Posted on 12/09/2014 4:05:28 PM PST by bad company
In any sustained discussion regarding the progress of liberal theology in the Orthodox Church, one sooner or later encounters magical thinking. Magical thinking is defined by Wikipedia (that modern oracle) as “the attribution of causal relationships between actions and events which cannot be justified by reason and observation”. In my experience, it often begins like this: someone (often a convert from a liberal Christian denomination, like the Episcopalians) warns that North American Orthodoxy is exhibiting the same signs of creeping liberalism as did their former liberal denomination, and suggests that this should be a source of concern for those who do not wish Orthodoxy to become similarly liberal.
For example, Orthodox in the west today are reproducing the same patterns of behaviour as did Anglicanism in the 1960s regarding women’s ordination. Some of our theologians are solemnly declaring the issue a very complex one and the question an open one; denunciations are made of those decrying the ordination of women as people who are narrow, stupid, retrogressive, and (of course) fundamentalist; groups are being formed under the dubious patronage of women saints such as St. Catherine or St. Nina for the purpose of advancing the feminist agenda; and the push is made to ordain deaconesses. When one calls attention to the historical fact that these are all symptoms of creeping liberalism in the Church and that this is precisely the road trod by the liberal Protestants a generation ago, one is shouted down as a convert who has no right to speak. One is diagnosed with Post Episcopalian Stress Syndrome, and more or less ordered to bed. One is told that the Orthodox Church in North America was getting on very well on its own without us and our kind, thank you very much. Your warnings are not appreciated or welcome. Please take a pill or something, and chill out.
This means that the Orthodox Church in North America could be the one institution which considers that years of experience of certain events actually disqualifies one from speaking about them. In every other outfit, experience is considering as qualifying one to speak authoritatively, not as a disqualification. It is very strange. It is also a form of bullying and of attempted ideological intimidation. In fact one’s long experience of Anglican liberalism does not mean that that person is afflicted with some sort of nervous disorder, or that their hands begin to shake if a copy of the revised Book of Common Prayer is somewhere in the room. It just means that said person has personal experience of how creeping liberalism works over a generation and can speak from the authority of that experience. That the warnings and words are not welcome does not at all alter the fact that they come from experience.
It is just here that magical thinking comes in. All of these regrettable changes occurred in Anglicanism and Lutheranism and Methodism and God knows where else, but they could never happen here, with us. Orthodoxy is somehow immune to the liberalism and worldliness that afflicts everyone else in North America. I call this conviction “magical thinking” because (to quote Wikipedia again) the supposed stability and sanctity of individual Orthodox in North America “cannot be justified by reason and observation”. Perusing blogs and their comment sections, and Facebook, and reading journals and scholarly books, and listening to Orthodox lectures on Youtube provide abundant evidence that Orthodox people can be just as thick and worldly as anyone else, and that we have by no means cornered the market on wisdom and holiness. We have many good and wise people, and many worldly ones—just like every other group. Saying that our status as the true Church bestows upon us an immunity from worldliness is triumphalistic nonsense. It is also lousy history: the Church in the fourth century was also “the true Church” and yet it was greatly afflicted by Arianism which spread like a wildfire for many years. Indeed, at one point, as St. Jerome once wrote, the “whole world groaned to find itself Arian”. The Church as a whole survived, but not without pain, and schism, and the loss of many souls to heresy. We have no justification that we are now somehow immune to heresy simply because we are “the true Church”.
It is undoubtedly true, however, that we are unlike our Protestant friends in one important respect: we define ourselves by the Fathers, and at least pay them lip service, even when we veer off in directions which cause them to spin in their patristic graves. We have to at least pretend we are faithful to the Fathers, even when we aren’t. (Part of the trick here is to denounce fidelity to the Fathers as “patristic fundamentalism”, or as a simplistic reading of the Fathers.) This means that even if parts of the Orthodox Church did ordain women, or marry gays, or conform to whatever the canons of modernity will demand in the future, large parts of the Church would not follow. In other words, such capitulation to the world would result in a schism. No one really doubts this, even if modern liberals like Behr-Sigel might plead for a “disciplinary pluralism”—i.e. a tolerance of heresy. For the issue here is not simply one of discipline, but of the Faith. What would St. Athanasius have thought of a “disciplinary pluralism” which tolerated Arianism? Count on it: if parts of the Orthodox Church ordain women or marry homosexuals, there will be schism.
