A Brief Meditation on Grace

One prevalent understanding of divine grace in mainstream American Christian culture pits it explicitly or implicitly against "good works." In contrast, Dallas Willard used to say, "Grace is opposed to earning, but not to effort," and even many Protestant thinkers now have followed suit in describing the grace of God as much more comprehensive than the old formula "unmerited favor." That phrase implies nothing of the rigorous, cooperative labor to which scripture so often exhorts us, and it falls short of characterizing the full life, energy, and activity of our God Who provides much more than a sort of cosmic "thumbs-up" to draw us further into union with Him. 

There are more and better ways of discussing this topic, I know, and many wise and learned people (among whom I would never count myself) have written about it to better effect. Still, I offer below a little analogy that has helped me somewhat in adjusting my own understanding, both conceptually and practically.

Imagine you are a little engine (perhaps Doubting Thomas the Train), and suppose, as I have suggested, that grace is something like energy (in the broadest sense--the energy that ultimately constitutes the material world of which you are made, and the energy that fuels your capacity to function at every level). Imagine too that the fuel upon which you were designed to function makes you stronger, more efficient, more beautiful the longer you use it. In fact, the proper fuel will actually refine and transform you into true engine-hood (i.e. full humanity)!  

When you use inappropriate substitutes, you become weaker, uglier, and more dysfunctional; indeed, even your ability to make use of the proper fuel is hindered as a consequence. It would be absurd for you, little engine, to think that either what you are or what you do can be meaningfully credited to your self as some uniquely creative self-sufficient entity. No, obviously you owe all that to God. On the other hand, it would be equally absurd to think that this ultimate and complete dependence on the Divine Energy implies that you cannot make free, concerted efforts to secure and run upon only the proper fuel, or that you could not do the reverse--that is, inure yourself to damaging synthetic substances that restrict, disintegrate, and destroy your engine. Clearly you, the conscious discerning Thomas the Train, must choose, must cooperate. That cooperation (perhaps we could also call it obedience) is what I call faith.

So when I read St. Paul's words, "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them," I hear God saying (in this context): "You are made a true engine by using the proper fuel, which I have provided and for which I designed you, owing none of that to yourself so you best shut your little toot-horn."

This is my (very rough) understanding of grace and sanctification (or deification), which is to say, the course of salvation. We are invited to work hard, to work full time--throughout and to the end of our lives to train our existence--our bodies, minds, and souls--to run on the grace of God, He Who is Love, He Who supplies "all [our] needs according to His riches in glory in Christ Jesus."

Acknowledgments

The path I’ve followed is perhaps hard to trace, covered as it is by such diverse underbrush. It is hard even for me to retread with precision, led as I was by so many impulses and failures, and also by so many wonderful guides. Some of those beautiful lives who have contributed to this journey must tolerate some recognition in this small corner of the internet:

Ágúst (Symeon) Magnússon: My first Orthodox (and Icelandic) friend. He challenged and suffered many of my recalcitrant, myopic assumptions. He is a beautiful man. Having gifted me my first icon (the Sinai Pantocrator), he put the first nail into the coffin of my sad westernized faith.

Dale Brown: This Anglican priest-turned-potty-mouthed-booze-drinking-icon-of-Christ is still far ahead of me on this path. May all his humility, guidance, and insight be rewarded. I owe him much.

Garret (Gregory) Miller: Philosopher and friend of a friend—now brother forever by the grace of God.

Jared (Paisios) Dybzinski: Perhaps more than anyone else, Jared has directly influenced my investigation and ultimate incorporation into the Orthodox faith. He is a patient, wise, and thoughtful man of precise words and cautious reflections. May God bless him.

Others, whose lasting effects I can hardly calculate, include:

Elijah White, Brendan Wicke, Fr. Mark Haas, Fr. Evan Armatas, Steve Hoskins, Lander Hultin, Seth Forwood, Steve Turney, Nolan Brown, Daniel Tucker, Kent Steiler, George Kenworthy, Scott Matkovich, and all my students, esp. Megan Davis, Elizabeth Yeh, Joe Caraway, and Anna Davis.

