Church: the objectivity of worship. No one bothered to ask me whether or not I was comfortable with the service. They didn't cut things out to shorten the service because my feet were tired. They didn't ask me whether I preferred a praise band to modified Byzantine chant. I wasn't consulted as to whether I might take offense at the doctrines and dogmas of the Church that would be proclaimed in the homily--and in the liturgy itself. No one asked me whether I found the constant references to God as Father offensive, or whether I would have like to eliminate the references to the Trinity out of deferrence to our Unitarian visitors. In fact, no one consulted me as to whether I felt it important that the Liturgy start at precisely nine o'clock and whether there should be a clear break between Matins and Liturgy so I could refill my mug at the congregation's in-house coffee bar.
No, I was left with a simple choice: accept it as is, or not at all. No one was going to bother about suiting my tastes. How rude!
Oh, but how necessary! For you see, worship is not about me or my tastes and preferrences. It is all about God. Orthodox don't ask whether or not they "got anything out of the service." Rather, the question is, "Did I worship God appropriately?" And if the answer to the question is to get anywhere close to yes, I have to turn my eyes away from myself and my own preoccupations toward God. There is no need to create a "mood" for worship. We don't need to start with a rousing and rocking series of hymns, then quiet down with more minor-key choruses, then get jazzed up with a "raising the roof" final song. It's not about my mood. It's about God.
And I have found this worship to be absolutely essential to all that I am, think, and do. It is precisely here that the existential part comes in. I do not change worship. Worship changes me. I come and am confronted by the majesty and holiness of God. I am made painfully aware of my sin. I am given the good news: repent and receive God's mercy and grace in Christ. And then, wonder of wonders, I am tangibly united to Christ, and through him to each and every worshipper there present and all the saints in attendance. (Well, in reality the last sentence is in anticipation of the day when that will become a reality for me. For now I can only anticipate.) I am likely not to feel a darn thing. And actually, that's a good thing. It keeps my attention on God and my cross-carrying.
By the same token, however, it is in the midst of this objective worship that I have been most moved. I was praying the Jesus prayer during Holy Communion one Sunday a few weeks ago, and was overcome with tears over the weight of my many sins. I did not seek such emotion. It found me. I have prayed intercessory prayers for friends and loved ones and have been unutterably moved by their need and God's love.
I am not obligated to feel anything. I am obligated to do that which the worship shows me I must do. Pray for others. Give alms. Fast. And serve my brother and sister.
It is only in Orthodoxy that I have found this kind of objective and existential worship. And it is what pulls me ever closer to the day when I will be one with the One Church of Christ.
[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: 6. Historicity and Validity of the (Orthodox) Church's Claims
I wanted to add to the thoughts I posted earlier addressing the question as to whether one's conversion to Orthodoxy must be either about leaving one's former affiliation or about embracing Orthodoxy. Here I want to dwell on how one can own more fully the beliefs and life of one's former religious home precisely by embracing Orthodoxy.
Frequently, onlookers of the journeyings of us inquirers see our journeys in terms of leaving something behind. Truth to tell, so do we. Indeed, that's pretty much a significant part of conversion of any sort. Our "Let me tell you why I'm Orthodox (an Orthodox inquirer)" usually comes out like "Let me tell you why I'm not Religious Affiliation X." As I said in the other post: Ain't nothing wrong with that.
But one of the reactions I got from friends and family in my heritage churches when I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church was one of incredulity. One of the reactions from family was that this was an explicit rejection of my upbringing and all the Christian doctrines I'd been taught. (A little melodramatic, but, well-intended concern was behind it.)
My response was as baffling to them as was my action: I became an Episcopalian precisely so I could more fully own my heritage. In the case of my Anglican confirmation, two of those aspects of my heritage were in particular the unity of the Body of Christ and a deeper life of worship. That is to say, far from abandoning all of my heritage church background, I was more fully and intensely embracing two very important doctrines.
The same is true of my inquiry to Orthodoxy.
Though there are indeed things about my heritage churches and the Episcopoal Church that I am rejecting and which gave impetus to my Orthodox journey, there are far more that I am embracing.
