I should perhaps lay my cards on the table, however embryonic the idea may be (so I reserve the right to change my mind on this). I increasingly believe that True Orthodox is actually pluralistic Orthodoxy - I don't think Orthodoxy is contained in the proper articulation of doctrine alongside the performance of liturgy and ascesis (Creed, Worship, Spirituality).
Instead, I think Orthodoxy - and theology in general - is an interpretive activity communally engaged and constrained. It has more in common with a book club than with a scholar's classroom (though both are extremely poor analogies).
The text in question, though, is literally everything. We cannot separate our use of language, our interpretation of the world, our encounter with the things of the world - these are immediate and inseparable. To see something is to think about it and categorize it. The brain literally cannot see without interpreting, nor can it interpret without the schematics and frameworks for interpretation which is has built up gradually over time from infancy.
So all encounter is interpretive. This includes the encounter with the Divine Liturgy, the Scriptures, the Church; but it also includes my encounter with my comfy reading chair, the hug I give my child, seeing a sunset, or reacting to news on CNN. Everything is interpreted. Everything. Yes - even what I'm writing now (which is why misunderstanding is impossible).
Yes, that means words do not have singular nor stable meanings. Words are, in fact, quite detached from the essence of the thing they refer to. They are symbols, and symbols are fungible / interchangeable / changeable. Words are, in short, metaphors. The function by making a referential claim, but can't ever quite live up to the claim. When I say "tree" the image that pops into your head is different from the image that pops into mine, no matter how closely related those images might be.
So what am I driving at? Everything needs to be interpreted, from the simplest words and encounters to the most complex. From the way one says "hello!" to one's neighbor to the highest theology of the Liturgy.
Orthodoxy is the interpretive key that unlocks the universe. Or rather, Christ is that key (and this I assert without warrant - I simply believe this to be so and the rest of how I reason rests on it and it alone; it is my first premise, if you will).
Everything else just flows out from that. But HOW it flows out - in what WAY it flows out - and how it OUGHT to flow out - that is entirely changeable as time shifts and new contexts arise.
To me, if I were to attempt any kind of synthesis with Orthodox tradition, this is the one I would forward. Every generation of Orthodox Christians has attempted to interpret their inherited framework such that it should accord with Christ.
Thus, we may speak of the first generation of Christians as doing this with their inherited Judaism, and subsequent generations with Middle Platonism and (later) Neo-Platonism, with inherited schools of rhetoric (Second Sophist) and inherited understandings of politics (Roman Imperialism) and anthropology (Single-Sex Primal Androgyny), etc.
From early Judaism through Platonism, Byzantine Imperial Ideology, Scholasticism, Latin Captivity (Confessional theologies and Counter Reformation tendencies), Romanticism, Hegelian Philosophy, Husserl Phenomenology, Heidegerian Phenomenology, etc... Always Orthodoxy has adopted these modes of thought and, using their categories, artifacts, tools, etc., interpreted the world in accordance with Christ.
The problem is that this produces varied interpretations. The Trinitarian theology of Irenaeus of Lyons is distinct from that of Gregory of Nyssa and yet both are quite a bit more distinct from that of Zizoulas - and these are all Orthodox sources! And the Trinity is the most fundamental of our beliefs! This is the Creed at its heart.
But Irenaeus and Nyssa and Zizoulas respond to different times and different contexts. And there ISN'T some ghost of a "real" doctrine of the Trinity behind them that we can sort of quasi discern through synthetic reasoning. Irenaeus and Nyssa and Zizoulas say different things - sometimes fundamentally opposed things - but they also say True things, even though they say opposed things.
Irenaeus reasons his way through the Trinity using the categories of Middle Platonic mediation (just like the Gnostics did, for that matter), and some handy anthropomorphic metaphor (also like the Gnostics).
Nyssa uses Neo-Platonic categories (e.g. ideals as summative concepts encapsulating whole realities), but also a heavy does of Rhetoric and Language Theory in his refutation of Eunomius.
Zizoulas uses... I don't know - categories of modern personhood? He posits the Trinity as a communion of love between freely loving persons - basically, a model of consent-based interpersonal love that entirely (100%) depends on modern concepts of human psychology, consent, and personal identity. Totally different from Nyssa and Irenaeus, but totally Orthodox.
And this means they can all say the formula of the Creed (or, in Irenaues' case, something very close to it), but mean rather different things by that forumla. So the formula doesn't provide a "sure footing" for identifying the essence (the Mind of the Church) behind their ideas.
Like all things, the Creed must be interpreted.
Each era has, though, a counterbalancing tendency to view the interpretive project of the prior era as somehow definitive and therefore immutable. In other words, in each generation you have progressive Orthodox Christians and conservative Orthodox Christians. I don't mean "progressive" here in the sense that one generation's synthesis is inherently a step forward from the prior generation's - I don't buy the myth of progress on that level. Generations are just different, not better or worse.