My eternal gratitude. 

Part Six: Death, Poetry, and Obedience

[Read Part Five here.]

I titled this section before I had written any of it. Even as I type now, I’m not sure what exactly I wish to add, but I do know it must somehow involve these three things: Death, Poetry, and Obedience. Part of me wants to retract everything after the prologue and start again here—sticking exclusively to Love and metaphor—not because I find my narrative problematic, but rather because, having worked through all of this over months and years, the surface explanations that have some vague appeal do not really convey the itch and ache and wonder of the process. My slow conversion has been more like fitful vertigo than a sudden epiphany, and probably such experiences are better described with colors or music, not clumps of verbiage marinated in my own confusion. But like I said at the outset, one impetus for beginning to write at all has been the need to face the confusion for myself and understand it better. My deepest gratitude to those who have had the patience and charity to follow along!

I started this series of half-baked explanations by reflecting on Bishop Kallistos Ware’s remark that we must be “loyal to the moments” in which we see deeply into the immeasurably dear and everlasting depths of another’s irreducible particularity. Such a being, exposed even briefly for his or her immense love-worthiness, is almost a crippling force—like gravity to the habitually weightless. As I suggested earlier, it is perhaps impossible to describe what I mean without sounding trite or ridiculous; you must consult your own experience. One might consider, as a rough parallel, the short scene in The Horse and His Boy (my favorite) when the talking horse Hwin sees the great lion Aslan for the first time. Terrifying as the experience is, her instincts serve her well:

"Please," she said, "you're so beautiful. You may eat me if you like. I'd sooner be eaten by you than fed by anyone else.”

Humility seems too mild a term to describe the effect of the sublime on a receptive soul. Here Hwin faces fear, forgets danger and death, and offers unto Beauty the only thing she has—herself. Of course, real Beauty does not devour but feeds and fills—as Christ himself, the manna of Heaven, feeds and fills. Yet a deep, even momentary willingness to abandon our own appetites and instead to be the one consumed can take a stubborn toll on the heart.

So where does death fit into this reflection?

Some of us require trauma to foster that willing abandonment. Pain, suffering, and death can be the occasions of a power by which we become capable of seeing what is real. And to see what is real is to love what is real, which is why, I suspect, few who have ever endured great turmoil or loss ever really wish their suffering to be erased or undone. We understand too dearly the change wrought within us by these instances, so we could only entertain the retrieval of those bygone circumstances and relationships if we could also retain the transformational effects engendered by their absence; the resultant understandings are too acute and intimate to leave us any conception of a future existence without the pale, revelatory light they shed upon all moments.

Such moments are not, I think, limited to the experience of physical death or personal loss—consider divorce, abuse, rejection, mental illness, sickness, injury, etc. Although I have less experience with some of these, I have seen and felt (and to some degree shared) the damage of them in the lives of others; and I have also seen and felt and shared the sweet and tender crop that many have yet managed to harvest from such coarse and bitter seed.

For me, the first and most painful occasion ever to scour the grime from the window of my private reflections was the loss of a dear friend—a beautiful young woman of incredible talent, wisdom, and emotional depth. Her sudden, accidental death (alongside two of her friends) was devastating, and it permanently wounded hundreds of lives to incalculable effect. I was only one such life, but it was a hard blow to my weak, sentimental heart. I was in love with her, or at least had been, before floundering in my selfish, juvenile insecurities. I felt inexplicably at fault for her death; saw clearly my own stupidity; felt a lot of shame, self-loathing; became at last aware of the great fissure I had allowed to grow between my mind and my heart.[1]

