Paper Tigers
The foolishness of God is wiser than men (I Cor. 1:25)
I have a Google document entitled “Basic Protestant Questions and Potential Dealbreakers” that I began when I first started looking seriously into Orthodoxy.
When I started this inquiry, there were plenty of reasons why I didn’t think I would become Orthodox. I recently re-read an email I sent to someone in which I said, “Ultimately my hope would be that it [this inquiry] leads me closer to Him, not necessarily that I become an Eastern Orthodox Christian, but hey if that’s what it takes, lol.”
My desire has always been to know and draw near to God—not necessarily to find religion. The things I made note of on that google doc seemed impossible to reconcile with a purely Biblical faith. I operated under the typical Protestant assumption which is grounded in the principle of sola scriptura that if it couldn’t be found in the pages of my Bible, it could not be legitimately integrated into the schematics of my faith. So, I wasn’t exactly wrong—there are things in Orthodoxy that can’t be reconciled with Scripture as Protestants read it. But there are these bricks in the wall that separated me from Orthodox faith, and as those bricks were found to be loose and not held in by any particular mortar, as they were removed, the whole thing came tumbling down. As I looked into the issues that at one time were problematic for me and learned why they needed to be considered, I couldn’t help hearing in my head “You’re responsible for what you know,” and I found my steps drawing me ever nearer to the door of the Church of the ancient Orthodox faith and away from Protestantism.
What are some of these “potential dealbreakers?” Maybe they will seem familiar to you, if you are an inquirer. Because I had a fair amount of mixed-up Protestant dogma stored in the memory and experience bank like a computer with too many cookies, these questions would produce sometimes nauseating levels of cognitive dissonance for me.
Tradition. I feel like the word “tradition” is like the “inconceivable” scene in The Princess Bride…How can the Church rely on it when we have 2000 years of the “telephone” game? Doesn’t that give undue authority to the clergy and institution? Is it just a way of saying, “because I said so?”
Mary. She is the mother of Christ, yes. But why are prayers said to her? Why is she venerated? Isn’t veneration just another word for “worship?” Why is she held in such high esteem even to the point that we say “save us”? Isn’t the honor given to her essentially honor that is being robbed from Christ himself and displaced onto a human being? God describes himself as a jealous God, so this is problematic. I have been taught that all prayer goes to God the Father through Jesus alone, and only in his name do we pray. Also, how can she be “ever-virgin” when the Bible talks about the brothers and siblings of Christ. Ever heard of “James the Brother of the Lord?” Why do I need to go through Mary?
Icons and Relics. What are these images and why are people bowing and kissing them? That looks a whole lot like worship or idolatry, and flies in the face of the second commandment. Furthermore, I’ve always been taught that miraculous relics and icons were superstition, folk religion, and definitely not of God. If an icon or relic did actually produce miracles, then its source would be demonic rather than divine, or a trick of the enemy. How can one truly know if something is of God? Are these things not potential distractions from the pursuit of truth--a seeking after signs and wonders, as Jesus warned about?
Confession. Why do I have to confess my sins to a priest? Can’t I just tell my friend, or even better, just tell God? Aren’t we all priests? Can I bind and loose, like Jesus told Peter?
Authority of Clergy and Church Hierarchy. While in the Anglican church I began to understand the intention of church hierarchy with deacons, priests, and bishops, there was a confusing blend of teachings that also invested a great deal of authority in the laity, in such things as prayer and teaching ministries, the governance of the church, and hiring of pastors, etc. The sanctity of the priesthood and authority of the bishop was apparently present, and I had witnessed the liturgical ceremony of it all, but from my perspective the laity had a lot of say. If one had come from a Catholic background, I imagine that the office of priest and bishop would be held in higher regard, but coming from a protestant background, I only translated these roles into congregational terms. Priest = pastor, vestry = elder board, Bishop = accountability for the pastor and the one responsible for the diocese. I recognize that this might be all wrong, but it was never addressed openly, so I was never corrected in my thinking.
