I have written this in an attempt to speak in some fashion to Metzger's particular issues with me. But this clarifies what I say below. Hence I submit it for all.

Dear Jonathan,
I appreciate your charity in removing your first post. I had no desire to offend. On the contrary, you nearly top the list of those with whom I would like to speak about this. Because you especially, along with Sam and Prizio, somehow exemplify what is needed. All three of you have in some sense rejected the faith in which you were raised, and all three of you have to a significant degree still clung to it. I do not blame any of you--those things which drove you drove me as well. I deeply regret that our separate paths have caused me to become, in any sense at all, your enemy. I simultaneously consider it a weighty compliment that you consider me worthy to be called your arch-nemesis--it implies that you detect in me enough honesty, authenticity and genuine desire for truth that you think it worth your while to express your disagreement with me (unless it simply expresses the fact that I managed to piss you off, in which case, I'm not sure what to say). But if it is the former, I like to think I have at least enough Christian charity to return the favor. Which is a roundabout way of saying that, for all I speak of Christianity and the superiority of the Orthodox faith, you shame me in your love for others.

I am, at the moment, trying to find a way around the label of heresy which the Orthodox in this country throw around perhaps too loosely at all who are not Greek, Russian or wearing a strange enough hat. It is not a comfortable label to throw. Nor is it charitable, and seldom is it profitable or edifying. I doubt, indeed, that I have ever heard it used in a helpful or edifying manner. The term seems only to have a limited usefulness in excluding certain doctrines which are antithetical either in and of themselves or in their consequences to the fundamental, unchanging Christian Faith.

But I do consider the Christian Faith to be unchanging. This is fundamental--but what I mean by it needs explaining. I do not assert, for example, that the Nicene Creed was the Christian expression of faith from the beginning. I do say, however, that it is precisely that, an Expression of Faith--that Creeds may change, but the Faith does not, being, fundamentally, the encounter of men with the immutable God. Or, put another way, men change, but God does not.
Therefore, as our ideas develop and shift, as our cultures evolve or devolve, our encounter with God may change, or, at least, the words we use to describe that encounter. For the encounter itself comes when we are most like God--so perhaps this is a common experience that transcends words and culture, being a mystical experience, devoid of image and form and defying description. Or, put even another way, the Faith is unchanging in the sense that a Christian man of prayer today shares something deeply fundamental to his being with Christian men of prayer of old--there is a relational identification between myself (if I am living my life existing in communion with God) and the Apostle Paul or Peter. I am sure the Scriptural quotes relevant to this are obvious--statements such as God is the same yesterday, today and forever, Paul's statement that, "For me, to live is Christ..." or "It is not I who lives, but Christ that lives in me," or John's statement that "everyone that loves is born of God and knows God..."

So the Faith is unchanging, immutable, indescribable. But just so it must be described, clothed in human terms, just as the uncircumscribable Son of God was circumscribed, was clothed in human flesh and in created time. For the Christian faith is a Faith of and in Incarnational Revelation--that the unknowable God posited by philosophy made Himself known, that the Infinite Truth became somehow comprehensible to the finite mind. Christians have maintained from the beginning that the essence of Christianity is found in the experiential encounter with God--but in that encounter, God enters the realm of human experience, and becomes someone of Whom we can speak in accurate or inaccurate terms--even if those terms are limited their accuracy, even if all that can be said of God with anything approaching complete accuracy is that He Is.

It is precisely this faith, this confidence (that it is possible to speak of God at least to a limited degree), which is represented and exemplified by the Scriptures. The Old Testament uses Hebrew language to describe the encounter of the Hebrew people with the God who revealed Himself to their forefathers, called them out of Egypt and spoke to them through the prophets. The New Testament speaks in Greek of the same God, revealed in the flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. But, though it is written in Greek, it is written by Hebrews, steeped in Hebrew culture, history and language. It represents a transition point--from Hebrew to Greek. It is at once the last expression of the revelation of God in Hebrew and the first in Greek, analogous to what a Greek might write in English today--the words would be English, but would be mere English translations of Greek ideas, meaningless removed from their context (as indeed most English-speakers find such writings today). We know that the Scripture was similarly meaningless to the Hellenistic philosophers of the day. To understand them required that on, in some sense, though still speaking Greek, become Hebrew. As the first century drew to an end it became clear that it was impractical and untenable for the Church to make this demand of the Greco-Roman society in which it lived.
The Gospel of John is, indeed, in many ways the first effort we can see to speak to the Hellenistic world in its own terms--Christ is spoken of as the Logos. And we're off to the races...from this point onward Christianity is dedicated to bringing the Gospel to the people, not in bringing people to the Gospel.

The second century of the Christian era is characterized by the efforts of Christian apologists and writers to make the Christian Faith, something intrinsically connected with Hebrew history, language and culture, comprehensible to the Hellenistic mind. From very early on, this effort took the form of re-articulating the Gospel in the terms of Hellenistic philosophy, of answering the questions of the philosophers from the Christian perspective and of following the first Christian articulations in this medium through to their logical conclusions, constructing an entire cosmology in competition with and in apposition to the systems of Plato, Aristotle and later, Plotinus. These efforts reached their culmination in the work of Origen in Alexandria.

This system can, for all intents and purposes, be characterized as the perfect syncretistic melding of Christianity and neo-Platonism. Which is to say, Origen got some things very, very wrong. One does not wish to be trite in an oversimplification of his ideas, but his lava-lamp idea of pre-existent souls constantly and eternally drawing closer to God as they heat up spiritually and lapsing again down to the material world as they cool seems at first glance to have almost no relation to the most basic of Christian doctrines. Yet Origen headed the catechetical school in Alexandria, influenced generations of Church hierarchs and theologians, and was only condemned for very specific heresies (including the above) several centuries later.