I can’t offer a definitive statement on the common features of a personal apocalypse, but somehow along the way everything merely practical or empirical begins to seem dreadfully sere or shallow—and then poetry makes better sense than anything else because we can look through it all, recognize that everything must be more than it is (that is, more than its apprehensible self).[2] Everything (all that really is) is rich and good—so good, in fact, that it burns the soul with an intolerable fire. Poetry seeks to find words for this truth, or rather for all particular instantiations of this truth. (I have already shared some of my thoughts along these lines.) Such visions have the power to interrogate and torment the heart. When received as a blessing, they will ask of you something that you cannot provide for yourself.  And those demands, therefore, must include something or someone entirely outside your management.  The independent, self-directed life is exposed like an infant on a barren hillside. It wails and shrivels and dies in its own futility. Thus may beauty spring out of anguish and yet grow also into a desire for help, for submission, for obedience. All this was said better, of course, by Hwin the Narnian mare, but how does it play out in the mind of a theological (and poetical) bungler?

Philosophies comprehensive enough to merit serious consideration will probably reflect one of two general attitudes toward reality: Either 1.) Reality is something we discover and learn to cooperate with, or 2.) Reality is something we create and therefore suit to our personal goals, perspectives etc. There may be some limited sense in which these two dispositions can be blended, but I believe, in the end, a thoughtful person will lean predominantly toward one view or the other. Sadly, I think most of us—even those of us who affirm objective Truth—live our lives largely devoted to the second view.

In the realm of spiritual practice, the often unconscious commitment to our own preferences (assisted no doubt by the phenomenon of “confirmation bias”) means that we more or less choose for ourselves what is true, helpful, and good. It is no coincidence that the word “heretic” derives from the Greek verb “to choose,” which implies that this kind of self-enlightenment is the best way to end up in a dark hole of one’s own pet conceptions.

Such a hole is where I found myself—even though (or perhaps because) my own conceptions were “chosen” largely from the American Protestant traditions in which I had been reared. The academic license to speculate, defend (proof-text), and systematize was part of my inheritance from a culture (and country) built largely upon ideals of self-initiative, self-reliance, and personal responsibility.

For a contrast, consider John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which I teach to sophomores each year. In it, Milton articulates in various beautiful episodes the classical understanding of Liberty. It sounds like a paradox to modern ears, but for Milton (and, I think, for the Church too) true Liberty is equivalent to obedience. In this respect, getting your way is frequently the shortest road to a ruined life. Satan and Adam both prove that. As I recently explained to one of my students, a fish is most free in the water, swimming and breathing as it was designed. Supposing a fish could wish itself to be “better” than it was made, the fulfillment of such a desire would actually mark the beginning of its death, its suffocation. Most of us are suffocating, I think—trying to live outside of the Church, straining our lungs with the oxygen of self.

 

In spite of my general comfort and familiarity with the concept of obedience, it was (and continues to be) a difficult disposition both to understand and to adopt. It is useful to go carefully through the scriptures with a renewed awareness of the thematic centrality of obedience. It is frequently and inextricably linked to faith, to love, to righteousness, and to salvation. Christ tells us to do what he says, to follow all he commands (John 15), to be perfect as His Father is perfect (Matt. 5). As I’ve suggested in previous installments, we often miss the full color of these exhortations—collapsing instead into a kind of passive spirituality that correlates to a purely mental conviction mistakenly labeled as “faith.” Nevertheless, “the rules of the Lord are true…sweeter also than honey.” We are to do, to act, to obey—not just to think, to feel, to believe. And if we are to embrace the precepts and commandments of Christ, we’re going to need help. This is where I started back in Part One. I needed help; I need help, and that, frankly, is precisely why Christ established the Church, the “pillar and ground of truth.”