Exclusivity. Why do the Orthodox exclude the teachings of other denominations? Why do they not participate in ecumenical events or give any kind of credit to the experiences of other churches, such as “moves of the Holy Spirit” or “revivals?” Wouldn’t they want to be a part of that? Why aren’t people who clearly profess Christ as their Lord and Savior willingly received into the Orthodox community and allowed to receive communion and vice versa.
The Afterlife. I wasn’t someone who was committed to the “once saved always saved” notion found in much of reformed doctrine, and I was no Calvinist. I felt that I was still capable of turning away from God, but would that damn me immediately to hell, or was Grace more generous than that? There were so many different messages in Protestant theology, which branch had the answer?Was it possible to choose the “wrong door?” I was wired to distrust most theological messages on the subject, though what I had heard from the Orthodox was very intriguing.
These were the biggies—the “sticky wickets” that I would find myself struggling to pass through. There was something ineffable about the Orthodox church that defied my attempts to explain, but I had been a firm believer in reason—it was one of the three legs of Anglicanism, after all—and if my reason could not tease out the answers to these issues, then maybe Orthodoxy was wrong. I wanted logical answers. But then there was this mysterious something that kept me coming back. Can reason be reconciled with mystery?
The answer to my need for logical answers lay partially in my love of history but bound up with this, my desire extended beyond historical facts and data points. I believe that God in his providence had a plan that seemed quite random to me, but I don’t believe anything happens by accident, in spite of the title of this blog. I had prayed to find His Church, the one that I had never experienced, the one I read about in Acts but never fully understood.
So I started attending class, submitted to being made a catechumen through these prayers and rituals (the first step in becoming Orthodox) and started asking questions and seeking answers. The prayers alone required a step of faith—they are ancient and they are raw. Catechumens take the physical action of spitting on the devil. In taking this step alone, I made firm my connection to the transcendent world. I had to say yes to allowing my mind and soul to be challenged by choosing to believe in the mystical, ineffable, immaterial existence of God, angels, saints, demons, and the devil and his works, and not just in their existence, but in their real and present activity and impact on humankind. I had always believed, but now action in that direction took on new meaning. Belief wasn’t just something I could rationally hold in my mind or heart. This was something that required my mind, heart, and my body—the blowing, the spitting, the bowing, the words I was saying out loud. When I submitted to that ritual of DOING something with my whole person, I was humbled and changed, or more precisely, CONVERTED.
As an American who is steeped in enlightenment humanism, materialism-as-truth, and the notion that the individual bows to no one, this step of humbling myself struck at the heart of all that we had believed and experienced. What was being demanded of us was incongruent with American lifestyle and western Christianity. Ultimately, in choosing to commit to Orthodoxy, this became the crux of the matter. It is not easy to lay down one’s reason and the sense of personal authority that comes with a religion reconciled to and deeply rooted in a humanist, materialist belief system. In my experience, even those Protestant Christians who embrace the miraculous and the working of the Holy Spirit, who appear to possess a non-materialist faith, still are concerned primarily with the how the Holy Spirit is working on behalf of individuals, their immediate community, or on how things should align the world with their views of morality or truth. These views are typically divorced from the traditions of the historical church and so the emphasis remains on God’s working on behalf of the individual, and not the surrender of the individual to the Kingdom of God here and now as it is fulfilled in his Church. Whereas in Protestantism my salvation was between me and God alone, in Orthodoxy I was submitting to becoming part of something much bigger than that. (More on that in later posts.)
The step taken to renounce the devil and his works and spit towards the west was transformational. Why would I submit to such actions and appear so ridiculous if there were not something true about them? Am I that great of a fool? When I consider what I bound myself to in that moment, and then later even more profoundly in baptism, I can look back on my questions and see them as paper tigers—interesting, but powerless. They had cast huge shadows, but the fact is they were flimsy and too easily undone. The answers I sought were deep and substantial. They were simple, but not easy, and before long the paper tigers lay in little crumpled heaps.
In future posts I will address the various questions and share the resources that I found along the way that helped me to understand the Orthodox perspective and reconcile what I could not understand with this deep and abiding Ancient Faith.