August in Indiana is making itself felt in pretty nasty heat index numbers.
Orthodoxy proper
Catholic polemicist swims the Bosphorus
Theophan Davis, f/k/a Michael Warren Davis, has become Orthodox.
I had encountered Davis at his Theologumena blog, where he engaged in Roman Catholic polemics, and perhaps at Crisis and/or American Conservative. I have no idea why and how a post from his new Substack, YankeeAthonite, was sent to me, but the subject, Why I Became Orthodox, definitely got my attention.
On Sunday, June 23—the Feast of Pentecost—I was received into the Orthodox Church. I had announced my conversion a few weeks earlier, on May 17, via my old Substack. Then I deleted my account.
I did this for three reasons.
Firstly, the conversion process made me painfully aware of my own ignorance. For years, I worked as a Catholic journalist. I trumpeted my Catholic opinions so confidently all over the internet. In becoming Orthodox, I had to admit that I’d been wrong on some pretty big questions. Shutting up for a while seemed like the appropriate response.
Secondly, I assumed folks wouldn’t care what I have to say anymore. I’m not sure how much credibility I have left. If the answer is “none whatsoever,” I’d understand.
Thirdly, as we said, folks just aren’t terribly interested in other people’s conversion stories—not unless they’re extremely dramatic, which mine wasn’t. It destroyed my career. It ruined many of my friendships with Roman Catholics and caused a terrible strain on many others. And I will say, there were some dramatic moments: the weeping icon, etc. But if you’d been a fly on the wall, watching me for the last two years, all you would have seen was me reading, talking, praying, and sitting quietly in front of my icon corner.
“The conversion process made me painfully aware of my own ignorance” definitely resonates. For me, it was 47+ years as a fairly sophisticated Protestant layman pretty much all down the drain. It reminds me of Moody Bible Institute’s program for training missionary pilots: the first thing they tell (told?) licensed pilots entering the program is “forget everything you think you know about flying.” Ouch!
Davis continues:
What’s odd is that everyone seems to agree that my conversion was, ultimately, a rejection of Pope Francis. Let me be absolutely clear on this point: it wasn’t …
So, let me give you the cliffnotes version.
I joined the Orthodox Church because I came to believe that it’s the one, true Church founded by Jesus Christ. I became Orthodox because I believe Orthodoxy is the one, true Faith handed down by Christ to His Apostles, and by the Apostles to the Fathers of the Church.
I believe the four Eastern patriarchs were right to resist those novelties which the Western Church embraced in the centuries leading up to the Great Schism 1054. I believe they were right to reject the insertion of the filioque into the Nicene Creed. I believe they were right to condemn the popes’ efforts to expand their own ecclesial and temporal power. I also believe they were right to reject innovations such as the celibate priesthood and the use of unleavened bread during the Holy Mass/Divine Liturgy, though these are of lesser significance.
So far, so typical. Then the surprising turn:
As an aside: it’s true, the current pope did influence my conversion, though not in the way you might expect. Since Francis took office, the Vatican has issued a steady stream of ecumenical statements conceding virtually every point to the Orthodox. Then came the recent “study document” on papal primacy, which calls for a “rereading” and “reinterpretation” of the First Vatican Council.
Now, Catholic apologists are quick to point out that these texts aren’t magisterial. But that’s not the point. The point is that the Catholic Church’s greatest scholars have basically admitted that Rome bears the lion’s share of blame for the Great Schism, and that Vatican I is historically and theologically indefensible, and that the Catholic Church must return to a more Orthodox understanding of ecclesial and magisterial authority. But, then, why not just… become Orthodox?
… [B]oth Catholics and Protestants are slowly groping towards the Orthodox consensus.
Those are pretty solid reasons for leaving Rome.
I have been decidedly negative about Pope Francis — not that I should have an opinion at all. Not my circus, not my monkeys. What Theophan sees as a “steady stream of ecumenical statements conceding virtually every point to the Orthodox” merits some more attention, though I’m not sure when I’ll find the time.
Only in Orthodoxy …
But how could we ever relate to God or, even more challenging, truly unite with Him? Of all religions, only Orthodox theology emphasizes union with God—in a real and actual sense—as the goal and purpose of all human life. We rarely speak of “going to heaven,” as though it were a destination. We do not speak of experiencing a “beatific vision” of God, as though God could be viewed but remained at some distance from us. Rather, Orthodox Christianity speaks of theosis, the divinization of the human person. We expect, hope, and strive for actual union with the perfect, infinite, eternal, omnipresent, and changeless God. But we are flawed, limited, and come into existence for a brief time; we are confined to one place at one time, and we are constantly changing. So how is union with God possible? The Incarnation, the enfleshment of the Son of God, gave us the ability to truly connect to God and become united with Him, transformed and illumined by Him, not simply because He died for us but because of the way He lived among us.
Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou, Thinking Orthodox.
This is a major difference — perhaps the most significant difference in overall mindset — between Eastern and Western Christianity.
Was it always so? No …
Anselm the Watershed
Theologians beginning with Anselm of Canterbury (d. 1109)—known as “the last of the fathers and the first of the scholastics”—presented human salvation not as the process of deification, of becoming ever more filled with the life of God, but as a one-time release from an impending punishment at the hands of an offended God who demanded satisfaction for man’s offenses.
John Strickland, The Age of Utopia
Other
A vivid (and important) image
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs
Archetypes
”How has it come about,” C. S. Lewis once asked, “that we use the highly emotive word ‘stagnation,’ with all its malodorous and malarial overtones, for what other ages would have called ‘permanence’?” It is, Lewis suggests, because the dominance of the machine in our culture altered our imagination. It gave us a “new archetypal image.”
Ken Myers, All God’s Children and Blue Suede Shoes
“Religious” but unaffiliated
Both the fundamentalist and the higher critic assume that it is possible to understand the biblical text without training, without moral transformation, without the confession and forgiveness that come about within the church. Unconsciously, both means of interpretation try to make everyone religious (that is, able to understand and appropriate scripture) without everyone’s being a member of the community for which the Bible is Scripture.
Stanley Hauerwas, Resident Aliens.
For several decades now, I’ve watched this assumption play out as sundry atheists and provocateurs read the Bible as fundamentalists (and many Evangelicals) do, and then (with some justification) condemn it as absurd. Oftener than not, the response is a tortured just-so story of how that reading is not absurd at all.
That’s why this has become a favorite quote.
Nationalism
More ominous were the demands of nationalists. Since the fiascos of 1848, they had infiltrated every corner of political life. After the unification of Germany, ethnic nationalism appeared to be the genius of secularization. Deviating completely from traditional Christianity—which, as we have seen, declared the unity of all nations and races in Christ—it divided Christendom like no other force since the Great Division.
John Strickland, The Age of Utopia
… that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height — to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Ephesians 3:17-19 (NKJV)
You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 