This is how the prospect of a fully ecclesial self-hood unites my points about Death, Poetry, and Obedience: Suffering opens the heart to what is real. What is real, we find, is not paltry, formulaic, or even comprehensible. It involves flesh and fire and blood. It is beyond us, yet for us and within us. (Go read Till We Have Faces. You need better words and better stories than I have.)  Perhaps the more pagan and irrational it all sounds, the closer it comes to the truth (and therefore the further it is from pagan or irrational). We must take counsel. We must sacrifice many of our most tightly woven syllogisms. We must even make peace with going through the motions—“chew sand,” as one monastic put it—until we find the clear water, taste the fountain of immortality. We must obey; it is the only path to freedom. Orthodoxy is this path. It is training in death, in poetic apprehension, and in submission to Divine guidance articulated and curated by The One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. So I signed up.   

[Acknowledgements]

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[1] There have been other disappointments, losses, suicides that have since touched my life, deepening and refining the evaluations and insights that this first wound began. The process never really ends.

[2] It is true that some people respond to grief by thinking that everything is less than it appears to be. I think that such an experience may be a proper half to other revelations that serve as its full complement.

Part Five: Flesh and Blood

The Eucharist and The Incarnation

[Read Part Four here.]

In in almost every facet of human community there is a temptation to pride and sanctimony. We follow what we believe is right (why else would we follow it?), but “being right” becomes an attitude of judgment almost before we realize it. Protestantism is perhaps no worse in this aggravation of self than Orthodoxy or the Church of Rome, but it does have the unique quality of asserting an individual's worthiness by self-assessment—that is, by an intuitive grasp of one’s own "adequacy" before God. I had long ago deemed myself quite adequate, if not a little better than adequate. I was unequivocally a Christian. Who could deny it? I had done the right stuff, prayed the right words, read the right books, but most importantly (underneath it all), I did mostly love God. I didn’t always know how to show it, but I was trying my best, and I knew God would honor that. So when I looked to Rome or to Orthodoxy and found myself barred from communion with them, I thought who are they to judge my heart?

In truth, my objection to being excluded from full participation in other communions grew out of my own sense of self—especially where I was more knowledgeable and mature in my philosophical reflections. In my heart I thought, I’m at least as deserving as most of these perfunctory adherents or perhaps, I know more about their faith than they do!  It is likely that both Rome and Orthodoxy can be much too eager to boast of their historical, apostolic claims, treating as divine approval what is primarily divine blessing. However, the converse error of my inherited Protestant culture has been not to stress historical claims so much as to resent that anything should be asked of a believer but to be himself—as-is—covered no less under some abstract panacea known as "Grace," or, alternatively, to regard some percentage of mental agreement with the doctrines broadly characterizing the tradition in question as sufficient for full participation. What such notions meant for me (I cannot say Protestants in general), is that I wanted full acceptance within a community either unconditionally or without more than a partial commitment to its unique life, mutual involvement, and shared practices. This is, frankly, why Anglicanism is so attractive. You can believe almost nothing about historical Anglicanism and yet engage in any and every aspect of communal life, for you are yourself the only proper assessor of sacramental unity. What it means to be the Church for Anglicanism, and Protestantism more generally, is to have an internal, invisible union, mystically conferred by God. All external, physical aspects and actions are therefore downgraded to “outward signs of an inward grace,” which (in a modern context) implies that the outward part is less important; sacraments are merely representative (rather than actually constitutive) of communion with God and one another.

With just such an understanding, I failed to see the rationale for my exclusion from the Holy Mysteries. I didn’t want to jump through their hoops to get something I believed I already had, but I simultaneously wanted them to recognize I already had it. Yet how could I expect them to know? How did I expect them to evaluate this inner sense of belonging? This is about the time I realized that, in spite of my intellectual convictions, my subconscious beliefs were still telling me that being the way I was was good enough for any church. In other words, I wanted unconditional approval—not real love or unity. So when the Church responded to this attitude by saying, "You need to adopt a whole life where you actually change—a life of transformation," my vain heart said, Why do you think you're better than me? I've done my homework. I know as much as you do. But this response was not only to mistake understanding for mere “head knowledge” (see earlier remarks on this distinction), but also to project my own arrogance on to them. Basically, it proved that I had no business sharing their table.

