Stephen Hayes's Blog, page 31

Orthodox Anthropology: human beings or human persons

There seems to be a theological dispute among bishops which has me rather worried since I read about it in this article Human Beings or Human Persons? | Public Orthodoxy:

One of the liveliest exchanges at the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church in June 2016 concerned which Greek words should be used in Council documents to refer to humans: anthrōpos (“human being”); or anthrōpino prosōpo (or simply prosōpon) (“human person”). The main protagonists in this debate were, in the anthrōpos corner, Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos), and in the prosōpon corner, Metropolitan John (Zizioulas), supported by Metropolitan Kallistos (Ware). While this episode may seem to be an intra-Greek linguistic spat, the theological stakes are very high.

For me, the main theological points are these:

For Vlachos, it is unacceptable to identify and name humans as persons, since this appears to put them on the same level as the divine Persons. So humans must be thought of simply as anthrōpoi (human beings); they do not, in Christos Yannaras’ terminology, have a personal “mode of existence” analogous to the Persons of the Holy Trinity.

The position of Metropolitan John Zizioulas and Metropoluitan Kallistos Ware, however, seems to be this:

…a refusal to attribute personhood to human existence downgrades humanity. This is not fidelity to patristic anthropology, but rather its betrayal. The Fathers sought to elevate humanity by stressing that humans are created in the divine image, with the potential for union with God (theosis), and not mere pawns subject to impersonal and implacable destiny or the gods. If the notion that all humans are persons is not acceptable, still less acceptable would be the idea that humans are individuals (atoma), since this gives rise to selfish individualism, contrary to commandment of love. If humans are neither persons nor individuals, they are mere anthrōpoi, interchangeable and expendable specimens of homo sapiens. This is a reductionist view of humanity: humans as solely anthrōpoi are not unique persons of infinite value, as they are considered in Orthodox anthropology and Orthodox personalism. This theology, contrary to the spirit of patristic anthropology, plays into the hands of contemporary secularists, for whom humans are nothing more than intelligent animals.

And it is their view that I find myself most in sympathy with, perhaps because one of my first teachers of Orthodox theology was Father John Zizioulas, before he was raised to the episcopate, back in 1968 at a seminar or Orthodox theology for non-Orthodox theological students.

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Metropolitan Hierotheos (Vlachos) of Nafpaktos and Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon

Now I find this all very confusing, not least because I read a book by Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos called The Person in the Orthodox Tradition, and if this article is correct, I must have completely misinterpreted it, because I interpreted it in the light of what Christos Yannaras, in his book The Freedom of Morality, said about the human person.

I’m not a Greek language fundi, and part of the argument seems to be about the meaning of Greek words, which I also seem to have misunderstood. I took the Greek anthropos to mean the same as the Zulu umuntu, which means a human person. The English word for that is man, which has to do double duty, because it is also used to translate the Greek aner and the Zulu indoda, which mean an adult male human person. Some feminists and Western theologians would deprive us of the first meaning, saying that it is impermissible, which means that there is no English equivalent for anthropos or umuntu, and if I read this article correctly, there is no Greek equivalent for umuntu either, because anthropos means something less than umuntu..

Here follows a rather large chunk of my doctoral thesis on Orthodox Mission Method, in which I tried to explain Orthodox anthropology and Orthodox ecclesiology (in part for the benefit of my Reformed promoter). But, if I have read the article correctly, it will probably need substantial revision in the light of what these bishops are saying. Is it heretical, or based on mistaken linguistic premisses, or what?

Ecclesiology

Orthodox ecclesiology sees the Church as one, holy, catholic and apostolic. In the West, “catholic” tends to be understood as meaning “general” or “universal”, whereas in Orthodox ecclesiology it is understood more as meaning “whole”. In Roman Catholic ecclesiology “the church” tends to be seen as monolithic, as a single body throughout the world bound in unity through the Pope of Rome. The local church is part of the whole, it may be described as a certain part of the single monolith, but is not at all separate from it.

In Congregational ecclesiology “the church” is essentially the local church, and the “catholic” church is the sum of all the local churches — the whole is the sum of the parts. These two images of the church, as a monolith or as a pile of pebbles, are not the only ones in Western Christendom. There is the “connexional” ecclesiology of the Methodists, the “presbyterian” ecclesiology of many Reformed churches, and the “episcopal” ecclesiology of the Anglicans. There is also a tendency to see the term “church” as referring to a denomination or sect, so that one can speak of the Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church and so on, as if these were all parts or “branches” of the universal church.

All this is foreign to Orthodox ecclesiology. In Orthodox ecclesiology, and indeed in the New Testament, there is no conception of the church as a “denomination”. The term “church” refers either to the local church, or to the universal church. The relationship between them is not seen either as that of a part to the whole (and therefore incomplete if separated from the whole), nor as a pebble in a pile of stones, independent, complete in itself, and self-sufficient.

A more accurate image is that of holography, pictures created by laser technology, where if the picture is divided into two, one does not have two half pictures, but two whole pictures. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but the completeness of the whole resides in all the parts. One could almost say that the part encompasses the sum of the wholes. The local church, led by its bishop, is “catholic”, that is, whole and complete, yet it is not independent, as in the congregational model, but interdependent with the other local churches.

Anthropology

In Orthodox anthropology too, this holistic understanding is found. In Western philosophy, theology and politics, a distinction is often drawn between the individual and society. In liberalism, for example, the individual is seen as primary. The law and society should be structured in such a way as to protect the rights of the individual. Larger groupings, such as “society” or the state, are simply made up of collections of individuals. The whole is the sum of the parts. In fact in Western individualism the whole is sometimes seen as being less than the sum of its parts. There is a kind of nominalism, in which the collective bodies are seen as less real than the individuals that make them up. But there have also been philosophies and worldviews that have seen the individual as simply a part of a larger whole. Society, or the state, have been seen as primary. In totalitarian ideologies, such as fascism and communism, the welfare of the individual must be subordinated to the welfare of the whole. The larger group is primary, and the individual is simply a part of the whole.

In Orthodox anthropology, however, neither the individual nor society has much meaning on its own. Orthodox anthropology distinguishes strongly between the individual and the person. A person is more than an individual, a person is in relationship to other people (see Lossky 1973:121f). It is these relationships that make up society, as a larger whole. The “isolated individual” is incomplete. Eastern Christianity is communal: “it is not good that man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18). Eastern Christianity sees the Church and the person as a reflection of the relationship between the Persons of the Divine Trinity (Bajis 1991:6). As a Zulu proverb puts it: Umuntu ungumuntu ngabantu — a person is a person because of people. Yannaras (1984:22) notes:

In everyday speech we tend to distort the meaning of the word “person”. What we call “person” or “personal” designates rather more the individual. We have grown accustomed to regarding the terms “person” and “individual” as virtually synonymous, and we use the two indifferently to express the same thing. From one point of view, however, “person” and “individual” are opposite in meaning. The individual is the denial or neglect of the distinctiveness of the person, the attempt to define human existence using the objective properties of man’s common nature, and quantitative comparisons and analogies.

