A
COMMON INTERFAITH LANGUAGE?
© 2002-2003 by Orchid Land Publications
[20020330, updated 20030424]
According to
a recent report quoted on OrthodoxNews: The head of the World Council of Churches, in remarks responding to Archbishop
Christodoulos of Athens, spoke at length on the Special Committee's ("which studies the conditions for the Orthodox Church's future presence in the
Council"] working towards finding a common language capable of expressing the common Christian tradition of the European
peoples and the search for new ways of co-operation."
Orthodox
festivals, Orthodox Mysteries, Orthodox Assimilation to God, Orthodox Grace,
Orthodox Salvation, Orthodox unity with God, Orthodox Divinization
are sufficiently reconcilable with
Western festivals, Western Mysteries, Western "image and likeness"
[sic] of God,
Western Grace, Western satisfaction Atonement and
Salvation, Western virtual unity with God and "Deification" (by
intention in Latin theology; covenantally for
Why advocate a "common language" that cannot be
shown or at least has not been shown to be thinkable? There is already a good deal of common language, if you just look at the words.
That is in fact the real problem. since similar words mean different things in different thought worlds. Is the
head of the WCC not aware of paradigms and their effects on what one thinks
and that paradigms are by definition incommensurate? (Like definitions
and like their axioms, paradigms are not vulnerable to falsification.)
--Could a "common language" mean that Grace is not only uncreated Energy (as the Orthodox say), and (in the same respect[s]) also
not-created and not-operative (as Latin writers of theological textbooks specifically
assert, "operative" or "active" being as close as they could
get to "energetic") or else not even "something" (according to the Protestant
view) but rather God's benignity?
--Could a "common language" thinkably sustain the view that the results
of the Fall were essentially ontological--a loss of the Energies of the
Assimilation ('omoíosis
Theô), i.e. a loss of the uncreated Energies of Grace. Before
being lost, the uncreated Energies of Grace in the Assimilation to God energized
the capacities (the dynámeis of reason and freechoice, which in Greek thinking distinguish human essence from
that of the animals). The faculties of God's Icon were energized to please God, as
the Fathers said. (Gen. 1:26 says that humanity was created "according to our [i.e. the Trinity's] Icon
and according to Assimilation. Icon, Assimilation to God, and creation by the
LOGOS [Reason] and SOPHIA
[Wisdom, practical reason] of God were ideas common to all schools of thinking
in the first centuries of the Christian era.
It was a convergence that allows us to guess why the Incarnation took
place when and where it did 'Omoíosis
"Assimilation” is a causative-energetic verbal noun in Greek, as its
final formative shows.
It is not "likeness": For
a speaker of Greek, that would be 'omoíoma,
the result of an assimilation. For
the relation signaled by "according to"--it is not the Augustinian
"analogy of being"--the reader is referred to P. Nellas's Deification
in Christ (a mis-translated title.)
Is it possible to describe the Patristic concept of the Assimilation to God
and at the same
time subscribe to the Western view that the Fall consists of the
physical inheritance of the moral guilt of Adam? How can a moral
trait--guilt or merit--be inherited by one individual from another? (Christians
share in Christ's good deeds because they are new creatings
in Him sharing His uncreated Life--His
Energy--which animates the good that
His members do. That includes the offering of the eucharistic Sacrifice,
which, as the priest's
prayer during the Cherouvikon says, Christ Himself offers--in
His members.
Anyhow, how can a
moral trait be inherited physically? Let us be shown that a common language regarding the Fall is thinkable before we
are exhorted to assume there is one! It is hard to believe
that the head of the WCC has the slightest intimation of what the conflicts in fact are.
(How could he? The effects
of the Orthodox use of Western language are discussed below.)
As I am not his judge, I leave the matter open and await his showing.
Could a "common
language" say that Salvation is ontological and not ontological?