My Restoration Movement heritage taught me to take seriously the New Testament Church. This Church was not just some primitivist fantasy, nor a figment of the imagination. It was real, is real and we must do all we can to see its increase. I was also taught to deeply regard the unity of the Church, of the historic Church and to deeply deplore the present state of multiplying divisions among Christians. I was also taught the centrality of the Christian home in the spiritual life. Though this was probably the closest we came to a real biblical understanding of community, it is also the most fundamental of human relationships. Along with this focus on the home came an understanding of the necessity of holiness of life as an indicator of mature discipleship. Christian faith was not merely a set of doctrines to be believed (though at times, this misunderstanding marred the strengths of my heritage churches), but a way of life. Sin was real, and I knew that it was something to be continually repented of. Without holiness, Scripture says, no one will see the Lord. And finally I was taught to know, understand and guard the purity and consistency of the doctrine of the Church.
Despite my severe criticisms of the current degenerate state of the Episcopal denomination, I without hesitation note the strengths I have gained from them, and the gifts I now embrace in Orthodoxy. There is the ascetical tradition of the Church. While it is true that the Episcopal Church does not offer a consistent askesis, I came into an Anglo-Catholic diocese which emphasized the three-fold Benedictine askesis of Eucharist, daily office and private devotion. This has deeply marked me, and I am eternally grateful for the preservation of this askesis. It is no surprise then, that the Episcopal Church, through my parish, also offered me a greater connection to the historic worship of the Church and the daily office. I came to know and love the sacramental tradition of the Church. And finally I came to so much more deeply understand the necessity and treasure of the daily co-labors of the Saints in our lives.
There are more things about which I could speak--and indeed, this series of blogs, for which this is the second part of an excursus, deals with these and other matters--but each of these has been deeply important matters to me, and were important in my previous church allegiances.
In becoming Orthodox, though it's an act not yet completed, I am embracing these things and owning them in the deepest way I know. Though I am leaving some things behind, I am taking up the most important and bringing them with me to an ever greater fulfillment in the Orthodox Church.
Alana and James of the Northwest both comment on a particularly pertinent question for those of us who have made (or in my case are still making) the journey to Orthodoxy:
Alana: "If one were to use Orthodoxy to protest Protestantism, wouldn't that still be being protestant?"
James OFTNW: "Has our journey into Orthodoxy been fueled by what we leave behind, or by what lies ahead?"
These are good questions. And as with many good either/or questions, the answer is "Both."
It seems to me that it cannot but be both. If one is choosing to leave one's religious affiliation for the Orthodox Church, there is necessarily a negative relation with one's former affiliation. In choosing Orthodoxy one is "un-choosing," to say it in as neutral if neologistic way as possible, the former affiliation.
But this isn't really the question is it? For there are some aspects of "un-choosing" which are forceful, radical, and, shall we say, spirited. So the question really becomes, Are we choosing Orthodoxy primarily on its own terms, or primarily on the terms of "un-choosing" our former affiliation? That is to say, is our act really more about choosing Orthodoxy or leaving Church Body X?
I have had it put to me that I am choosing Orthodoxy, not because of the reality of what the Orthodox Church really is (in which case I don't really see it as it is but as I want it to be), but, disappointed at excruciating failures of the church bodies of which I have been a member, I have reified my desire for the sort of church I seek and have overlaid that reification on the Orthodox Church. Or, to say it more simply, my pursuit of Orthodoxy is little more than the projection of my desire for the perfect Church on the Orthodox Church. Understandable, given my personal history, but in the end escapist.
Of course, we Orthodox inquirers want to assert that we seek Orthodoxy for itself, while our critics and sceptics want to assert that we seek Orthodoxy as an escape from something else. We Orthodox inquirers are hesitant to admit any escapist motivations lest it delegitimize our search or denigrate the Orthodox Church. Our critics and sceptics are perhaps hesitant to admit that we seek Orthodoxy for what it is lest our search cast doubt on their own situations.
But the fact of the matter is, any change of religious venue--if it is sincere--will include elements of attraction to the newly-owned affiliation and rejection of the former affiliation. How could it be otherwise?
We Orthodox inquirers need not be fearful that admission of certain so-called escapist motivations are somehow illegitimate or not a pure enough basis from which to start and finish our journey. After all, if what we believe about the Orthodox Church is true, then we should wish to escape (or, more neutrally, leave) our one-time homes.
Our Orthodox inquiries almost always begin in disquiet. That is to say, we are moved on our journey by some disconnect or contradiction, something that lacks resolution. A problem, contradiction or conundrum--an aporia--confronts us. To be true to our convictions, and to ourselves, we have to resolve this impasse.