Chiefly in the field of sociology and politics, the human being is frequently identified with the idea of numerical individuality. Sometimes this rationalistic process of leveling people out is considered progress, since it helps to make the organization of society more efficient. We neutralize the human being into a social unit, bearing the characteristics, the needs and desires, which are common to all. We try to achieve some rationalistic arrangement for the “rights of the individual” or an “objective” implementation of social justice which makes all individual beings alike and denies them personal distinctiveness.

This view of man in numerical, quantifiable terms is in many ways a characteristic of modern urban and civilised society. The very size of cities makes it easy for people to be anonymous, to disappear into the crowd, and to relate to people only in a functional way. In small towns and villages, and even more in rural tribal society, people may have multiple relationships to each other. I might know the name of the person who works at the check-out counter at the supermarket, not merely from a label attached to their clothing, but because I meet them in other settings and situations. A recent job advertisement in a newspaper called for a “Human Resources Superintendent” for an industrial company. The implication is that people have simply become another “resource” in the production process, and such dehumanising terminology is scarcely questioned (Sunday Times 1995-07-24).

In Orthodox anthropology, persons relate to one other in much the same way as local churches relate to the universal church. The person is not an individual, a numerical unit, the smallest unit or component of society, which cannot be further divided (Vlachos 1999:16-17). The person, the hypostasis or prosopon, is the bearer of human nature, and thus in a sense represents the whole as well, without losing personal distinctiveness.

The truth of the personal relationship with God, which may be positive or antithetical but is nevertheless always an existential relationship, is the definition of man, is mode of being. Man is an existential fact of relationship and communion. He is a person, prosopon, which signifies, both etymologically and in practice. that he has his face (ops) towards (pros) someone or something: that he is opposite (in relation to or in connection with) someone or something. In every one of its personal hypostases, the created nature of man is “opposite” God: it exists as a reference and relation to God (Yannaras 1984:20-21).

When God gave the ten commandments to Moses, he did not hide his identity or that of his audience behind a string of impersonal passives, like our constitutions and statutes. The commandments do not say “Adultery is not to be committed”, but “Thou shalt not commit adultery”.

If you accept the ten commandments, you are not accepting one code of principles among many, you are not acquiescing in a general disapproval of murder; primarily you are committing yourself to a God who has a purpose and a judgment and who reveals that purpose to his people, part of which purpose is that you should not deny your neighbour’s God-given permission to live. Accepting the ten commandments is an act of faith in the living God, not of approval of an ideal way of life. They are not man’s idea of what God wants; they are God’s own word, addressed to man, second person singular (Davies 1990:2).

When God spoke to Moses, he spoke not to Moses alone, but to the whole people of Israel. Moses, as a person, could nevertheless represent other persons. “The person is not an individual, a segment or subdivision of human nature as a whole. He represents not the relationship of the part to the whole, but the possibility of summing up the whole in a distinctiveness of relationship, in an act of self-transcendence” (Yannaras 1984:21).

It is in the light of this that Orthodox ecclesiology must be understood. In the Divine Liturgy, the priest as a person represents the community to God and God to the community. The priest is the ikon of the community towards God, and the ikon of Christ to the community — not in the Western sense of being a “mediator”, as something apart from both the community and God, but as a person who is a person because of people. In English, something of this is retained in the word “parson” that is sometimes used for the parish priest — a word that is etymologically related to “person”. In Orthodox theology the bishop thus not only “leads” the local church, but represents it. “Where the bishop is, there the church is”, said St Ignatius.

In some African societies, this conception of one person as a representative of the community is also found — even to the extent that a single person is regarded as a community (Ogbonnaya 1993:120). There is a sense in which the king is the people. The king is the king because of the people. This is very different from the Western concept of absolute monarchy, which developed in the early modern period, in which the king was set over the community he ruled. It is also different from Hitler’s “Führer principle”, which has the connotation of a car and driver — the driver being different in quality from the car. In Zulu society, for example, the inkosi (a word that is variously translated into English as “king”, “chief” or “lord”) is a member of the community, and its representative. He is part of that which he represents.

When Christianity stopped being persecuted, Christians tried to transform human society into an image of the kingdom of God. The institution of the Roman emperor was to be transfigured, so that the emperor was to represent the people, to be the one person who stood for the people, the Tsar was to be the “little father”. The extent to which this transformation was achieved is a matter of debate among theologians. The point here is that it is related to the Orthodox understanding of the human person.

This view of human nature, of Christian anthropology, is almost incomprehensible to many Western theologians. This can be seen, for example, in a tutorial letter sent out by the Faculty of Theology of the University of South Africa to students, instructing them to avoid the use of the word “man” to mean a human being of either sex, but to use it only to refer to male persons (Saayman 1995:2). The concept expressed by the term “man” is missing from the consciousness of most Western theologians. Western theology has no need of a singular term for a human person that can also represent the plural, and therefore sees no harm or incongruity in censoring and suppressing that term, and insisting that is must be used only to refer to males. Such attempts to impose Western theological categories by such bodies as the World Council of Churches are seen by many Orthodox Christians as arrogant cultural imperialism, though those who participate in such ecumenical bodies are often too polite to say so, or express their criticism in guarded terms (see e.g. Veronis 1990:269). Others, however, use it to illustrate their understanding that “ecumenism” is a heresy, and a device for destroying Orthodoxy.

A human person is not simply a part of a greater whole, nor an individual in isolation apart from the whole, but contains within himself or herself the whole. A person is always a person in community, is a person because of people.

_______

So much for my thesis, in which I even quoted Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, though I apparently misunderstood him entirely.

So I’m hoping for some comments from Orthodox theologian friends — where to from here? And where did I go wrong?

An academic generation gap?

Duncan Reyburn recently posted a link to a book, Philosophical Approaches to Demonology, in which he has written a contribution, concerning which he says that it is “about how King James was a being really nasty when he wrote his book—titled, “Daemonologie”—back in 1597. My philosophical approach is rooted in the work of the late, great René Girard.”

[image error]I was interested in this because some years ago I wrote an article on Christian responses to witchcraft and sorcery, While Duncan seemed to be viewing the topic through a macro-closeup lens, focusing on one book by one man, mine was more of a wide-angle view, though sometimes zooming in on the Zionist Christians of southern Africa.  In spite of these differences, however, it seemed that we were dealing with the same topic. King James VI of Scotland (I of Great Britain), was one Christian and Duncan covered his approach, I looked at a few more approaches.

I was quite surprised, then, to discover that in our bibliographies there was not a single work in common.

Perhaps this indicates a kind of academic generation gap. My article was published in 1995, whereas Duncan cites several works published after 2000, which obviously weren’t available to me. Even so, it still surprises me. Does knowledge get completely recycled every 20 years or so? Does that mean that I’m now completely out of touch?

Here are the two bibliographies:

Witchcraft Bibliography
References
Philosophical approaches to Demonology — contribution by Duncan Reyburn

Alison, James. 2001. Faith Beyond Resentment: Fragments, Catholic and Gay. New York: Crossroad Publishing.