Truly, I had yet to realize that there is nothing in Eucharistic exclusion to deny another's Christianity, sanctification, or individual life within the kingdom of God. Rather, the exclusion assumes the importance of shared understanding, mutual practice, and due reverence for the implicit reality. In short, it relies on the ordinary fact that one's disposition matters—not just one's doctrine or one's good will toward a community, nor even one's private love for and commitment to the triune God, but one's readiness to live and work for union with His embodied Church. Humility will not seek vindication, but submission, and my psychological or emotional perception of being rejected eventually had to give way to fresh attempts to understand the sacraments from an insider’s perspective.

A helpful (but by no means perfect) analogy for me has been the study of martial arts: Suppose that I am healthy and athletic; I appreciate the principles of self-defense and have a general appreciation of the historical forms. Perhaps I’ve also developed a degree of proficiency in one form by watching YouTube videos and conducting my own research. Would these personal qualifications allow me to walk into a dojo or gym and demand a black belt? No. Unless I enlist to train in and practice a form, say jiu jitsu, with an instructor who is himself trained in jiu jitsu, not only do I have no business asking for a black belt, I have no business asking for a white belt. Suppose moreover that I have actually learned jiu jitsu on my own, or from some independent institution, and I'm even better at it than some of the instructors—would even that justify such a demand? I think not. Until I adopt their particular life, the training regimen—become a student and learn their practices—I have no basis for asserting my place among them or judging them for their lack of acceptance. But if I refuse to join, why am I so insistent that they treat me as if I had? To put it more simply, we can only be unified if we are actually unified.

There is no inherent enmity in requiring conditions. God's love is unconditional but greater intimacy with Him is not. Marriage is itself a conditional relationship. A covenant is precisely the statement of those conditions that will bring about the proper state of unity. In marriage, we take vows to be loyal, trustworthy, and honorable. Implicit to such vows is more than the technical execution of our “duties,” but a humble commitment to greater and greater intimacy. If we are to be Christ's body and his bride, we ought to be at least a bit more attentive to the factors by which we are made one flesh. Fr. Stephen Freeman speaks frankly on this analogy concerning the Eucharist:

As recently as the 1960’s, “closed communion” (so-called) was the normative practice across all denominations with only minor exceptions. And it had been the single practice of Christians since the beginning.

It is not a denial of union – it is the profession of belief in union. If there is no true union, then there is no danger in the Cup. Indeed, the modern practice of “open-communion” is a denial of union and of any possible danger in the Cup. It becomes the anti-communion. This same understanding of union is also inherent in Christian marriage. A man and a woman “become one flesh.” That union is sacramentally consummated in their sexual union, and seen as fruitful and particularly blessed in the conception of children. And the marriage union has boundaries. The communion of a man and a woman in marriage is not open to “hospitality” or “sharing.” Their union is guarded by chastity, by faithfulness and by steadfast love. In the practice of “open communion,” no chastity is required (any doctrine may be held by the one who approaches the Cup); no faithfulness is required (people may come and go at will and accept no mutual responsibility or discipline); no steadfast love is expected. Communion becomes ecclesial politeness."[1]

Again let me say: none of this is intended to deny the legitimacy of another person’s faith in God. It is an affirmative stance, not a negative one. The Orthodox are fond of saying “We know where the Holy Spirit is, but we do not know where the Holy Spirit is not.” God looks upon the heart of man, and may He have mercy on mine! Nevertheless, the Eucharist matters deeply—indeed it is another revelation of Christ’s incarnation. That the Word was made flesh has long been a point of difficulty for the human intellect. We like things to fall neatly into one category or another, in this case spiritual or physical, immaterial or material. But the Eucharist, Christ’s Church (His Body), Christ Himself—these are all One, and they unify (and yet defy) these categories. They are spiritual and divine, yet not ethereal or abstract. They are physical and concrete, yet not reducibly so. It is a mistake, therefore, to separate the human and divine in our ecclesiology. We must get away from metaphors and abstractions and learn to accept the challenging mystery that Christ has a real body, and He makes us His real body by feeding us His real body.

