How about the Orthodox Church?

One of my regular readers asked me something about the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christian faith. I suppose I’ve already established I’m not too favorable about the Western Catholic branch, nor with much of the Protestantism that derived from it. I have no complaints with how Wikipedia summarizes the differences.

Most of the controversies arising in the early church resulting in the split between East and West was a matter of asking the wrong questions, or restricting the answers in false dichotomies. I grow weary of citing all the names of the debates and who was involved; not because such things don’t matter, but that they may not be pertinent to your faith. Not everyone needs to know Church History in order to serve the Lord.

The primary departure between East and West seems to have started with the dispute over the Trinity. The debate tried too hard to define with precision the nature of Christ and the Father and how they related to each other. The question simmered with outbreaks over various implications of this question, such as whether the Church could require the confession that Mary was “mother of God.” Everyone was wasting time chasing their tails with precise formulaic statements that made all the wrong assumptions. In other words, by the time the two branches of Christian religion got into a fight, they were both far off the path of the ancient Hebrew assumptions that Jesus taught.

This whole thing was kicked off by Emperor Constantine. The man himself was never a Christian. However, he wanted to use the unifying power of Christian religion to rule his empire. He saw how Christians loved each other and assumed it was something that could be formulated in writing and law. So he pressed the church leaders of his day to politically organize the church on Roman terms. That meant casting aside the covenant feudal tribalism of the ancient Hebrew culture, and it meant regulating religious teaching and church organization in ways totally contrary to what Christ taught and what the disciples spread around the Roman Empire.

There’s nothing wrong with answering questions, as long as we deal with the false assumptions behind a great many questions that caused fractures leading up the Constantine’s demands. Most of the big disputes were bogus. For example, the Donatist controversy: What was required for the sacraments to be valid? One side said that the minister must be worthy or a sacrament is invalid. The other side said grace comes from Christ, not men, so all that mattered was whether the minister was duly appointed and ordained. I say both are wrong, because the sacraments don’t matter. We use rituals to bring our conscious minds into focus on God and claiming the peace He offers. The key is whether the participant is reaching out in genuine faith and commitment; the minister is just a servant who is surely filled with his own human failings, just like everyone else.

Or how about the Pelagian controversy? How does faith arise in the human soul? One side said it was wholly a gift from God, but the other side said that meant taking away human accountability. If God commands faith, how can He justly condemn those without it when He might refuse to give it to them? The mistake is in assuming it has to make sense on a human level. The Bible doesn’t answer this question because it’s the wrong question. As Paul says, “Who are you to question God, human?” (Romans 9:20)

The major flaw I see in the Eastern Church is not the answers they came up with so much as the fundamental issue of trying to answer bad questions in the first place. They were just as nit-picky and semantic as the Western Church, but simply had different answers. Both churches have their own take on mysticism, and I’m not impressed with either one, because both are a departure from the Ancient Near Eastern brand of biblical mysticism. Notice that a religion based on Greek language is not going to ignore everything Aristotle taught; Orthodox theology is as Greek as Catholic theology is Latin.

Here’s what really disturbs me: Both are highly regimented, elitist and closed. Both will tell you that they are the true inheritors of Christ’s authority on earth, and that you can’t rightly call yourself a Christian unless you are within their system. You can’t even know what Christ said without asking them. They are convinced God doesn’t really deal with people outside their organization. Today the two hierarchies have papered over most of the big differences, and what remains are a few minor points.

If you try to research the differences between Eastern and Western Churches today you’ll run into a wall of obfuscating terminology, all with fairly precise meanings that each of the two church hierarchies take seriously. Once you begin to understand these terms, you might conclude early on that what I teach does sound somewhat like the Eastern Church, but that I teach without using that fancy terminology. For example, hesychasm will sound quite familiar. However, you should understand that I borrow nothing from them, and there are significant departures once you get past the surface.

Feel free to chase the Orthodox way if you feel called to it, but sooner or later you will have to lose interest in what Radix Fidem is doing, because there is a clear divergence. In order to give proper attention to any existing church structure, you are going to have to step away from what I teach. That’s not meant to hinder your choice, but to point out the unavoidable consequences. We can still fellowship, but my blog is likely to engender distance between us, because we won’t have a shared mission.