Orthodox Reflections

Growing up, I attended Sunday school at our charismatic, Evangelical church every week. Even at a young age, I never really fit in. I asked too many questions. One Sunday in particular comes to mind. The nice older lady teaching the class was walking us through our statement of beliefs when one really caught my attention. The statement said that our denomination accepted the Trinitarian formula as expressed in the Nicene Creed.

My hand shot up. “Can we read that?” I asked. The teacher looked momentarily stunned, told me “no”, and then tried to move on. I kept asking questions. “Who wrote it? When? Why? You just told me that we believe what it says about God, so why can’t we read what it says? Why didn’t they print a copy of it in this pamphlet so people know what we believe?”

There were no answers forthcoming, no matter how hard I asked. The teacher made it clear we had to get through all the beliefs before we could have cookies. That was incentive enough to let the subject go.

I was eventually able to read the Nicene Creed, and find out about the Council of Nicea, but only because the school library had books on Christian History.  I never got over the fact that a secular library would teach me more about Christianity than my own church would.

That was not the only time my questions went unanswered. Once I even sat down with our pastor to ask a whole series of questions, “Who was Christ? Why did Christ have to be born? Why did He have to die? Why do we have to come to church to hear a sermon, if we can watch it on TV? Did the original church have worship services the way we do?” I left after an hour very disappointed. The pastor had offered no deep wisdom, just Evangelical platitudes.

Evangelicalism, as I had discovered to my dismay, could never really answer my most important questions. Later as an adult, I realized that attempting to do so would have exposed how disconnected Evangelicalism is from actual Christianity. If you read the Nicene Creed, then you immediately realize that it reflects beliefs and teachings which are totally alien to Evangelicalism. The historical context makes things even worse. If you study the Council of Nicea, along with the beliefs and practices of the time, it is apparent that the 4th Century Christian Church was neither Evangelical nor even Protestant.

That presents a real pickle for an Evangelical denomination that, for example, wants to preserve the traditional teaching of the Trinity. While you can find support in scripture for the Trinitarian formula, it is not explicitly stated anywhere in the Bible. The Church had preserved that teaching in her Tradition, fully articulating it in the Creed as a response to Arianism.

So what is a good Evangelical denomination to do?

You do what mine did when I was a child. You claim the Trinity as taught in the Creed, or whatever other doctrine suits your fancy, but refuse to give any details, lest you encounter inconvenient historical contradictions you prefer to avoid.  Contradictions such as: why do you accept the Biblical canon and the Nicene Creed given to you by a Church you otherwise completely reject? Or how can charismatic Evangelicalism be the true Christian Faith, when it plainly never existed before the 19th Century?

Yeah, better to avoid all that.

I was recently reminded of my first brush with the Nicene Creed in Sunday school because a contributor responded to a question on her latest article, “To Prevent Death, Please Stop Living”, with a lengthy post about the nature of Christ and the councils in which it was discussed. I highly recommend it. You can read it here in its entirety. The conclusions about Christ are below, for those who want the condensed version:

Thus far, all the Ecumenical Councils established the following:

1. Christ has two natures – He is both God and man, possessing a divine nature and a human nature
2. Each nature is full and complete – He is fully God and fully man
3. Each nature remains distinct – they do not intermix to form a third type of nature
4. Christ is only one Person – with two natures united in one Person, He will be both God and man forever
5. Things that are true of only one nature but not the other, are still true of the whole Person of Christ.
6. Christ possesses two wills – divine will and human will, where the human will willingly submits to the divine will.

Despite decades of Orthodoxy, I am still amazed by how much easier life is when you don’t have to avoid 1,500 years of Church History. I reread the post a few times. Each time I pondered something else the Church was telling me about Our Lord. The well of Orthodoxy is inexhaustible. We may live for eternity, but we will never want for new things to learn about God.

