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.

Part Three: What I Wanted and What I Found

[Read Part Two here.]

The Road to Anglicanism

A Little Biographical Interlude

At some point along in my young adulthood, I began to reflect on the “early church”—a common fixation for those who grow discontent with the highly modern, consumerist elements of American church life. We look wistfully back on a time when the Old Testament inheritance was not just historically but culturally part of faith and life; when scientific rationalism had not yet parsed everything into its vitiating spreadsheet; when the Holy Spirit was dangerously active in the daily affairs of local communities; when those who once sat at Christ’s feet were themselves the shepherds and stewards of the Church that He established.

Such reflections led me away from the predominantly academic realm and into the messy world of ecclesiology—that is, out of my books and into the pews, so to speak. Specifically, I was looking for two tangible realities that were largely missing from the faith communities of my youth: 1.) A recognition of both the historical and liturgical elements that one can trace back to the first century, and 2.) a genuine sense of the Holy Spirit’s power and presence in the life and transformation of believers (individually and corporately).

With respect  to the first consideration, my theological convictions made it all but impossible to entertain any of the churches broadly categorized as “Reformed,” no matter how stoutly liturgical they might be. The Episcopal Church was another group of semi-ornate enigmas, which my mind had somehow classified among the largely secular denominations committed to fundraisers and “civil rights,” offering little spiritual depth and no prescription for personal transformation. I had only a vague awareness of Orthodoxy at the time—perhaps as a kind of anthropological residue of impoverished peoples in Eastern Europe. So the natural place to start seemed to be Roman Catholicism—except, having been raised more or less to think of Catholicism as a cult, I had plenty of reservations there as well. Still, I was willing to look more closely at anything with legitimate historical credentials and suspend my preconceptions.

With respect to the second consideration, my hesitancy toward the abused term “charismatic” made my investigation a little more cautious. I wasn’t looking for an artificial psychological frenzy or an “emotional enema” (cf. Aldous Huxley), and I especially wasn’t looking for a new set of perfunctory behavioral expectations by which others could judge my legitimacy as a “true believer.” I read a few measured and intelligent books by respected members of mainstream charismatic movements and discovered some important observations and moving testimonies. I couldn’t, in the end, agree with everything, but it was clear to me that an intimacy with and humble reliance upon the Holy Spirit was essential. I had given lip-service to the idea for most of my life, but I didn’t really understand what I was looking for.

Following at times one impulse and then the other, I made both short and protracted ventures into a variety of local congregations over several years and locations. I hovered in more familiar haunts from time to time, but mostly those stints functioned as transitions to subsequent investigations. Sometime after I met my wife in 2004, we started regularly attending a Catholic parish in Chanhassen, MN. Sara, by the way, was raised as a faithful Catholic, albeit with a highly inclusive attitude toward other Christian expressions. This Minnesota parish was a warm and friendly place with thoughtful clergy, beautiful services, and many young families. Thus, in 2006, when my daughter was born, I began to think about her baptism. I won’t stop here to offer an explanation of how infant baptism became an important and desirable aspect of Christianity for me. I am sure there are numerous, intelligent explanations from all sorts of angles, but let it suffice for now to say that it is a long-standing practice of the Church (consider the book of Acts, for example). You can find it still today as an integral part the sacramental life in both Catholic and Orthodox parishes, as well as many traditional Protestant churches.

Around this time my wife and I, with little Lillian in tow, moved to Milwaukee so I could start graduate school. We showed up once or twice at the local Catholic parish and scheduled a meeting to discuss the parameters of our participation there as I also continued to weigh our next ecclesial steps. After a somewhat disappointing conversation with a lay-minister, I finally got it through my thick skull that if I wanted my daughter to be baptized as a Catholic I was implicitly (perhaps explicitly) committing to raise her in the faith and practices of the Catholic Church. And I finally realized (not sure why it took me so long) that I, too, would be unable to participate fully in their sacramental life unless I capitulated to the requirements of full membership. I was not ready for this, nor (as it turned out) would I ever be ready. I can outline why this is the case elsewhere, but for now, let me stick to the rough historical narrative.

