On an American Orthodox Church
The beginning is context, analogy; just wait for the provocative “aside.”
Fr. Stephen: … [R]eligions that are separate things … didn’t exist in the ancient world. What it meant to be a Greek was not just to have grown up in Hellas or to have your people be from there for many generations; what it meant to be a Greek was also to worship the Greek gods and to participate in the ritual life of Greece that surrounded the gods, the public festivals, all of those things. That’s what it meant to be Greek.
So what does it mean to be a Greek Christian? Now we take that for granted, but for St. Paul that wasn’t something you could take for granted. And so you can understand why, in the early Church, you get the opponents of St. Paul in Galatians who were saying, “Well, okay, you can’t be pagans any more. So why don’t, uh, you be Jews? You can’t be a Greek any more. You have to have some culture. You have to be something. So you need to get circumcised, you need to keep Torah, you need to do all these things. You need to be Jewish. You can’t be Greeks any more, because being Greek is being a pagan.” And St. Paul is saying, “No! You’re not to become Jews, because you’re not Jews. You’re going to remain Greeks, but what it means to be Greek is going to change.” So a Greek Christian identity is forged, and that takes a couple centuries. St. Paul starts it, but you read all the problems he’s having, for example, in 1 and 2 Corinthians that we already referred to. This is a difficult process.
Fr. Andrew: And even while the concept and the way of life gets worked out, the terminology largely isn’t kept even, early on. By the time you get to the Cappadocians and so forth, “Greek” in terms of something other than language, “Greek” is used to refer to pagans. If you’re Christian, you’re a “Roman.”
Fr. Stephen: Right. Greeks are the ones still following that way of life.
Fr. Andrew: Right. I mean, the word “Greek” in various ways gets revived again in the 18th, 19th century for other reasons, but, yeah, that identification of “Greek” with “pagan” holds on for a long time, even while they’re kind of developing a Greek Christian life, just calling it something different
Fr. Stephen: Yeah. And so St. Paul is going to affirm… So he’s got those folks on the one side who want people to become Jewish; on the other side, he’s got the Jewish zealot tradition that wants to overthrow societal structures within Roman life. And St. Paul is going to want to keep those social structures. That’s the part of the Gentile identity that he can keep, sort of, you know: families! Marriage in general! We don’t need to get rid of marriage in general. All of these relationships, all of these structures we can keep, but they need to be re-infused. Paganism needs to be drawn out; they need to be re-infused with Christ. So that’s part of this transformation.
And as a kind of aside, when folks… One of many things I’m a pessimist about is there being an American Orthodox Church any time soon. The big reason is that we still have to do precisely this. Not figure out what it means to be American and Christian, because there’s an American Christianity, and the more American it gets, the less it looks like Christianity, frankly. But figuring out what it means to be American and Orthodox Christian: we can’t just take for granted that that’s just an easy sub.
In fact, the fact that America is deeply steeped in another form of Christianity—a sort of Puritan, Calvinist, Protestant Christianity—sometimes makes it harder for us to make the distinctions that we need to make in order to form an American Orthodox identity. If America was a Muslim country or a Hindu country, when we looked at cultural institutions, it would be a little easier for us to spot, in the Hinduism case, the paganism, in the Muslim case, the Islamic parts, but when it’s another form of Christianity, the distinctions get more subtle and more tricky, and that identity can be a little harder to form.
(Underlining added)
When an American Orthodox Christian steps to either side of the safe corridor cleared by the Church, she’s likely to hit a Puritan land mine or a Calvinist IED. When an American Orthodox Christian feels we’re missing out on something good in the larger society, what he wants us to import may well be a Puritan version of a Trojan Horse.
About that American brand of Christianity
William Craig Brownlee “contrasted the genuine religion that flourished in America with ‘the mixed Christianity that began its career at an early period in the history of the church’”.
Paul J. Gutacker, The Old Faith in a New Nation: American Protestants and the Christian Past.
To these Orthodox Christian eyes, that reads as perversely the opposite of reality. The religion that flourished in America, and of which we are still heirs, is the later, entropic version.
The starting point of Christian faith
To be Christian, to believe in Christ, means and has always meant this: to know in a transrational and yet absolutely certain way called faith, that Christ is the Life of all life, that He is Life itself and, therefore, my life. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” All Christian doctrines—those of the incarnation, redemption, atonement—are explanations, consequences, but not the “cause” of that faith. Only when we believe in Christ do all these affirmations become “valid” and “consistent.” But faith itself is the acceptance not of this or that “proposition” about Christ, but of Christ Himself as the Life and the light of life. “For the life was manifested and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us” (1 Jn. 1:2). In this sense Christian faith is radically different from “religious belief.” Its starting point is not “belief” but love.
Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World
When will they ever learn?
Only slightly tempered by a sense of their own limitations, these reformers espoused private judgment as the sure route to coherence and harmony. Unfortunately, the more confidently they attacked the traditional order and espoused individual autonomy, the more confusing their limitless world became. In one of the early republic’s severest ironies, the determination to quiet theological wrangling resulted in a proliferation of voices.
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity
Iconoclasm
God was understood to have physical form, but that form was to be described only verbally, not represented iconographically.
William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry
Purging
I am greatly looking forward to reading St. Paul the Pharisee by Fr. Stephen De Young. An ex-Calvinist Orthodox Priest with deep knowledge should be perfect for purging my involuntarily-retained Calvinist readings of St. Paul.
Mute
It is very difficult to make our contemporaries see that there are things which by their very nature cannot be discussed.
René Guénon Guénon, The Crisis of the Modern World
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
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Tipsy Teetotaler ن 