For many of you this may be challenging and offensive. I hope not. The reason, I think, that closed communion seems so scandalous is precisely because it is connected deeply with “being the Church.” When you exclude someone from communion, you imply that he or she is not fully part of Christ’s Body. That’s a tough pill to swallow. But the alternative is to dilute and spiritualize the concrete, visible reality established by Christ Himself. Within Orthodox Christianity, one cannot speak properly of the “merely human” or “merely symbolic,” for the Incarnation renders such distinctions fallacious. What is sym-bolic (“thrown together”) cannot be separated in Christ. What is human (flesh and all) has been made divine, for the divine became human. To use Milton’s words again—God speaking to His Son:

Thy Humiliation shall exalt

With thee thy Manhood also to this Throne;

Here shalt thou sit incarnate, here shalt Reign

Both God and Man, Son both of God and Man,

Anointed universal King.

We all affirm the Incarnation in our theology and our conversations, but we struggle to hold onto it in our hearts because we still doubt that all this mess we call the physical world can really be part of the Ultimate Reality. Relegating God and The Church to the invisible realm, even unconsciously, allows us a degree of comfort with the division, ugliness, and incongruity of our ordinary experience. But it is this ordinary experience that Christ came to redeem. The Church may be as ugly or as beautiful as any human marriage, but like marriage, it cannot be simply ideological. At some point bodies must join other bodies and live together under the same roof.[2]

[Next up—Part Six: Death,Poetry, and Obedience]

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[1] Fr. Stephen Freeman “Un-ecumensim and the Saving Union”

[2] I wish to mention that when I ran this segment by my friend, himself a convert to Orthodoxy from Buddhism, he noted that it is mostly impossible to separate Eucharist from the entire sacramental life. All of it is interrelated. The Eucharist combines and fulfills all the prayer, worship, confession, fasting, etc.—and in some mystical fashion Eucharist is also within all those things—Thanksgiving in its most holistic sense. This is what my martial arts analogy attempted to capture, but keep in mind that I am offering only a very rough sketch about something nearly impossible to articulate. One might as easily write a love poem in differential equations.

 

Part Four: Sticking Points

The Invisible Church and Other Barriers

[Read Part Three here.]

I have already recounted something of the existential crisis that led me to seek real, personal change over the mere formal or theological elements, but my reservations about Orthodoxy (and Catholicism, for that matter) were at this point still numerous. Allow me to detail some of the most significant barriers that kept me a devoted Anglican for five or six years. I’m afraid I cannot offer comprehensive answers to each difficulty. Some of the issues are quite complex. Still, I’ll try to give you some sense of my current perspective, and perhaps point you to some other (and better) resources. There are many.

Primacy of Scripture

Like a good Protestant, I was eager never to downgrade Scripture for the sake of some “tradition.” However, as an amateur philosopher, I also knew that interpretations of Scripture are driven by underlying assumptions—hence the thousands of denominations (not to mention cults) who claim simply to be following the “plain meaning” of the text.  It is somewhat delusional—in a fallen world—to think that one can simply apply reason, do some basic historical and linguistic research and come away with the fully accurate vision of Christian life (Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick has some nice reflections about this fact). What we’re taught about the Bible and what we take to be a proper interpretive lens for the various debatable passages do not themselves derive from Scripture. So an important question is what traditions (handed-down teachings) have informed our understanding of the Bible? My own (little “t”) tradition (whether I liked it or not) included a highly modern, rational sense of “fact-finding.” I had my own philosophical framework to guide this investigation. I had the general principles outlined during the Reformation. I had some very basic training in Biblical languages and exegesis. And I had the subconscious cultural conviction that my private experience attended by emotional sincerity would aid me in applying what all these other intellectual exercises were primarily intended to produce: the capacity to prove that I was right! I will not detail here everything that helped me evaluate my own mistaken attitudes toward Tradition (big “T”) that seemed to threaten the centrality of Scripture. Others have done a better job at that (here or here, for instance). Suffice to say that my uneasiness about accepting Tradition as united with Scripture was unwarranted. The Holy Scriptures are revered, read, taught, and studied with great zeal in the Orthodox Church.