I mean "progressive" (or liberal) in the sense of willing to call into question the underlying assumptions of the prior generation on the basis of changes in culture, philosophy, or other field (e.g. medicine and biology have radically changed the way we see the human person, especially the mind). I mean "conservative" only in the sense of resisting that desire to call those things into question.
Athanasius and Nyssa were, frankly, liberals of their day. In Athanasius' case, quite an obnoxious one. So was Photius of Constantinople, for that matter. In contrast, Theodore the Studite and John of Damascus were conservatives (the iconoclasts tended to have more of the academics). So it isn't like I'm saying "yay" to one group and "boo" to another. There are degrees of liberalism, also. Irenaeus was certainly more liberal theologically than Justin Martyr (who was pretty darned liberal in comparison to, say, the Epistle of Barnabas or Quartodecimens like Melito of Sardis), but Irenaeus was less liberal than the more adventurous Gnostics. Though in some ways, by today's standards, Irenaeus was MORE liberal than the Gnostics (who tended to preserve a bit more of their inherited anthropology, which Irenaeus challenged).
But straight down into the late Byzantine period and beyond you had people pushing Orthodoxy to interpret itself within its new realities (e.g. Moscow as third Rome type stuff, which is pretty liberal if you think about it in its time period), and those who pulled back.
The nice thing is that this pattern holds EVEN for the data that Florovsky and a lot of today's Orthodox systematics rejects. The whole confessional conflict of the 17th century makes a ton of sense. So does the Latin Captivity - where Orthodoxy took its intellectual and cultural context and made it Orthodox. That the theology of the Latin Captivity is seemingly at odds with or uneasy next to the theology of Irenaues and Nyssa is immaterial UNLESS we want them all to somehow (ultimately) say the same thing - that is, if we want a synthesis.
If we abandon a synthesis in favor of pluralism (of a symphony of diverse voices singing in harmony with Christ but each with their own note), then the diversity of the Latin Captivity next to Gregory of Nyssa does not produce dread in us but joy at the Spirit's activity in ALL Orthodox history.
Theology becomes something un-tamable, like a good book. We must continually return to it and re-envision it because we, in our fallibility, continually change and need to be re-integrated into it.
So when someone tells me that "X" should be excluded from the church I am deeply, deeply suspicious of the basis of that claim. Far too often, dogmatic maximalism ("fundamentalism") seems to be the root - if I can just collect enough witnesses from history to perspective "Y" in conflict with perspective "X" then I can say that "Y" IS Orthodox and "X" IS not.
But that isn't how the fathers reasoned - they openly and creatively used their context to produce varied and distinctive theologies. They were, in short, DYNAMIC (especially the earlier ones - the earlier you go, the more dynamic they appear).
About the only thing that seems consistently excluded are: a) those who exclude themselves, and b) those who interpret the phenomena of the world according to a different starting point (e.g. "not Christ" but, say "Torah" or "Mohammed").
In short, what Orthodoxy did with the Judaic Scriptures (interpreting them Christologically), and Neo-Platonism (interpreting it Christologically), and Roman Imperialism (interpreting it Christologically), and Scholasticism, and, and, and, etc. right on down to Florovsky interpreting Phenomenology "Christologically" (so to speak) - this is what I want us to do today EVEN IF it means rejecting the systematic theologies of the past century because those theologies, however normative they claim to be, are historically contextualized and merely one episode in a very long chain of Orthodoxy's attempt to interpret the world according to Christ.
What do I mean by "today"? Well, that would force us to ask what the prevailing perspectives are which we find challenging, and what the phenomena are that we find troubling. These are what invite theological creativity today. Our continuity with the tradition is not in repeating the norms of the past, but rather in imitating their dynamic interpretive creativity.
It is easier to discuss this in the specific context of a particular thing. EG) ethical norms for human behavior are based on our understanding of the human body (or, conversely, we may "invent" a narrative of how our body works in order to use that narrative to explain a given ethical norm). However, BOTH the ethical norms AND narrative of how our body works have changed (culturally speaking) over time. So things are morally permissible in today's society that would have been condemned in the past and vice-versa: we also condemn things today that were permissible in the past. Further, this shift in normative behavior interacts with how we understand the human body and human person, and this understanding likewise changes over time.
Our task, though, is in the context of today's understanding of the body. That's the material we have to work into conformity with Christ. Merely "returning" to the understanding of the body from the late second century doesn't work. You can find attempts at this, and it frankly requires a lot of unsatisfactory mental gymnastics even to get there and then, once there, it tends to sit uneasily. We don't REALLY think (today) that, for example, lesbians can grow male equipment from being too masculine (Clement of Alexandria did, as did many of his peers) or that the "heat" of male seed determines the genital anatomy of the offspring, or etc. etc. Seriously, ancient medicine had some really silly ideas.
Plus, basically none of these ideas are inherently Christian. They predate Christianity, by a far distance in most cases.
So mere return - a neo-patristic synthesis - doesn't suffice. Cannot suffice. If the ancient Christians under the guidance of the Holy Spirit could take the material of their ungodly culture and conform it to Christ then that is likewise what we must do.
Dynamic, Pluralistic, Orthodoxy.
