The Boring Part--My Theological Background.
Before I can detail all my intellectual/theological
hang-ups, I wish to frame my narrative with a kind of survey of my formative
context and beliefs. I’ll try to keep this short and clear.
I was reared in a fairly generic
non-denominational/Evangelical context. If the particular churches I attended
as a child and young adult were formally or informally affiliated with a
network or denomination, the members were at most only vaguely aware of it. The
idea of an “independent Bible church” could justly capture my early faith
communities. At some point the southern
California phenomenon of the mega-church began to sap the smaller and less—shall
we say—spectacular churches, whose
waning resources led even committed members (like my parents) to consider
whether singing a few hymns and hearing a camp-counselor-style sermonette were
worth the longer commute. As my siblings
and I entered high school, my parents were no doubt eager to have us engaged in
positive Christian social networks (the offline sort) and for our part we
wanted something fun, dynamic, and preferably filled with pretty girls. This
made the local mega-church an ideal fit: three-hundred-plus high schoolers (many
from our own school), plus lights, music, games, and girls—some of them would even talk to me!
My trajectory through this
new world had many benefits, but as some of you may be anticipating, the
subculture of Western consumerist Christianity eventually took its toll. I
became deeply and emotionally involved in the whole spectrum of “ministries”
offered by this huge Carnival of Christianicity (I’m afraid it would be too
generous to call it Christianity, though certainly there were many real Christians
participating). I was a “worship leader,” I attended all the social events and
several “missions trips,” I organized and led small groups, and at one point I
was trusted with keys to the entire youth center. (Sorry for all the scare
quotes, but there was a high degree of irony in a lot of these labels given
what they actually entailed.) After several years I was brimming with pride and
self-importance. I remember actually thinking that I had pretty much reached
the top; there was no more for me to learn. Not an unusual thought for a
teenager. However, the subsequent realization that I was actually at the
absolute bottom came somewhat
gradually.
Reading My Way to the Gates of Hell and Back Again
For idiots like me, one essential
but problematic strategy for maintaining the delusion of superiority is having
read (or at least skimmed) the books that other superior people think are
important. The strategy is essential because you have to know what other people
know (or at least be able to sound like you know it well enough to judge it) or
people may think you’re not as special as you obviously are. The strategy is problematic, however, because
reading good material might actually challenge your perceptions of yourself and
your world. The trick is to read only pseudo-spiritual Christian drivel; that
way you can have the benefit of projecting your own expertise without the
discomfort of rethinking your whole existence. Alas! (and praise be to God!) I
was unable to sustain this feedback loop of self-regard.
My inability to perpetuate
the false reality grew from both internal and external factors. Deep down I
think no one in a position similar to mine really enjoys it, and God uses this
subtle discontent to prepare the heart for change. The internal shift away from
pretention and peer-approval is very hard to describe, so I will focus on the
external elements that helped put me on a new path. Just know that Christ’s
work within me was ongoing and not
only an effect of equally providential circumstances.
Some wonderful friends and
mentors that I had undeservedly collected at the time were rather ahead of me
in the process of reflection and evaluation. The role of C.S. Lewis’s writings
in my post-adolescent faith mirrors that of many others, so I will not dwell at
length on the tremendous and lasting impact his literary visions and
philosophical wisdom have had on me. I do however want to mention one perhaps
less profound but uniquely powerful book that altered the course of my life.
The book was J.P. Moreland’s Love Your
God With All Your Mind. Moreland is an Evangelical philosopher who helped
build the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics department at Biola University (Talbot
school of Theology). His book identified (in highly accessible prose) the trend
toward anti-intellectualism within mainstream Protestantism. It detailed the
characteristics of the “empty self,” a psychological profile rampant in our
culture, which includes a tendency toward narcissism, sensualilty, and
excessive individualism. And it gave direct, practical advice about fighting
against these trends, detailing some basic starting points for growth in
apologetics, logic, and the spiritual disciplines. I began to read more of his
books, to listen to his lectures and sermons, and even eventually to take his
advice. It is from him that I first heard about the Jesus Prayer, a tradition
arising from the Hesychasm of Eastern Christianity. At first Moreland’s
assessment of American Christian culture fed my impulse to criticize and
condemn others (as I’m sure many of my friends and family can verify), but it
was not long before it became clear that the assessment applied equally (if not
more justly) to me.
