Orthodox Christian Identity in America

Fr. John H. Erickson on "Orthodox Christian Identity in America: Historical Perspectives, Present Challenges" Recorded on November 15, 2012  at St. Herman of Alaska Orthodox Sobor in Edmonton, AB, Canada. www.sthermans.ca

Fr. John is the Dean Emeritus of St. Vladimir's Orthodox Seminary in New York, USA. Recorded

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8R8oCo4WL8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5LoJ8RblxY

Transcript:

Part 1

Fr John Erickson: Thank you very much for your introduction, and I promise not to tell any Norwegian jokes.  We had many in Minnesota when I was growing up.  It's wonderful to be here in Edmonton.  I've not been here.  I've driven through Calgary on my—driving across country once.  I've been enjoying the city.  It's really wonderful to see snow again.  We do have snow in Arizona up in the mountains, but this reminds me much more of growing up in northern Minnesota, which is what makes me—My wife is from Minot, North Dakota, which is even closer to being Canadian.  She even speaks practically like you folks.  And I promise I'm not going to do all of this this evening.  This combines several other things.

I'd like to begin with a deceptively simple question.  What is the Orthodox Church?  When we refer to this church, to our church, that's the church at least of most of us who are here this evening, what do we mean by this?  If someone says, "Tell me about your church," how do we respond.  How do we present this church to others?  How do we present this church to ourselves?  And this evening, and continuing on Saturday, I'd like to explore such questions by offering some reflections on Orthodox identity.  I'll begin with some historical perspectives, and keep in mind, I taught church history for over 30 years, mostly ancient and medieval.  But then I'd like to consider some challenges that we face in North America, in the United States and Canada, but also challenges in other lands of mass immigration in this now the 21st century.

As a point of departure, I'd like to consider the word identity itself.  The word can be used in several ways.  It comes from the Latin word idem, and as that suggests, in its proper sense, identity means self-sameness.  It's what makes something to be one and the same yesterday, today, and forever.  But in everyday English, the word identity is also used in a looser sense to mean individuality.  What distinguishes one thing from others.  I'm quoting now from a dictionary definition.  The set of behavioral or individual characteristics by which a thing is definitively recognizable or known.  So in the United States at least, and maybe here in Canada also, one can speak of an underworld informant being given a new identity as part of a government witness protection program.

When referring to the church, theologians, Orthodox theologians most often use the word identity in the former sense of the word, to mean self-sameness.  Consider this passage from an essay by Father George Florovsky, who is one of the most distinguished Orthodox theologians of the 20th century, and I'm sure many of you have read essays by him in books.  "The Orthodox Church," he says, "claims to be the church.  The Orthodox Church is conscious and aware of her identity through the ages, in spite of all perplexities and changes.  She has kept intact and immaculate the sacred heritage of the early church of the apostles and the fathers, the faith which was once delivered to the saints.  She is aware of the identity of her teaching, with the apostolic message in the tradition of the ancient church, even though she might have failed occasionally to convey this message to particular generations in its full splendor, and in a way that carries conviction."

"What gives the Orthodox Church her identity," Florovsky continues, "is living tradition."  He observes, "This is not just a human tradition maintained by human memory and imitation.  Rather it is a sacred or holy tradition maintained by the abiding presence and guidance of the Holy Spirit.  The ultimate identity of the church is grounded in her sacramental structure, in the organic continuity of the body."  And again, I take this simply as typical of the way in which many people would write and speak of the church and identity of the church.

I think most Orthodox theologians would accept this understanding of the identity of the Orthodox Church.  Like Florovsky, they would locate the ultimate identity of the church in her sacramental structure, in the organic continuity of the body, in the sacramental and spiritual life, which has been, again quoting Florovsky, "which has been ever the same in the course of ages, despite historic failures and losses, despite perplexities and changes.  Despite the fact," Florovsky says in another lecture, and I think very truly, "despite the fact that the true church is not yet the perfect church."

I mention all this because seen through the eyes of faith, the ultimate identity of the Orthodox Church as the spirit-filled body of Christ is evident.  But what is evident to the eyes of faith may be less evident to outside observers.  May be less evident to outside observers, and in this category we have to count not just sociologists, historians, other students of empirical phenomena, but Orthodox Christians themselves.  Our perception of the Orthodox Church has been molded by those historic failures and losses, those perplexities and changes, that Florovsky speaks of, perhaps more than Florovsky and many theologians have been willing to recognize.  The externally perceptible identity of the Orthodox Church, that set of behavioral or individual characteristics by which an observer might identify and recognize the Orthodox Church, is more complex, more difficult to explain than theologians sometimes acknowledge.

Just consider trying to give a succinct definition of the Orthodox Church.  Let's say you're writing a newspaper article or, for the more academically inclined, a dictionary entry.  A presentation that limited itself to the kinds of theological truths I was just repeating would lack credibility.  Even a sympathetic reader might have difficulty recognizing in it the historic Orthodox Church that we encounter in everyday life, that we encounter in everyday life here in Alberta, or in Arizona, through whatever province or state begins with a Z.  Let me just offer as an illustration, one of the churches—I serve pretty regularly and pretty evenly in four churches in southern Arizona, one in the Serbian Western Diocese, one in the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese, one in the Antiochian Archdiocese, and one in the OCA.  Four different churches, four jurisdictions, two calendars, lots of differences, and four bishops.

Let me use just as an example the St. Demetrius Greek Orthodox Church in Tucson, Arizona.  We're very proud at St. Demetrius to have the largest Greek festival in the state of Arizona.  It runs for four days, packs in enormous crowds.  There can be lines up to forty minutes just waiting to pay the admissions to get in to it.  It's a wonderful event.  It pays the assessment for the parish to the diocese, many other things.  It also has a very active Philoptocos Society, the women's organization.  The people who are most active in it are the American wives of a number of the Greek male parishioners.  They may not go very often, but the wives are there and they make very wonderful baklava.  St. Demetrius also has a celebrated troop of Panathenian dancers, young people.  Their numbers include two Eritrean kids, because it is a very diverse parish, in fact.  This is the Orthodox Church as we need it on Fort Lowell Road in Tucson, Arizona.  I'm sure you can find diversity of this sort, surprises of this sort, in Alberta as well.

So let's turn now to this externally perceptible identity of the Orthodox Church.  The way we appear to others.  As this is presented first in popular introductions to Orthodoxy.  Here I'm going to be putting together a string of passages from now Metropolitan Kallistos Ware's "The Orthodox Church," probably the most popular introduction to Orthodoxy going, and probably most of you have looked at it from time to time.

"The Orthodox Church is most often described as a family of self-governing churches, which are held together not by a single prelate wielding absolute power over the whole body, but by the double bond of unity and faith and communion in the sacraments."  Then he continues, so far theological verities.  "In popular presentations of this sort, the universal vocation of Orthodoxy may be acknowledged, but certainly the self-governing churches actually constituting this family are more or less accurately recognized as being Eastern, as distinct from Western in their primary geographic distribution; as being Greek, as distinct from Latin or Syriac in their theological tradition; largely ethnic, Russian, Romanian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian, Greek in their culture.  The special role of the patriarch of Constantinople in this family, often a dysfunctional family of churches, may be mentioned, but usually it's in a way to contrast his position with that of the Pope in the Roman Catholic Church."

As further refinements and qualifications are added, these popular presentations do give a reasonably accurate account of the set of behavioral or individual characteristics, by which an outsider might recognize and identify the Orthodox Church.  As they do so, they suggest also how difficult it can be to recognize the externally perceptible identity of the Orthodox Church, how we look to others and even to ourselves.  With that self-sameness that we experience in the Church's sacramental and spiritual life.  How do you hold these together?

Also, these externally perceptible aspects of our identity suggest the high degree to which Orthodox identity in its external aspect has been formed in very particular historical circumstances.  These circumstances, some economic, political, circumstances of the sort typically studied by historians.  But there's also a specifically religious element involved in the way in which we come to be viewed.  To a high degree, and I'll spend a couple minutes on this theme.  To a high degree, Orthodox identity in its external aspect has been formed in the context of Christian divisions.  The characteristics by which not only outsiders, but we ourselves, identify our church, most often are those that make us different from other Christian groups.  Certainly that has been, over the centuries, how we have gone about presenting ourselves, or others have identified us.

Now a full account of how these distinctive characteristics have emerged and have gained prominence in Orthodox self-understanding, this would require many volumes.  I usually do that in two semesters, or three, depending on changes in the curriculum.  At the risk of over-simplification, we can identify two ways this has happened.  This has happened by emulation.  That is, by imitation or appropriation for oneself of claims, institutions, or practices of another.  Or it can take place by way of contradiction.  That is, by rejection of the claims, institutions, or practices of another, and the concurrent development of claims, institutions, or practices more or less directly opposed to them.  This may sound awfully abstract, but I'll offer an example.  I'll offer an example from ancient church history, one that will not be particularly controversial at this point.

Let me illustrate with reference to the history of relations between Eastern Orthodox, Chalcedonian Byzantine tradition Orthodox.  Us, in other words.  Our relations with the non-Chalcedonian or Oriental Orthodox.  Once upon a time, very often incorrectly referred to as Monophysite.  The division between our families of churches goes back to the Council of Chalcedon in the year 451 A.D.  We call this the 4th Ecumenical Council.  They don't.  In this Oriental Orthodox pre-Chalcedonian or non-Chalcedonian family of churches would be the Copts, whom we will be visiting in the course of these events.  David, you'll have to remind me when it is that we're doing this.  Copts in Egypt, Armenians, Syrians, Ethiopians, Eritreans in their own countries.

