I have still, even after posting this, a massive respect for the tradition and the witness of the Orthodox Churches. I wish I could join them; I tried, but it was not going to happen.
I agree with Orthodoxy on most of the issues that Protestants are supposed to disagree with Orthodoxy about: the role of Scripture versus Holy Tradition, the interpretation of Scripture, the role of the Liturgy, the witness of the Church Fathers and the Saints. All the big scary issues, I will lay my cards on the table and say that the Orthodox got right.
But there are sufficient caveats in my thinking - and I openly acknowledge that these are the result of my thinking, and as such are entirely fallible - that I have decided not to affiliate myself with the Orthodox Church. I have more or less decided to affiliate myself with the Anglican Church, (basically because they're the minimally-hated confession) and I'll go into that in more detail later.
To explain why I am not Orthodox requires an awfully long prolegomena, which I do not necessarily have time to flesh out here. The first thing I should mention is that I have attempted to form an emic view of Orthodox theology, working within the system; I came to Anglicanism afterwards, finding there not a solution to my problems with the Orthodox faith but an alternate set of problems that I'm currently happy to live with. Hence I'm not claiming, as many other non-Orthodox writers do, that Orthodoxy is Bad and Wrong because it does not contain the elements that my particular denomination stresses; I have instead tried to understand Orthodoxy on its own terms, and express my doubts and concerns from within that system.
But I at this point have to admit that I am not a member of the Orthodox church and so cannot argue completely within that system; my experience of Orthodoxy has been provisional and not necesarily wholly accurate. (But when, whose is? That is a mystery of Orthodoxy which I invite you to ponder but will not discuss further here.)
I will, I know, affect a polemic tone in my writing, but that is purely for the purposes of rhetoric style. I know that the appropriate response for me is humility, and I fully acknoweldge that I have merely scratched the surface of Orthodox Christianity; if there is something underneath which I have missed, then I must apologise in advance. Please do correct me in person or in the comments below, and I will be glad to rephrase myself. But on the other hand, I have to work with what I have! When I read Bulgakov and Lossky and Ware and other scholars and find no consensus about what Orthodox believe, I have to make up my own mind, and frequently this is incorrect. I apologise, but I hope it will not obscure my main points.
A note on the handling of Scripture. For some reason, when someone speaks about Orthodoxy and uses the Scriptures in their defence, the immediate reaction from the faithful is that this Protestant is behaving sola scriptura and taking the Word out of its context of hermeneutic and historical engagement.
I will say right now that I believe that sola scriptura is a mistake. Nobody ever said this was how we were supposed to live. And frankly, I'm not sure it's fair to label me as a Protestant, but then I'm not sure it's fair to label me as anything else either.
However, I also believe that if the Bible belongs to the Church, then it belongs to the individual theologians - that is, as Bishop Kallistos frequently reminds us, each believer - to interpret under the authority of the Church. So I humbly submit my uses of Scripture to the deliberation of the Church.
But what, I have to ask, does it mean for the Church to deliberate on a matter? I admit that I am very much impressed with the idea that the pronouncements of the Church are inspired and infallible. I want this to be true.
But then I began to think about where the locus of this infallibility lies, particularly its temporal locus. When is something infallible? This is particularly a hard question when you have Councils of the whole church which are true but are not accepted for a while, and you have Councils of the whole church which are accepted for a while and are later found to be not true. (Second Ephesus, for instance.)
So here is an interesting question: at what point is it possible to declare an infallible answer to a question? Remember that any answer you have now may later be found not to have the sense of the church, and hence not to be infallible. If you think about it, there is not any point in the present for which one can say that the answer to a given question is able to stand the test of time of the Church in the future. That is, I have a question now, but any answer I receive now may not be judged to be infallible until some later date. And therefore, I have no useful answer to my question right now.
And hence the doctrine of ecclesial infallibility - which I agree is much needed - is unfortunately meaningless, since such infallibility cannot be temporally located.
Also, there is the issue of Hellenism. I am not going to stagger over to the library to dig out Jim Stamoolis' thesis on the topic, but one of the issues in Orthodox mission is the acceptance of Hellenistic categories of thought, particularly Platonism, as an intergral part of the Orthodox faith. To put it absurdly, the Orthodox took a Middle Eastern faith and contextualised it to Greek philosophy, and then refused to allow any further contextualization from there. The symbolics of Orthodoxy, even today, are framed in Greek philosophical patterns of thought. The absurdity of this is not lost on me.
I have mentioned in my previous post the primacy of God's action over man's dogma; therefore I have issues with the Orthodox exclusivist tendency which considers a dogmatic formulation of the faith to be more important than the manifest work of God. Frankly, they - for whichever version of "they" you worry about - are brothers if they have received the Holy Spirit, not if they measure up to your standard of doctrinal purity. When reaching out to the Gentiles, God asked of the Apostles to look to the external outworking of His Spirit and not to the theological nitty-gritty, and surprisingly, after much persuasion, they did! I find it amazing that this is the only activity and attitude of the founding Fathers of the Church that the Orthodox do not today follow.
Finally, I wish to end on a more positive note. It is my wish that all Christian confessions be able to gather together under the banner of what they agree on - Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, as Lord and Saviour - before they begin to worry about what they disagree on. The Orthodox Church, amongst its theologians, has a lovely word for that-which-they-disagree-on - the "theolegoumena". These are the things which, in the grand scheme of things, don't actually matter, so long as we agree on the basics.
The Orthodox attempt to minimize these distinctions amongst themselves and maximise the distinctions between the "confessional bases" of the other confessions. But to be honest, it's all theolegoumena. We don't agree, but that's OK; we agree on the basics.
And one day, we will all realise it, and celebrate it together. Maybe on this earth, and maybe not; but one day.
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