For me personally, I came to impasses in my heritage churches of the Restoration Movement, and to my one-time adopted churches of the Episcopal Church. In my heritage churches there was a disconnect from the historic Church and there were inconsistencies of biblical interpretation and of doctrine relating to baptism and the Lord's Supper. In the Episcopal Church the impasses had to do with the implicit and explicit rejection of Scripture and Tradition. In both these church bodies, the impasses could not be resolved from within the resources of the groups themselves. Furthermore, these contradictions in each of these groups were unlivable. Therefore I had to seek resolution of these impasses from sources outside them.
Now it is true that in bringing resolution to these matters, the Orthodox Church does so, at least implicitly, on the original terms of the groups themselves. That is to say, these resolutions take place from the Orthodox Church allowing itself to be limited to, in a certain sense, and understood in, the presuppositions and on the terms of the original groups. How could it not? What sort of resolution would it be if it did not, in part, meet the original terms and conditions of the impasse?
But if the search for Orthodoxy is left there, if one makes the decision to become Orthodox merely because Orthodoxy best resolves the impasses of our former religious affiliations on their own terms, and does not proceed from there, then our sceptics and critics would be justified in their allegations and complaints of escapism. And such a state may well be worse than the first, as our house may well have been swept clean but left empty.
However, it's hardly the case that, simply becaue our journey begins as a reaction to a problem, that it must end there, or be characterized only as a negative reaction. Indeed, it is our disquiet that is itself evidence of another desire, a desire different from mere quiet of soul. We do not seek mere comfort. There are remedies, however unhealthy, present to hand for that. We seek Truth.
And it is here that we move from the realm of escapism to the arena of authenticity. The second most important question after "Who do you say that the Christ is?" is "What is the Church?" If our answer is merely: "Spackle to fill in the holes of the walls of our religious affiliations," we are a sorry lot indeed. I daresay for all those I know, and, if I may, for myself, the answer may have begun with the filling of holes, but it has moved on to something else. Indeed, we are leaving, or have left, behind the spackle-covered walls for an altogether different home.
I have been formulating an account of my journey to Orthodoxy in this series of reflections. As is clear, my account is a mix of leaving behind and of stretching out toward. For myself, I suspect this dual nature of my journey will remain long after the oil of the chrism (may that day come soon!) has dried. But eventually the character of that journey must cease having this dual nature. Eventually the leaving must give way wholly to the arriving and staying. Who knows how long this will be? One can never say, for repentance and salvation are lifelong projects.
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
3. Consistency of Theology (Part IV of IX)
Because Orthodoxy honors the present and respects the past (even enough to confront it), it can also display a greater consistency of theology.
One of the first impasses in the beliefs of my heritage churches I came to while training for the ministry. Ours was a group of churches seeking to best understand the New Testament, and the Church of Christ revealed in it, so best to believe and practice those things the New Testament Church believed and practiced. This led to an historical-grammatical hermeneutic (much like the ancient Antiochene "school" which shaped St. John Chrysostom). Our intent, and tendency, was to let the Scripture speak for itself and understand it on its own terms.
So, it will come as no surprise that our view of baptism was that it was an act of immersion done in the name of the Trinity, for the forgiveness of sins and the receiving of the gift (and seal) of the Holy Spirit. Though my heritage churches would have rejected the term "sacrament," nonetheless, this view of baptism is very sacramental. The view that we espoused was one which really took the Scriptural passages "on their face," as it were. However, in complete contradistinction to our view of baptism, our hermeneutic was left off to one side when it came to the Lord's Supper (or Eucharist). Here, rather than take the passages "on their face" (i. e., that consumption of the elements was consumption of the Body and Blood of our Lord, clearly stated by Paul in 1 Corinthians 10-11, for example), we took them "symbolically." The "body" Paul was referring to was the Church. When Jesus spoke about eating his Body and Blood in John 6, he was just exagerrating to prove a point. And so forth.
This was inconsistent.