Dallas Willard
Through my Moreland
obsession I discovered his mentor, Dallas Willard, under whom he studied
philosophy (specifically analytic ontology and realism) at USC. C.S. Lewis and
G.K. Chesterton notwithstanding, I think it is safe to say that no other
Christian thinker has been so instrumental in the practical metamorphosis of my worldview than Dallas Willard. I
encourage anyone who wants a richer understanding of the Christian faith to
read and re-read his various books and numerous articles, and to download the
hundreds of hours of illuminating audio that you can find for free around the
internet. Here are the main tenets of Willard’s theology that I think most
related to the Orthodox Christian faith; they will also serve to summarize
those ideas that more generally comprised the soil of my understanding as the
Orthodoxy way began to take root in my heart.
[Disclaimer: To my knowledge, Dallas Willard never encouraged anyone to join the Orthodox Church, if
he even mentioned it at all. His ecclesiology was highly inclusive, and while
he often emphasized the importance of local, concrete communities of believers,
he seemed mostly to treat effective expressions of Christian discipleship as
trans-denominational (consider, for example, chapter 7 of Knowing Christ
Today). Nevertheless, it is plain that
Willard was very familiar with the early Church Fathers such as Athanasius of
Alexandria (whom he mentions in The Divine Conspiracy) and certainly many of his teachings mirror and rearticulate the themes
and messages of pre-Schism writings.]
Realism
Dallas Willard was a
philosopher, and one area of his expertise was ontology. There is a wide
spectrum of positions in this field of study, but I’ll generalize for the sake
of my broader points. Dallas was a metaphysical realist, meaning, roughly, that
Reality is not dependent on perception for its nature and qualities. In other
words, if something is beautiful, round, wooden, green, etc., then such
qualities are really in the world, not only in our
perceptions or thoughts of the world. This may sound obvious to some of you,
but it is becoming the minority view. Opposing views tend to fall under the
label “Nominalism,” meaning that human life and experience is largely projected onto a reality, which either has no intrinsic qualities independent
of our interpretations or does not even properly “exist” without them
(“nominal” means “in name only”). Whether we intellectually agree with Nominalism
or not, we do tend to operate practically under the assumption that our ideas
about reality have no essential connection to its make-up. We all need to
reflect on how deeply this line of thinking may have distorted our understanding
of God’s presence in every atom, both as its Designer and its Sustainer. In
western Christian life, nominalism finds its clearest expression in the
reduction of symbolism and sacraments to mere figurative representations or
means of “remembering.” It is very hard for us in the throes of secularism to
shake the deep, almost unconscious notion that spiritual significance is
something imposed from outside or above—a primarily mental reality. We live as
if God is up in heaven and the meaning He offers is extrinsic to the immediate, material world; He is no longer the one
in Whom “we live, and move, and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Like Willard,
Orthodoxy flatly rejects the nominalist assumption. The material world is
absolutely brimming with Christ and does not depend on our thinking to make it
meaningful. In other words, Christianity is not a conceptual lens for
interpreting the world so much as it is an opening of the eyes (as is so often
mentioned in Scripture) to see what is
really there.
The At-hand Kingdom
A related and central part
of Willard’s message is that reality at its base is the community of
Trinitarian love. As I said before, most modern Christians, even if they would
not say so, believe deep in their hearts that God is mostly removed from our
world and daily experience. Willard emphasizes that Christ is the present and
active Logos; that Heaven is here, within and around us, and capable of access.
He used to say, If you want to go to
Heaven, go now; don’t wait until you die. This is reminiscent of Fr.
