Not only do I believe you, but I'd Want to do it! :)
Alex and I had a long chat the other day, off this forum, about how knowing a language lets one get "inside" the mind of a culture and leads to a fuller understanding of that culture. As it happens we were both speaking about Greek, but its a pretty obvious observation no matter what the language. Its implications are, however, huge if one's religious belief is going to be based solely in writings done 2000+ years ago in a language one doesn't understand, or understand well and set in a culture which bears virtually no likeness to the one the believer lives in. (emphasis added)
I echo Quix's comments about transcendence. I agree with him that the Holy Spirit has made sure that core Christian doctrine has survived time and languages. Regarding what I underlined, I would only add that my beliefs are not based on a language I do not understand. They are based on translations of that language which I trust. You have your own translations of that language that you trust.
That is fine, but what I always object to is the monopoly of truth claimed, even in the translations. I maintain that it's the interpretation that is the difference, not the translations. 98% of the time I have been perfectly fine with any quotes from "Apostolic-favored" translations.
When you all say that you have an appreciation because you know Greek, I take that to mean that you have an agreement with others who have taught you to read Greek in a certain way, and translate it in a certain way. That's not bad, that's good. You have more freedom than I do to decide certain things for yourself, and I envy and respect that. AND, yet the major points and true direction of your personal theology have absolutely nothing to do with your knowledge or appreciation of Greek. That is driven by the Church, and translators and interpreters that have been accepted by the Church. Again, this is no criticism. I just see it as both of us relying on different people for the interpretation and translation of the Greek language. I might be at a personal disadvantage as respecting you, but the people we trust for our respective theologies were all heavyweights.
Most non-Orthodox Christians live in such a world, but the majority of them, Roman Catholics and traditional Anglicans, worship liturgically and the centrality of the various liturgies in their lives provides a context for the translated words they read in scripture.
I don't have any problem in acknowledging the interconnection. However, this same interconnection does not help to refute traditional Protestant arguments (positions) concerning the assertion that error did enter the Church.
A lot of good wise points in your post.
Thanks for the ping.
There is certainly merit in that view. Nonetheless, you'd agree that something is lost in translation simply because different languages lack linguistic and conceptual equivalence.
Based on my own experience, I know that, for one reason or another, so many English coloquialisms cannot be translated into some of the languages I know. Instaead, they must be imported wholesale into another language.
Thus, the Russian tea maker is called samovar in English, and underground publications are know as samizdat in English as well as in Russian. But to an English-speaking person, these words are really meaningless, and represent no more than a label.
The same can be said of just about any other foreign word integrated into daily English, such as Orthodox, or Theotokos. As labels, they are associative rather than meaningful.
But, I will agree with Quix and you that the "core [my emphasis] Christian doctrine has survived time and languages". We can probably make the same claim with respect to the Hebrew OT, yet I am deeply convinced that to truly experience AND comprehend the Hebrew Old Testament is to read it in Hebrew, as the rabis seem to find a lot more in their verses than we do in ours.
The question is not whether something is lost in translation, but how significant that loss is. It depends on what we define as 'significant'. I would say that when it comes to Faith, living the fullness of the Faith is significant.
Some believe it can be achieved by reading asnd comprehending; others believe it is not. But, as Kolo aptly observes, the Orthodox, Catholics and some Protestants (traditional Anglicans and Lutherans) experience their faith through Liturgy.
The Orthodox Wiki says "Worship is faith in action. In the words of Georges Florovsky: 'Christianity is a liturgical religion. The Church is first of all a worshipping community. Worship comes first, doctrine and discipline second'. Orthodoxy sees people as liturgical creatures who are fully complete when glorifying God.
We can discuss the merits of the liturgical worship as opposed to non-liturgical Protestant approach, but it is clear that some Protestant sects condition their fellowship with God entirely on reading and comprehension of the written word, in which case excellence in Greek and Hebrew seems inevitably the way of becoming 'fully complete' in their relationship with God.