In the decades immediately following the Council of Chalcedon, back in the 5th century, both sides competed for the designation Orthodox.  In various ways they tried to demonstrate their own perfect fidelity to the faith of Nicea, the first ecumenical council.  For example, it was in this context that the Creed, the Nicene Creed was introduced into the divine liturgy.  The Creed hadn't been used in the course of the divine liturgy until that point.  It was associated with baptism.  But it was at this point that you prove that you're really Orthodox by saying the Nicene Creed every liturgy.

But somewhat later, emulation of this sort gives way to contradiction.  We can see this at its simplest in our Triodian rubric for Cheesefare Week.  The accursed Armenians fast from eggs and cheese, but we, to refute their damnable heresy to eat both eggs and cheese for the entire week.  In other words, what one side does is enough to prompt the other to do the opposite.

Also in this same period, new and divergent symbolic interpretations come to be given to ancient liturgical practices that originally had nothing divisive about them at all, no polemical intent at all.  For example the use of leavened or unleavened bread in the Eucharist, the use of a mingled challis with warm water added as we do, or not.  All of these things eventually are given a polemical understanding, although they originally arose without any polemical intent at all.

I mention these elements of emulation and contradiction by relation with the Oriental Orthodox.  At this point it's no longer a significant problem.  But this same process can be seen in our relations with the Latin West from the later middle ages onward.  Certainly, scholars now recognize the separation of the churches can't be dated with precision.  Don't exaggeration the importance of the year 1054, people say, as the year of the schism.  Sometimes you'll get branching schema showing how churches branched off one way or another.

Only very slowly did their alienation reach a point that these churches regarded the other as being outside the fullness of the church.  Long after 1054, when churchmen in the Byzantine East contested Rome's claim to be the universal mother church, they did so by appealing to the idea of the pentarchy of patriarchates, by meaning here Rome first, then Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem.  All this recalling the idea of the church, the ancient Christian understanding of the church as an ordered communion of sister churches.

But from the 13th century onward, we can notice signs of change as Roman claims begin to have serious implications.  I think, for example, of Frankish Western crusaders sacking Constantinople in the year 1204, something still very painful in people's memory.  Hitherto, the  Easterners, and this is getting too much into Byzantine history probably.  Hitherto, Easterners had taken the existence and the external support of the Byzantine Empire, Roman Empire, for granted.  Now the empire is crumbling.

In the vacuum, patriarchs of Constantinople, initially living in exile in Nicea, began to rebut papal claims to universal authority by calling attention to their own universal authority among the right believing.  Us.  Rather than the emperor, or a fortiori the pope, now the patriarch comes to be seen as the focal point of the civilized world, the symbol of the unity, the identity of an organic Orthodox Christian world now over against the Latin West.

Again, I'm sketching this as quickly as possible.  You can see how developments in one area will influence the way that we present ourselves.  In other words, Latin claims are rejected, but aspects of these claims are adopted as our own.  After the fall of Constantinople to the Turks, signs of emulation and contradiction, often in combination, multiply.  The most often cited examples, some of you will be familiar with this, are in the area of theology, a kind of uncritical adoption of Latin scholastic categories.  Most often this is blamed on Peter Mohila, canonized in two jurisdictions or three, roundly castigated in another.  Florovsky referred to this as a pseudo morphosis of Orthodox theology.  It was conspicuous in Ukraine and Russia.

But this same tendency can be detected elsewhere, even when anti-Latin feeling is very, very strong.  For example, in the Greek East in the 18th century, there was a big controversy about confession.  Many of you may be familiar with the name of Saint Nicodemos the Hagiorite, Saint Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain.  He is the perennial favorite of Orthodox traditionalists, and very often people look to him as an example of true Orthodoxy against anything Latin.  This again may be a little technical sounding.  He wrote a manual for confessors, how to hear confessions.  In this manual, Saint Nicodemos insists on the use of a deprecative formula of absolution, "May God forgive."  And he vigorously attacks use of an indicative formula, "I forgive and absolve."  A patriarch of Constantinople, Callinicus III, had insisted that was the right formula to use for confession.  Now it's easy to say how right Saint Nicodemos was.  This indicative formula, "I, an unworthy priest, forgive and absolve."  This certainly, he'd say, must be a sign of latinization.

But there's a lot of irony in this.  Because like his opponent, Patriarch Callinicus, Saint Nicodemos the Hagiorite was preoccupied with determining the right formula to use.  In earlier centuries there was not a preoccupation with this at all.  There was a whole range of things, formulas, or rather words and prayers that wold be said, not an effort to find a single right formula for absolution.  This is a preoccupation you don't find earlier.  Saint Nicodemos refers to his preferred words precisely as "the form of the sacrament," in Greek, [speaking in Greek].  This is technical theological vocabulary, and it is straight out of Latin scholastic theological vocabulary.  The form of the sacrament.  He attacks the indicative formula as a latinization, but he does so, Saint Nicodemos does so in the context, in the framework of a sacramental theology that itself is quite latinized even in it's technical terminology.  Again, there are a lot of ironies of this sort.

Less often noted is the impact that developments in Latin understanding of the church had on our Orthodox self-definition in this period.  The Latin church, the Western church in the middle ages, could be described as a big tent.  All kinds of theological current and views of church polity could be encountered.  This changes in the age of the Protestant reformation in the 16th century.  The reformers tended to view the church as the invisible body of true believers.  Again, I'm over-simplifying.  That is to say, those who had correctly perceived and appreciated the doctrine of salvation by faith alone.

Against this invisible understanding of the church, Roman Catholic theologians developed what has been called soteriological and ecclesiological exclusivism.  That is, the idea that no salvation is possible outside the visible institutional structures of the Roman Catholic Church.  Quickly enough, this understanding of the church, initially developed against the Protestants, comes to be applied to the Orthodox as well.  An earlier sacramental approach could suggest that the Orthodox—an approach common both East and West—could envision reunion as restoration of communion between sister churches, estranged churches, but could envision reconciliation.

Now this gives way in the Catholic West to a predominantly institutional ecclesiology aimed at conversion of individual schismatics to the Roman Church and their submission to the Roman pontiff as very visible head.  This new ecclesiology expressed itself in a number of ways, for example, with the development with the establishment of now called Eastern Catholic churches, which tended to drive the churches even farther apart rather than bring them closer together.  Symptomatic, more than ever, each side came to insist on itself as being the exclusive bearer of salvation.

Symptomatic on the Roman Catholic side was the 1729 order of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, which was in charge of Eastern churches at that time.  Forbid any communicatio in sacris with the dissident orientals, meaning us.  Communicatio in sacris, communion in sacred things, did not mean simply receiving communion.  People did not receive communion very often anyway.  It meant going into churches, venerating images, genuflecting in the course of processions, the kinds of—you could not go to a funeral or anything in the other guy's church.  That on the Catholic side.

But symptomatic on the Orthodox side is, I'm giving the official title, definition of the Holy Great Church of Christ defending the holy baptism given from God and spitting upon the baptisms of the heretics.  This was issued by Patriarch Cyril V of Constantinople in 1755.  It's a pronouncement, by the way, that has never been officially rescinded, though it's been enforced only erratically.  In other words, just as for the Roman Catholics the dissident Orientals, we were completely outside, so also for the Orthodox, the Latins were completely outside, so completely outside that they were to be regarded as unbaptized.  And if on occasion an exception was made, and if they were received without being rebaptized, it was considered simply a matter of economy, signifying nothing about the spiritual state or ecclesial status of the groups in question.

This line of thinking is, in fact, one can still encounter quite frequently these days, although it is really basically an 18th century invention.  This was the state of Orthodox-Catholic relations in the 18th century.  In the 19th century Orthodox controversial apologetical literature elaborated on some of these themes, developed several new ones.  For example, Orthodox apologetical literature would stress the conciliar character of Orthodoxy, this in contrast to the absolute monarchical character of Catholicism.  Orthodoxy's decentralization and identification with national cultures was contrasted with Roman emphasis on uniformity and the exclusive use of Latin, and so on.

In short, through emulation and contradiction, Orthodox identity in its external aspect continued to develop in counterpoint with Roman Catholicism and, to a lesser degree, with Protestantism.  The usual joke is told that Orthodox used Protestant arguments to refute the Catholics, and Catholic arguments to refute the Protestants.  And again, this brings us to a very basic question, and one that has—I'll spare you more ancient history, but brings us back to a very basic question.  What is the relationship between the ultimate identity of the Orthodox Church as the spirit-filled body of Christ, and her externally perceived identity.

This identity formed through emulation and contradiction in the midst of all those historic failures and losses, those perplexities and contradictions that Florovsky alluded to, that I mentioned a few moments ago.  For much of the church's history, this question wouldn't have troubled most Orthodox Christians, whether hierarchs or theologians, or ordinary church goers.  They took for granted the full consonance, the complete agreement of all aspects of the church's identity.  Not just it's underlying belief structures, but all its distinctive practices and customs.  And their adherence to the church was reinforced by a number of societal supports.