Stephen Freeman’s notion of the “one-storey
universe,” where God is not removed, but “everywhere present.” Willard
defined the Kingdom of God as anywhere that His will is done, and he noted that
the gospel that Christ preached in Scripture is “Repent, for the Kingdom of God
is at hand.” In other words, it is now in
our midst. The whole Orthodox liturgy (along with the daily exercise of our
faith through the week) takes this very seriously, which accounts for the
various forms and practices of worship that many modern western Christians might
think of as superstition or idolatry—icons, incense, robes, candles, chanting,
a real belief in the communion of Saints and the mystery of Holy Eucharist. If
God, in Christ, has entered and infused all of reality, then there is no place
for rejecting or downgrading the physical elements. Indeed, all of it now
matters. That icons can be “windows to heaven”; that the Eucharist can be truly
the precious Blood and Body of Christ himself; that incense can not just
symbolize but somehow be our prayers
offered sweetly to God should not be so strange. But our world has been disenchanted,
and we now take the stale, flat wafer of Modernity somehow to be more “real”
than our Poet-Savior’s paradise of love.
No Gospel of Sin Management
Unlike the gospel of
repentance that Christ taught, a common assumption in American Protestantism is
that the essence of the Gospel is forgiveness of sins brought about by Christ’s
substitutionary death. Sometimes called “Penal Substitutionary Atonement,” this
view tends to treat forgiveness of sins as a legal transaction, an arrangement
largely independent of any actual change in character or participation for the
believer (except for a kind of mental acceptance). I won’t play the expert
here, but you’re welcome to start some conversations on this or read
more. Suffice to say that Willard clearly rejects this notion (for example,
here),
calling such a depleted message the “Gospel of Sin Management.” Instead,
Willard defined salvation as joining the
life that Christ is now leading on Earth, and he cautioned against any
version of the atonement that depicts God as getting “paid off” or “appeased” by
the death of His Son, noting that Christ did not die so that we didn’t have to,
but so that we could die with Him. In
being crucified with Christ, we are able to take on His resurrection, i.e. the true
life, Jesus Christ Himself. Similarly to Willard, Orthodoxy has long taught the
idea of Theosis,
briefly summarized in the beautiful words of St. Athanasius, “God became man so
that men might become gods.” We are commanded to be like God, like Christ, and
to partake of his Divine Life. This is salvation. (cf. 2 Peter 1:3-7)
Knowledge and Belief
One of Dallas Willard’s
greatest gifts was distilling difficult or vague concepts into manageable
terms. Two important concepts that he helped greatly to make clear for me were
Knowledge and Belief. Knowledge he
defined as on-going, interactive relationship. This means that the idea of mere
“head-knowledge” or an understanding of truth that is entirely theoretical or
mental is highly deficient in most contexts. Being “right” and/or producing
logically defensible “doctrines” for their own sakes are distracting and
potentially destructive impulses. All true knowledge should really aim at the
development of right relationships to the world—to reality—especially to the
Ultimate Reality, the triune God. This is also reflected in Orthodox thought
and practice, which has often (though at times somewhat flippantly) blamed
Scholasticism, Rationalism, and the so-called Enlightenment for the modern divorce
of mind and heart. Certainly a reflective human being must and should use his/her
reason to think and study the world carefully, but the elevation of human reason
to the highest or exclusively reliable source of spiritual truth or experience hampers
the cultivation of intimacy with the Divine Persons. Such a view is not
comfortable with mystery, and it threatens to reduce the unknowable essence of
God to a textbook concept or a philosophical axiom, such as the Unmoved Mover.
The beloved quotation from Evagrius Ponticus, “If you are a theologian, you
will pray truly. And if you pray truly, you are a theologian,” captures the
Orthodox idea that prayer—entering deeply into the Divine Presence—is how one
really “learns” about God. Studying theology can be very good and even
necessary, but the true practice of theology invariably, for the Orthodox,
means developing union with the
always near and ever-existent Christ. In this sense one can be a true
theologian and yet be dumb as a cow. That’s good news for me. (Note: I
am not by any means advocating a form of anti-intellectualism. I am only
against that slavish distortion of rationality that seeks to dismiss, manage, systematize,
and ultimately control realities that defy propositional and abstract
categories.)