I often am tempted to think that the certainty of such a schism is the real reason why many bishops would never take such action (though whether their inaction springs from courage to resist heresy or fear of schism is perhaps an open question). As always, the Faith, though defined by the bishops, is guarded by the faithful, as the Patriarchs themselves insisted in their letter to Pope Pius IX in 1848. Our episcopal leaders are smart enough men, and know that such changes would not be countenanced by many of their North American faithful. The liberal proponents of change of course suggest that if the Church were to “modernize” by making these changes, multitudes of secular people would come piling into the Church to fill its empty pews, and this would more than offset those lost to schism. Again, this is magical thinking. The experience of Anglicanism shows that such a happy stampede will never occur. If the Orthodox Church becomes secular in its faith and praxis, the secular world will praise us for our enlightened approach and then go back to ignoring us. We may, it is true, be applauded periodically in the Huffington Post and on the CBC, but this is, to my mind, a thin reward for scrapping two millennia of Tradition and provoking a schism.
What remains certain is that we must live in the real world, and look at our selves as reflected in the mirror or blogs, organizations, and Facebook. There is not a shred of evidence to suggest North American Orthodoxy is immune to the worldliness and liberalism affecting everyone around us. Magical thinking must give place to thinking, and to realistic appraisal regarding our current state.
Ping!
Complaining about magical thinking, in church. Funny.
Just like St. Nicholas, we need to slap the heretics out of Orthodoxy.
I could never be an Orthodox or a Catholic. I don’t have a good enough attorney. Their explanations of everything read like the legal briefs in a securities fraud derivatives industry lawsuit.
Funny how Jesus wasn’t that complex.
You could always apply yourself a little.
Save Thy people, O Lord,
and bless Thine inheritance.
Grant victory to Thy Church over her enemies,
and protect Thy people by Thy Holy Cross!
If it ordinates women, it is not Orthodox. For similar reasons that, if it can breathe underwater, it’s not a raccoon.
The author is a convert priest from Anglicanism. They are an odd bunch, so many of these convert priests. They carry terrible baggage into Orthodoxy with them. They know all the rules, or what they think are rules, but sadly and even after many years, never come to understand Orthodoxy or our Orthodox phronema. It’s not magical thinking, it’s our mindset, our particular worldview.
This priest seems not to understand the fundamental principle of the Orthodox church. “Conforming to whatever the canons of modernity demand” only means that those who do so are no longer Orthodox, and have ex-communicated themselves from the church. There is no schism, as a schism would require a different, defensible, interpretation of the theological tenets of the church. Instead, this is just some laity and even (former) priests removing themselves from Orthodoxy, no matter how much they claim to be “modernizing” it.
I understood it perfectly and I know little about the Orthodox church aside from a short I had with a colleague of mine who goes to one.
typo...short conversation I had*
Transubstantiation isn't complex either.
Neither was Jesus' curing of the blind, lame and deaf.
The Healing Touch of Jesus
…21 for she was saying to herself, "If I only touch His garment, I will get well."
22 But Jesus turning and seeing her said, "Daughter, take courage; your faith has made you well." At once the woman was made well.
Jesus was the antithesis of complex. Being a good person is simple as well, NOT COMPLEX as all.
It isn't always EASY but it's sure not complex.
I've heard Catholic teaching all my life...NOT complex.
Jesus said it: Matthew 22:37
Jesus said to him: 'Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: 'Love your neighbor as yourself.' All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments."
Very simple.