Sometimes, as in Byzantium, in the Russian empire, Orthodox Christians were in a dominant or hegemonic position.  At other times, as in the Ottoman Empire, the Orthodox formed a close-knit subject population, marginalized within the dominant society and culture.  Still other times in, I would say classic diaspora situations, they constituted a permanent foreign colony in the midst of a host culture.

A wonderful example in Potsdam near Berlin.  There is a charming collection of Russian-style houses and a beautiful Russian Orthodox church of the early 19th century.  They were built in the early 19th century under the patronage of King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia to accommodate the chorus of Russian singers that he hired to entertain his first Prussian regiment of the guard.  Still there, lovely, lovely place.  But again, clearly a foreign colony in the midst of a foreign culture.  Very different from our situation here in Canada, for example.

In all these situations from the past, whether in a hegemonic position or marginalized in a ghetto situation or as a little colony in a host culture, Orthodox identity could be taken for granted as something into which you were born, and from which you could not escape save by renouncing it in favor of a new and totally different identity, and this was usually by converting to another religion, Catholicism, or to Islam, or what have you.  Over the past century, this complacency has been shaken in various ways.  Nowhere has that been truer than in countries formed by massive immigration.  In my own case, the United States certainly.  Canada, Australia, some of countries of Latin America, have been totally refashioned and formed by mass immigration.

And, first of all our societies, at this point, are notably and proudly pluralistic.  One just has to look up articles on Canada, and that will be signaled as one of the main characteristics, even to the point now there's some questioning of the limits of pluralism.  The United States, we moved from a state church system, to an unofficial Protestant establishment, to a nation of Protestant Catholic Jew, the title of a famous essay by Will Herbert, to a nation now in which virtually every religious and special interest group known to humankind has a chance to be heard and to thrive.

Canada's religious trajectory has been a little different, but only a little different.  I did some homework, a factoid that maybe even you Canadians don't know.  When was the first census undertaken in the dominion of Canada?  1871, shortly after the formation of the dominion.  At the time, in this first census, 98% of the population indicated they were Christian, of whom 43% were Catholic, concentrated in Quebec, French-speaking Quebec.  52% were mainline British background Protestants, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Baptist.  That was it.

But with massive immigration in the closing decades of the 19th century onward, the religious and ethnic makeup of Canada changed dramatically.  For example, by 1911—again I do a little homework for these things—there were nearly 90,000 Ukrainians of Eastern Christian tradition, mostly in the prairie provinces here, and certainly many more since then.  And certainly also large numbers of Mormons, Mennonites, Hutterites, and so on.  Ethnic, racial, and consequently also religious diversity were somewhat constrained, partly by depression where nobody went anyplace, and also partly constrained by preferential immigration policies for a time that favored European, favored in fact British and French, and then United States in terms of preferences.

But with the Immigration Act of 1976, any remnants of this has changed.  And so in Canada, just as in the United States, people come from everywhere, and from every kind of background imaginable.  I'm sure you're going to lecture me eventually on the differences between the United States and Canada.  We could do that another time.  In our North American context, whether the United States or Canada, pluralism doesn't mean simply that a number of religious groups coexist on the same territory.  If that were the definition of pluralism, even the Ottoman Empire would qualify.  It means that these religious groups are free to compete for souls, or to engage in dialogue, or to cooperate in any number of common projects, or to remain aloof from any contact whatsoever, just so long as they maintain a modicum of civility and eschew violence.

Pluralism in this context also means that a person's religious identity can't be taken for granted as something you acquire at birth, as once may have been the case in both our countries.  Rather it involves an element of intention, an element of decision, indeed of ongoing decision.  All religious groups in our countries are forced to deal with, sociologist Peter Berger called, an uncoerced clientele, a clientele free to choose their own religious identity, or what is very common today, free to fashion their own religious identity by putting together a personalized patchwork religion.  If any of you have had a child say to you, "I think I'm a Buddhist," don't take that as an occasion for confrontation.  It's simply an invitation for conversation, and its the kind of conversation that I think many people, whether in the United States or Canada, have.

Now, this experience of pluralism.  It's affected all religious groups in North America and other lands of massive immigration, but not always in the same way.  In my estimation, Orthodox Christians have had a particularly hard time adjusting.  In our collective historical memory, from our collective historical memory, we are equipped to deal with a variety of situations ranging from hegemony to ghettoization, persecution and sectarian strife.  But our historical memory hasn't equipped us to deal with religious pluralism, the sort that we have in the United States and Canada.

It's relatively easy to trace the formation of Orthodox ecclesial identity over many centuries.  I gave you a very condensed version earlier.  It's much harder to trace the formation of a specifically American or Canadian or Australian Orthodox ecclesial identity.  Almost inevitably, one would be forced to speak not of identity but identities.  In the late 1990s, I was asked to write a popular history of Orthodox Christians in North America.  In principal, this was to include Canada and Mexico as well as the United States, and to cover the Oriental Orthodox as well as the Eastern Orthodox, all with some very short scope.  I immediately wondered whether such a history was possible.  Was there enough unity of subject to permit such a history.  It's not just that you have a lot of material.  It's just how does this make a story.

Just consider the way in which Orthodox Christians themselves have recounted their history in the New World.  I have in mind a 1984 collective work.  It's entitled The Companion to the Greek Orthodox Church, an excellent little volume as far as it goes.  It includes an appendix, a list of milestones in the history of Orthodoxy in America.  The first entry reads, "1528.  George the Griego arrived in Florida, the first known Greek to come to America."  Now, we of course know nothing whatsoever about George the Griego's religious beliefs and affiliation, if any.  Under the circumstances, coming when he did to what was then a Spanish outpost, it was unlikely that he was a practicing Orthodox Christian, or that his arrival left any lasting Orthodox imprint on this continent.  I mention this because comparable examples can be found in other jurisdictional histories.

The history of Orthodoxy in the United States, the history of Orthodoxy in Canada, or Australia, or other lands of massive immigration, comes to be little more than a collection of ethnographies.  You have a book on Ukrainians in Canada, or Ukrainians in Alberta, and there will be a chapter devoted to the religious factor.  Or A History of Greece, a fine volume by Ted Solutos on Greeks in America, two chapters on the church.  So also A History of Serbs, have a chapter on religion.  But a history of Orthodoxy in America, very hard to find.  Individual Orthodox Christians face similar problems.  Someone asks, "What are you?"  In the context assuming that you're going to be responding in terms of religious identification.  Very seldom is it enough simply to say Orthodox.  I lived for a very long time in New York, and that would have had a very different meaning in New York.  It would have meant that I was Jewish.  It's not enough even to say Orthodox Christian, in many cases.  Inevitably, you're pressed to add a modifier usually relating to ethnicity, Greek, Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian.  At the very least, one is pressed to acknowledge being Eastern.

In the United States at least, even among the Orthodox themselves, Orthodoxy is perceived as something foreign, exotic, so closely linked to alien cultures as to be non-American, if not altogether un-American.  Because there have been periods when we've been regarded as un-American and subversive.  But even to our fellow Orthodox Christians, this claim can—some people will say, insist that they are simply Orthodox.  But even to many of our fellow Orthodox, this claim seems presumptuous, a contradiction in terms, a claim to an impossible identity.  How can you really be Orthodox and be American or Canadian.  Much here depends on what it means to be Orthodox and what it means to be Canadian or American, what it means to uphold Canadian values or American values.

So much of Canadian history and also U.S. history was spent in trying to form people in accordance with Canadian values and get them to adopt Canadian values or American values, and in the process forgetting some of their tribal, old world ways.  In any case, neither the term Orthodox, nor the term American or Canadian, is self-evident.  These don't represent stable, static realities.  The definition of Orthodox has changed in various ways over many centuries.  So also the definition of what it means to be an American, what it means to be a Canadian.  Over the centuries, the decades, definition of Canadian or American have become ever broader, ever more capacious, as our national experiments with pluralism have expanded.

At the same time, the definition of Orthodox, I fear sometimes, has become ever more fragmented.  Now, of course, the most obvious factor complicating Orthodox identity, whether in the United States or Canada, has been ethnicity.  Sometimes, a sense of ethnic identity is stronger than a sense of Orthodox religious identity.  This is hardly a new discovery on my part.  There are many reasons for this.  Very often, and quite understandably, Orthodox Christians have found it difficult to imagine an Orthodox identity without a corresponding cultural or ethnic identity.  But given the dynamics of religion in our nations, as these have been presented by sociologists and by general church historians, one would have expected the ethnic factor gradually to recede in importance, to lose its power to divide.  That at least is what Orthodox Christians growing up in the United States in the decades following World War II were led to expect.

I believe this is also what Orthodox Christians in Canada were led to expect in the course of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s.  The expectation was that Orthodox Christians, that lands of immigration, the United States, Canada, there would be gradual integration into the mainstream of American life, into the mainstream of Canadian life.  In the United States, we went from being immigrants to being hyphenated Americans—Greek-Americans, Russian-Americans, Ukrainian-Americans, and so on—to being Americans whose religious preference was Eastern Orthodox.  This in the 50s and 60s, continuing in the 70s.  And that was how church history textbooks were written as well, gradual integration of immigrant groups, religious groups, into mainstream life.

