MAKING CONVERTS

© 2003 by Orchid Land Publications

[200304017, 20030424, 20030621] 

     Having read others' comments on an earlier thread, perhaps that is not all there is to be said.  I will comment on knowledge.  There are several approaches:  that of encylopedia articles and the books I was given to read; and others approaches, one of which I will show a preference for.  We begin with our Savior’s commission at the end of St. Matthew’s Gospel, enjoining us to TEACH all peoples.  St. Peter (1 Pet. 3:15) admonishes us to be ever ready with a rational reply to anyone asking us for the reason of the hope in us.  Teaching and “apologizing” (in the technical sense) require knowledge—knowledge not available in the books I was given to read (by famous authors).  The encyclopedias generally tell us how the Church is governed and how we differ from the Latins (they even speak of seven instead of the nine Ecumenical Synods that we accept):  Papalism light with an icing of  very, very light doctrine (teaching).  
      Why don’t our records show the Eighth and Ninth Ecumenical Synods?  Well, there were four centuries of Balkan Dark Ages, when the Turks wouldn’t let us print religious books.  When the MSS were sent to Venice for printing, the Latins deleted those Synods along with of course St. Mark Evyenikós of Ephesos and St. Gregory Palamãs from the calendars.  Before that, the West had lost cognitive contact with the Greek-language (and Greek-thinking) East, though some of Augustine ad survived for the vanishingly few in the West who could read at all; there a few translations of St. Maximos & St. Dionysios by the Irish monk John Scotus Eriugena.   The Latins and Reformers got the forms of their new paradigms from the Muslim Aristotle--Muslim and Jewish writers of Córdova--the largest city of the world (having 700 mosques), with scholars in a tradition that invented algebra and much else.  The Pedalion ("Rudder"), a collection of the canons by St. Nikodemos of the Holy Mountain, was so tampered with by the Venetian publisher than, according to his bibliographer, he "wept bitterly."
      Take Salvation, an important topic in speaking with the otherdox.   They adhere to the pagan Greek philosophical teaching that the soul is immortal BY NATURE—not by Grace, as we teach.  They teach that God punished humans by imposing death—the Fall was juridical—and that newborns inherit the first humans’ sin and guilt—by “natural generation” no less!  Per contra, our Fathers teach that the loss of the Assimilation to God (Gen. 1:26 speaks of the eikón and the Assimilation to God, the latter being a bonus of the uncreated Energies of Grace [God’s Life] that enables the capacities of the eikón [“image”] to reason and choose freely) was ontological and inheritable as such; and that God let satan impose death to prevent the perpetuation of sinning.  So the Fall is viewed in the East as an ontological separation from Grace, God’s Energies.
     If the Fall was juridical and God cannot forgive without first punishing, then Salvation, which reverses the Fall, is juridical too:  a propitiatory Crucifixion is the center of soteriology in the West.   (A sacrifice is an Offering; some in third Book of Moses in the Old Testament are preceded by an Immolation.  Christ’s Immolation cannot be repeated; He can, however [as our prayers say], in His members offer Himself at every divine Liturgy.)  If Salvation is juridical, there have got to be satisfaction, atonement, justification, redemption, legal adoption, and virtual unity with God’s Essence.  (Since God’s Essence is “pure Energy” in the West and no distinction is made between His Essence and His Energies [or His Nature, spoken of in 1 Pet. 1:20], unity with the imparticipable divine Nature can only be virtual:   Thomas Aquinas said that that unity is intentional/conceptual; the Reformers made it volitional/imputational—legal and covenantal.)   Where we hold Grace to be uncreated Energy, God’s Life, distinct from His changeless Essence, Aquinas rejects the idea that Sanctifying Grace is either uncreated or operativa (energetic; it is a habit of the human soul), and for Luther and Calvin, justification is virtual righteousness imputed to sinners.
     If the Fall was ontological, as in the East, so is Salvation—receiving the lost Energies of the Assimilation to God—being born again as a “new creating” and ontological membership in Christ, sharing the uncreated Energies of His Life—culminating through the vision of uncreated Light (the purest form of energy) in what we call Théosis “Divinizationi” (NOT “Deification” in God’s Essence).  The Incarnation united our nature with God’s, just as the Resurrection of the flesh unites individual worshipers with Christ through their sharing His Life—His Energies.  The Crucifixion is expiatory (not propitiatory or appeasing) in removing the religious blocks to an individual’s ontologically benefiting from what the Incarnation made possible.  Even the Transfiguration and Ascension are part of Orthodox soteriology.
     This one example is replicable with other basic doctrines.  It serves to show the different thought worlds of Eastern and Western Christianity—why it is that when we say the same things we are not saying the same things.  That fact is reason enough to understand and stress the different backgrounds of Eastern and Western Christianity--and its historical source mentioned above.  Our energetic view of the cosmos allows for evolution--the constant re-creation of the world, always little different, by the divine LOGOS, to keep it from falling back into nothingness.  Western theologians cannot allow that because of its Augustinian heritage, which, as Dr. G. Gabriel has observed, prevented them from accepting "the idea of change or evolution of any kind . . . because it would mean that the eternal archetypes of the species in the mind of God were, of necessity also subject to change and, therefore, not eternal." 

