Insouciant Radicals

I have mentioned fairly recently the work of Evangelical Daniel Clendenin in understanding Orthodoxy and explaining it to his fellow Evangelicals. I discovered Sunday afternoon that I actually had retained a copy of  (and a link to) his “Why I’m Not Orthodox” article in Christianity Today, and that I had inaccurately recalled the exact words of his conclusion on why he remains Evangelical.

To my friend who asked why I had not converted to Orthodoxy, the answer was surprisingly easy. I responded by writing back: “Because I am committed to key distinctives of the Protestant evangelical tradition.”

In context, that was not as vague as I suggested. “Conclusory,” yes, but not vague, as he had just marched through a long list of distinctives wherein Evangelicalism has departed from Orthodoxy (and orthodoxy).

I also discovered, with the benefit of at least a decade of Orthodox life since I last read him, that he does not, in my opinion, understand Orthodoxy as well as I initially thought.

I think I mistook the depth of his understanding when I first read him (which may have been when I was still a catechumen) because he had the “effable” distinctives down pretty well, as if he were preparing a table with side-by-side comparisons, while missing the ineffable pretty badly. At that stage, I probably had the “effables” down pretty well, but simply agreed with the Orthodox instead of the Evangelicals. The ineffable aspects of Orthodoxy come to the adherent’s appreciation much more gradually. (I’ll call the “effables” “tangible” from here.)

A second deficit I now see in Clendenin is that while he draws the distinction between fairly tangible differences passably well, he seems quite credulous about the foundations of Evangelicalism’s distinctives. That’s why I call the block quote above “conclusory.” This paragraph in particular jumped out:

In 1523-24 the Reformers Ulrich Zwingli and Martin Luther donned the gown of the university scholar. This simple change of dress symbolized a radical shift that has characterized the Protestant West ever since: that the knowledge of God is mediated primarily through the written Word. The Puritan John Foxe, for example, insisted that “God conducted the Reformation by printing, writing, and reading.” Before long, in Reformation churches the sermon had replaced the Eucharist as the defining moment of the liturgy.

I’ll give him credit for accuracy about the broad arc of Protestantism abandoning Eucharist for sermon as the defining moment of the liturgy, but I’m stunned that, even in an article that was running rather long, he makes no effort to defend this revolution against a millennium-and-a-half of unbroken tradition.

I don’t know what Clendenin would say to defend the revolution, but I have a few questions:

• If “the knowledge of God is mediated primarily through the written Word,” what did the Church do before there was a set New Testament canon — which was centuries, not decades, in coming?
• How do you know what the canon of the “written Word” is? Can you look it up in the Bible? Which book of the canon is it in?
• If “the knowledge of God is mediated primarily through the written Word,” what did believers do, and how did the Church survive and thrive, before the printing press?
• Is Protestantism essentially an techno-triumphalist epiphenomenon of the printing press?
• If “the knowledge of God is mediated primarily through the written Word,” isn’t your god necessarily, shall we say, a bit two-dimensional, and the knowledge of Him more intellectual than personal? Isn’t your faith semi-Gnostic, or even Docetist?
• How can you be so (expletives deleted) insouciant about this “radical shift that has characterized the Protestant West ever since”? Are you saying, or assuming, that radical shifts are good?
• Can you clearly and convincingly justify this radical shift from the scriptures you claim as supreme authority? Or do you assume that interpretive and liturgical innovations, 1500 years after the seminal events and in contravention of the tradition and liturgies of the intervening years, bear no strong burden of proof?
• Why should I care one whit about what “doctrines many evangelicals consider nonnegotiable essentials of vital Christianity” when Evangelicalism is only tenuously connected to the novelty of the Reformation, owning more to the even more novel Second Great Awakening and arising 1800 years after the seminal events?
• Is a religion centered on sermons even the same essential religion as one centered on the Eucharist?

I could probably go on. This is off the top of my head, without consulting the many apologetical notes I’ve made for myself over 14 years or so.

Clendenin makes other dubious arguments, too:

• “[W]hen an Orthodox believer once asked why his church did not do more doctrinal teaching, his priest responded, “Icons teach us all that we need to know.” (Clendenin) One Priest does not a doctrine establish, but if he did, that’s a game two can play, all day, all night. Item: An Evangelical friend assured me that all he wants to do is get into heaven; he’s not interested in attaining such holiness as would win him jewels in his crown. Or if that Item is too laicized, how about (Item:) the airhead Evangelical minstress on WMBI who said of Chist’s incarnation, in effect, “Wow! Isn’t it amazing! Mary allowed her womb to be used so Jesus could zoop down to earth through her! What a gal!” She clearly was implying that Mary was just a conduit, not the source of the humanity of the God-man. And that charitably assumes that she actually believes in Christ’s humanity.
• “Icons are not merely sacred art. Rather, they are a source of revelation.” I’m not sure what he means by that, but every interpretation I can imagine is false. Icons are (among other things) teaching tools for the illiterate (and “visual learners”?), but not a source of revelation.
• “We think the fundamental Christian schism occurred when Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Wittenberg church, October 31, 1517. Orthodox believers see things very differently. For them the fundamental schism occurred 500 years earlier—in the year 1054.” So he’s conceding that Protestants are schismatic? Does he have any idea how the Church Fathers frowned on schism, and how eager Catholicism and Orthodoxy are to fix the “schismatic” label to each other as a consequence?
• “[Russian] Intellectuals, like one of my students at Moscow University, often disdain Orthodoxy as a ‘medieval mentality.'” Yeah? Really? You mean that chronological snobbery, worship of novelty and reflexive rejection of The Venerable have reached Russia? I’m shocked, simply shocked!
• “[I]n biblical interpretation the Reformers placed the Scriptures above the church. They insisted that the Bible interprets itself, and through the Holy Spirit, God instructs its readers in a direct and individual manner rather than binding their consciences to the supposedly reliable teaching of the church. It is precisely this view that elevates Scripture above the church and actually encourages private interpretation that the Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky once called ‘the sin of the Reformation.'” Clendenin incredibly makes no response to this powerful indictment (which I believe is true).

I’m glad I found the Clendenin piece, and glad to see that the puzzle of his continued Evangelicalism isn’t such a puzzle after all. As a drawer of parallel tables of tangible similarities and differences, he’s adequate and fair (if mistaken at points); but it appears that he never got the intangibles of Orthodoxy.

And from what I’ve read of him that, I cannot see that he has any good basis for his commitment “to key distinctives of the Protestant evangelical tradition” — a tradition that, expounded by Clendenin, comes across as insouciantly radical.