[Note: On the problematic assumptions beneath Sola Scriptura see the first few episodes of this podcast by Dcn Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers.]

Individualism vs. Individual Responsibility

Individualism, more or less, makes one his own purveyor of truth and significance. Related beliefs and attitudes are corrosive to anything that aims to be remotely worthy of the term “communion.” Nevertheless, this fact does not remove our individual responsibility to seek and to embrace the Truth for ourselves. Though I am no expert, my understanding of Kierkegaard's reflections on faith had suggested that even where it is possible, we must not simply absorb the prefabricated concepts, categories, or convictions of someone else. I agree with this impulse for authenticity. Certainly, we do not invent our own faith, but what we discover in the religious sphere must be rendered genuinely ours, not just passively imbibed. How can one balance such responsibility with the idea of obedience to authority, submission in praxis, humility in the face of uncomfortable mysteries? It’s very hard to answer such a question (though this lovely piece offers some very useful points on that topic). In my experience, there is a kind of back and forth movement in discovering a life of obedience to something new and unfamiliar. It is rather like acclimating oneself to the vast, cold ocean. In this case, I waded in a little; then I retreated to reflect on the experience. I waded in a little more, and then retreated again. I observed the lives of others who were already acclimated, and I observed my own life as I remained aloof. Over time, what I wanted for myself became what I had begun to experience through testing and observation. Full immersion was the only step left. There was still plenty of risk (and plenty of fear), but doubling down on stagnation was in some ways an even greater risk.

Ecclesiastical Variety and the Invisible Church

One of my old reservations came from a latent idea that the “true Church” was really comprised of those people whom God in His wisdom knew to be sincere followers of Christ, regardless of their traditions or denominations. In spite of the painful schisms to which they testify, I interpreted the highly diverse expressions of Christianity, mostly as a providential accommodation of diverse peoples. C. S. Lewis’s The Last Battle, the beautiful conclusion to the incomparable Chronicles of Narnia, seems to support this view. After the apocalyptic climax, the characters find themselves in the truer Narnia revealed beneath or behind or within the old. It is Lewis’s allegorical vision of the new Heavens and new Earth. Among those who have now entered this eternal realm, the Pevensie children find one of the Calormen—a pagan and violent people devoted to a savage deity named Tash. This particular Calormene, Emeth, is just as surprised as some of Lewis’s readers to discover he is welcomed by Aslan to this new reality, opposed as he was to Aslan and the religion of the Narnian people. In this lovely vignette, Lewis seems to be suggesting (as indeed Christ’s own words about the final judgment also suggest) that God, who sees the inner heart of each human being, responds in love wherever He is welcome and brings those who truly seek Him into the life He offers. Who, then, am I to pretend I know who is “in” or “out”? This generous inclusivity in the plan of salvation has always appealed to me, and still does. Yet at some point, I realized that I had conflated this soteriological charity with a highly inclusive ecclesiology. Or, to use less pretentious words, I had confused the conditions for “getting into heaven” with the proper attitude toward “being the Church.” All sorts of concepts are wrapped up in this confusion (sin, salvation, communion, etc.), and I can’t address them all. Let it suffice, for now, to say that the Orthodox do believe that God provides grace to all; The Holy Spirit goes wither it wills, but it is up to individuals to participate, to soak in, to cooperate with that grace. Additionally, individuals are not meant to eat, drink, and dwell in isolation from each other, and so Christ himself establishes the food, the drink, the unity of his own body—in short, the Church and her Holy Mysteries—for the continuance and the conveyance of a life steeped in His loving energies. The Church, therefore, is a particular, concrete, historical reality, built and maintained by Christ and His holy disciples. It is not merely an idea or inner disposition. The modern concept of an “invisible church” to which all sincere believers mystically belong is only an intellectual palliative for the kaleidoscopic fragmentation of Christian denominationalism. There’s no significant historical or scriptural warrant for it, and unfortunately, the idea also keeps us largely content with some very deep divisions.  [Read more on this here.]