“I echo Quix’s comments about transcendence.”
And I, like Kosta, agree with both of you. I also agree that to an extent, and perhaps in spite of what follows, I believe the Holy Spirit did preserve at least some level of “core” Christian belief among most Protestants, Trinitarian and Christologic theology primarily as expressed in the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed and the dogmas of the Council of Chalcedon.
“However, this same interconnection [Liturgical praxis and community as a context for scripture] does not help to refute traditional Protestant arguments (positions) concerning the assertion that error did enter the Church.”
That’s a rather broad statement, FK, that I KNOW no Orthodox Christian would disagree with. Roman Catholics might disagree, but not we Orthodoxers. Error has flowed into The Church time and again throughout history, but in the end, The Truth prevails and heresy and apostasy are cut off and rejected. In Eastern Christianity we have extensive experience, up close and personal, with heresy, heretics and heresiarchs. Our ancient “Orthopraxis” within a Liturgical Community centered on the Eucharist, assures that The Church will shake off heresy when it shows up. Our Eucharistic theology and ecclesiology are rooted firmly in the Mystical Supper and the First Council at Jerusalem. Within 70 years of those events, +Ignatius of Antioch explained that theology simply and clearly and in so doing described what The Church in fact was doing in his lifetime. He tells us that the “fullness” of The Church exists in what we now would call a single diocese, a relatively small unit. He tells us what the early Church believed about the Eucharist and what we still believe. In any event, small groups can maintain “orthodoxy” fairly easily if they are interconnected, something large, top down groups have a problem with if error of one sort or another infects the top. Conversely, divorced from an “orthodoxy” of both belief and praxis, small groups can spin off into basic heresy, no matter what the reason for the break. It is in this area that I see the fundamental problem with Protestantism. Any honest person can see and today understand the motivation of the Reformers in their break with the medieval Latin Church. That said, aside from the Lutherans and the Anglicans, the rejection of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist took the very core out of the community and for this reason the Pope could say that Protestant groups are not strictly churches at all but rather “ecclesial groups”. Our Orthodox assurance of “orthodoxy” lies within The Church itself. Let me put it this way. We trust the scriptures because they are “within” The Church. We trust the consensus patrum because the Fathers wrote and taught and preached “within” The Church and The Church accepted what they wrote and taught and preached. We do this because by definition The Church is centered on Christ in the Eucharist and is so structured as to recognize and deal with error. This is not to say at all that Protestantism is inevitably destined to preach heresy. I don’t believe that at all. I listen most Saturday mornings to a pretty fundamentalist radio bible program from Canada. My wife laughs at me, but the preaching is generally pretty good and the hymns are wonderful. But there can be no assurance that what is preached in Protestant ecclesial groups is over time “orthodox” Christianity because these groups are not anchored in the Eucharist.
I can understand why so many of the spiritual children of the great Reformers of the West rejected the Real Presence. So much of what the medieval Latin Church did certainly could have been viewed (erroneusly in my opinion) as “magic” and demonic magic at that. Given that those people were as much social as religious revolutionaries, they were naturally prone to view the opposition as evil. There was a lot of evil in the Latin Church of those days and for many Western Christians, no practical, human way apparent to address that evil save by the Reformation. But within a generation, the centrality of the Eucharist, which both Calvin and Luther recognized, was gone, replaced by sola scriptura (in a way, I am convinced, that Luther certainly never intended).
From a strictly Eastern Christian pov, that rejection of 1500 years of Eucharistic theology, completely unchanged at least in Orthodoxy, led inevitably to error in Protestant groups which sola scriptura simply cannot deal with.
By all of this, I most certainly DO NOT mean to say that Orthodoxy has a monopoly on Theosis. Orthodoxy as a general proposition does not claim that. The mystery of the economia of salvation is just that, a mystery and it is plain that the “sporoi”, the seeds, of Faith exist in human belief throughout the world and down through the ages.