For Orthodoxy, the Incarnation unites human
nature with Divine Nature [not Essence], and the
Resurrection unites individuals with Christ
as sharers of His Life after Christ's Self-Offering on the
Life-giving Cross has removed the religious obstacles to that). But
in Western Christianity, Salvation is a moral and
juridical punishment and satisfaction paid to God. Where is the common language? The
Incarnation and Resurrection are merely incidental--as
the Jesuit Fr. Pohle specifically says of the Resurrection and as is assumed
in Protestant treatments. Since I do not see how these views can
be combined in any manner, let the head of the WCC or one of his subordinates
tell us before speaking of a "common language" about Salvation.
That is just asking for due order.
One could go
on and on and on and on with gobbledygook of
the sort being commented on. The Archbishop of
Athens should, IMHO, not proceed in this direction till His
Beatitude has first been shown that such a project is even thinkable, let
alone doable. I wager that no linguist or philosopher or theologian
cognizant of the facts and problems and who
is also devoted to bonne methode or sound procedure could imagine that any "common
language" with shared meanings is
thinkable, let alone creatable,
in the face of downright incompatibilities. But
at any rate, that is WHERE TO
START--as the head of the WCC himself says.
Who could disagree with the proposition that discussing the possibility of a
common language is EXACTLY WHERE TO START?
If there is none (in the
sense under discussion), the current form of the WCC should be closed
down--or continue to exist simply for co-operation on charitable enterprises
or something else of a non-theological
character.
Please, let's get real and not visit this never-never land in which contradictions can be resolved with supposititious
"common terms." Let the reverend doctor who
heads the WCC first show any reputable linguist or philosopher or
theologian how any two or three of the basic terms (the list can be greatly
extended) can be reduced to a
truly "common language." I
wish there were one, but I find it unthinkable;
and none of the advocates of
speaking with the Latins or Protestants about unity has ever (to my knowledge)
shown otherwise. I am open to listening to any attempt to show it.
Not to show it is to lapse into relativism--unless that can also be
convincingly shown not to be so.
One
would have to be out to lunch to believe that contradictions are reducible in
the way one may conclude--rightly or wrongly--that
the head of the WCC has in mind. Till he clarifies what he commends as
being thinkable, one cannot say whether the foregoing conclusion is right or
not;
so it is put forth as tentative,
as no one wants to bemean him
or anyone else for their good intentions. But to go along with
something not shown to be even thinkable, one would have to be an
Orthodox trained in Western academic-theological
ways or else somehow come to be of
the opinion that it is false to maintain:
"When Eastern and Western Christians are saying the same thing, they
are not saying the same thing." That
the foregoing is true is so easy to show (even in this short memo) that it will
be hard to contest it convincingly. The best that might
be able to be shown is a way
to get around it honestly. The only way that that can be done, so far as
I can see, is for the head of the WCC to immerse himself in our
energy-ontology paradigm, see what the conflicts and contradictions are,
and then deal with them in an orderly manner. For me, a contradiction is
a contradiction is a contradiction is a contradiction . . . unless someone can
show that something is true in one respect and untrue only in another
respect. That's the way it has got to be approached, if intellectual
honesty is to be maintained.
Whether or
not intellectual honesty and true convictions are to be
side-stepped and ignored in any way, sentimentality and
longing will not suffice. Love cannot make what is true false or
what if false true. What love can do--what requires more love in
many respects than loving those who agree with oneself--is to call forth
respect for those who disagree in acceptable and honest ways and then see
whether that respect can somehow help to resolve contradictory beliefs on the Trinity
and Its necessity, Worship, the Fall, Grace, Salvation, Mysteries, and so
on. (Meanwhile, let's not get bogged down with Church organization and
government; that should logically be last on the docket.) Without
having spoken to every linguist and philosopher, I dare say that any
linguist or philosopher cognizant of the facts would presume that it is
self-evidently true that similar meanings do not attach to "similar"
terms (of a foundational nature) in different
paradigms, since they are conceptualized according to the axioms and premises
of conflicting thought worlds.
This should be simple enough for any WCC member to understand.