Belief. My remarks in Part One about the centrality of
asceticism (the spiritual disciplines) in Orthodox spirituality derive in part
from a shift in my own thinking about belief. Dallas Willard taught that we can
discover what we really believe by simply looking at our actions. Belief, for
him, meant primarily a disposition to act as if something were true. It did not
mean a kind of purely mental activity in which we give assent to some
proposition or statement. Such an understanding means that you might not truly believe
what you nevertheless know. Consider
the difference between believing in gravity and “believing” in gravitational
theory. The one whose belief in gravity applies in the fullest sense is the one
who avoids jumping off cliffs, who does not set his glass of lemonade in
mid-air, and so forth. In this sense, human beings were deep believers in
gravity before any theoretical concept of gravity was formulated. In
theological contexts, however, we tend to treat our beliefs as abstractions to
which we have given at least a temporary “thumbs-up” in our minds. Faith itself
becomes a kind of mental act, a theoretical commitment, divorced from action or
obedience. Yet, as J.P. Moreland used to say, “It makes no sense to say you have
faith in your doctor, if you don’t take his advice.” The same applies to the
Divine Physician.
The Spiritual Disciplines
I will not rehash what I’ve
already said about the importance of integrating the ascetic practices into the
daily life of each Christian, and doing so in community and with proper
guidance. I encourage you to read (or re-read) Willard’s book The Spirit of The Disciplines or the
various works of Theophan the Recluse (among others) if you want an explicitly
Orthodox perspective. Suffice to say, Willard helped develop my understanding
of and commitment to a life of participation in my own transformation.
Hesychasm
One specific spiritual
practice that Willard advocated was ceaseless prayer of the heart. He often
recommended (and also wrote a foreword to) a book by Frank Laubach called Letters by a Modern Mystic. Similar to
the central figure in The Way of A
Pilgrim (a Russian spiritual classic), Laubach decided to take seriously the
idea of constant communion with God. He expended tremendous effort and focus
attempting to bring Jesus into his mind just once every minute throughout his
day and it completely changed his life. In Orthodox spirituality the term
“Hesychasm” refers to this inner prayer as taught and developed through
centuries, especially in the collection of writings called the Philokalia (which means the “love of
beauty”). The term “hesychasm” literally means “silence” or “stillness, and it prescribes
the attentive and guided use of the Jesus Prayer, which in its longest form is,
“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Oddly enough, I
first heard of this prayer from Evangelical teachers like Willard and Moreland
whose demeanors and personal lives evinced the astounding effects of this
interior communion. They, I regret to say, were the exceptions within
Evangelical circles, but the efficacy of such practices is undeniable. To say
that Hesychasm is an essential aspect of Orthodox monasticism is an
understatement, yet it is also a common and helpful aspect of spiritual
practice in the lives of ordinary Orthodox parishioners.
Human Freedom
I’ve never entertained even
a half-flirtation with so-called Reformed theology. To me, even its milder
versions pose some of the most repugnant inferences about God and human value
ever to turn the stomach of a person in pursuit of real Love. I knew from a
very early age that I had freely and actively alienated myself from the God (and
others). No matter. Regardless of what any of us say about the importance of human choice, responsibility,
sanctification, etc., the culture of American Protestantism subtly reinforces
the idea that we are mostly helpless and incorrigibly depraved. Thus, for all
my intellectual commitments to free will and moral responsibility, I had
absorbed unconsciously a lethal dose of passivity toward my own salvation.
Dallas Willard helped shake me out of this. He was fond of saying, “Grace is
opposed to earning, but not to effort.” His view of salvation as
participation in the Divine Life precluded such disparagements of human action.
Grace, to Willard, was like fuel: saints use a lot more of it than sinners because
they are trained to rely on it ever more fully (just as a jet engine uses more
gasoline than a lawnmower). Sadly, many Christians think of grace as just the
kindness God shows when He hands out free tickets to Spiritual Disneyland for
anybody who raises a hand to claim one. Fortunately, such an understanding has
never been a part of Orthodox theology or
culture.
