I really truly should be going to bed by now. But I haven't blogged for a month, and I have something significant on my mind. Justice and reason dictate that my first post back should be a response to the questions so kindly posed to me by
Karl Thienes. I am in the middle of composing such a post. But some of the answers are taking me more time than I had expected, and I am currently excited about something else. So I will post, promising, as I have for a month now, that "next post" will include the interview.
This post owes much to my current courses here at Holy Cross (which have apparently been more thought-provoking than I had thought), especially to my Church History course with Fr. Thomas Fitzgerald and to the massive paper assignment from Fr. George Dragas. It also owes much to my
Beloved Enemy and good friend
Daniel Silliman and to our
epic conversations regarding Orthodoxy and Anglicanism, to the recent
joint statement issued by Orthodox and Roman Catholic theologians regarding the Filioque clause of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed, and to a myriad of other influences. Mainly it's my overactive brain on overdrive. So...off to the races...
Since I was old enough to comprehend that it existed, I have abhorred the rift between denominations of Christians. While I was still Protestant, I sought to distance myself from denominational barriers and derided denominationalism as blasphemous to the name of the undivided Christ which we claim to bear. To this I still hold.
My conversion to Orthodoxy vastly improved my position and aided my image of myself. For now, I can claim to be a part of that true and complete Body of Christ from which the others have split off. I have been able to say to myself in good faith that it is not I that blasphemes Christ, not I that makes Him divided in the eyes of the world outside--it is THEM! And this has been pleasant.
Yet I have maintained, parallel with that view of myself, a pity for those outside--for the schisms and heresies which spawned this abomination which we call the denominational explosion all lie far in the past (and many even were spawned in good faith, with the intention of preserving the Faith and worshipping God in spirit and in truth). Moreover, I know all too well that those who today exist in schism with the Orthodox Church do so by default. They never left the Church; rather, they grew up outside Her, and know nothing of Her. So I have pitied them and tried to communicate to them the truth which they lack, that they too might partake of the wonder and blessing that lies constantly within my grasp here.
I have, however, been constantly frustrated in that many dear friends have failed to understand, failed to be interested, ultimately failed to convert. I have questioned what ailed them. Did they not see? Could they not hear? And I ultimately attributed it to the ineffable workings of the human soul and consigned them in prayer to the far more ineffable mercy of God.
But I have recently understood something which had before escaped me. I came to college and encountered Orthodoxy with a mind and heart purposely wiped clean of a theological vocabulary. I had intentionally shunned preaching, teaching, books and church attendance itself in a desire to rid my mind of preconceived notions and expectations and approach Scripture truly openly, that I might understand what God said to men, not what men said about God. And consequently, I had far less of a theological system to shed as I embraced the Eastern theological system by which Orthodoxy is expressed. I found in it the fundamental truths of the Scripture in which I had immersed myself for the past two years, and knew of a certitude that here I belonged within three months of my first encounter.
But others cannot be expected to do so. Others have far too much invested in a system of thought that is existentially Western and English, as opposed to Eastern and Greek. Moreover, there exists the ever present handicap to the modern American mind of the inprecice nature of the English language theologically speaking. There have been so very many writers who have bandied so many words so differently that it is truly possible for thousands of differing denominations to confess the very same creed as I do (save the Filioque) and mean something utterly divergent from Orthodox Christianity.
This was not the case 1500 years ago in the Eastern Roman Empire. There, there was a literature, a dialogue on papyrus and parchment, a refining fire in which words were tested and tried--so that when a catechumen stood up in the Church and confessed "Pistevo eis ena Theon, Patera Pantocrator..." those receiving him for baptism could be confident that, if he spoke in good faith, he truly held the Faith once delivered to the Apostles, that he truly believed in one God, the Father Almighty...
It is a matter of fact that language is by nature an imprecise and fluid thing. A word means practically nothing removed from its context. Just so, a word, a sentence or a creed mean nothing when removed from the larger context of literature in which they were spoken. The Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed itself expresses little of the faith--but it represents countless volumes which carefully define every single word within it, so that, on that imagined day 1500 years ago, the newly baptized Christian knew precisely what it was to which he had committed himself. He knew that his confession of Christ as "homoousion" denied the belief that the Son of God was a mere creation. He knew that a distinction existed between the word "ousia" and the word "hypostasis;" that three of the latter could exist in one of the former, and that this was how the Trinity was to be described. And this he knew because Gregory of Nyssa, Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, Athanasius, Arius, Cyril of Alexandria, Nestorius, Eutyches, Origen and countless other Saints and heretics had fought long and hard over each word until there could be no doubt of the meaning of the Creed. Indeed, the Creed is the summation of the entirety of Holy Tradition--and its translation in each language must needs be based in a similar corpus of literature.
The strange thing to realize is that it will not suffice simply to translate that older corpus. For the distinction between ousia and hypostasis and the heresy that spawned it is a Greek distinction and heresy, not an English one--and any English translation will have its own issues, countless and myriad and each a latent heresy. After all, English is its own language, with its own history and an already vast corpus of literature. Rather, the same battles which defined the early centuries of Christian history must be each re-hashed, re-examined, re-fought. And new battlefields must be created, new battle lines drawn. There will be heresies. And it must needs be so.
But for the moment, it is too early to begin pointing fingers, to begin issuing anathemas. The language is far too imprecise. I cannot in good faith point a finger at any random Anglican or Roman Catholic at a first encounter and call him a heretic. His belief may be heresy, but I cannot know that so soon. Indeed, so many of my conversations are primarily semantic--the entire time is spent defining and redefining terms. And all too often, in the end, we realize that that which divides us is far less than it had seemed.