All
of that having been said,
it should be observed that the Orthodox are greatly at fault for encouraging
the far-fetched idea that
heirs)
the Reformers and their theological
that it is acceptable for us to call a
number of our important festivals and teachings by Western names.
Till it is shown whether Western language can
indicate Eastern concepts without bringing in the alien
theological baggage of the West, I do not see how it is legitimate. Even
if, per contra, it were somehow in order for the Orthodox to use Western forms
for Eastern concepts, it would simply be confusing. Yet, we see Orthodox prayer books with
"Easter" in the title, temples
called "Church of the Assumption" [a term associated with the
idea that death is penal, something that the all-pure Theotokos
would
not have
suffered,
despite
an early
writing about her dying], translations of Orthodox
books with "Deification"
(which means "by essence"--or so infer native-speakers
of English familiar with the alleged destiny of dead Roman Emperors,
one of whom--Claudius,
if I remember correctly--just
before dying said, "I feel I'm becoming a god"). When LOGOS gets
mis-translated as "Word" on the pages of many
volumes and Assimilation is mis-rendered
as "likeness," we are far from
understanding
what the original Greek Bible says as well as
being far from good
Orthodoxy and a "common
language."
--"Word" in
the Vulgate and Western Bibles generally cannot convey the sense of St.
John's LOGOS, and it doesn't pair with St.
Paul's SOPHIA;
--"likeness" cannot convey
the sense of "Assimilation," since likeness is the result of an
assimilating, and the assimilating is alone
"energetic."
--"work" or
"operation" and the cognate verbs and adjectives in
Latin, English, etc., cannot convey the concept of energy that pervades
St. Paul's Greek writings and is found in St. James' Epistle;
--nor can being a "new
creature" (the result of a creating) convey the energetic
sense of being a "new creating"--an energizing
by the all-holy Spirit, a sharing in the Energies of
divine Life;
--"valid" cannot at the
same time refer to both a "dynamis" (Latin
"potentia") for
the Greeks and a formal authentication
for the Latins--since
for the Greek way
of thinking, authenticity requires
an energization IN the Orthodox
Church, energizing being
what makes a dynamis actual,
real, authentic, and actively functional.
--Deification (with an uncreated and
imparticipable Essence, even
if only virtual),
can hardly
be squared with Orthodox ontological
Divinization through God's uncreated Energies
in the Vision of uncreated Light--the purest form of
energy.
Where is a common language to be found in the foregoing? It seems fair and eminently reasonable to say that those who claim such to be possible are obligated to show us how it is even thinkable.
Orthodox Theophany and Western Epiphany have the same origin: ergo, they are they same or sufficiently similar to share the same name. The same argument can be applied to the Great Fast and Lent--which carries no overtones of being one of several fasts. To see the structure of this line of argument, try the following: Birds and dinosaurs were originally the same; ergo, birds and dinosaurs are identical or at least sufficiently similar to go by the same name. You don't even have to believe that dinosaurs and birds were once the same to see the antilogism in this way of arguing. Yet, would-be educated people argue like that.One specious argument not seldom met with concerning the names of the festivals and other things.
Before we are advised to go looking for it, let us please be shown that a common term for virtual and truly ontological unity with God is thinkable. We don't want to get started on a hunt for those non-existent critters that boy scouts are
mischievously sent out to find; we don't want to go looking for the proverbial pot of theological gold at the end of the ecumenical rainbow.The Orthodox should IMHO insist on first being told how a moral thing like guilt can be inherited physically "by natural generation," as papal theologians and magisterial Protestants like Turretin (and possibly the head of the WCC) proclaim. It cannot be "inherited" in any other way
, either.Adam's sin to newborns, He would be the cause of evil. In fact, He would be insane to be wrathful at newborns for the evil He Himself imputes to them. None of that seems to bother those who read the Bible in one of the Western paradigms. I should point out that Western theologians even think that the human soul is immortal by nature, and that God, not the devil, imposes death on humans as a penalty for sin. (Calvin even viewed the body Gnostically as a prison [ergastulum] of the soul.) All of this is alien enough to holy Orthodoxy to require a showing that it can be semantically (not just verbally) reconciled in some common language with Orthodoxy. Let no one write asking us to use a misleading word to express an alleged commonalty between East and West until the writer convincingly shows us that common terms (no one denies that such exist!) have reconcilable meanings in both East and West. This is an entirely fair and reasonable demand for us to make, since it would not be honest to pretend that we agree on Grace or Salvation just because of some common forms of words. Let's have commonalty, but not a spurious commonalty.If God simply imputed
And so on
with the other divergences--e.g.