For the next two years, Sara and I spent time at three or four different local congregations. We at some point, I think, had Lillian “dedicated” rather than baptized, which really just kicked the sacramental can down the road. Believe it or not, we ended our time in Milwaukee at a large Assemblies of God church, which was a bit emotive in its Sunday morning tenor, but evinced some of the vibrancy and sincerity we had ourselves lost in the exhaustion and isolation of parenthood and graduate study.  To abstract from the particular circumstances a bit, the trend for a few years was plainly a kind of vacillation between pursuing my historical/liturgical inclinations and satisfying my more immediate, personal desire for intimacy with God himself, all the while never forsaking my high expectations for theological depth, philosophical coherence, and hermeneutical rigor. I started to lose hope that all these things could exist together in a single parish let alone a whole tradition.

That burgeoning despair was stiffly curbed when we moved to Colorado.[1]

The Discovery of Classical Anglicanism in America

For our first several weeks in Colorado, we extended our excursion through comfortably charismatic congregations by attending the local Vineyard church. Many of my heroes in the Evangelical philosophical world had found homes in Vineyard congregations, and that was high praise in my mind. However, I had never lost the taste for real liturgy and a sense of reverence. This church, like many others, was something like a Starbucks and a movie theater, or perhaps a daycare attached to a concert venue. Now that we had two kids, I was more sensitive to what I would be training them to think of as proper worship. Dropping my kids off for playtime while I grabbed a latte and attended a rock concert was out of the question. So the search continued.

I can’t recall the parameters of the web search that led me to a small Anglican parish near Colorado State University, but a review of their website suggested that there must be more to Anglicanism than simply the British or Canadian label for the Episcopal Church. For those of you who may not be familiar with this tradition, here’s a very cursory synopsis.[2]  Others can feel free to skip ahead.

The English Reformation produced the Church of England (COE)—a predominantly Catholic faith (sans Pope) for several decades that was slowly reworked and formalized into a unique ecclesiastical entity—an optimistic “via media” between the Catholic faith and more staunch reformed theology. The faith and polity of the COE, which were exported through various means over the centuries, are known more generally as Anglicanism. However, many non-British peoples who loved this faith and yet were somewhat resentful of English hegemony preferred the moniker “Episcopalian” because it avoided the etymological reference to its country of origin.  When America famously parted ways with the British in 1776, the Anglican parishes in the colonies began to share this preference. Over time, as the Episcopal Church of the United States (TEC) grew further and further from its original faith and practice, many faithful clergy separated from TEC—sometimes joining the Catholic or Orthodox Churches, sometimes finding a place in other Protestant expressions. However, a large group of disenfranchised Episcopal clergy eventually sought to carve out their own jurisdiction under traditional, conservative bishops from traditional, conservative dioceses—mostly those in the so-called “global south” (e.g. Africa, Latin America, and Asia).  These bishops found it convenient now to reclaim the moniker “Anglican” since their desire was no longer to disassociate from England, but rather to disassociate from the modern Episcopal Church. All of this means, more or less, that the Anglican Church in North America (and related entities such as ACN, AMiA, PEARUSA, etc.) came to be comprised primarily of small start-up parishes that represent as best they can the classical, historical Anglican faith. The parish that I attended was originally part of the AMiA (Anglican Mission in America), deriving its identity both from these dedicated Americans and from the faithful clergy in Rwanda. Later, when the AMiA cut its ties with canonical Anglican authority, the parish retained its identity as a full part of the Anglican Communion through province of Rwanda, currently overseen by Archbishop Onesphore Rwaje.

Obviously I didn’t know any of this when I started to attend this particular parish, but even had I known of the excessive acronyms and the tenuous status of these parishes vis-à-vis the global Anglican Communion, the appeal of this particular community would have been undeniable. Here was a group of families deeply involved in each other’s welfare. Here was a parish with a strong commitment to the traditional practice of liturgy. Here was a parish that was explicitly charismatic, invoking and attending to the Holy Spirit. Here was a parish where the priest understood scripture and taught it faithfully. We sat on metal folding chairs in a pathetic little gym of a school that had probably never met fire-code, but it was better than anything I had ever before experienced.