Collins, Brian. 2014. The Head Beneath the Altar: Hindu Mythology and the Critique of Sacrifice. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

The Politics of Possession 269

Crossan, John Dominic. 2012. The Power of Parable: How Fiction By Jesus Became Fiction about Jesus. London: Harper One.

Farneti, Roberto. 2015. Mimetic Politics: Dyadic Patterns in Global Politics. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Garrels, Scott R. 2006. “Imitation, Mirror Neurons, and Mimetic Desire: Convergence between the Mimetic Theory of Rene Girard and Empirical Research.” Contagion: Journal of Violence, Culture and Mimesis 12–13: 47–86.

Girard, René. 1965. Deceit, Desire and the Novel, trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Girard, René. 1977. Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory. London: Continuum.

Girard, René. 1986. The Scapegoat, trans. Yvonne Freccero. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Girard, René. 2001. I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, trans. James G. Williams. Maryknoll: Orbis.

Girard, René. 2008. Evolution and Conversion. London: Continuum.

Guiley, Rosemary Ellen. 2009. The Encyclopedia of Demons and Demonology. New York: Infobase Publishing.

Hamerton-Kelly, Robert. 1993. The Gospel and the Sacred. Minneapolis: Fortress Press.

Levack, Brian P. 1992. The Literature of Witchcraft. Garland: University of Texas.

Palaver, Wolfgang. 2013. René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, trans. Gabriel Borrud. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press.

Pavlac, Brian A. 2009. Witch Hunts in the Western World. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Stewart, Alan. 2003. The Cradle King: The Life of James VI and I, the First Monarch of a United Great Britain. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Stuart, James. 2011. “Daemonologie (1597).” In The Demonology of King James , ed. Donald Tyson, 221–283. Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications.

Teems, David. 2010. Majestie: The King Behind the King James Bible. London: HarperCollins.

Tyson, Donald. 2011. The Demonology of King James I. Woodbury: Llewellyn Publications.

Bibliography
Christian responses to Witchcraft and Sorcery by Stephen Hayes

Adler, Margot. 1979. Drawing down the moon: witches, druids, goddess-worshippers and other pagans in America today. Boston: Beacon.

Anderson, Walter Truett. 1990. Reality isn’t what it used to be. San Francisco: Harper.

Berglund, Axel-Ivar. 1976. Zulu thought-patterns and symbolism. London: Hurst.

Bosch, David. 1987. The problem of evil in Africa: a survey of African views of witchcraft and of the response of the Christian church, in Like a roaring lion, edited by Pieter G.R. de Villiers, vide de Villiers 1987.

Cohn, Norman. 1975. Europe‘s inner demons: an enquiry inspired by the great witch-hunt. London: Sussex University Press.

Comaroff, Jean & Comaroff, John. 1991. Of revelation and revolution: Christianity, colonialism and consciousness in South Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Daneel, M.L., 1990. Exorcism as a means of combating wizardry: liberation or enslavement?, in Missionalia, Vol. 18(1) April. Page 220-247.

Davidson, Hilda Ellis. 1993. The lost beliefs of Northern Europe. London: Routledge.

de Villiers, Pieter G.R. (ed.). 1987. Like a roaring lion: essays on the Bible, the church and demonic powers. Pretoria: C.B. Powell Bible Centre.

Ellwood, Robert S. 1973. Religious and spiritual groups in modern America. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Fox, Robin Lane. 1987. Pagans and Christians. New York: Knopf.

Hillgarth, J.N. 1986. Christianity and paganism, 350-750: the conversion of Western Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Hunter, David E. & Whitten, Phillip. 1976. Encyclopedia of anthropology. New York: Harper & Row.

Hutton, Ronald. 1991. The pagan religions of the ancient British Isles. Oxford: Blackwell.

Kiernan, JP. 1987. The role of the adversary in Zulu Zionist churches, in Religion in Southern Africa Vol 8(1), Pages 3-14.

Levack, Brian P. 1987. The witch-hunt in early modern Europe. London: Longman.

Luhrmann, Tanya M. 1989. Persuasions of the witch’s craft: ritual magic in contemporary England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

McCord, James B. 1951. My patients were Zulus. New York: Rinehart.

Murray, Margaret Alice. 1973. The god of the witches. London: Oxford University Press.

Parrinder, Geoffrey. 1958. Witchcraft: European and African. London: Faber & Faber.

Pomazansky, Michael. 1994. Orthodox dogmatic theology. Platina, CA: St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood.

Saul, John Ralston. 1992. Voltaire’s bastards: the dictatorship of reason in the West. New York: Free Press.

Schmemann, Alexander. 1973. For the life of the world: sacraments and Orthodoxy. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Stewart, Charles. 1991. Demons and the devil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Trombley, Frank R. 1993. Hellenic religion and Christianization C. 370-529. Vol 1. Leiden: Brill.

Williams, Charles. 1959. Witchcraft. New York: Meridian.

Wilson, David. 1992. Anglo-Saxon paganism. London: Routledge.

Wright, William Kelley. 1941. A history of modern philosophy. New York: Macmillan.

What does it mean?

Though the differing bibliographies seem to indicate that there is no common ground, at least on the subject of witchcraft and demonology, fortunately Duncan and I have common ground in a wider sphere: we have both read G.K. Chesterton, though Duncan is far more of a fundi on Chesterton than I am, and has also written a book on Chesterton.

Or perhaps it is not so much a generation gap as an interdisciplinary one. The blurb for the book in which Duncan’s contribution was published, Philosophical approaches to demonology, reads:

In contradistinction to the many monographs and edited volumes devoted to historical, cultural, or theological treatments of demonology, this collection features newly written papers by philosophers and other scholars engaged specifically in philosophical argument, debate, and dialogue involving ideas and topics in demonology. The contributors to the volume approach the subject from the perspective of the broadest areas of Western philosophy, namely metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and moral philosophy.

Since the philosophical approach is so strongly contrasted to all other approaches, including my historical-theological approach, perhaps one cannot expect a common bibliography.

But I like to make connections. I like to see how different approaches can throw light on a phenomenon, and so I favour a more interdisciplinary approach. I’ll therefore be putting some of the books that Duncan lists on my “to read” list. And it bothers me somewhat that the philosophical approach seems to be proudly isolated from all other approaches. I’d be interested in reading some of the other contributions. but the price, even of the electronic version of the book, puts it way out of my league.

[image error]Also, the book focuses on demonology rather than witchcraft, and for much of history, and even Christian history, they were largely separate phenomena. King James I/VI lived in a place and period when witches and demons were most closely linked  in people’s minds, That could also help to account for the difference in the bibliographies.

That leads to another aspect of witchcraft that I haven’t mentioned yet — the literary. Witches played an interesting role in contemporary theatre, most notably in Shakespeare’s Macbeth. It could be interesting to compare King James’s treatment of witchcraft with Shakespeare’s, and there’s an interesting blog article about Shakespeare’s approach (from which I also borrowed some of the illustrations): Are the witches in Macbeth evil?

