Questions About Orthodox Christianity From an Evangelical Charismatic

An early 19th Century Russian Orthodox Cross depicting Jesus, Longinus, a fistful of Marys, and who knows what all. Magnifying glass sold separately.

From the Christian Home Schooling Forums (quoted and edited with permission):

I have been in a Charismatic Evangelical denomination for over 30 years. After reading more about history and science I began to have questions about my own faith and that has led me here. A few months ago someone suggested reading Thirsting for God in a Land of Shallow Wells, because many of the questions I had were addressed in the first few chapters of this book by the Evangelical-turned-Orthodox author. I can’t say that the book answered all my questions, but it has left me wondering how long I will last as an evangelical.

Honestly I’m on information overload, so I just confuse [my husband] when I start talking. [… . ]

So there is this question of what proof is there for Orthodoxy. If it is true then the only question to ask is were the apostles right or wrong - if they were right then it doesn’t make sense to be any other brand of christianity and if they got it wrong then christianity doesn’t really have a leg to stand on. These are the thoughts going through my head right now.

 A couple of thoughts. (I always say things like that and they turn into torrents and jungles. I’ll try to keep it concise.)

To some degree it helps if you can clarify what you think you’re looking for.

I think that in some ways Protestant / Reformed traditions and Orthodox / Catholic traditions talk past one another because they’re aiming at different targets.

For instance, if you’re looking for the ancient practices of the faith, how a community behaved and talked (the vocabulary a community uses is very important, I think), you really need to be looking hard at Orthodoxy.

If you’re looking at the way that a community incorporated its practices into a radical, eschatological community, you really need to be looking at Orthodoxy.

But if you’re looking for how that existentially impacted a person, causing them to do lunatic things like sell all they own, you might find yourself staring hard at some scary forms of Protestantism. Or an Orthodox bishop. Or some rather wonderful corners of Catholicism. And two or three lesbian Anglicans.

If you’re looking for the community of the Holy Spirit, expecting the imminent return of the Lord and withdrawing from the world, you can find flavors of that in Catholic monasticism, some Greek Orthodox dioceses, and of course the Pennsylvania Dutch and whole towns in central Indiana.

But I suspect what you’re describing is a hunger for a place where your heart finds a home that your head doesn’t have to constantly reject or filter or hold reservations about.

I wish with all my heart I could give you good news about that.

Here’s the truth as I see it.
Patriarch Bartholomew, spiritual head of the Eastern Orthodox Church [EOC]. Differs from both Santa Claus and Dumbledore in important respects

If you’re looking for the historical lineage of apostolic bishops, with all the messiness and corruption and reformation that that necessarily entails, you are going to end up Orthodox or wishing you could be Orthodox.  If you suppress this for too long you’ll grow a strange beard.  No, really, I’ve seen it dozens of times.

This is not something you can “prove,” except by whittling away at other expressions of Christianity. One by one, they depart in significant ways from the practices of the ancient bishops: Rome (saving the reverence of my RCC friends [and spouse]) exalted the bishop of Rome above the college of bishops that had for centuries represented the voice of the Catholic Church. The Reformation exalted the book of the Church above the church itself (I’m tempted to write, “above the Holy Spirit herself”). The Copts are less easy to dismiss, but they are sort of the Amish of the Orthodox world, a little too weird even for themselves.  (I tease.  I like the Copts, and particularly enjoy saying, “Cheese it, it’s the Copts!”)

I have known many people in your place to find a sense of place in the Orthodox Church, and I hope you are able to find a congregation that at least will feed you on the fellowship bread (which is a pretty fair chunk of lembas: I once had some and didn’t eat again for two days, no lie, without feeling the slightest hunger). Your faith makes it real, I think.

There’s enormous spiritual pleasure in such a sanctity, even for the skeptic, and enormous healing to be found.

As with all such healings, all such sanctities, your mileage will vary. Your faith makes it real, but faith is a curiously temperamental thing that doesn’t obey rules I could put a name to.

There is a peculiarity about Christian spirituality that it is a little like falling in love. It comes and it goes. It feels forever and then, well, it isn’t.

And your commitment to Orthodoxy will be on the order of marrying based on the grace you experience.

But the proof of any Christian church, say Saint John and Saint Paul together, is the love that feeds a person.

It isn’t in their rightness, or obviously I would be the one true Church. (That was humor.  Airsick bags are under your seat).

It’s not in their miracles, even, though these have an importance to them I think.

It’s in their love, and in their commitment to that love as a way of living.

And sadly, I have known Orthodox churches that could not be bothered to feed their own terminally sick parishioners. These would be few, because the Orthodox remember that love is the mark by which you shall be known as a disciple, and in general, in their communities, this is not forgotten.

Like the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church is wonderfully good at structuring such love, giving it a form and a memory that calls a person “Saint” when they show they love with great heart and courage and originality.

But again: the argument for its supremacy or its claim to your attention cannot be divorced from this love.

There is no objective argument for “where god is.” Only for where ideas changed, where they slipped or changed their meanings. And those point to Orthodoxy fairly clearly, or at least in that direction, where they still remember that the mystical union of God and flesh cannot be described in terms that leave both “sides” the same… that is, you cannot have a personal relationship with Christ, you must be absorbed into Christ. You do not talk to God, you are lifted into God. And in so describing these things, they preserve something of the radical nature of Christian faith.

You find echoes of it elsewhere: the Wesleys were ardent admirers (and even imitators) of classical Orthodoxy… read (or better, sing) their hymns and feel that old majestic breathless spirit, beginning with “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.” (Holy Cthulhu: “Veiled in flesh the godhead see / hail the incarnate deity / pleased as man with man to dwell / Jesus, our Immanuel…” No Protestant fails to sing it at Christmas, but no Protestant could ever have written it unless he were steeped in the writings of the East.)The Wesleys: Samuel (in odd hat), Susanna (not wearing wig), John, and Charles. I think they had the poetry to fit the evangelicalism, something they got more from Ephraim the Syrian and Saint Basil than from Luther, who had all the poetry of John Philip Sousa.

One final point.

Evangelicalism is not exactly wrong.

It’s bad poetry, which is not the same thing.

It’s seeking (sometimes desperately) to put a name on an experience that is perfectly real. It’s seeking to elevate that experience to the level of a mechanism, a law of nature, a replicable thing that can be explained and summed up.

Which as I write these words makes me ache with pity for evangelicals.

Orthodoxy is evangelical, for it seeks to articulate, in far better words, in far better language, in far more strange syllables, what it is that is strange, better, and beyond language in the mysterious spaces where people love one another without any particular warrant.

Comments

[Ginny Abraham]

Your Otterness, you might just really hit a groove on Aramaic translations. They imbibe body and soul with modern soul (at least in the translations of Neal Douglas-Klotz). His Lord's prayer is something to wholeheartedly enjoy, and there's even a playback on the web http://www.thenazareneway.com/lords_prayer.htm
enjoy! ;)