When I became an Episcopalian, the inconsistencies mounted. One was ostensibly free to believe what one wanted on women's ordination, yet it was mandatory that if a woman qualified for the priesthood, then her gender could not be a factor refusing her ordination. So much the worse for one's convictions. The liturgy of common prayer was said to be the sine qua non of worship life in the Episcopal Church, but by the time I left ECUSA, there were nine different possibilities for a liturgy of the Eucharist. On any given day in any given diocese nine different liturgies could be used. Apparently, common prayer only applied to the local parish, severing ties to its sister parishes within the same diocese. So much for common prayer. Marriage, according to the prayerbook, was one man and one woman for life. But it was also legitimate to bless couples who were sexually active though not married and couples of the same sex who were sexually active. So much the worse for marriage.
This was inconsistent.
Now I fully realize that it is one thing to have a standard and not live up to it. That's one kind of inconsistency. And except where it is arrogantly willful, it is sadly the normal course of fallen humanity. We sin, repent, sin and repent.
But it's quite another to have espoused a particular theology, only to espouse another that contradicts it. One cannot, on my own heritage churches' terms, have both a sacramental view of baptism, but a Zwinglian view of the Eucharist. One cannot call it common prayer, if the only thing common about it is that everyone meets at the same time in one particular location and, at least for that day, all say the same words. One cannot claim a sacramentality of marriage, then turn right around and claim some sort of "sacramentality" (thus the "blessing" and also cf. Bishop-elect Robinson's own words about his relationship) for relationships that violate the marriage standard. One cannot proclaim freedom of conscience, but then mandate processes that cannot but violate that conscience.
The Orthodox Church, on the other hand, maintains a most dogged consistency in its theology. One cannot speak of Christ in such a way as to lose the dogmatic understanding of the Incarnation: that in the one Person of Jesus of Nazareth, the two natures of divinity and humanity were united without change, separation, confusion or division. Because if one loses the Incarnation, the whole faith unravels. No Incarnation, in short, no Church, no salvation. One cannot speak of God in such a way as to deny his Fatherhood. For in denying the Fatherhood of God, one ultimately denies the Trinity. And denying the Trinity, one denies the whole of the Christian faith. If one loses the Mysteries (or Sacraments), in some sort of Zwinglian reduction, then one loses the Incarnation. The Orthodox Church witnesses to the truth of the Faith: one cannot deny one tenet of the Faith, without ultimately denying the whole. One cannot claim an a la carte method of retrieving those ancient doctrines one prefers and claim that one is honoring the ancient Faith of the Church. It is, quite literally, all or nothing.
This is not to say that somehow the actions of individuals in the Orthodox Church are without sin or censure. Consistency of life with belief is damnably hard in our fallen state. But my point is not about the ubiquitous variety of sinners of which all churches are full. Rather, my point is the consistency of belief itself. I am attracted to Orthodoxy precisely because the Faith all hangs together of one cloth. And it is a most generous cloth, one which can cover all of one's life and destiny.
[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: 4. Fullness of the Faith
2. Respecting the Present (Part III of IX)
Anchored as they are in the Church's Tradition, the Orthodox do not so readily succumb to modern pressures to change doctrine and canonical practice. More than many, the Orthodox Church understands that the most pressing concerns of today are frequently left on the ash heap of history tomorrow.
History is, in part, a display of ephemeral fashions. I think it was Chesterton who expressed something like, "He who today marries himself to the present age, will tomorrow find himself a widower." Churches that find their guidance for life in the modern age find themselves bound to the age and unable to speak a credible witness against it.
The Episcopal Church has endorsed abortion by refusing to condemn it in General Convention referenda. Both the Episcopal Church and my heritage churches accept, and even encourage in some cases, divorce. The Episcopal Church accepts the propriety of sexual acts outside of the marriage covenant of one man and one woman. But all these beliefs are unremarkable to the present age. After all, this is what the present age itself believes. And so the present age largely ignores the Episcopal Church and my heritage churches. The present age certainly doesn't need its beliefs reinforced by these churches. The popular media functions in that role quite nicely. Indeed, these churches only look silly to the present age precisely because they are so far behind the curve. My heritage churches only now are investing thousands and millions of dollars in media equipment. But MTV was on this "cutting edge" of marketing and outreach more than twenty years ago. The present age bought in to indiscriminate sexual activity more than thirty years ago (though personal immorality has been around, oh, since the Fall). The Episcopal Church has only just got around to endorsing it in the General Convention previous to this last one (though individual parishes and dioceses have been doing it for some time).