verses like 2 Pet. 1:20, John 6:53-54, etc., etc.--which "don't mean what
they mean" in the Reformers' paradigm. If
the Creator were a
"Word" (a mis-translation of
John 1:1,3; cf. His
being the Wisdom of God in St. Paul's thought
world), then of course the emphasis on words in
Luther and Calvin--perhaps also word magic--would seem to be justified.
The eminent Calvinist theologian, L. Berkhof, has the "preached Word"
replacing the need for "sacraments." The Orthodox contribute to such
silliness when they
call the LOGOS a Word. And it is more or less parallel with the other basic
Western terminological usages.
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It's easy to wave hands at the problem and say that it is
enough to subscribe to the same words because differences
over what they mean and
differences in what we
believe
don't matter. Moreover, it's easy to suggest that contradictions can be reduced to a common tenet if
one is not required first to show us how such an (at least, humanly speaking) unthinkable project could be even thinkable.
Hasn't
the Holy Spirit been guiding the Orthodox Church into "all truth"
(John 16:13)--including the Orthodox Church's specifying which books belong to the Biblical
Canon? The choice cannot be infallible if the Orthodox Church is as errant as its
opponents contend. (To judge the Church or the Bible as infallible
requires an infallible judge, a status that many Evangelicals implicitly claim for
themselves when they say the Bible is inerrant, etc.)
Didn't the
Spirit so guide the Orthodox Church before the papacy's losing cognitive continuity with the original paradigm of the Greek-speaking Apostles for seven
centuries of Dark Ages and before the papacy's subsequently re-inventing itself in a new paradigm from
the middle of the thirteenth century on--and well before the papacy's deciding in 1870 that it is infallible?
Didn't the Spirit guide the Church into all truth for almost a millennium
and a half before the head of the WCC's form of Christianity was invented (from
1515 onward down to the much later dates of the Salvation Army and the Latter Day Saints)?
Or is the Gospel promise fallible?
Making untenable assertions about reconciling conflicts without
showing how that
can be done leads, I suggest, to a number of obvious and deplorable consequences.
But
however that may be, one requirement is for everyone who
says things of the kind that
the head of the WCC has expressed should give us an example of how
basic differences can be resolved in a common language. (It will
not suffice to resolve calling the Panayía "the Virgin Mary" or
calling the Nativity "Christ-mass"; the requirement touches basic intractabilities.) It's all
too easy to advocate something without
being called on to demonstrate it.
If, however, one does not
(or cannot)
demonstrate that a
project or plan is doable, the
rest of us have the right--and if it is important, the
obligation--to question whether the plan is useful in a obligation--to question
whether the plan is useful
in any way. An
academic or a Church leader with "Dr."
before one's name (as in the case of the head of the WCC) should respect
bonne methode enough to feel
obligated to show that something
is possible before commending it to us.
It's that simple. The
contradictions of anti-credal simple-mindedness are far from being
simple. The simple slogan or two of anti-credal, individualistic, un-Trinitarian
Christianity as far to the left of conservative orthodoxy as possible--Evangelicalism and
Liberalism--retain
the Reformer's paradigm but banish the doctrines that would energize
and make meaningful any of its dogmas or the latter-day slogans--e.g.
"Jesus die for EGO. Complications arise when some intelligent
and curious person asks, Who is He and how can his dying benefit EGO?