From my perspective, there were very few problems with what I found in this community. The issues in the broader communion weren’t yet on my radar, and my dissatisfaction with my own spiritual growth had yet to hit critical mass (see the previous installments for details in that regard). In certain ways, I thought I had found the end to my ecclesiological quest.

Parish vs. Communion

For a long time—about 6 years—this was all I wanted. My ecclesial educators taught me that classical Anglicanism was the inheritor of “three streams”: 1.) the Catholic faith (whole/universal/historical), retaining apparent Apostolic succession to bolster the claim. 2.) Evangelical credentials—a commitment to Scripture, the Gospel, and missionary work. And 3.) Charismatic sensibility; that is, a prioritization of spiritual renewal, attentiveness to inner convictions, and genuine openness to the miraculous. This seemed amazing—even perfect.

What I didn’t know was that much of what I found at this particular parish was more like Orthodoxy than global Anglicanism. When I asked about liturgy, my priest gave me Orthodox theologian, Alexander Schmemann’s For The Life of The World. When I asked about prayer, my priest gave me, A Night in the Desert of the Holy Mountain, an insightful interview with an Orthodox monk. When I began to dig deeply into the works and reflections of Anglicans like C.S. Lewis and N.T. Wright, or when I discovered podcasts by Archdeacon Michael McKinnon, I began to believe Anglicanism was supposed to be just like Orthodoxy except with open communion, fewer ritualistic carryovers, and a stronger commitment to Biblical teaching. But I was wrong (and not for the last time—it’s a habit of mine).

Without being unfair, I think I can say that Anglicanism is almost impossible to define at this point in history. There is a camp that likes to think of it as true “Reformed Catholicity.” There is a camp that uses the term to refer to Protestantism par excellence. There are some who think it is the most fulfilling version of progressive, religious quests for social justice. There are others who think they are simply restoring the faith of the early Church, perhaps with some of the useful cultural aspects of the English-speaking peoples of the British Isles. In my opinion, it is at its best when it is exactly as I discovered it in this parish in Northern Colorado, and yet it was still amorphous and inclusive enough to make almost every western Christian relatively comfortable.

Sorting It Out

The truth is, even though I eventually left, the deficiencies of this church (or any church) were not the central problem. Obviously, I don’t think Anglicanism is the answer, but it was at least a beginning to the answer for me, and my tenure as an Anglican, brief as it was, allowed me to find balance and process more deeply the hang-ups that had long separated my faith from what I now believe offers the fullest version of the true and ancient faith.  Nevertheless, underneath all my earlier “church shopping” forays (a horrific but accurate description) was an infectious sort of individualism—that is, a belief that it was up to me what a “good” Church should imply. I had done my reading; I had thought and studied and determined the “truth.” Why wasn’t there a church that conformed to (or at least accommodated) my brilliant vision? Once again, I had failed to see many of my own narcissistic assumptions. I wasn’t looking for The Church to which I could humbly submit myself for training in unity with God; I was looking for a church, rendered in my own image. 

[Next up--Part Four: The Invisible Church and Other Barriers]

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[1] Note: During grad school, I met my first Orthodox friend, a patient and gentle person with a lovely story. He helped to broaden my view of both philosophy and theology, but at the time I regarded the primary obstacles to my joining as largely the same as those I had discovered in the Catholic church, though I dimly understood a few attractive differences, e.g. no papacy, no purgatory, etc. I went to my first Orthodox liturgy there in Milwaukee—the Paschal Vigil. It was beautiful, but very intense. The influence of this friendship and such experiences had a deep, incalculable effect. In 2008, while still in Milwaukee, we named our new baby boy Spiridon without any clue how common such a name was in the Orthodox world. Eight years later, we joined the parish of St. Spyridon in Loveland, CO and have now met six or seven others by the same name.

[2] To my Anglican friends: Please forgive this highly truncated and simplistic account.

Part Two: Briefly into the Weeds

[Read Part One here.]

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?

[Next up—Part Three: The Road to Anglicanism]