Why I am … Eastern

This series, ‘A Renewed Generous Orthodoxy’, is all about how I as a Christian today identify with different traditions and movements. Last week I talked about being ‘traditional’ in broad strokes. But of course Christianity is, and has always been, a big tent. At its best, this has been understood as a healthy diversity; at its worst, it has been wrought with division and, eventually schism. The most fundamental of these differences in the Ancient World was originally more cultural and linguistic than theological: between the long-established, Greek-speaking, and decentralized East and the new-on-the-global-scene, Latin-speaking, Rome-centric West. Today I’ll be focusing on the Eastern half of this divide; and in the next two posts I’ll look at the Western half, first as a general cultural sphere, then specifically in terms of the Western Christian, ‘Catholic’ tradition.

I’ve written many times before here about my many-year, life-changing foray into Eastern Orthodoxy. In a time when I was frustrated by the state of theology and spirituality, and stagnant in my faith, and felt I’d exhausted the resources of the evangelical and charismatic traditions in which I was embedded at the time, Eastern Christianity was a welcome alternative. And while it was not able to be a sustainable home for me for the long term, I remain profoundly impacted by its ethos, theology, and spirituality.

By far the thing that resonated most with me — and continues to be important to me today — is the East’s refusal to separate theology from spirituality. I’m not sure if it was a basic cultural difference from the start, or simply the result of what conversations were happening where, but (to vastly oversimplify), the West became preoccupied early on with the mechanics of salvation and the sacraments (the whats, hows, and how manys of it all), whereas the East was happy to accept salvation as a given, and focus instead on questions about experiencing and knowing God. Reading the Church Fathers and Medieval theology, it often feels like Eastern theologians were writing love songs while their Western counterparts were writing marriage contracts. This is not to say that the West was spiritually bereft — just that it seemed happy to separate spirituality from theology, whereas in the East the two remained inseparable. This was exactly the kind of approach I’d been longing for. I’d been exhausted by reading dry theology and vapid spirituality and to find the two brought together so powerfully throughout a whole half of the Christian world consistently for almost two millennia overturned everything I thought I knew about things.

Another unexpected benefit from my time in the East was simply getting out of the bubble of the West’s ideas and conversations. This is nothing against the West, but just that growing up in a cultural bubble — any bubble — makes certain debates feel essential and inevitable; and only by stepping out side of that bubble do they reveal themselves to be relative and arbitrary. For example, growing up, it had always felt like there was this huge, unbridgeable divide between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. Yet in the Eastern Church I found myself in a context where they were seen as simply two sides of the same Western coin. Or, in the West we often talk about the intellectual revolution brought about by the rediscovery of Aristotle. But if we step outside that bubble, we find that Aristotle had only ever been ‘lost’ in Western Europe and throughout the Byzantine world, he was essentially the junior high curriculum — helpful for logic and classifying the world, but hardly worth having an intellectual revolution over. (Or, if we do want to celebrate Aristotle, stepping even further out of the Western bubble, we’d also see that Muslim philosophers were doing far more interesting things with him than the West ever did!) Again, the point here is just that engaging in the thought world of the Christian East allowed me to see the West for the bubble that it has been. It’s not a bad thing — the East is its own bubble, and I’m sure the Christian East and West together look like a strange bubble to those brought up in South or East Asian conceptual worlds. And that’s the point: it allowed me to see the fact that it is a bubble and thereby relativize its conversations and divisions, and thereby look for alternatives that bypass those dead-ends completely.

Third, my venture in to the Christian East showed me what a more truly catholic approach to theology and church life could look like. ‘Catholic’ is a word that most of us don’t have much context for outside of the ‘Roman Catholic Church’. But, as used in the ancient Church, it referred most basically to a sensibility that emphasized the “we” in the Nicene Creed. As I wrote in my series on the creed:

It’s saying that we don’t do theology or life on our own, but in community. It’s saying that we need each other in order to understand the world. The Church in Toronto must hear what the Church in Hay River, in Bogota, or Baghdad is saying, and vice versa. Catholicity, when understood best, is not about the top-down unity of sameness, but about how diversity of experience and language helps us to understand more about God, humanity, and the world.

And this is the theological and ecclesiastical ideal of the Eastern Church (even if this lofty ideal has rarely been lived out well). There was no Eastern equivalent to a pope or a curia, but a communion of Churches in conversation with each other. And this approach is seen just as much in its theology as in its ecclesiology. If, as I mentioned above, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism can be seen as two sides of the same Western coin, that coin is firmly imprinted with St. Augustine’s image. So many of the theological debates of the West are extrapolations from Augustine’s thought. If the major problem Western theology sought to solve was the problem of sin, it’s actually original sin we’re talking about, and not just original sin but Augustine’s understanding of it. But, as important and prolific and thoughtful as Augustine was, he was just one Church Father among many, and his conception of original sin was far from universal or the ‘obvious’ reading of the relevant texts. If we were to take a different, ancient, orthodox, and biblically-grounded interpretation of sin, say that of St Basil, the entire edifice of Western theology collapses like a Jenga tower with the bottom brick pulled out. There is no figure in the East with that kind of dominance. Instead its theological life feels like a choir or jazz big band, with many voices contributing to rich and beautiful, and sometimes dissonant, music together. And for this reason, so many of my big theological influences come from the East: The Cappadocian Fathers, Saints Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, and Gregory Palamas, and more contemporary figures like Alexander Men, Vladimir Lossky, Alexander Schmemann, and Olivier Clément. They all have their unique voices and particular emphases — mystical union with God, Logos Theology, the Theology of Light, the doctrine of the energies of God, the paschal mystery of the Church, and so on — but these contribute to the same beautiful song.

So, why am I ‘Eastern’? I am Eastern because it offers a helpful outside perspective from the West. It’s a different ethos, a different way of talking about the faith and being Church together, one that stresses the local as much as the universal, the many as much as the one, and which refuses to drive a wedge between theology and spirituality. And as it happens, the particular alternatives and ideas it offers are ones that resonate deeply with my heart and experience.

But again, this is not the whole story. For I was and remain embedded firmly in the West. And it is to this vast, unwieldy beast that we’ll turn to in the next two posts in the series.