Out of curiosity, I went to the Website of my old denomination and looked at the statement of beliefs. The reference to the Nicene Creed is gone now, as is the word “Trinity.” Neither of those terms are anywhere on the official denominational Website. Instead, there is just this statement that says, “We believe in one God eternally existing in three persons; namely, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”

I suppose that fixes the inconvenient “historical” issue, at least as far as that doctrine is concerned. Out of sight, out of mind. Until some kid raises his hand and asks, “Where does it say that in the Bible?” or “What is this Trinity thing my friends talk about and why don’t we use that word in our church?”

I feel sorry for Evangelicals. I wrote in this article about what it was like to watch Evangelical tourists in Europe visiting historic churches. They are quite lost when doing so. Their faith did not even exist when those churches were built. The triumphs of Christendom do not belong to them. They are rootless orphans living in makeshift hovels while surrounded by mansions.

I even feel sorry for Evangelicals when they cherry-pick quotes from Church Fathers. Something which happens online on a regular basis. They will triumphantly find and publish a sentence or two that seemingly backs up some Evangelical claim. Moments later, they are sadly made aware that, often in the same document, the saint they are referencing espoused Church doctrines (Eucharist, baptism, liturgy, confession, icons, etc.) that are explicitly against Evangelical teachings. The cognitive dissonance this provokes is awful to behold. Poor Evangelicals are left arguing that we are to ignore everything some saint wrote, said, or believed with the exception of the chosen few sentences that can be interpreted as agreeing with one Evangelical doctrine or another. It’s very sad.

It is so much easier to have discussions about God and His Church when you can be honest about all aspects of Christian History. Evangelicals clearly can’t, and they project that inability, wrongly, onto Orthodox Christians. Below are a few historical and Theological examples Protestants believe will be “inconvenient” from an Orthodox perspective that really aren’t:

• “Heretics were Patriarchs of Constantinople!” – Yep. They all got condemned. Sometimes the Church needs time to sort things out.
• “You were under the Pope!” – Not like you think. We were in communion with the Patriarch of Rome, who was an exemplar of Orthodoxy for much of the first millennium. When the Pope ceased to be Orthodox, we ceased to be in communion with him.
• “That’s not in the Bible!” – Yep. The Bible is neither systematic Theology nor a liturgical handbook. The way Evangelicals do church services, for example, isn’t in the Bible. That doesn’t stop them, however. The Bible is full of references to liturgical worship (see Jewish temple, Book of Revelations) and the Eucharist. “Revivals”, electric guitars, and unfermented grape juice are, on the other hand, conspicuously absent.

So much of the Christian Faith was defended and explained during historical periods that Evangelicalism consciously avoids dealing with. This leaves Evangelicalism with no real understanding of even basic Christian beliefs. Which is a strange predicament for a group claiming to adhere to Christian “fundamentals.” Nor does Evangelicalism have even a tenuous historical connection to Christ and His Church. At this point, for me, it is an open question if Evangelicalism is a heretical “Christian” movement, or is it a totally separate religion?

Evangelicalism is much more well-known in America than Orthodoxy. Which creates serious problems, as many of the common misconceptions of God and the Christian Faith are caused by Evangelicalism. TV preachers and evangelists have wreaked havoc among non-believers by exposing them to a counterfeit god and a counterfeit faith. When we encounter those who reject God, we must be patient. They frequently aren’t rejecting the real God, about Whom they know nothing. Rather, they are rejecting the version of God learned from ignorant men in designer suits. To teach them about God, we must also teach them to “unlearn” what they think they already know.

But this is not to say that Evangelicals are bad people. There are many good people in Evangelicalism who are trying to be followers of Christ. They just don’t know how. It is up to God to have mercy on them, and up to us Orthodox to figure out how to reach them. The fact that I am sitting here typing this post tells you that is entirely possible, no matter how frustrating it might be to witness to them.

Nicholas – member of the Western Rite Vicariate, a part of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese in America