This was what was going on in the 1960s, and I'm sure many of you can remember those days as well as I can, probably better than I can.  I get forgetful in my old age.  I was referring a moment ago to those milestones in the history of Orthodoxy in America.  There are comparable presentations that could be mentioned.  We began with small, isolated beginnings, pioneers like George the Griego.  Then waves of immigrants establish ethnic parishes.  Gradually the ethnic jurisdiction emerges, giving an element of institutional stability to the religio-ethnic groups in question.  And most of these jurisdictions formed in the inter-war period, and included both the United States and Canada, or even more.

For example, there was the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, very comprehensive.  The Serbian Orthodox Church in North and South America, the Romanian Orthodox Episcopate of America also covered both the United States and Canada.  The main exception here would have been the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in the U.S.A., distinct from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada.  But over a dozen such jurisdictions in the 1940s.  But following World War II, we become more and more integrated you would think.  In the United States, we had in this period, 1955, official congressional recognition as a major faith.  Again, I'm going from these milestones of Orthodoxy in America.  1957, Archbishop Michael of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese becomes the first Orthodox Hierarch to take part in the presidential election.  1967, Archbishop Iakovos walks with Martin Luther King, Jr., and other religious leaders in the march on Selma, Alabama.  Similar milestones could be mentioned, noted in Canada.  1989.  What happened in 1989?  Ray Hnatyshyn was named Governor General.  You know, similar integration into society.

In the United States at least, Orthodox were joining Protestants, Catholics, and Jews as full-fledged Americans.  The nation's pluralism by that point having expanded to accommodate what lingering elements of symbolic identity these immigrants and descendants of immigrants might have.  So you continued to eat pyrogi, baklava, and have Panethenian dance troupes, but you no longer speak Greek, or Serbian, or any number of other things that are a little bit harder to master than baklava recipes.  So as we were becoming more American, the Orthodox were also beginning to come together in greater unity.  Their common American Orthodox identity was beginning to transcend ethnic particularities.

Here we can note another milestone that affected both the United States and Canada, since the jurisdiction spanned the border at that point.  1960, the formation of SCOBA, the Standing Conference of Canonical Orthodox Bishops in America, a body that brought together heads of nearly all the Orthodox jurisdictions in North America.  It seemed to anticipate a united Orthodox Church in America, and the establishment, this simply being a manifestation of a common Orthodox identity.  This is how the story of Orthodoxy in America seemed to be going when that Companion to the Greek Orthodox Church was being assembled.  When I was in high school and college and university, this is how many Orthodox Christians in America expected the story to go.  This is how the story was supposed to go.  Even the sociologists said this was inevitable.

But over the last few decades, the story of Orthodoxy in the United States, and I believe also in Canada, has taken a very different turn.  In my estimation anyway, Orthodox Christians in North America are less united now than they were in the 1960s and 70s.  Why?  This is not simply because of personalities, though this has to be taken into consideration.  People like Archbishop Iakovos, he was a giant.

This is not simply because of ethnic resilience reinforced by new immigration, though this has been massive both in the United States and in Canada.  First in the wake of the Cyprus crisis, then civil war in Lebanon, then the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, it's transformed our parishes.  Parishes that were once mostly English speaking, Greek American parishes for example, who were mostly English speaking, then became again Greek speaking principally, and so also other ethnic groups the same way.  Our parishes, I would say we are less homogeneous than we were 40 or 50 years ago.  Forty or 50 years ago, we were all basically hyphenated Americans or hyphenated Canadians, Ukrainian-Canadian, Greek-Canadian, Russian-Canadian, what have you.  Now, this is changing.  This change also isn't simply because of changing global politics.  Improved communications, cheap airfares, all of which have facilitated closer contact between mother churches in the old world and their dependencies in the new, and also I would add here, more influence and more control over new world dependencies.

I would like to present an argument here.  Our present disunity, our seeming lack of a common Orthodox identity in North America, may be the result of some underlying disagreements about what constitutes Orthodox identity itself.  These disagreements, I would suggest, have developed and increased as literate and well-meaning Orthodox Christians in North America, that uncoerced clientele that sociologist Peter Berger speaks of, have discovered and have freely and self-consciously adopted for themselves some very different and disparate Orthodox identities, most often as the result of extensive, though perhaps selective readings in Orthodox theology.  Books on Orthodoxy in English have proliferated, as we all know, and in French for that matter.  So also have internet resources.  Many of these books may not be worth reading, but read they are.  Even those that are well worth reading may be read and understood and applied in very different ways.

Some of my teachers long ago, and colleagues in a couple cases, were theologians.  Father George Florovsky I've mentioned before, Father Alexander Schmemann, Father John Meyendorff.  They were emigres.  They were very important, though, in bringing Orthodox theology to America and presenting America to the Orthodox world, and here I would include Canada.  Meyendorff and Schmemann spent all their summers at Lake Labelle in the Laurentides.  So they were at least a quarter Canadian in residence.  These people, on the one hand theology, theologians, contributed to the Orthodoxy's adjustment and adaptation in the North American context.  They were involved in the ecumenical movement in various ways, putting Orthodoxy into a more conspicuous position on the world stage.  They were experts in early church history, thought.  They found in the fathers of the church, and in the worship of the early church, resources for the strengthening and renewal of church life today.  They called on Orthodox Christians in North America to rediscover their common trans ethnic supra cultural identity.  They denounced what Father Schmemann called the evil plaque of jurisdictionalism.  They called for Orthodox unity.  They drew attention to the importance of mission in the history of Orthodoxy, including the history of Orthodoxy in America, as witnessed in the name of this church itself.  They emphasized the importance of the church's worship, above all the Eucharist, for all aspects of the church's life.  Implemented on a parish level, this meant, among other things, greater use of living vernacular languages, English and French, in church services, more frequent communion.  You know many of the things that you are familiar with in this parish.

So theologians, Orthodox theology, there books, have contributed to the integration of Orthodoxy in North American life, but the story isn't quite so simple, though it is drawing to a close, I assure you.  The works even of the people that I've just mentioned, people like Florovsky, Meyendorff, Schmemann, could be read in very different ways, and have been read in very different ways.  Among other things, these theologians had a deep interest in the problem of the relationship between Christianity and culture.  At the risk of gross over-simplification, their contribution can be summed up by using categories that those of you familiar with H. Richard Niebuhr's classic work, Christ and Culture, would be aware of.  Sort of a classic in religious studies.  In reaction to an Orthodoxy that regarded itself as the bearer of culture, but in fact was submerged in culture, and effectively reduced to ethnic culture.

These emigre theologians preached a message of Christ the transformer of culture, just as the Christian message once transformed and transfigured Hellenistic culture, just as the Orthodox message transformed and transfigured other cultures, Slavic, Native American, what have you.  So now also, they argued, the Orthodox Christians message must transform and transfigure North American culture.  This is one way you could read Orthodox theology today and its contribution.  But often Orthodox theology, and the contribution of theologians to this, and their books to this, can be read in a slightly different way.  It can be read as a message of Orthodox of Christ over culture.  Or rather, it has been read as a message of Orthodox Christianity and culture over Western culture.

The West, according to this line of thinking, has been poisoned by rationalism, legalism, secularism.  The East, by contrast, has maintained the authentic Christian vision of God and the world above all in its experience of worship, and this despite the baneful Western influence on its institutions, on its formal presentations of theology, and so on.  You can see two very different interpretations of Orthodoxy and its relation to culture, Orthodoxy and its relation to our North American situation.  And I would say that the impact of books, books of the people I've mentioned and many other things that people read, the ways that we have discovered Orthodoxy, the way that so many of us have read our way into Orthodoxy, this can be unsettling.  The impact has been enlivening.  It brings you here tonight.  But also unsettling, and it's also cut across old jurisdictional lines to reveal the multifaceted character of Orthodoxy itself.  It takes only a quick browsing of the internet to demonstrate this.

In the United States at least, and I expect also in Canada, there are a host of controversies troubling Orthodox Church life today, down to the parish level.  Controversies about forms and styles of leadership.  Controversies about accountability and transparency.  Controversies about liturgical practice and even musical idiom.  Controversies about the place of monastic expressions of piety in parish contexts.  And the list could go on and on.  I expect you've run into controversies of this sort.  A significant but easily overlooked truth about Orthodoxy helps explain why this has been the case.  Orthodox Christians live by an ideal, whether they are able to articulate this ideal or not.  Orthodox Christians sense the need for wholeness, for integralness I guess one could say, for authentic church life to penetrate the surrounding culture.  And over the centuries Orthodox Christians had some experience of this integralness in our various old world Orthodox Christian empires and nations, even when these have been reduced to a ghettoized situation.

Orthodox Christians in turn believe that the greatest threat to Orthodoxy in North America and elsewhere, in the so-called diaspora, a much discussed topic, comes from dilution, comes from loss of authenticity, loss of wholeness, loss of integralness.  And this fear holds true not just for cradle Orthodox Christians.  I think they are, in fact, relatively unconcerned about this.  It holds true also for converts to Orthodoxy and reverts to Orthodoxy, people who were raised and baptized in the Orthodox Church, spent a great deal of life away from the Orthodox Church, and then reverted to Orthodoxy at a later point.  North Americans of whatever sort have found Orthodoxy attractive, in large part because Orthodoxy has been a culture informing Christianity, a Christianity not content with remaining on the margins of life even under different circumstances.