Today, people really seem to want an explanation of who Mary was. People like to know the milieu of that first century Anno Dominum. Nothing wrong with explaining to people the theology of the seven Sacraments either. I'm not afraid of learning and I'm sure you aren't either. No one forces you to believe anything. It's always, of course, your choice to believe whatever you want. Jesus IS the Way, the Truth and the Life and THAT is simple too.
The Catholic Mass is really very simple, just a MEAL, a Sacred Meal, with the Word of prophets (old and new testament readings) and Jesus' words in the Gospel before the Sacred Meal.
It's a SIMPLE meal of bread and wine transformed into the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus. And we Catholics have the privilege to be able to take Him into our bodies.
As for attorneys, you've been reading too much anti-Catholic rhetoric. The mainstream media LOATHE both Catholics AND Evangelicals and NEVER miss an opportunity to either ridicule them, demean them and/or to expose any wrong-doing of any kind by any Catholic priest, nun, friar, brother or Evangelical minister...especially sins against those "absolutes."
Jesus CHOSE to leave His Church humans, to His Twelve Apostles. He might have done is any other way, but He chose that way.
Since there are 3.3. billion Christians in the world, 1.6 billion being Catholics, with the other 1.7 billion Christians belonging to over 40,000 different Protestant denominations, I would say that the Apostles and 72 disciples did a decent job of converting the world to Christianity, wouldn't you?
Perhaps a shot in the dark here, but I’m guessing the author is working from the premise that Orthodoxy is already in many pieces. While oversimplifying, the truth is that the Orthodox Church consists of many jurisdictions which are not in communion with each other. Kolokotronis, you cannot say one leaves Orthodoxy in the same way a Roman Catholic can say one leaves Catholicism. Orthodoxy has no single See, but a conciliar system which, again, is in many pieces. Out of communion yes, but out of claimed Orthodoxy no.
The call here seems to be to recognize the history of the fraction tearing at the whole. The devil does not fight over conquered ground.
This isn’t true. The Orthodox Church by definition includes the various hierarchies that are in communion with each other. That’s what it means to be an Orthodox church. As to “claimed Orthodoxy,” why, you can claim to be a duck, too. That doesn’t make you one.
Convert disease.
But the warning signs should be acknowledged none the less. My bride is Catholic, and has suddenly realized that many of the priests in our home diocese are no longer Nicean Christians (they deny the Incarnation).
When a priest, on Christmas, gets up and says that Jesus was not “a god” till maybe after the Resurrection, you have a problem. Such things don’t happen overnight though, and I had noticed this years ago.
I've never heard anything like that in a Catholic church, and I hope I never do. But it would justify contacting the bishop in a NY minute.
“When a priest, on Christmas, gets up and says that Jesus was not “a god” till maybe after the Resurrection, you have a problem. Such things don’t happen overnight though, and I had noticed this years ago.”
I’ve never seen anything even hinting at this sort of heresy in the Orthodox Church. You want to remember that in Orthodoxy, the People, the Laity, are the guardians of Orthodoxy. A priest or a hierarch starts preaching heresy and the People of God rise up and solve the problem. I’ve seen it myself. There is a danger with some converts, especially early in their life as Orthodox. Many of them, it seems especially the ones who go on to become priests in some jurisdictions, can be described as suffering from a sort of spiritual PTSD. They can be dangerous. Recently there was a big dust up about an OCA convert priest at base supporting the gay lifestyle, including gay marriage. When the complaints started, the OCA top metropolitan, another convert, seemed to support the priest. Both were condemned across the Orthodox world. In another instance, another convert priest, from Episcopalianism I think, announced that it was his job and purpose to “demystify” Orthodoxy. He got slapped down hard by the People across his jurisdiction.
We know, inherently, what is Orthodox and what is not by the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We know when a dogma is true when we live it out in our lives individually and collectively. We react to the World in an Orthodox way. You may have seen flashes of that here on FR. But none of it is as a result of “Magical Thinking”. It is the result of 2000 years of living Orthodoxy.
Check out the dust storm Fr. Robert Arida out of Boston has kicked up.
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