Coming down to more recent times, we have the role of witches in C.S. Lewis’s Narnia stories, where the links with demons are fairly tenuous. Lewis’s contemporary Dennis Wheatley made a much stronger connection between witchcraft and satanism, though his writing slides over into the horror genre. Lewis’s fellow Inkling Charles Williams wrote about satanists in some of his novels.

[image error]One finds an entirely different understanding of witches in the Harry Potter books, in which witches are assumed to be female, and the male equivalents are “wizards”. Though English does not have gendered nouns in the same way as Greek, French, German or Russian, J.K. Rowling treats “witch” as feminine and “wizard” as masculine.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s books also feature wizards, who, far from being linked with demons, are on the side of the angels; in fact, as we discover if we read The Silmarillion, they are angels, until they go over to the Dark Side, that is. In The Hobbit there is also the witch-like figure of the Necromancer, who is male.

So I think there is quite a lot more that could be said about this, and perhaps we can discuss it at our next Neoinklings coffee klatch on 6 July 2017, when we hope Duncan Reyburn will be with us to introduce it from the starting point of his article.

 

Orthodox & Roman Catholic Reunion redux

Every so often some or other Roman Catholic publication carries an article about reunion with the Orthodox, and notes that the differences between us are very small, and lamenting that the Orthodox don’t seem to be very enthusiastic about it.

Here’s another in the genre — Orthodox not interested in reunion with Rome | National Catholic Reporter:

When it comes to theology, the Catholic Church and the Orthodox churches are very close. We accept the same Nicene Creed, we recognize each other’s priestly and episcopal ordinations, as well as the sacraments of baptism, confession and Eucharist. Catholic and Orthodox teaching on morals are also quite compatible, with both being more conservative than their Protestant colleagues.

The touchy issue has always been the role of the papacy, but Pope John Paul II invited a worldwide dialogue on this topic, showing that the Vatican is open to a less intrusive role for the pope in the Eastern churches than in the West. There were even attempts to resurrect the title of patriarch of the West for the bishop of Rome, in order to distinguish his robust role in the Western church from his role in the East.

Rome is very much interested in improved relations with the Orthodox. It is deferential to Orthodox feelings.

But if it were truly deferential to Orthodox feelings, it would take them more seriously, and not condescendingly brush them off and minimise them. That’s not deference, that’s arrogance.

Like most RC publications and sources, this one tends to downplay differences, and reduce them to “the Papacy”. If one is to take the possibility of reunion seriously, then there must be honesty in facing the differences, and saying how they are to be dealt with. And in this, the RCs are far more evasive than the Orthodox.

We don’t, for example, accept the same “Nicene Creed”.

Surely the editors and writers of a Catholic publication ought to know that, and not pretend that it is not so.

Yes, “The Papacy” is a problem, and the RC pontifical ecclesiology differs from the Orthodox episcopal ecclesiology. But have they thought through the implications of reunion?

To give just one example — if there is reunion, will all RC bishops and clergy in Africa place themselves under the Pope and Patriarch of Alexandria and all Africa instead of under the Pope of Rome? If not, why not? And if not, how real would the “reunion” be?

I suspect that they might object to that, and might feel that it was a bit like the tail wagging the dog, even if you did lop off the bits of Africa that traditionally were under Rome (the Maghreb). And even if you did that, it would still be like the tail wagging the dog in what remained. And the Orthodox might not be so happy at being the tail, and might think it better to be a dog, albeit a smaller dog, than to be a bigger dog’s tail.

[image error]

Pope Theodoros II. Pope Francis I, Pope Tawhedros II, Patriarch Bartholomew

Or to use another metaphor, the toothpaste has been out of the tube for well-nigh a thousand years, and by now has been trampled all over the floor and into the carpets. Getting it back now will be a lot more difficult than when it was freshly squeezed.

The biggest obstacle to reunion is the attitude of the writers of articles like this one, who think it is “deference” to refuse to take Orthodox objections seriously and try to sweep them all under the carpet of “The Papacy”. I wrote about this seven years ago, and I don’t think much has changed since then.

If there is to be any serious talk of reunion then the differences must be faced, and talked through, and sorted out first, and pretending that the differences don’t exist, as this article does, does not augur well for even thinking about such discussions.

You can’t begin to discuss differences when one party doesn’t know, and doesn’t want to know that such differences even exist.

We can be friendly with Roman Catholics, and talk with them about all sorts of things. We can work with them for peace and justice in the world. But we can’t talk about reunion, not yet. They aren’t ready for it.

 

100 must-read books about Christianity

Someone posted this list of 100 must-read books about Christianity. I had a look at the list, and most of the titles I had never heard of, much less read. I had only heard of about 8-9 of them, and had read about 4 or 5. So what makes them “must-read”?

100 Must-Read Books About Christianity:

According to Pew Research, Christianity is the world’s largest religious group, so it’s worth knowing something about it, whether you’re a Christian or not. And if you’re interested in learning more about the Christian faith, there’s no lack of books out there. It’s hard to know where to start! I’m here to help with enough recommendations to keep you reading for a long time.

So I thought there really needs to be a better list

As an Orthodox Christian, I also thought that it was a bit inadequate that there were only two books by Orthodox Christians on the list. Not that such a list should be composed entirely of Orthodox books, but there should be more than were included on that list.

[image error]So if I were compiling a list of such books for someone who knew little or nothing about Christianity, what would I include?

My starting point would be The Lion Handbook of the History of Christianity as the best introduction for someone who wanted to get the big picture, an idea of how Christianity has developed and spread and changed over the centuries.

After that it should be possible for the reader to decide which strands to follow next.

The original list was divided into various categories, and I haven’t done that, and I suppose most of my recommendations would fall into the categories of theology and history.

I can’t think of 100 books, but here are some I think should be included, which were not on the other list:

Anderson, Allan. 2014. An Introduction to Pentecostalism.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN: 978-1-107-66094-6

Bowden, John. 2007. A Chronology of World Christianity. London:
Continuum.
ISBN: 978-0-8264-9633-1

Dalrymple, William. 1997. From the Holy Mountain: a journey in
the shadow of Byzantium. London: Flamingo.
ISBN: 0-00-654774-5
A travel writer follows in the footsteps of St
John Moschos, who described his own journey
through the Christian Near and Middle East in
AD 578, over 14 centuries earlier, shortly
before much of it was conquered by the Muslim
Arabs. For most of those 14 centuries, the
Christian communities have survived, if
somewhat precariously. Now, in the 20th
century, they are in danger of disappearing
altogether, as they face the greatest threat
to their survival in 20 centuries.

Hopko, Thomas. 1981. The Orthodox Faith: Volume 1 - Doctrine. New
York: Department of Christian Education.
ISBN: 0-86642-036-3

Hopko, Thomas. 1984. The Orthodox Faith: Volume 4 - Spirituality.
New York: Department of Christian Education.

Hopko, Thomas. 1997. The Orthodox Faith: Volume 2 - Worship. New
York: Department of Christian Education.
ISBN: 0-86642-012-6

Hopko, Thomas. 1998. The Orthodox Faith: Volume 3 - Bible and
church history. New York: Department of Christian
Education.