Indeed, at the time, Origen was a standard of Orthodoxy. His philosophical system was hailed as perfect and adopted almost universally throughout Africa and much of the Eastern Church. For he was the culmination of that first generation of Christian philosophers, the originator of the best philosophical system Christianity had possessed since John committed Christianity to this engagement with Hellenism with his adoption of the term �Logos.�

In the century and a half following Origen�s death, however, more and more pillars of his carefully constructed philosophical system were discarded as Christians more carefully considered their ramifications and decided they were, at best, defective (at worst incompatible with reality and Scripture). But no cohesive system arose to replace it, creating a meltdown of sorts in Christian doctrine, a crisis of belief, culminating in the Arian crisis, which simultaneously was the culmination of the Church�s rejection of Origen.

Arius was seemingly the first to openly and insistently reject Origen�s definition of Christ�s origin (no pun intended) as �eternally created by the Father� as the sort of first emanation (cf. Plotinus, etc). The problem lies in the fact that Origin�s creation of ALL spirits by emanation, as it were, removes any meaningful distinction between Christ�s nature and ours�but once the doctrine of emanations as a means of connecting the agenetic Father with the genetic Spirits is removed, one ends in making all into mere creatures, including the Son and the Spirit. Arius, in articulating this, boldly and insistently, sounded the death-knell of Origenism. *Note* The philosophical, theological and political issues behind this entire issue are complex (too much so for examination here), but let it suffice to say for the moment that there�s a lot more going on than I�m saying. I have a paper due on this in a few weeks, which I will post, hopefully filling in the picture. *End Note*

While the decrees of Nicaea rejected Arius� assertion and established the logical refutation of his doctrine, that rather than a created being, Christ is of one essence with the Father, co-eternal with Him, uncreated and never having not-been, they had no philosophical system to back them, to explain them, etc. The protracted controversy regarding Nicaea that followed the Council itself was a simple consequence of this�fully Christian bishops, priests and laymen were left in a philosophical vacuum following this wholesale abandonment of the systems that had tied the intellectual tenets of the faith together for the Hellenistic mind. It was only with the work of the Cappadocian Fathers that a system was developed to replace Origen and the other early apologists.

Their great and lasting contribution was the creation of a system incorporating the Nicene definitions, the tradition of the Church and the best of Hellenistic philosophy into a single, seamless system, at once fully consistent with the inner life of the Church and the reality of her encounter with God, nonetheless treating and adopting the best of philosophy with such faithfulness to its fundamental kernel (the illumination of Socrates, Plato and Plotinus that had spawned it) that many even of the philosophers of the day held them in high regard.

Its perfection is indicated by the fact that, in the Greek-speaking, still Hellenistic East, the Cappadocians� system perseveres to this day as the standard of Orthodoxy. Other theologians have written, of course, but they have merely filled in less developed portions of the Cappadocians� system. One could even attribute the supposed stagnancy of Byzantine intellectual thought (an accusation often leveled against the later Eastern Roman Empire) to this�after the Cappadocians, there was little to say. The definition of Christianity in the Greek language was complete, the energies of Byzantium�s intellectuals directed elsewhere. As much had been said about God as could be understood by the rational mind�to discover more was the arena of the mystic, the hesychast, the man of prayer. Words and ideas had reached their limit�more could not be learned without shedding these transient things and delving into the blinding darkness of God Himself.

Such a system, however, was not developed in the West. I say that not in any attack upon Augustine, Aquinas or any of the other theologian-philosophers with whom the Latin West has been graced. Their work was good�but the very existence of the subsequent philosophers and theologians, of the Renaissance, of the Protestant Reformation and, in more modern times, of the parallel developments of modernism/post-modernism on the one hand and the denominational explosion on the other bear witness to the imperfect nature of Christianity�s Western philosophical clothing.

This can, I think, probably be attributed to external pressures. There was a lengthy period of peace and security in the Eastern Roman Empire which provided the environment necessary for a protracted discussion. But Augustine himself only scarcely outlived the fall of Rome in 410, and whatever one may say of the centuries following, they were not an age of peace and security. Indeed, there has been no opportunity for Christianity in the West to regroup and re-examine the philosophical system clothing the Faith since the fall of Rome. Or rather, on the rare occasions that the opportunity has presented itself, it has led to more schisms, more divisions and more confusion.

In modern America, this theological meltdown has reached its apogee�but it is here, in this time and place of peace, prosperity and security, that we Christians of all stripes are finally presented with the crucible we have needed for so long. It is far past time for a Western culture to develop a consistent philosophy of Christianity that can finally give an answer to all the controversies that have plagued us for so long. I am convinced that there is a way to resolve the questions that divide us, whether they be ecclesiology, soteriology, Christology�even the question of free will seems within reach.

I see all the pieces moving towards this very conclusion. The English-speaking world is full of those who have experienced in themselves the failure of the Church in the West to answer the fundamental questions, those who have at once left the Church and still cling to it despite themselves. It is at peace (in that its lands are not ravaged by war), secure, with energy to spare for intellectual pursuits. It possesses an unparalleled knowledge of the past, an unequaled ability to look with clear sight at the 20 centuries which lie behind us and understand them in their virtues and their faults. It is an age of hope and despair united, an age in which people are willing to surrender ancient feuds and pet ideas. And it is an age in which finally the Christian-philosophical traditions of East and West are co-existent in one land, speaking one language, experiencing one culture, facing common enemies. All of Christianity is gathered here, in person or by proxy. There will be no better time than this.