So the church goes on not just here, but in our homes, in the way we arrange our homes, the way that we pray and when we pray, so many aspects of life touched.  I remember my children.  We were fixing hot dogs at the beach once, and I didn't say a prayer.  And their conclusion was, we don't bless hot dogs.  So habituated they were to the idea that you do things in a certain ritual way, and its not just confined to doing it here, it's also something that you even do at the beach.  I would say that Orthodox Christians have found people coming to Orthodoxy, rediscovering Orthodoxy, or experiencing it, find it attractive precisely because it doesn't separate a timeless essence of Christianity from its historical manifestations.  Because it bridges the gap between the ultimate identity and the perceived identity of the church.  Because it holds together classic expressions of mystical theology, Vladimir Lossky's Mystical Theology of the Orthodox Church, or the Philip Calea, or what have you, with the Panethenian dancers at St. Demetrius Greek Orthodox Church in Tucson.

In the past, in the heyday of the ethnic jurisdiction, this preoccupation with integralness most often was expressed in the form of ethnicism, and this is still sometimes the case today.  But today, Orthodox preoccupation with authenticity, with wholeness, with integralness, can't be explained simply as vestigal ethnicism.  Today, some people would argue that authentic Orthodoxy calls for greater openness to the surrounding culture, if enculturation on the Alaskan Mission Model is to take place in North America, if we are really going to transform this world in which we live.  But today also an increasingly vocal minority argues that authentic Orthodoxy calls for maintenance of a style of life and practice that visually distinguishes and separates Orthodox Christians from the surrounding culture.

There is, however, no longer a direct correlation between such positions and ethnic background or jurisdictional affiliation.  You find the same cleavages in every jurisdiction that I know in North America.  If anything, the increasingly derided modernist is more likely to be able to be cradle Orthodox than convert.  And if anything, the self-styled traditionalist is more likely to be an American convert who has read his way into Orthodoxy or a cradle Orthodox revert who has read his way back into Orthodoxy, than a cradle Orthodox who has remained in church life all his life or all her life.

Those of you who from time to time look at Facebook or elsewhere, you may be familiar with a meme, Herman Hyperdox.  You've run across this, any of you?  Some of you.  Not very many.  Anyway, it's a meme.  It shows a bearded younger guy with self-satisfied and self-righteous expression on his face, and the text ever changing with this.  For example, one of them, "Still a catechumen, and has already switched jurisdictions three times."  "Has to give a presentation at work.  Begins by saying, 'Wisdom, let us attend.'"  Or, "Parents wouldn't call him Barsanuphius at the family reunion.  Reminds self that Jesus said his disciples would be persecuted."  You get the idea.

At this point in North America, we're faced with a plethora of views as to what constitutes authentic Orthodox, integral Orthodoxy, what should be our Orthodox identity in this new world context.  At least in the United States, very possibly here in Canada also, even within a single jurisdiction, one can find, depending on a bishop, or parish, or priest, or faction, an ethnic reduction, a hyphenated American reduction, a conservative evangelical reduction, a traditionalist reduction, and possibly other reductions of Orthodoxy.  Reductions that would seize upon select aspects of our externally perceived identity as being the quintessence of the faith.  More versions of Orthodox identity no doubt could be mentioned.  Talk more about that maybe another night.

The problem facing us is this.  How can we properly valorize our externally perceived identity, our ethnicity, our various distinctives, various aspects of our historical patrimony?  How can we accept all this and value this as a contuative element of our faith, something that we cannot and should not simply discard?  But at the same time, how can we relativize our ethnicity, our distinctives, all those historically contingent aspects of our identity, in response to the more compelling demands of our faith.  This is a question that I hope we can explore in discussion, but then also continue on Saturday evening.

And you wanted to ask some questions.

Speaker 2: So, yes, another quote.  [inaudible 01:15:07]

Fr John Erickson: I'm having a ball.  Because I'm retired, and I don't depend on any of them for my livelihood.

Speaker 2: What I mean is, is there a [inaudible 01:15:36]

Fr John Erickson: For studying, but also . . .

Speaker 2: [inaudible 01:15:46]

Fr John Erickson: Studying and interacting.  I try not to create a whole lot of waves.  But I can tell you, I've joked, the four places I've served most frequently, four jurisdictions, four bishops, and so on.  One of the churches has doors and curtains.  One has curtains, no doors.  One has doors, nor curtains.  And one has neither nor.  And the way in which services are done also varies considerably.  One, for example . . .

Speaker 2: This is all part of the unchanging tradition.

Fr John Erickson: Unchanging tradition.  For example, one, very observantly sings all the prescribed troparia on the Beatitudes; all of Psalm 33:34, Blessed be the name of the Lord henceforth and forevermore, with the expectation the priest will consider the gifts at that point.  The most rubricacious place I have ever seen and consulting so closely with every little detail, and the personnel, the number of people and so on, fortunately the singers are very good.  But at the same time, there are just enormous gaps that make things—you never—the sight lines in the altar area are very poor.  And I have to be going sort of like this to get someone to hand me a censer at various points.  In other places, the jurisdictional differences do make it—cause some complications.  Directives in one will say specifically, point at the paten, the challis at the words of institution.  Another would say, no, you are not supposed to do that.  And differences in censing and so on.  The biggest difficulty though, is how to proclaim the word of God in these very different communities, say something—because I don't have contact with all of them so regularly that I can, that I know—and I have terrible problems with names.  How do you convey the gospel in these very different situations?  How do you give hope to a parish?  I'm the closest in Bisbee, Arizona.  It's a mining community.  The mines went out in the end of the 60s, beginning of the 70s.  I serve there once or twice a month.  I'm the closest to a full-time priest they've had since the 1970s.  How, in this situation, do you bring a message of hope, and also suggest that Orthodoxy may have something to say that the local community church hasn't been telling you on all those other Sundays that you have been going to church, but maybe hearing something a little different anyway?  How do you talk to a very energetic, active, and enthusiastic college-age constituency at St. Demetrius Greek Orthodox Church and Holy Resurrection Antiochian Orthodox Church in Tucson, with kids with all the usual problems of being 16, 17, through the early 20s, a very wonderful group?  How do you get them to appreciate and feel appreciated for their performance with the Panethenian dance troupe, but at the same time encourage them to become more deeply involved with their faith, or simply . . . How do you allow them space to feel comfortable asking questions on religious matters?  This in a situation where I'm, as you were mentioning, only just relatively recently ordained.  By Orthodox standards, I'm very recently indeed.  So I can sometimes speak—I don't always speak ex cathedra and being an authority figure, especially not with these kids.  But on the other hand, very often they're accustomed to that and in Arizona there is a very strong presence of a certain type of monasticism that can be very cultish.  And so you run into a huge range of issues, and I haven't sorted them all out.  But it's very exciting.  Now my biggest challenge, though, and my biggest problem, you will think very trivial indeed.  You were introducing me and mentioned some things that I've done, but you didn't mention the fact that my wife and I have edited six volumes of Orthodox liturgical music in English language, and my real love is liturgical music.  And none of all—one of the churches singes very well.  But my little church in Bisbee, if it weren't for my wife, I would be desperate.  But we are beginning to sing quite well.  They are even able to sing Bortniansky #5 Cherubic Hymn, many times.  And so if you're interested in seeing what a small, little Serbian Orthodox parish in a practically deserted mining town is like, go to www.saintstephensnemanja.org, and we even have an MP3 singing my adaptation of Serbian Chant Troparian for St. Stephen Nemenja.

Speaker 3: [inaudible 01:22:10]

Fr John Erickson: The first question about unity is a question that often arises because the concern several decades ago was especially jurisdictional unity.  It seems to me we are farther from that now, even with an assembly of bishops in Canada and an assembly of bishops, Orthodox bishops in the United States.  We are, for reasons related to sociology, but also old world entanglements, farther from jurisdictional unity.  We very often fail to recognize those elements of unity that we do have, and we don't always feel very comfortable talking about the elements of unity that we do have.  And I think that the agencies, or those areas in which effective Orthodox unity is developing in expressing itself in creative fashion is through, for example, OCMC, Orthodox Christians Mission Center, through IOCC, International Orthodox Christian Charities, and other forms of organization and expression quite different from anything that the church has known through most of its history.  These are means available to us today.  That was the easier question, though.  I hope I'm answering part of it at least.

The question of culture, and I think you've touched on a very important subject.  I think historically, and I think a correct theological perspective, emphasizes the importance of seeking out and trying to see the image of God in each and every one, and being able to find in those elements of cultures, past and present, to be able to see those things that God loves and hopes that we will love and embrace, and that we will be able somehow to communicate this.  But one difficulty in our North American context, though not exclusively here, it's just where I live and how I live, is the growing tendency, if something is new and different, or if there is not any possibility of direct communication, we are so quick to heroize or to demonize, and there is no other path.  We use all kinds of superlatives that would best be reserved to Christ and the Theotokos, for our particular hero of the day or the moment, whether in politics or in ecclesiastical matters, and language that I wouldn't use for anybody at all, the internet contributes to this, for those with whom we disagree.  This sharpening of—this tendency to heroize and to demonize, and in this way to depersonalize those with whom we are interacting, I think is one of the most dangerous things in our North American society today.  Again, this is, I think, rather different than the situation in our countries three or four decades ago, where there was a greater sense of community and commonality.  But this also, I think, bleeds over into church life.  We become accustomed to a certain way of interacting.