Huddleston, Trevor. 1971. Naught for your comfort. London:
Fontana.
The death of Archbishop Trevor Huddleston in
April 1998 was the prompt for re-reading his
book after 40 years. Huddleston was a
missionary priest of the Community of the
Resurrection who ministered in Sophiatown, a
black township near the centre of
Johannesburg, whose inhabitants were forcibly
removed in the name of apartheid.

Hughes, Philip. 1976 [1924] A history of the church to the eve of
the Reformation. London: Seed & Ward.
ISBN: 0-7220-7663-0
History of the church from a Roman Catholic
point of view

Jones, Alexander (ed) 1974. The Jerusalem Bible. London: Darton,
Longman & Todd.

Schmemann, Alexander. 1973. For the life of the world: sacraments
and orthodoxy. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's
Seminary Press.
ISBN: 0-913836-08-7
Dewey: 264.019 SCHM
Orthodox sacramental and mission theology.

Schmemann, Alexander. 1977. The historical road of Eastern
Orthodoxy. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir's Seminary
Press.
ISBN: 0-913836-47-8
Dewey: 281.9
Theological reflection on the history of the
Orthodox Church.

Ware, Timothy. 1986. The Orthodox Church. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
ISBN: 0-14-020592-6
A general introduction to Orthodox Church
history and teaching and the current state of
the Orthodox churches.

If you can suggest any others that you think ought to be on such a list, please add them in the comments.

Requiem for Evensong

Most Sundays on our way from church we listen to the radio (SAFm) in the car, and we usually catch the last part of that annoying opinionated man on Facts of Faith, and the first half of the broadcast Sunday service. Sometimes it was from our “home” parish of St Nicholas of Japan in Brixton, Johasnnesburg, but the last time they tried it to record it there there was too much interference from the transmitters at the Brixton broadcasting tower.

If we miss the announcement, we try to guess which church it is, but usually they all sound the same, with twanging guitars drowning out the words of rather sentimental “worship” songs, followed by a sermon.

But last Sunday was something completely different — Anglican Evensong from St George’s Church, Parktown, I think. At the beginning they announced that it was from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. It sounded a bit odd to have Evensong in the morning, And even odder to have it from the 1662 Prayer Book. I’ve been to St George’s a few times, though many years ago, and they used the somewhat revised South African Prayerbook, then.

All that is by way of introduction to this article, which I think is a classic, a must read for anyone interested in church history — A Church that Was by Peter Hitchens | Articles | First Things:

English Protestantism, with its secret enjoyment of the chilly, the grim, and the frugal, was killed in fifteen years by supermarkets and TV commercials, fake Italian restaurants, cheap holidays in Spain. The Church’s loveliest and most accessible service, Evensong, was killed off in many parishes because, in the days before VCRs, worshippers preferred to watch a dramatization of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga on TV.

If that rings any bells with you, go on and read the rest of the article. I think it’s not just true of England, but in some ways of South Africa too. Missiologists often speak of inculturation, the way in which Christianity becomes indigenous to a culture. What this article explains, however, is more like disinculturation.

[image error]It reminded me of 1973, when I was invited by the Revd Arnold Hirst to be assistant priest at St Martin-in-the-Fields Anglican Church in Durban North. I agreed, and on my first Sunday in the parish there were 200 people at Evensong. Well, not actually Evensong; back then it was something called Office II, but it was in the evening, and people came. Arnold Hirst was a bit scornful about two neighbouring parishes, Greenwood Park and Umhlanga. The former had dropped Evensong, and the latter, a new parish, hadn’t started it.

In 1975 the SABC began television broadcasts, and at the beginning of 1976 the full service was due to start. The Rector suggested that we drop Evensong (which by then was Evening Prayer from Liturgy 1975), because, he said, no one will come. He had a point. The average attendance on Sunday evenings was down to about 40, and full TV broadcasts hadn’t even started yet. We suspected that part of the reason was that he himself wanted to watch TV.

Evensong was stopped for a while, and then restarted, but by then only about 20-25 people were coming.

Then we became Orthodox, and we had Vespers, on Saturday evenings rather than Sundays, because the liturgical day begins at sunset the evening before. But many Orthodox parishes don’t have Vespers either. Some have Vespers and Matins combined, one following the other, in the Vigil service. Orthodox Vespers differs quite a lot from Anglican Evensong. It is always sung, and there is always incense, and there is never a sermon. I find it is a good thing to invite non-Orthodox friends to, to introduce them to Orthodox worship.

But this post is not about Orthodox Vespers, but about Anglican Evensong, and it seemed a bit strange to me that I should read this article the day after Anglican Evensong reappeared like a ghost from the past on the radio yesterday morning.

A few years ago in England there was Flash Evensong. People would call on cell phones and invite people to form a flash mob for evensong, or they would announce it on Twitter @FlashEvensong. But now it seems that even that has died. The last post there was in 2012.

 

 

Pro-life activists ostracised by anti-abortion and anti-war groups

People talk about society being “polarised”, but it’s much worse than that. “Polarised” suggests that there are only two poles, but when pro-life activists are rejected by both anti-abortion and anti-war groups, then it’s not polarisation but fragmentation.

Consider these two posts (and apologies for citing Patheos, but that’s where I found them). In the first, pro-life activists are rejected by the anti-war movement because they are opposed to abortion: Can you be pro-life and anti-war? In Pittsburgh, apparently not.:

On Tuesday, a “Consistent Life Ethic” group was booted from sponsorship of the Pittsburgh March Against War after Facebook complaints against their pro-life stance.

Rehumanize International, previously Life Matters Journal, is a group that opposes all violence against human beings, including abortion, war, euthanasia, torture, capital punishment and human sex trafficking.

They were invited to co-sponsor the Pittsburgh March Against War, set to take place this summer, and were then removed from sponsorship after a vote of the other co-sponsors, following several complaints on the event’s Facebook page.

And here, pro-life activists are rejected by the anti-abortion movement because they are anti-war: Abortion: the Most Important Moral Issue Ever….Except for When it’s Not:

New Pro Life activists and writers have received accusatory messages demanding to know whether we are a “Podesta plant” or perhaps receiving Soros money to infiltrate the pro-life movement with insidious messages of social justice.

The message is clear: abortion is the worst evil. Stopping it is the top priority. The absolute necessity that we choose life for the unborn renders all other issues null and void, for now.

It seems that if you want to get on in this world, you have to want to kill somebody.

As a song from long ago put it, It’s a strange, strange world we live in, Master Jack (sung by Four Jacks and a Jill). People talk a lot about the importance of inclusion and the virtue of inclusiveness, but all we see is more and more exclusion. You can’t take part in an anti-war march, because you’re anti-abortion. You can’t take part in an anti-abortion march, because you’re anti-war.