All of this is not to say that other Christians, Protestant or Catholic, are disqualified from God’s grace; they certainly are not. But remember, from an Orthodox perspective, salvation is not about “getting in” or “making the cut.” It is about abundant life. Plenty of people, like the Calormene, can “make the cut” by the mercy of God. Nevertheless, those outside of the Orthodox Church presently do not share the full life and unity available within it, meaning that the power and provision for which the Church was established are at best impeded or missing and at worst, completely distorted.

I will, by necessity, say more about ecclesiology in another installment when I address the Eucharist. For now, allow me to close this section with this quotation from Bishop Kallistos Ware in his wonderful book The Orthodox Way:

It is of course true that there are many who with their conscious brain reject Christ and his Church, or who have never heard of him; and yet, unknown to themselves, these people are true servants of the one Lord in their deep heart and in the implicit direction of their whole life. God is able to save those who in this life never belonged to his Church. But looking at the matter from our side, this does not entitle any of us to say, “The Church is unnecessary for me.” There is in Christianity no such thing as a spiritual élite exempt from the obligations of normal church membership.

The Religion of the Heart

Dallas Willard, whom I have previously covered at some length, clearly endorses a generous ecumenism, perhaps even the “invisible Church” notion I have just addressed above.[1] He does so primarily because he sees the turmoil created by a toxic dedication to one-upmanship amongst the members of differing Christian groups and subcultures. In emphasizing charity, Willard does well to remind us of Christ’s centrality and the “Religion of the Heart” which focuses not on mere behavioral or ritualistic conformity, but on the sincerity and inner devotion that Christ Himself speaks of in Matthew, Chapters 5-7 (The Sermon on the Mount). For a long time, this emphasis kept me from considering any Tradition that seemed to require robust ascetic or sacramental practices. This is sadly ironic since, in the end, those were precisely what my heart needed for deeper transformation. Still, I do fully believe that the development of a genuine spiritual disposition must be primary in our local Church communities. And yet we need not treat that goal as somehow incompatible with outward bodily practices. Physical actions often involve and reinforce proper spiritual attitudes. After all, the Word became flesh in order that the body itself might be redeemed in the death and resurrection of Christ (cf. Romans 8:23). When Christ criticized the Pharisees for a legalistic, perfunctory, and/or self-congratulatory approach to “righteousness,” he was not thereby suggesting that all their forms and practices were themselves the source of that error. Jesus gave plenty of commands and He Himself followed the law perfectly, also enjoining his disciples to fast, pray, baptize, serve, offer communion, etc.  We must all guard against temptations to pride and vanity. And, yes, I have shown plenty of both. But don’t allow my personal failures or the fear of legalism deprive you of a chance to harness further the grace of God, to train in obedience for the sanctification of soul and body (cf. 1 Cor. 9: 26-27 and Titus 2:11-14).

The Biggest Obstacle

After years of reflection, probably the most significant impediment to my adopting a fully Orthodox perspective was how I understood the Eucharist—communion—and its implications for what it meant to belong to God’s Church. I was scandalized by the practice of closed communion and the sense that I was being cut out, excluded—rejected as unworthy or incomplete. The topic is too important, I think, to deal with in a paragraph. It is a broad strand in the full tapestry I am only beginning to understand. So I will address it at length in a subsequent installment.

[Nextup—Part Five: The Eucharist and The Incarnation]

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[1] See Chapter 7 of Knowing Christ Today, especially 178 and 181-182.