Speaker 4: Do you want to follow up on that at all?

Speaker 3: [inaudible 01:26:32]

Fr John Erickson: He offers an excellent example.  Another area, though, I think that's important.  We so often think of mission, we've projected this onto antiquity, and we tend to look at mission as—I can put it this way—an elite group of white guys goes and proclaims the gospel in various places.  In the early church, what is missed, but you can find it in the New Testament, you just don't find it emphasized particularly.  It's very often displaced persons.  It's persons in some cases upper class, in more cases the people who were not the elites of society.  They were people who may be rich or well off, but not socially acceptable because they were new immigrants.  The martyrs of Lyon and Vienne, for example, in Gaul, include a physician and various others who were occupied important niche roles in society.  But they were a Greek-speaking ghetto in a Latin-speaking part of the empire.  I think that it's so easy to neglect the role that such people played, but still play.  I was able to spend some time in Tanzania in the Spring of 2008, teaching in the little Orthodox seminary at Kasikizi, which is about a day's walk or a 5-hour drive, 4-hour drive from Bukoba on Lake Victoria.  Orthodoxy in Africa is interesting because it was not a top-down, white guys coming from outside and proclaiming the gospel.  Christianity, Orthodox Christianity especially in Sub-Saharan Africa grows by gossiping the gospel.  It was very often just ordinary people, because people talk about religion, and things that are, in fact, important to them, to other people.  One of the people most important for development of Orthodoxy in Tanzania had been working in an office, and one of the other people working in the office happened to be Greek.  And he in this way discovered Orthodoxy.  In many ways, especially in Kenya, the next over, Orthodox began not as canonical Orthodoxy with someone coming from Alexandria or from any other place.  It came from a movement originally in the United States of African Orthodox, Marcus Garvey and other people of this sort, to South Africa, then to elsewhere in Africa, reading their way into Orthodoxy and sort of partly inventing it as they went along, partly discovering it.  And this, I think, is what gives it it's vitality, that and the singing.  The singing is marvelous.

Speaker 4: I wish we had that movement in Cape [inaudible 01:30:47] here in Canada. [inaudible 01:30:49].  If I can ask you one thing.  You talked about—you were making a case for, suggesting, that we're farther away from unity, even though there's more sort of jurisdictional relationship.  When we think of the end of the—the wall came down in '89, and the number of the jurisdictions in North America schizmed largely over issues related to kind of superior, and some of that's been healed.  Are you suggesting that we now live in a period where there is a more kind of virulent ideological commitment which is different within parishes?  And that that is . . .

Fr John Erickson: Partly within parishes, or in that virtual world of the internet, because in fact the schisms, the divisions, caused, or were centering on communism in Eastern Europe.  These are pretty much over with, and now the ideological cleavages are revealed to be within Orthodoxy itself, or rather they've morphed.  Because in some cases they are related to people in the Old World rediscovering Orthodoxy, in the same way that people here may rediscover Orthodoxy, getting little bits and snippets of it.  And, you know, it's interesting that some of the same pathologies that you find in certain quarters in the United States, you can find in Orthodoxy in Old World contexts.  For example, the controversies concerning bar coding, and the mark of the beast that having something bar coded on you.  The stories of pious monks rejecting any gifts of anything that has bar coding on it because it will ensnare you with the devil.

Speaker 4: I ran into this in Romania.

Fr John Erickson: But you know, you find exactly the same ways of identifying the antichrist and so on, on sites called BiblicalProphecy.org, and so on, on the internet, from sects in the United States.

Speaker 4: I believe we're going to have coffee upstairs.  You're going to speak more to this matter after vespers on Saturday.

Fr John Erickson: And I'm going to try to offer some answer to the question that I posed at the end.

Speaker 4: That's terrific.

Fr John Erickson: So come . . .

Part 2

F. Matthew: Good evening everyone. I'd like to welcome everyone here. Thank you for praying with us during the Service of Faith vespers. We are very honored to have with us for a second evening of teaching, Archpriest John Ericksson. We are very pleased to have Fr. John with us to continue his teaching. I had the opportunity to visit a little bit with Fr. John this past couple of days. We had some discussion and he mentioned the title of the book he had written a few years back called The Challenge of Our Past. He mentioned that St. Vladmir's Seminary Press has invited him to contribute a follow-up volume called The Challenge of Our Future. Those of you who were here on Thursday evening would have heard a little bit of Father John's presentation regarding our history as Orthodox Christians and Orthodox identity, in particular here in North America. Tonight we will continue on with the presentation and perhaps we will hear a little bit about some of your perceptions about the challenge of our future.

We welcome you, Father John. Thank you.

F. John: Thank you very much, Fr. Matthew. Thank you, Father Alexander. For those all of you who are here. A number of you were here on Thursday, if you weren't that's okay because I'll give a short summary of some of the things that I've said before moving into things that may be a little new. Also I'll be briefer than I was on Thursday, you'll be happy to know. (laughing) We had a lovely vespers service but I don't want to impose too much on your time.

I began on Thursday with a deceptively simple question. What is the Orthodox Church? How do we present this Church, our Church, to others? How do we present this Church to ourselves. As a point of departure, I suggested looking at the word IDENTITY which, I mentioned, could be used in several ways. In its proper sense  ...  etymological sense, it means self-sameness. What makes something one and the same now, yesterday and forever. This is the sense of the word that theologians most often use, have in mind rather, when they speak of the Church. This is the sense the sense of the word we have in mind when, in a very particular way, we identify the Orthodox Church with that one holy catholic and apostolic Church that we confess in the Creed.

As I pointed out on Thursday, in everyday English the word IDENTITY also is used in a looser sense to mean individuality. What distinguishes one thing from others. The dictionary definition has it to "a set of behavioral or individual characteristics by which a thing is definitively recognizable or known." Much of my presentation on Thursday had to do with Orthodox identity in this second sense of the word. It was not meant to be a theological so much as, historical. The way that the Church has presented itself that we have apprehended the Church in time through history. I offered historical perspectives on the formation of Orthodox identity through the centuries. Those behavioral and individual characteristics by which the Orthodox Church may be definitively recognized and known by people who might just wander in off the streets to our Church services with whom we may speak.

As I suggested, for much of Christian history, Orthodoxy ecclesio identity was formed in the context of Christian divisions. Formed by emulation and contradiction, by imitation, by opposition was what we ... distinguished us from others. What distinguished our Church from others. Very often we would explain our selves by saying we were not, for example like the Catholics. We don't have a Pope. We are rather [kon-see-lee-ar 00:05:06]. There was very often an element of defining ourselves over against others.

The question that I ended by posing, or nearly ended by posing anyway, was what is the relationship between these two aspects of our identity? What is the relationship between the ultimate reality of the Orthodox Church, as a spirit-filled body of Christ, and the Church's externally perceived identity? This identity formed through emulation and contradiction, in the midst of all those historic failures and losses, perplexities and changes that Florovsky spoke of in passages I quoted on Thursday. Perplexities and changes, failures and losses that theologians May acknowledge but only grudgingly and they seldom explore them.

This question, what is the relationship between these two aspects of identity, doesn't seem to have troubled most Orthodox Christians through much of the past, whether Hierarchist theologians or ordinary Church-goers. This question has acquired a particular urgency over the last century and especially over those so-called diaspora, even more specifically in countries formed by massive immigration. The United States, Canada but also others like Australia, many parts of Latin America at this point.

What does it mean to be an Orthodox Christian? To go to the Orthodox Church in this new context? What does it mean to speak of the Orthodox Church in this context?

Certainly, in North America we're faced with a plethora of views as to what constitutes authentic Orthodoxy ... real Orthodoxy. At least in the United States, and I think probably in Canada, within a single jurisdiction one can find, depending on bishop or parish or priest or faction, an ethnic reduction of Orthodoxy. A hyphenated American reduction of Orthodoxy. A conservative ... an evangelical reduction of Orthodoxy. A traditionalist reduction of Orthodoxy and possibly, other reductions of Orthodoxy.

That would seize upon select aspects of our externally perceived identity as being the quintessence of the faith. I'm sure you can point out even more versions of Orthodox identity.

Finally we come to the question with which I ended my presentation on Thursday. How can we integrate our externally perceived identity with our ultimate identity as Orthodox Christians? How can we properly valorize our externally perceived identity? Our ethnicity, our various distinctives, the various aspects of our historical and cultural patrimony. How can we accept all these? Appreciate all these. Value these as the constitutive element of our faith. Something that we cannot and should not simple discard.

At the same time, how can we relativize our ethnicity, our distinctives, our many historically contingent aspects of our identity in response to the more compelling demands of our faith?

As I ended by pointing out a little bit more simply, how can we hold together the pan-Athenian dancers that I enjoy so much at St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in Tucson, Arizona? Mostly Greek young kids but also two Eritreans, as I pointed out. How can we hold that together with reading lost east mystical theology of the Orthodox Church? Or reading the Philokalia and twice during Lent. Certainly, I think we can find a partial answer to these questions if we return to something else that I was pointing out on Thursday.

On Thursday I sketched some of the ways in which Orthodox ecclesio identity developed. Suggested by emulation and contradiction. This is the case through much of our history. We tried to distinguish ourselves from others. From the 5th century on, from the Non-Chalcedonian Oriental Orthodox Christians. From the middle-ages and continuing through the modern period. How we distinguish ourselves from the Catholics but also from various versions of Protestants.