[image error]People who are pro-life are not welcome in the US Democratic Party. This is something new, except, perhaps, for Communist parties, where everyone is expected to toe the party line in everything (this is what is called being “politically correct”). But for the most part, few people agree with every policy of the political parties that they support and vote for. Sometimes they even disagree with most of the policies, but vote for a party because they dislike another party’s policies even more. They choose the lesser of two evils. Demanding absolute toe-the-line political correctness seems to be aimed at promoting more polarisation, or more fragmentation.

[image error]But then, you see, these pro-life activists are extremists, and you know how bad extremists are. They want an end to all violence against human beings. And at the opposite extreme you have suicide bombers who not only kill other people but themselves as well.

The world does not like extremists. Whether they are extremely violent or extremely nonviolent, they are ostracised. The world wants moderates, people who are moderately violent or moderately nonviolent. You can march and say that you don’t want to kill some people, as long as you will also say that there are some whom you are willing to kill.

US Supreme Court removes ‘buffer zone’ keeping pro-life protesters at distance from abortion clinics | The Independent:

In 2009, Dr George Tiller, who performed abortions, was shot in a church in Wichita, Kansas, and in 1994, a gunman killed two receptionists and wounded five employees and volunteers at two clinics in Brookline, Massachusetts.

It’s OK to believe that people have a right to life, as long as you recognise that some people don’t have a right to life. Moderates have one great advantage over extremists — they can have their cake and eat it.

 

A blue afternoon (book review)

Blue Afternoon by William Boyd

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A good read with some odd flaws, and I learnt quite a lot that I didn’t know before.

Kay Fischer, a Los Angeles architect, is accosted by a man who claims to be her father. When things go wrong in her architecture practice she allows herself to be persuaded to travel with him to Europe in search of a lost love. He was originally from the Philippines, and so much of the story takes place there.

I suppose one thing that appealed to me about it is that it was a family history mystery, with elements of a whodunit police-procedural mystery as well, and partly a love story, and partly a historical novel including the history of surgery, powered flight, police procedures and the Philippino-American War.

I knew a little of the first two (surgery and powered flight) but nothing of the Philippino-American War or the Spanish-American War which preceded it. For years and years I have heard how the British were inventors of concentration camps in the Anglo-Boer War, but in this book I discovered that the Americans used them too in the contemporary Philippino-American War, and that the American atrocities in the Philippines matched those of the Nazi SS Einsatzgruppen in the Second World War. In that sense it was quite an educational read as well.

There were also some niggling errors, perhaps because I’m still a language pedant. I would expect an American architect from Los Angeles to use American English terms, but she uses terms that sound unlikely: she speaks of luggage, not baggage; sweets, not candy; trams, not streetcars, and on one occasion uses lift rather than elevator. And the pioneering aircraft, dubbed by its builder an “aeromobile” for want of a better term is called a “plane” a couple of sentences later, which sounds rather incongruous.

But all-in-all it’s a very good read.

View all my reviews

Unburdening the Captors

Yesterday the South African Council of Churches (SACC) held a press conference to release the report of its “Unburdening Panel”.

Unburdening, Uncapturing: SACC and SACP take leadership while ANC dithers | Daily Maverick:

,,,for the first time since the height of apartheid, the church is intervening to take on “a government that has lost its moral legitimacy”. The SACP, meanwhile, is convening “progressive forces” in the country for a national imbizo that could set the agenda for the big political conferences coming up…

The heads of all the churches that are members of the SACC have agreed to issue a pastoral letter across all congregations about the report on the Unburdening Panel. This will guide preaching, discussions and prayer in churches across South Africa. It is an unprecedented move in post-apartheid South Africa and it is happening now because the church leaders believe that government has lost its “moral barometer”.

This could be a “game changer”, as journalists like to say.

The last time I saw such a game-changer instigated by Christians in Southern Africa was in 1971, when the leaders of the Lutheran Churches in Namibia issued a pastoral letter to be read in all their churches saying that they agreed with the World Court that South Africa’s rule over Namibia was illegitimate and illegal. The South African government were gobsmacked.

For years the South African government had been saying to other denominations, like Anglicans, Methodists and Roman Catholics, “Why can’t you be like the Lutherans? They aren’t political, they just get on with preaching the gospel.” That it came from such an unexpected quarter and also that the Lutheran churches together were the biggest in South West Africa (as the South African government liked to call Namibia in those days) caused them to sit up and take notice. The Prime Minister of South Africa, Balthazar Johannes Vorster, travelled to Namibia for a special meeting with Lutheran leaders, and tried to cow them with the bombast he usually used with recalcitrant church leaders, and it didn’t work. They stood up to him and answered him right back.

And it made a difference.

The World Court decision, and the Lutheran endorsement of it, suddenly made black people walk tall in the streets of Windhoek. The National Party idol, like Nebuchadnezzar’s, did not need to be worshipped any more. In fact it had feet of clay. Even later back-tracking by Bishop Leonhardt Auala of the Evangelical Lutheran OvamboKavango Church could not stop the momentum for change.

We didn’t have TV back in those days, but the SACC conference yesterday was broadcast live on eNCA, and you can see it here.

Ten years ago there was a movement for Moral Regeneration in South Africa. It was government sponsored and government initiated and the man who was put in charge of it was Jacob Zuma, who about that time was described by a High Court as having a “generally corrupt” relationship with a businessman who was jailed for fraud, but released around the time that Jacob Zuma became president.

There were attempts made to get civil society to buy into this Moral Regeneration thing, based on ubuntu, but the most they seemed to achieve were to produce a list of shared moral values that were so vague as to be meaningless, and again, after Jacob Zuma became president, we heard no more of moral regeneration. I’ve said more about moral regeneration and ubuntu here and here.

This Unburdening Panel set up by the SACC seems to be a step in the direction of a real moral regeneration, rather than the phony government-initiated one. It was pointed out that it is pastoral, not inquisitorial. To judge from the questions asked by the media, it seems that it is difficult for the media to understand this. As someone once put it, the media just don’t “get” religion.

They kept asking questions to try to get the church leaders to say that Jacob Zuma was corrupt.

But such questions are, quite literally, satanic.

The word “satan” means “accuser” or “prosecutor”, and the journalists’ questions were aimed at getting church leaders not merely to accuse Zuma, but to judge him and find him guilty. And that is a satanic temptation, the temptation to judge and condemn. Jesus said “Judge not that ye be not judged.”

[image error]

SACC Unburdening Panel

The SACC leaders resisted the temptation. The most that they would say was that the jury is still out, and they might have added that they are not the jury. The purpose was not to investigate, much less to prosecute. The purpose was pastoral, to help those who were troubled in their conscience to unburden themselves.

But while Christian leaders should not be accusers of their brethren (Rev 12:10) they should give pastoral care to those who are troubled in conscience, and point out what kinds of behaviour are sinful and need repentance, and in the course of this unburdening a lot of corrupt behaviour has been revealed. Church leaders should not be pointing fingers to say who is wrong, but they can and should say what is wrong. It is the behaviour rather than persons, that is to be judged. And they have found plenty of evidence of bad behaviour in the highest circles of government.