So here's my question. When the present age--even if only from nostalgia--returns to a marriage as one-man-one-woman-for-life sexuality, as an unbroken lifelong covenant, will these churches take twenty or thirty years to "catch up"? The present age--at least the gen x and younger crowd--seems to be abandoing the ethic of abortion on demand. Will it take those churches who endorse it now twenty or thirty years to finally acquiesce to this development?
On the matter of abortion, the Orthodox Church holds to the ancient texts and canons (dating from the first and second centuries) that explicitly equate with murderers those who give abortifacients or who perform abortions. With regard to divorce, the Orthodox Church only allows it in extreme cases. And in the case of remarriage makes a change in the liturgical celebration of the marriage to indicate this is a concession to human sinfulness and our mortality. In the case of human sexuality, the Orthodox Church has held firm on the historic Church's teaching. In all these cases the Orthodox Church utilizes the Mysteries of Confession and the Eucharist, and much loving pastoral counsel, to assist those who have fallen from the Church's standard, to live lives of repentance, mercy and forgiveness.
And it is precisely this stance, anchored as it is in Tradition, and not subject to the whims and mores of the present age, that enables the Orthodox Church to speak to the world. Because the Orthodox Church has this two-thousand-year expertise in ministering to human beings of all ages, sexes, ethnic groups, and religious faiths, it can say a word to the present.
More to the point, precisely because it can speak against the present age, is the very reason it can show the most respect to this age than can any other ecclesial body (though the Amish run a close second in my view). Anchored as it is in the past, with an unbroken living Tradition, the Orthodox Church is the only ecclesial body that can most consistently and with the most authority say, "Here there be dragons."
Because the Episcopal Church and my heritage churches (ironically in the latter case) are so immersed in the modernist worldview, because they have conformed themselves to the mores and convictions of the present age in so many respects, they have no authority to speak saving truth. They can most certainly, and do, speak the living Truth, but it is with no real authenticity. Much like we teenagers did, the world ignores the "authority figures" who join in its games and try to be "relevant." Afraid to lose their audience by being different, it is because they are so much the same that these, the churches of my previous allegiances, have a message no one takes seriously.
The Orthodox Church knows where she's going, because she knows where she's been and who is her Head. She is willing to be crucified, to be rejected. She has survived Muslim persecution, the savage crusade of her own Western Christian brothers and sisters, and the Communist purges. She knows there are only two ways: life and death. And she is not afraid to die, and dying to live and witness with authority.
And it is this combination of faithfully held Tradition and authentic present witness that evidences the Orthodox Church's consistent theology.
[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: 3. Consistency of Theology
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
Prelude: Setting the Stage (Part I of IX)
At the beginning of the summer of 2000, for various reasons which I have explored elsewhere, I began to take a serious look at the Orthodox Church. I come from a non-denominational ("independent") conservative evangelical Protestant background. In part because of a longing for a real, tangible connection to the New Testament Church which my upbringing had taught me to seek and to make a reality in my own day, I began to explore within the historic Church the disciplines of the monastic orders, the daily office and liturgy. In the course of my exploration, over some five years, I looked seriously, if only briefly, at the Roman Church, but soon focused my attention on the Anglican Communion, and the Episcopal Church here in the States. Because of my strong Protestant sensibilities, and because of the historic ties of Anglicanism to apostolic origins, the liturgies, and the sacraments, the Episcopal Church made a lot of sense to me, and I was confirmed at the hands of Bishop Peter Beckwith on 14 April 1996. My parish priest, Fr. Jim Cravens, was my sponsor.
Beginning in 2000, I began to have misgivings about certain issues in the Episcopal Church, but I was also pursuing ordination. So, as an aspirant, I began to attend an Episcopal seminary. My experiences there, in the space of about three months, were the catalyst for me to reignite my previous search for the historic Church and a way to find tangible connections to it. Orthodoxy was my only other option. I began to read a dozens of books, popular and scholarly, on Orthodoxy, especially several books describing the testimonies of various Jews, agnostics and atheists, Roman Catholics, and Protestants of diverse varieties, and how they came to be baptized or chrismated into the Orthodox Church.
On 23 July 2000, I worshipped for the first time at All Saints Orthodox Church. In the ensuing three years, it has become my home parish. I am not yet Orthodox, not having yet been chrismated. But here is a list of reasons why I want to be.
[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: 1. Honoring the Past (Part II of IX)