But we step off of the precipice when we fail to realize that when we say
the same things we are not saying the same things. That failure requires
a sort of mental scótosis (note the "energy" formation in Greek
scótosis!), something that should give us pause rather than credence
in what results from the failure in question.
I have looked at the
Jesuit Fr. Maloney's Marquette lectures, A theology of
"uncreated Energies," since he has at least tried
to step into the Orthodox paradigm and has indeed succeeded to
a fair degree. But after many good observations
and remarks, he lamely concludes (perhaps because a Jesuit could not
avoid doing so) that Eastern theology "can profit by being complemented
in this doctrine of the uncreated energies and the image and likeness [sic]
by the teachings of St. Augustine and St. Thomas." To say this,
after having shown how wrong the statement cannot avoid being,
is nothing if not remarkable. Fr.
M might at least have gone
back to Thomas's actus as a
point of contact and then shown
that separating energy from
essence would be a good (and essential) first
step. In Fr. M's pioneering lecture, he
might have taken advantage of Fr. Lonergan's (another Jesuit) much
earlier explanations about the two actus
in Thomas's thinking--one being formal and
the other operativus (with
activus, the closest term to "energetic" in
the Thomistic vocabulary; Fr. Lonergan must
have had Aristotle's kínesis in mind as the third term). This approach
could have logically led
to the second step
that Fr. M would presumably recommend--viz. accepting actus as truly
energetic. At that juncture, the
Orthodox MIGHT HAVE SOMETHING TO DISCUSS
with the Latins, .
. . though once paradigms come up,
down go distinctively papal tenets. One
should not hold one's breath in anticipation. Discussing actus would lift
the discussion above current attempts to mesmerize us into thinking
that the impossible is possible and
offer something concrete to consider. . . something
better than the idea that we could be so deluded as to think that when we
say the same things we are saying the same things. One wonders what the head of the WCC would be
willing to do.
Till we are shown, the Orthodox should hold back and not waste money and item
on a will-o'-the-wish. The ball is in the WCC's court.
It all
boils down to the essential
preliminaries
of using the right words for the right comments and of not hiding differences under the cover of similar words . . . at
least if we are not to fall into what Einstein characterized as
insanity--doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different
result. So let it be repeated, since it cannot be stressed too often: The first
requirement is for the head of the WCC (or any advocate of unity) to
give us a cogent example showing that it is possible to resolve the contraries mentioned--a model showing that such
is thinkable and worth pursuing. . . .
One
should not stop at just
waving hands at something or
recommending something from never-never land.
Lack of unity is deplorable--between GOA and the other Orthodox
jurisdictions in America as well as among all Christians. It is contrary
to the expressed will of Christ. But a spurious unity of
Orthodox and heterodox would be bbbbaaaadddddddd.
Besides not being honest, it would inevitably
lead to future dissension and schisms.
There are two additional considerations in all of this. The first has to
do with why the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Greek Orthodox in America
should address interfaith activities before addressing inter-Orthodox
unity--failure to do which cannot be in accord with Christ's will expressed in
the prayer St. John records His praying. I'm sure that it can
be gotten across to the WCC that it would be cacodox
or dysdox to subordinate unity with other willing Orthodox to an
airy-fairy unity with the heterodox. The second consideration is why
"love" keeps being brought up--since there is required greater
or at least a different kind of love, perhaps, to love those who disagree
with us than to love those who agree with us. When it is granted
that love cannot make the true false or the false true but only grease
the wheels of a discussion, love is undeniably valuable.
But to tout love as the method of reconciling opposed truths would be to
establish false priorities--usually relativism in belief. As I have
said before, while belief is not as important as Worship and other
piety, the latter have no worthwhile foundation other than orthodoxy
(with a small "o") "right belief," which we hold to
be Orthodoxy with a big "O." Just as the raison
d'être of a temple lies in the building, not in its foundation, it
nevertheless cannot exist without the foundation. In the same way, right
belief is the foundation of proper Worship and other pious behavior.
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