For this to have any effect, for the promised pastoral letters to be sent out and actually read in churches, there needs to be a lot of awareness of what is happening, and so I’ll do what I usually try to avoid doing — ask people who read this to “like” and share it on Facebook, to tweet and retweet on Twitter and other social media (you’ll find buttons for doing this at the bottom of this post), and to do the same with other articles you find on the subject, and if you have a blog, write about it and link to other articles, including this one, if you like.

More links

SA Council of Churches release scathing report on state capture | City Press
#SACC: ‘ANC needs to mend its ways’ | IOL
SACC disconcerted by state capture revelations
SA may just be a few inches from the throes of a mafia state – SACC | The Citizen

 

 

The Chapel of the Thorn

The Chapel of the Thorn: A Dramatic Poem by Charles Williams

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

An early play by Charles Williams, long thought to have been lost, and edited and prepared for publication by Sørina Higgins, who has also written a comprehensive introduction. There is also a preface by Grevel Lundop who has written a biography of Charles Williams, Charles Williams:the Third Inkling.

I began reading it two years ago, and began with the introductory material, which I think was a mistake. The book was mislaid in a reorganisation of our bookshelves, and so when I rediscovered it I began again, but this time reading the play itself, and saving the commentary for afterwards. And I’m glad I did, because the play speaks for itself, and it is perhaps better to read it without too many preconceptions.

It is set in an unnamed country, which has recently been evangelised by Christian missionaries, but pagan ideas have not been forgotten. The action of the play takes place at a crossroads, in front of a chapel which has a relic of a thorn from Christ’s crown of thorns. Beyond the chapel is a cliff, and below the cliff can be heard the waves breaking.

The crossroads is also symbolic of the four social groups or forces represented in the play. One road leads to a new monastery, whose abbot and prior want the relic for the monastery. Another leads to a seaside village, whose parish church the chapel is. They earn their living by fishing and farming, and find life hard. The villagers are also aware that the chapel is the burial place of their semi-divine folk hero, Druhild. Two roads lead to the capital, the secular city, the seat of secular power. One road is rough and winding and follows the coast, the other is smooth and direct.

The priest of the chapel wants to keep the relic there, but the abbot of the monastery enlists the secular power of the king to help him seize it. The villagers are in two minds, and at one point are inclined to support Joachim, the local priest. The drama plays out between characters representing these four forces..

The play was written about 1912, and only published a century later, I don’t know if it has been performed since it was published, but it would be quite easy to perform, or could even be done as a simple play reading.

The explanatory material (which takes up more space than the play itself) is useful. Sørina Higgins compares it with Charles William’s other work, and gives informatuion on his personal background, which is useful in helping to understand the play, though I don’t always agree with her conclusions.

Because of its setting, in a place where Christian missionaries were still active, and people were between Christianity and paganism, I found it useful as a missiologist, and if I were teaching missiology to live students (most of my previous teaching was by distance education) I might incorporate a reading of it in my course, as it raises many missiological issues, and could provoke useful discussions.

I might ad that more than 50 years ago our church youth group wanted to have a play reading, and I asked a monk if he could recommend a play, and he recommended The House of the Octopus, one of Charles Williams’s later plays. I suspect that if The Chapel of the THorn had not been “lost” at that time, he might have recommended that instead.

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What is an Evangelical?

What is an Evangelical?

This is a question that has bothered me for a long time, but especially since 1999 when an outfit called The Ontario Center for Religious Tolerance assiduously and very intolerantly tried to propagate scare stories that “Evangelicals”, disappointed that the world had not ended in the year 2000, would set off bombs in public places to show their displeasure that the Almighty had failed to oblige.

More recently I reviewed Fr Andrew Stephen Damick’s book Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy, in which he described a number of religious groups and viewpoints, and evaluated them from an Orthodox point of view. Nothing wrong with that, but I thought that his chapter on Evangelicalism and Revivalism was the weakest in the book, in spite of (or perhaps because of) his having come from an Evangelical background himself.

And most recently I read this article, and thought perhaps it is time to try to counter some of the media (and other) spin on Evangelicalism. The Evangelical Roots of Our Post-Truth Society – The New York Times:

Conservative evangelicals are not the only ones who think that an authority trusted by the other side is probably lying. But they believe that their own authority — the inerrant Bible — is both supernatural and scientifically sound, and this conviction gives that natural human aversion to unwelcome facts a special power on the right. This religious tradition of fact denial long predates the rise of the culture wars, social media or President Trump, but it has provoked deep conflict among evangelicals themselves.

That innocuous phrase — “biblical worldview” or “Christian worldview” — is everywhere in the evangelical world.

I’m by no means a fundi on Evangelicalism. I’m not an Evangelical, but an Orthodox Christian, though I do believe that the Orthodox Christian faith is evangelical. But I can claim to have some knowledge, first from having been steered in the direction of having a Christian worldview by an Evangelical school teacher, and secondly from having majored in Church History.

The word “Evangelical” means “pertaining to the Gospel”, and has quite a wide range of meanings. but when used as a noun, rather than an adjective, it refers to those who stress the importance of faith as more than assent to a set of propositions, but rather personal commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. In order to understand this, one needs to be aware of the circumstances in which it arose. Following the upheavals of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century, and the Wars of Religion of the 17th, Protestantism, in most of the countries where it flourished, settled down to a rather dull doctrinal orthodoxy. The churches were afflicted by formalism, and the most important thing was not to rock the boat.

Dissatisfaction with this took the form of Pietism in central Europe, which in turn influenced the Methodist movement in Britain in the early 18th century, which was led by John and Charles Wesley and George Whitefield, and these and others, like Jonathan Edwards, preached a similar message in North America. As I noted in my review of Fr Andrew Damick’s book, he himself calls for something like this when he says:

I am not suggesting a Churchless “Christianity,” but rather warning against a Christless “Church.” Just as there is no Christianity without the Church, there is also no Church without Christ. If I cannot detect Jesus Christ—in all His warmth, personality (if we can use such a word), and transformative love—in someone’s speaking about the Church, then I have reason to doubt whether I should heed him.

Yet he compares Evangelicalism with Gnosticism, but can what he says above be seen as Gnosticism? Is the Orthodox teaching on Theosis based on Gnosticism? When the priest asks a catechumen “Do you unite yourself to Christ?”, is that Gnosticism? Even the common phrase heard among Evangelicals, about the need to “accept Christ as your personal Saviour”, though it is not found, in that form, in the Holy Scriptures or in the writings of the Church Fathers, means substantially the same thing as “Do you unite yourself to Christ?”

As a friend of mine once put it:

Moses has received the ten commandments. God confronts the people with his will. Note that he does not say `The Sabbath day is to be kept holy’, but `Thou shalt keep holy the Sabbath day’; not `Adultery is not to be committed’, but `Thou shalt not commit adultery.’ God does not hide his identity or that of his audience behind a screen of impersonal passives, like our constitutions and statutes. He rises up against his servant and identifies him by addressing him as `Thou’. If you accept the ten commandments, you are not accepting one code of principles among many, you are not acquiescing in a general disapproval of murder; primarily you are committing yourself to a God who has a purpose and a judgment and who reveals that purpose to his people, part of which purpose is that you should not deny your neighbour’s God-given permission to live. Accepting the ten commandments is an act of faith in the living God, not of approval of an ideal way of life. They are not man’s idea of what God wants; they are God’s own word, addressed to man, second person singular.