By the end of the 19th century, the wider context was beginning to change. It was beginning to change many things but I would mention just two. With the birth of the ecumenical movement and with the rise of historical scholarship, particularly in areas of liturgy and Patristics. These are all things that affected Orthodox. In the 20th century, the full impact of these new forces would be felt. First of all, in the face of the Scandal of Disunity and the experience of disunity, especially people in the so-called diaspora have. The émigrés from Russia and France in the 1920's and 1930's were felt but now we feel here in North America.

In the face of Scandal of Disunity theologians, Churchmen and ordinary people have turned from polemics to dialogues, or at least conversation with other Christians. In other words, a kind of synchronous dialogue. A dialogue in the here and now with our contemporaries. At the same time, Orthodox theologians, Churchmen and ordinary people have entered into a dialogue with the past. We've looked to history both for a deeper self-understanding and for a deeper of the many factors which impugned with our relations with others. Let's call this diachronous dialogue. Dialogue through time.

This two-fold dialogue has been experienced by many groups. It's not unique to the Orthodox but certainly the Orthodox have not been strangers to this two-fold dialogue. Point out that the Orthodox Christians been involved in the ecumenical movement from its beginnings even in the closing decades of the 19th century. This is especially true of the Russian Orthodox Church in the final decades of the 19th century and in the beginning decades of the 20th. Certainly, also Orthodox Christians have made significant contributions to historical scholarship, study of Patristics especially floruishing in Russia in the 19th and early 20th century.

In my own area, canon law, the study of Church history. Many areas are certainly ... especially in the 20th century, the study of liturgy, study of Patristics, those of you who studied at St. Vladimir's Seminary know this is what we are known for.

The results of this dialogue however ... dialogue with our contemporaries, dialogues with the past. The results of this synchronous dialogue, diachronous dialogue ... the results have been unsettling. For centuries Orthodox identity and its external aspects were formed in the context of Christian divisions. Through emulation and contradiction, the characteristics by which we identify the Orthodox Church were those that made us distinct form other Christian groups. Our peculiar calendar, our baptismal practices, various aspects of worship, our distinctive Church structure or, put differently, our pope-lessness.

In the 20th century, this identity has been challenged in various ways. When I say challenged, I don't say threatened. We have been given new opportunities for discovering what it means to be Orthodox Christians. Perhaps the most conspicuous and most controversial aspect of this 20th-century challenge to our perceived identity has been ecumenism, a controversial subject at various Church councils, the internet and all over the place. This has raised the question of whether we really are so different from others as we have insisted in the past.

I will not go through every aspect of Orthodox ecumenical discussion, just point out one of the least controversial, our relations with the Non-Chalcedonians or Oriental Orthodox Christians I referred to on Thursday. Our relations with, for example the Coptic Oriental Orthodox Christians. Those of you who were participating in things on Thursday ... on Friday went by a beautiful Church, very large Church of St. Mary and St. Mark, over five hundred families, very large congregation. The Copts, Armenian, Syrian, Melankara, Indian, Eritrean, Ethiopian, our relations with the Non-Chalcedonian Christians.

Discussions over the last decades of the 20th century reached the conclusion that, I'm quoting from agreed statements, "Both families of Churches have always loyally maintained the same authentic Orthodox Christological faith and the unbroken apostolic tradition, notwithstanding our many centuries of separation." One area in which we are no ... all that divides us now, the Oriental Orthodox seems ... all that divides us is division itself. That's the conclusion that leads practically to everyone. It's just a question of finally getting all the details, how this re-recognition is going to take place. I have used this just as an example.

It leads some nervously to ask whether we are in danger of falling into relativism, indiffirentism because there May be some aspects of this dialogue with our contemporaries make us nervous. Some of you May be familiar  ...  I think I mentioned this on Thursday, with [eh-mee-ma 00:17:41]that you see on the internet. Herman Hyperdocks, the guy who mimicked a catechumen for six months and has already changed jurisdictions three times. (laughing) who, when about to give a presentation at his office begins by saying, "Wisdom let us attend." (laughing) Who, when his family wouldn't call him Barsanuphius at a family reunion reflected to himself, "Well, Jesus said that his followers would be persecuted." You get the idea. I think you May have met people of this sort.

It's not just ecumenism that sometimes is perceived as a threat to our identity. Equally decisive or challenging our perceived identity, the less often noted has been a better knowledge and understanding of the faith and practice of the early Church. The faith and practice of the Church of Ecumenical councils, the faith and practice precisely of our Church. Those who have gone to seminary, those who have had Father Schmemann or more recently Professor Paul Myendorf, also read in this area certainly are aware of  ...  that for example, our worship has changed in many ways over the centuries.

We've always liked to say we don't change but you Catholics have changed because you do this, that and the order's different now. Certainly over the centuries there has been a number of changes in worship and other areas. Other areas call into question some of our insistence on distinctives we once had. The obvious question, one obvious area might be the question of the Paschalia, the dating of Paschal, Easter.

In antiquity there were a number of controversies on this subject, the one of concern to us right at the moment relates to a decree from the 1st ecumenical council, Council of Nicaea in 325. The council  ...  the decree in question was directed against celebrating Pascha, Easter [foreign language 00:20:27] With the Jews, what it means literally. Now, it's clear from a number of accounts from this period and from when Pascha actually fell for many centuries after, that this decree was directed against dependence on contemporary Jewish ways of reckoning the date of the Passover. It was not directed against a coincidence of dates or even celebrating at an earlier date.

There were a number of times, in the centuries following the Council of Nicaea, that Christian Passover, the Jewish Passover coincided. The dates fell on the same days. Only centuries later, with the increasing lag of the Julian calendar, it became impossible for them to coincide. A new interpretation was developed. This prohibition against celebrating with the Jews was interpreted in a symbolic way to mean that the Jewish Passover, as a type of a true Passover, must necessarily precede the Christian Passover every year. Another was it has to come after the Jewish Passover.

This interpretation enjoyed renewed popularity in the context of polemics against the calendar innovation in the West that led to the Gregorian calendar. Certainly, this interpretation that I was just mentioning, I'm sorry, May be a little complicated, this is still uncritically accepted by many people, maybe even a majority of Orthodox Christians. I noticed that regularly in OCA publications, an old and very good article by Archbishop Peter on this subject has been reprinted. Often as not, you can also find reprinted exactly an incorrect interpretation or presentation of this question of the dating of Pascha. In fact, a number of people say, "Yes, this is authentic Orthodox tradition." but in fact it flies in the face of the historical evidence. It's quite contrary to the spirit of the Council of Nicaea itself which wanted to exclude dependence on contemporary Jewish ways of reckoning.

I use this simple as a long example. Many more examples could be mentioned from the realm of practice, from the realm of doctrinal formulation. They suggest, at the very least, that sometimes we have presented our Church and our Church's history in ways too simplistic, too triumph-alistic to be taken seriously.

This also raises some more fundamental questions. Have we unwittingly mistaken a derivative external identity for the Church's ultimate identity? Have we allowed the Church's living tradition to be replaced by traditionalism? By a self-satisfied attachment to received forms that no longer serve ... no longer express the organic continuity of this spirit-filled Body of Christ that is the Church.

I pose all these simply as problems that we have to consider. The dialogue that we have been engaged with other Christians, with our own past has been unsettling. In certain respects though it's also been very liberating. Among other things, this has helped us to recognize how the ... I'm quoting here from Florovsky again, I quoted it on Thursday ... helps us to recognize how the ultimate identity of the Church is grounded in her sacramental structure. Here, the rediscovery of the Eucharist and of the ecclesiological significance of the Eucharist is important. What the Eucharist means for the Church.

I've already alluded to this briefly on Thursday. Many modern Orthodox theologians have come to recognize the Eucharist isn't simply one of the several means of grace at the Church's disposal. The Eucharist is the very basis of the Church's life. When we, with all our diversity of gifts, gather together in the one Eucharist the Church becomes truly herself. The Church becomes truly the icon of the kingdom which is to come, foretaste of that heavenly banquet. This bring me to the principal point of the evening.

This adventure of discovery needs to go farther. So far Orthodox theology in the 20th, continuing in the 21st century, has devoted ... has focused on the Eucharist and on the ecclesiological significance of the Eucharist. Those of you who have read the books of Fr. Schememan or by Finasia or by many people, are familiar with this term Eucharistic ecclesiology, refer to it.

We've devoted far less attention to baptism. We've tended to ignore what early Christians knew very well. The Church is indeed a Eucharistic organism but only because the Church is, first of all, a baptismal organism. The Church is born of water and the spirit to new life in Christ. What are the reasons for this neglect of baptism and its significance? Certainly and maybe, that for many of us baptism has been reduced to a few ritual acts we ... most of us don't remember. A three-fold encounter with water quickly followed by a multiple anointing with chrism on various parts of the body but divorced from the catechesis, from other the elements that once made it the real locus, the real place for formation of Christian identity. It's in baptism that Christian identity and finally the Church's identity is formed.

