What I LOVE and HATE about the Orthodox Church! (From a Protestant)

rusmeister

A Russified American Orthodox Chestertonian
Dec 9, 2005
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That happened some time after the experiences I described. I was not a rebel from the beginning, I saw ugly and narrow attitudes and it lead me to question the exclusivist claims I was being presented with, and I realized in the end the church has no particular infallibility. I became a cafeteria convert, not unlike many churchgoers. Being a "cafeteria Christian" can be very healthy because it forces you to be discerning. Still, I simply preferred to worship God in an orthodox church- I was tired and exhausted, and Orthodoxy had successfully destroyed my faith in any other Christian church. But I wasn't going to let it control my life or jeopardize my sanity.



I don't deny Orthodox worship and faith has that, and that can be alluring. But those aren't the sort of spiritual experiences I am talking about. Recall that I said the Orthodox took away my confidence in any other church. My experience in the Lutheran church was the Holy Spirit restoring that sense of confidence to me that Orthodoxy took away, in a dramatic way. Like a Damascus Road type experience.

I remember one time walking out of a service on Pentecost and the pastor had prayed a prayer about the Holy Spirit and being stunned and not sure what happened to me. As he prayed I was overwhelmed by the feeling of a presence and the feeling that someone was speaking or communicating to me in a way beyond words, like knowledge was being put into my mind, and I walked out of the service with a sense of peace I had not felt in a long time. I just sat in the memorial garden with my partner for about half an hour nearly speechless, because all the cynicism I had been struggling with was taken away.

And from a Lutheran standpoint, awe is insufficient. The fruit of Christian faith is self-sacrificial love, which in my mind means real vulnerability. Orthodox Christians, in my experience, are weak on understanding what vulnerability is. It's hard to be vulnerable when you are so committed to a Platonic idealist notion of the Church. The attitude of unchanging traditionalism is symptomatic of that.



That's not really what the problem was. I loved Orthodox worship (and Lutherans generally have very similar attitudes to worship as do the Orthodox, so that isn't the issue). But like Paidiske's examples, I encountered some ugly attitudes that I was taking on as my own. I don't encounter that in my Lutheran church.




I am not a relativist. However, our theology should not be framed as a reaction to the modern world. I believe in dialogue, not polemicism. I think that's what Jesus did too- he asked alot of questions, didn't he? The only people he was firm with were people that were abusing others.

Being a follower of Jesus is not about being right and putting a righteousness feather in our cap, it's about being loving. Truth and love are not opposed.

On the contrary, fundamentalism gravitates towards polemicism. It's an oppressive, graceless way to live.

Since it seems that your first principal is seeking affirmation of your passion, I don't think any argument, in the polite sense, could convince you of anything different. As to your experience, like all personal experience, it is limited. Your generalization on Orthodox being weak in understanding vulnerability is a serious example of that, because it is a personal rather than theological observation, and you cannot have known millions of Orthodox people personally, or even a large enough number to be really representative ( which would have to be in the tens of thousands at the very least) in order to even have any idea of what each individual knows of vulnerability.

I am a teacher, and I say that even experience as a teacher is not enough to understand what is going on in the public schools. It's not enough. You have to know the history of the schools, from A to Z, know what is going on in the State Ed programs, what is going on in State and County Ed as well as your own district and school board, have a serious range of experience of different schools, before you can begin to hold an opinion worth holding about public education. Yet absolutely everyone has an opinion about it, mostly because they sat at a desk as a kid in such a school, or even taught in one, and think that enough to give them the broad understanding of what is going on. So the basis on which you are encapsulating and dismissing Orthodoxy, because you met people, either judgemental of you as a person (bad) or saying things about doctrine you sidn't want to hear, I don't know, does not seem well-founded to me. Certainly it is not on the basis of coherent theology, Church history, or reason.

The kind of experience based on feeling you hunger for ( who doesn't?) is something we see as really dangerous. It is a major path to what we call "prelest", spiritual deception, both self-deception and demonic deception. "Blessed is he who has not seen, and yet believes". We think feelings are an incredibly dangerous guide, and the person who obeys regardless of how he feels is more blessed than he who seeks feelings.

Your idea that tradition means some things really don't change is necessarily Platonism is absurd. I think the idea that denies unchanging aspects of human nature to be insane. It means that there really is no such thing as a human, or truth. It does mean relativism, though you deny that. We don't think that all of life is completely static, but we do think that murder has always been evil, that the ideal of sexual morality is constant, even when patriarchs of the Old Testament violated it, and that there has always been a definite creature called man, who we are capable of understanding because he was the same kind of creature thousands of years ago as we are today, so we can understand stories about Adam, about Noah and Abraham and the rest, because the fundamental things did not change. That's not Platonism. That's a certainty of constants, like death and taxes. :)
The idea of tradition, and of Holy Tradition, is based on that.

You speak of polemicism. Polemics is a good thing, when practiced by interlocuters honestly seeking truth, and willing to change anything in their own views that does not conform to truth. It is disagreeing in order to come to agreement in the end. It is sin, selfishness and a willingness to deceive oneself out of that selfishness that can make polemics bad.

Real truth and real love are not opposed. But there is a conception of truth that can be pitiless, and therefore loveless (your concern), and a conception of love that can be untruthful, and therefore unloving in the true sense, a John Lennon conception of love (my concern).

I think it is vital to have a solid foundation on which to build one's life and faith. I do think it to be Christ, as Truth is a Person. But that's exactly what "fundament" means: "foundation". Speaking of "fundamentalism" is an attempt to express thought that is not thought out. It is not even a rational word. It doesn't even say what it is trying to say, and winds up complementing its targets without the speaker realizing it. To say "fundamental" is to say "foundational". One might deceive oneself into thinking that there is a difference between the words, if one knows only English, but if you learn other languages, you eventually find out different.
 
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