And similarly the priest in addressing the catechumen does not say “Do you think union with Christ is a good idea?” He says, “Dost thou unite thyself to Christ?” second person singular. It is personal.

Note that the phrase used by Evangelicals is “do you accept Christ as your personal Saviour” and it is similarly using the second person singular. What they do not say is “do you accept Christ as your individual Saviour”, though perhaps nowadays many Evangelicals might interpret in that way.

But this is the origin and the essence of Evangelicalism, and that should not be forgotten when one examines later developments.

One development of Evangelicalism is, as I suggested above4, to interpret “personal” as “individual”. Evangelicalism developed alongside the Enlightenment in Western Europe, and the Enlightenment promoted individualism, and this affected Evangelicalism to some extent. So, in the 19th century some evangelicals regarded this personal relationship with Christ as the most important thing, or even the only thing. For such Evangelicals the church was of lesser importance, and so they were referred to in England, at any rate, as “Low Church”. In their ecclesiology they came to see the church as a collection of saved individuals, like a heap of stones, rather than as a finished building, with each stone going to make up the whole.

The essence of being a Christian thus came to be seen as “making a decision for Christ”, and those who had come to make such a decision were said to be “born again”. But in the Orthodox Church, the decision “I have joined myself to Christ” is followed by Holy Baptism and Chrismation as the “seal of the gift of the Holy Spirit”. This is being “born of water and the Spirit” (John 3:5), and “the washing of regeneration” (Titus 3:5). So in being released from the power of the devil (exorcism), renouncing the devil, accepting Christ as King and God, being baptised in water and sealed with the Holy Spirit, one is transferred from the authority of darkness to the Kingdom of God’s beloved Son (Col 1:13)  The theological term for this is “baptismal regeneration”, whereas the truncated Evangelical version is called “decisional regeneration”. And “regeneration” means being born again. So Orthodox Christians who are baptised and chrismated are born again Christians.

Not all Evangelicals have taught decisional regeneration, and Calvinists, especially, have rejected it. It is worth noting that in Germany at least, a distinction has sometimes been made between Lutherans, who were Evangelical, and Calvinists, who were Reformed, so that being Evangelical is one thing, and being Reformed is another. This was not universal, however, because in Prussia (north-eastern Germany) there was a state-sponsored union of Lutheran and Calvinist churches, which was called the Evangelical Church.

[image error]

John Wesley

But when there is a revival, where the church is trapped in a dead formalism, there is also resistance. John and Charles Wesley, in their preaching of revival, were priests of the Church of England, and Charles Wesley never left it. But the formal church clung to its formalism and resisted revival. Joseph Butler, the Anglican Bishop of Bristol, told John Wesley “the pretending to extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Spirit is a horrid thing, a very horrid thing.” Enthusiasm of any kind was taboo.

That kind of attitude was common in Protestant churches in Western Europe in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. Any manifestation of the Holy Spirit must be seen as extraordinary and irregular and some form of charlatanry, and so in many ways Evangelicalism was forced out of the “mainstream” churches. But not in every instance. some Evangelicals remained in the Church of England, and, though they took a “Low Church” attitude, did not think that one could dispense with the church entirely. They became quite influential in movements for social reform, and especially the abolition of the slave trade. One group of Evangelicals in particular, known as the Clapham Sect, though they were generally politically conservative, nevertheless brought about several social reforms.

What is the Orthodox Church’s attitude to “extraordinary revelations and gifts of the Holy Ghost”?

It has never sought to suppress such things, as did 17th-18th century Protestantism, though of course pretending to them is not acceptable. Such things have always been around. The Orthodox  Church does not believe that maverick Lone Ranger Christians can manifest genuine gifts of the Holy Spirit, but such things are found within the Church, and are exercised under Church discipline. There have always been clairvoyant spiritual elders. And sometimes such things have been found outside the Church as in Acts 10:47, for example when Orthodox missionaries went to Alaska, and found that the shamans had prophesied their coming, and had seen angels who revealed such things to them.

Those Evangelicals who left “mainstream” churches and formed new denominations often adopted new distinctive doctrines and ecclesiology, so the variety of Christians called “Evangelical” increased, and they became known for different things, and to be contrasted with different things. So there were Evangelicals as opposed to Reformed; Evangelicals as opposed to Fundamentalists; Evangelicals as opposed to Ecumenicals, and Evangelicals as opposed to charismatics.

Evangelical missionaries went to many different parts of the world in the 19th century, and their emphasis was generally on “saving souls” rather than planting churches. But this was not universal. One group of Anglican Evangelicals called their missionary society the Church Missionary Society. This led to a peculiar Anglican joke: the “High Church” missionary society was the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. The joke was “The SPG is the Church Missionary Society, and the CMS is the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel.” If you get the joke, you’re on your way to grasping the basics of Evangelicalism.

One of the problems with the view of “decisional regeneration” is how do you know? How do you know if someone has really decided to follow Christ, or is just pretending to? When I was a student there was a beggar who used to follow people around the streets and his hard-luck story was always that he had made a decision for Christ a couple of weeks ago, and needed money to get back home to a distant town. I heard him tell the same story several times over the next three years.

So the decision-making process tended to become fixed and formalised in different ways in different branches of Evangelicalism. It became a cultural trait, and then a tradition, and then a decision that does not follow the pattern is not counted as genuine. In some it took the form of the “altar call” — “every eye closed, every head bowed, if you accept Jesus raise your hand… I see your hand, and yours…will those who raised their hands please come forward.”

The problem here is what sociologists call “routinisation of charisma” –once “making a decision for Christ” becomes a routine act, following an expected pattern, it can become just as dead as the churches when the Evangelical revival first started.

In the East African revival in the mid-20th century those who were “saved” during the revival became known as “balokole”, and soon the balokole were seeing themselves as different from and separate from other Christians. They would go to different churches, and if the preaching was not Evangelical enough by their standards they would interrupt the preacher saying, “Sir, we would see Jesus.” This could be a wake-up call for moribund churches, but it could also very easily become self-rightousness on the part of the balokole, and where do you draw the line?

And so I return to the article I cited at the beginning, The Evangelical roots of the post-Truth society. And I ask how “Evangelical” are those roots really? Could one not equally well speak of The post-Truth roots of the media’s perception of Evangelicals? That was certainly the case with the perception of Evangelicals that the Ontario Center for Religious Tolerance was trying to create back in 1999.

And how many so-called Evangelicals have gone such a long way from their roots that what they are practising is a syncretistic mixture of Moneytheism, ethnic nationalism and perhaps a few other things, with a very thin veneer of a formal acceptance of Christianity — the very kind of society that the Evangelical revival reacted against in the first place?