The Flames of Heaven
The prospect of Hell is
real. However, many Protestant and Catholic thinkers tend to talk of Hell as geographical
location suited with various conditions for the eternal torture and punishment
of those who have “broken the rules” and didn’t manage to ask for forgiveness
before they kicked the bucket. For most Orthodox theologians and writers,
however, Hell is simply the name for the state of existence, the “outer
darkness” to which those who reject God relegate themselves because they are
obdurate, unwilling and therefore unprepared to tolerate the “consuming fire”
of God’s presence (Heb. 12:29, Dan. 7:9-10, Rev. 19, etc.). That is to say, the
Hell of the final judgment is mostly ontological, a state of being—as Milton’s
Satan says in Book IV of Paradise Lost,
Me miserable! which way shall I fly
Infinite
wrath and infinite despair?
Which
way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell.
Thus, the emphasis in
Orthodoxy is much less on God as a cosmic punisher. Rather, both God’s Light
and His Love may be experienced as “wrath” and “punishment” by those who have
so alloyed themselves with sin and death that they take them to be part of their
proper nature. Put differently, sin is like a subtle cancer; when it has so
metastasized throughout our souls and bodies that we cannot distinguish the afflicted
tissue from the healthy; all attempts to purify and heal us seem more like an
assault on the very core of who we
are—that is, on what we mistakenly think is essential to our identities.
Because of our practiced confusion, Love then feels like a threat to our “true”
selves rather than the remedy. (C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce offers a beautiful vision of precisely what I
mean.)
Now, since I am an amateur
(and in no position to speak for the Orthodox Church on this matter) I will
simply point you to this much more thorough
and intelligent reflection, by Alexandre Kalomiros. I do feel confident,
however, in representing Dallas Willard’s views. He used to talk about the
“Flames of Heaven,” namely, that God’s presence might be the one thing some
people really do not want. Fire can scorch or it can purify, and which one it
does is largely determined by the object to which it is applied. As I said
above, for Willard, salvation was always more than a ticket out of Hell; it is
the process by which one becomes gradually capable of standing in the Fire
without being consumed (cf. Exodus 3 and Daniel 3). In this context, Willard often
said, God will let anyone into Heaven who
can stand it. Or again, No one who
really wants to be there will be left out. In this way, Willard’s teachings
prepared me for a deeper understanding of God’s love, the unity of justice and
mercy—while still recognizing that some may freely and perpetually reject Him.
Nevertheless, one or two Orthodox teachers have suggested that with Eternity
and infinite Mercy (as well as remarkable ingenuity) on His side, God may eventually
win over even the most averse soul, for He “desires all people to be saved and
to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4). We can hope and pray at
least.
Some Concluding Remarks
The above paragraphs capture
the primary ways in which the instruction of Dallas Willard helped to point me
in an Orthodox direction. There were, as I’ve said, other important influences
as well. One final major influence on my thoughts was N.T. Wright. Wright is
perhaps the best New Testament scholar alive today. His writings on Pauline
theology and related concepts such as Justification, Atonement, etc. help
establish thorough Biblical warrant for the complete reevaluation (if not
rejection) of the typical lexicons of mainstream Evangelicalism and Reformed
theology. He is himself a faithful practitioner of Classical Anglicanism, as I
understand it, but his books, articles, and lectures are worth the time of any
serious student of scripture. His rigorous hermeneutics and elegant prose,
alongside Willard’s predominantly philosophical and devotional contemplations,
added also to Lewis’s brilliant narrative visions, apologetic treatises, and
keen personal reflections—not to mention countless other writers—all together built
a framework in me, a skeleton upon which the sinews and flesh of real faith yet
needed to be hung—breathed upon, and made alive. I still needed help. I needed
a life equal to or superior to all these beautiful ideas. But where does one
find it and what might one lose in the process?
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