     Take Philippians 2:12-13; in Greek (cf. the Orthodox New Testament’s translation; I will use my own rendering here); it says:  “ . . . with  fear and trembling work out your Salvation; [13]  For it is God [Who is] energizing in you all both to will and to energize for the sake of [His] being pleased.”   Western translations say something from a world apart; you won’t find St. Paul’s 26 uses of energy terminology or St. James’s single use in their Bibles—or even in most of their translations of the Fathers (though sometimes a footnote may comment on it). 

          Note in passing that if Salvation is juridical and not ontological, the rôle of the Theotókos (God-bearer) is incidental; but if Salvation is ontological, she is essential.
     Let me conclude by saying that converting many of the otherdox requires knowing two things—what they believe (esp. if they are Western Christians) and what we believe.  There are those who come to an Orthodox temple out of curiosity and then go away saying what a pretty service they’ve witnessed, though standing for a couple of hours often proves hard; they may appreciate exhibitions of piety and even what some of the (properly translated) Fathers and Mothers of the Church have written.  But those things—and humility—won’t get one too far with some (i) relativists and (ii) those who live on slogans.  Dealing with them requires art as well as knowledge.  Suppose you meet one who says “My only belief is that Jesus died to save me.”  It’s harder than one might think to show that that is a superstition UNLESS one is told Who Jesus is (the Orthodox, the Arian, the Nestorian, the Monophysite God); why He died--whether God could forgive without requiring punishment; and how on earth the “merits” of someone’s dying could accrue to EGO—any more than someone elses’s guilt could.  [Our Orthodox answer is, as already noted, that when we become one with Christ by sharing His uncreated Life, the Assimilation to God of Gen. 1:26, etc., the Spirit energizes our minds and wills to accept God’s energizing good works in and by us.]
    It’s best to be prepared.  To explain Orthodoxy without knowing what our thought world is is a real loser, unless the potential convert is very, very naive.  Naïvetê is not necessarily humility; or if it is, it is not the best kind.  But the Orthodox phrónema or mindset is instilled by reading devotional passages from the Fathers, through biographies (from those of the Desert Fathers to St. Seraphim of Sarov and the martyrs of 20^th-century Communism), and most of all in prayers—but also through silence and meditation in front of the icons.  Since the LOGOS made the cosmos logikós "intelligible," we can and should respect reason.  But we need to be cognizant of the fact that Orthodoxy is not rationalist (like much Latin and Reformation theology), though it is certainly not anti-rational (volitional/emotional) and content with a few slogans like much Denominationalism today:  We Orthodox are aware that knowledge of the things of God comes through revelation, understood in its own framework, since His uncreated Essence is not knowable by reason, that an unmediated apprehension of divine truths comes through the transcendent faculty of noûs (located in the heart by the Fathers), which apprehends the things of God by transcending reason, will, and the emotions.

SEE R97, R265, R285