This is not to say that heresy cannot or does not exist in this English-speaking land. But in the past, the wisest among the Fathers always took very great care to ensure that a man was not condemned for his heresy until he understood the meaning of the words he used and nonetheless stood by them--it was only when a heretic, fully understanding that in his belief he differed from the decision of the council in question, refused to renounce his beliefs, his terminology, that he was finally condemned. The instances of Nestorius and Eutyches come particularly to mind.
It also must be borne in mind that the Fathers were this merciful to the heretics themselves, the first originators of the false doctrines. Who are we, who am I, to point my finger at my estranged Christian brother (a Pentecostal, for example), reared in the West, ignorant of history, ignorant of any church but that in which he took his first steps in Christian thought and philosophy, and accuse him of heresy. The kernel of his faith may well be as Orthodox as mine, if not more so. If he does not understand the consequences of his individual beliefs, can I condemn him? If the language I use to speak to him is incomprehensible or, worse, is that which he associates with a Mormon, a Buddhist, or (as this is very common with those among whom I grew up) a Roman Catholic? He has been conditioned to reject these from his birth--he took in the reflex reaction with his mother's milk.
But he, and indeed no devout Christian upon this earth intends to be a heretic. After all, even the heretics thought that they was upholding the fullness of the Orthodox Faith. Were it not so, they would not have been so recalcitrant. And so, in this age especially, as the Orthodox Tradition, that which most completely possesses the faith of the early Church (for it is organically connected to that Church, both in history and in language) finally is introduced into the sphere of English and American Christianity, what is most needed (next to a genuine faith and a heartfelt prayer on the part of each and every one of us) is a dialogue, a literature, the beginnings of a corpus of verbiage that will give precision and depth to the language we use to speak of the things of God.
But we who are Orthodox must not think that it will suffice to dialogue only amongst ourselves. Amongst ourselves, we already share a vocabulary, much of it taken from those few Orthodox who have written in English, much more simply borrowed directly from the Greek (such as Logos). In many ways, we ARE Greeks, speaking Greek in English. We cannot expect the average American to do this--we must begin to speak in English, and that requires that we begin to address the misunderstandings and problems arising in English. For that, we need controversy, we need contention--we need our estranged brothers in the Anglican and Roman Catholic and Calvinist communions, and perhaps even in the further removed denominations of low-church Protestantism.
We already know that we share many beliefs, even many words with them. There are similarly many matters upon which we greatly disagree. In many cases it remains to be seen whether the beliefs behind the words truly differ--or if they would if we each comprehended what the other side understood us to be saying, what they thought those beliefs implied. I have no doubt that there are hoards of heretics in modern America--but equally I have no doubt that, once all understand what the words mean, far more than those hoards would be Orthodox.
This, then, is what I propose, in my hubris and vanity as a first-year seminarian. Let us ourselves begin such a dialogue, begin intentionally and in earnest the long work of refining English as a theological language. Let us not abandon the roots from which we have sprung, but let us rather begin to remove those seedlings from the temporary pots in which they have for so long remained and begin to transplant them into this new land. The goal is not to condemn, not to immediately establish who is in and who is out--it is simply to talk, to understand, to develop a common vocabulary, so that, whether we end in agreement or not, we KNOW where we stand.
For the Orthodox--I do not propose that we admit that the denominations of America are Orthodox--I merely suggest that we at least extend as much to them as the ancient Fathers did to the heretics. Let us talk to them, crunch terms with them, and understand them. For you who are not Orthodox, I do not ask you to accept Orthodox definitions and schemai--rather simply to at least consider them, critique them, converse with them and seek to understand them. Let us together seek to ensure that, 200 years from now, if there are still denominations in America, those denominations will at least know with certitude what divides them.
For this purpose I offer my papers blog, Pilate's Question. The reference to Truth seems to me a fitting title, and a fitting place to begin. Let us, indeed, see a great conversation begin between Hillsdale's League of Extraordinary Bloggers on the one hand and the Ecumenical Council of Orthodox Bloggers on the other. I suspect it will be most expedient if I remain the sole administrator, posting such things as others may send me. But details may be worked out later.
As I write this, I begin to fear that I am thinking too highly of myself, that I have no right to aspire to this. But, should I ever hope to have such a right, to be capable of writing coherently of the Christian Faith in this English language. I must begin somewhere. And this--this is a lofty goal. I recall something Jake Allen,
the Ockhamist, wrote a number of weeks ago--that he had always thought to be a great man someday but had, for the first time, begun to doubt that he truly would, as a great cause in which to prove his greatness had failed to present itself. I have felt similarly. But this--this is truly a great cause, a great enterprise, a great life's work. It is one that could draw into itself even the highest of scholars, but still include the simplest of blue-collar workers, simply because that worker could pipe up and say, "I don't get it--what you said means this to me," or worse, "So why should I care?" So easily do the mighty fall�for the wisdom of the world is made foolishness, and this we must not forget.
So let us take care in our writings, working to always speak directly to the matter at hand, not losing our way in the ethereal heights of reason or rhetoric. Let us equally maintain a publishable level of quality--for this, surely, is something which could be published. Let us always carry on in charity and Christian love, seeking the edification of ourselves and one another, preserving the Faith but never using a particular formulation thereof as a weapon against one another. And let us pray, always pray--for the words of theolgians and councils are but the cloak of the inner life of Christianity, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.
Consigning ourselves to His guidance, and praying that the mercies of God may ever shown upon us and this land, let us then begin.
Come let us reason together...