Today we talked a lot about building community. You hear that expression used very often. Early Christians knew that this community had to be a community of faith. Hence the importance of the catechumenate in the early Church. We shouldn't consider it important simply because it was long or a number of other things. It wasn't simply a matter of acquiring certain vital information. It wasn't about learning how to refute the filioque or to explain the palamite essense energy distinction. It involved instruction in the crux of the Christian faith certainly but it also involved practice in Christian living. It included exorcism of demons, rejections of false gods. It involved and entire re-orientation of life and the values. It involved a living appropriation of the creed not simply the memorization of the words of the creed. That was part of it also.

Consider this question posed to early Christians and it is posed to us. What is it that gives meaning and direction to our life? What is it that receives our commitment? In antiquity there were many false gods. One of the most widespread forms of idolatry was expressed in emperor worship. Behind emperor worship stood the idea that the Greco-Roman way of life, with the maintenance of law and order, was an ultimate good. In our day we have our own false gods. Consider what media, what advertising, Madison Avenue has to say. What is Madison Avenue in Canada? I don't know but I'm sure there must be such a place.

Male: Madison Avenue.

F. John: Madison Avenue? (laughs) Do you remember old ads for a car that is no longer made, "Buick is something to believe in." Or "GE brings good things to life." An old Nike ad, a runner is briefly resting silhouetted magnificently against the sky and the Nike swoosh logo very prominent and the words, "Test your faith daily." How often the faith by which we actually live is formed by advertising of this sort. Our gods become financial security or stages or power or successful personal relationships often defined in sexual terms. How does one move or how is one moved from faith in such gods to Christian faith?

In antiquity there was a similar question. How did one move from the culture of death that was epitomized in the gladiatorial arena? From the fatalism of the various philosophies of the day? To Christian faith with its horizon of hope. How did one move from the worship of the emperor and his global empire to confession of one Lord, Jesus Christ? The Holy Spirit, the Lord, giver of life? How did one from various dualistic cults that preach liberation of the inner self from this visible world of meaninglessness? To belief in one God, Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible?

In our own day, we have many of the same challenges, same questions. In a world that lives by a conspicuous consumption. In a world where aggressiveness and competition are highly-prized characteristics. In a world where the only alternative seems to be death through mass murder, mass suicide or drugs. Can we really believe in the Lordship of someone who preached humility, poverty, responsible concern for creation and love for enemies? When have you seen an advertisement for a CEO asking for someone poor in spirit or humble and meek. It doesn't happen in the United States, anyway. Canada may be different. (laughing)

Of course, there May be more reasons for this neglect of baptism. It May be also that we are afraid to address the issue because it's so controversial and potentially divisive. What is, for example, the significance if any of baptism, quote, outside the Church? I think all of us, I wager, would have met or at least heard of non-Orthodox Christians who nonetheless show distinct signs of that new relationship to God and to the world that one associates with baptismal faith. The example usually given is Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Just as all of us have met a few insiders who are in fact, as I use the expression the other night, hardly more than Eucharisticized pagans. I was mentioning the other night, in the course of questions, the divorce rate, the you-name-whatever rate, the rate of white-collar crime, at least in the United States maybe not in Canada, for Orthodox Christians is right on the national average. How transformed have we been in Christian initiation? And in that, the strengthening of baptism that we are given in the Eucharist? It's a question.

In the creed we confess our belief in one holy Catholic and apostolic Church, just as we confess one God, the Father Almighty, one Lord Jesus Christ, Holy Spirit, Lord the giver of life. The Church is an object of belief. The Church is part of our faith. It is important to keep in mind that for the Orthodox there exists no dogma of the Church that's analogous to the Trinitarian dogma or Christological dogmas of the ancient ecumenical councils. The kinds of direct challenges that led to [kon-see-lee-ar 00:34:51] limits in those areas. This is largely absent in ecclesiology.

Orthodox ecclesial Identity, as I have suggested, developed over the centuries in other less formal ways. Maybe as a result, very often, our identity, our sense of what is the Orthodox Church has been derivative, reactive, negative, formulated against someone else by emulation and contradiction. Formulated against those we ... this is hard to say ... whom we regard as being outside the Church. Over this past century or a little more, we have had the opportunity to take a more positive approach. We have the possibility of looking at ourselves and at our Church not simply on how we differ from others but also to appreciate more deeply what we are given in baptism. What we are meant to sustain in our Church life, in our communities but also in the world. The only question that I think remains ... Do we have enough confidence in that ultimate identity of the Church and of our identity as Christians formed anew by water and spirit in baptism? do we have enough confidence in this identity to brave the risk of further dialogue, whatever subjects?

As I promised, be shorter this evening than I was on Thursday but that leaves more room and more time for more questions if you have them.

F. Matthew: Thank you Father John. I'll pop to facilitate some of the questions. I think the presentation's not only instructive but spiritually sobering as well, for us as Orthodox Christians. Any initial comments or questions for Father John?

Male: In the early Church there was a lot of division, as you said, to begin with. [inaudible 00:37:32] By the context of the early Church and today's Church, there was a lot of divisions and today we have the same divisions as you were saying. Can we say that it's normal, this divisions we have today, and we don't need to go further on or we need to go further on and [inaudible 00:38:05].

F. John: I think if we don't go further ... if we say, "Well, they May be very nice people but they're not nash. They're not us. They're not ours." If we just stick to ourselves, this will be a terrible counter-witness in the world. If we have enough confidence in our identity as Orthodox Christians ... confidence in an identity that is not simply a collection of ethnic folk ways or inherited misinformation, we have enough confidence in our baptismal identity, we should have the confidence, or at least the challenge to see whether we can find elements of this identity, of what we stand for, others and in other Christian groups.

For example at St. Mary and St. Mark of the Coptic Church. Do we see that re-evaluation of life, that re-orientation of life, the same lines of values and concerns? Then it would be important to affirm this in some way. To engage in closer relations and strengthening one another even if this outside the walls of this, really very charming and very lovely, temple. I don't know if that helps.

Male: Yeah, that helps.

Male: This is more of a comment than a question. I don't how many of us talk to each other at work and say, "Are you baptized?" Is that a proper thing to say In a conversation? [inaudible 00:40:03] practice who we are.

F. John: Of course, we don't go saying, "Are you Orthodox?", either. (laughs) There are many things that we don't say at work. I think that one of the difficulties is that we so often limit  ...  our conception of baptism is limited to, "Are you baptized?" "Well, yes. Three times." or "Yes, okay. I was baptized." The fuller significance of baptism is not really appreciated. Baptism as a process leading us from one way of living to another. From one way of reacting to another. I think it's important not to say, "Are you baptized?" Maybe a better way to begin is simply words from the Scripture, "Come and see. Come with me sometime to Church." Ah, father?

Father: We got the Oriental churches, I think probably in North America were right in our presence, in our midst [inaudible 00:41:28] serving, having served here. Now, the question is, we probably know and perhaps the rest of the Orthodox world, they don’t have to view the Oriental or the Eastern Church doesn’t have to view the Oriental or Middle Eastern as much as the American [inaudible 00:41:56] brings this type of unity or [inaudible 00:42:06] has to take place.

F. John: You touched on a very important point. One of the things that I was ... its' one of the challenges and blessings of being Orthodox in the context of North American society today. I was mentioning on Thursday how often, even our fellow Orthodox ... sometimes even in this country, but certainly in Old World Orthodox countries. How can you really be Orthodox not living in an Orthodox country? Living in America ...

Male: [inaudible 00:42:40] (laughing)

F. John: You know how often we got that question but this gives us a whole lot of opportunities. So often, it doesn't take really very much study of facts and figures as published to recognize that Orthodox countries have a lower rate of Church attendance, a higher rate of abortion and any number of other things than many places that may seem to us less Orthodox. I think that we have here in North America the opportunity of meeting other groups like the Oriental Orthodox on, to use an over-used phrase, a level playing field. We are not diaspora in the sense of being away from our native land and our proper place, a little colony of outsiders in someone else's world.

Canada is as much as your world as it is ... you name the group. Whether French-speaking from the 17th century or English, Irish, so on in upper Canada, in Ontario from the, let's say, 18th century. Also in the United States. We are in a very new position in these lands of the so-called diaspora. These lands of massive immigration. some people think that this means more opportunities for compromising the faith but it also gives many more opportunities for witnessing to the faith.

Female: You mentioned something about the [inaudible 00:45:07].

F. Matthew: As I've mentioned on Thursday, certainly there is a lot of really positive here. Re-discovering the Eucharist. The Eucharistic revival of the 20th century, I think, has touched all of us. It was certainly once upon a time. People didn't go to communion or certainly didn't go to communion more than four times a year. The danger that I mentioned also on Thursday is once upon a time we didn't go to communion out of habit. Now we go to communion out of habit. Without recognizing ... another thing that has changed, of course, and this is one of the positive changes, receiving communion used to be regarded as and used to be seen as an individual act of piety. It is my personal ascetical effort, first of all, of a certain number of days of fasting and preparation, the sacraments, generally speaking, and certainly the Eucharist in this way becomes practically privatized. An individual act of devotion.

The corporate significance of the Eucharist, expressing our life together as the body of Christ was absent. Now that is present and that's really very fortunate. It think we can even go further and recognizing the implications of this for our life beyond the very comfortable walls of this Church. Very often in Orthodox Church will be very proud of itself for having rediscovered the Eucharist and the number of people who go to communion and the amount of participation and the wonderful fellowship of the coffee hour afterward. That doesn't mean that there is ... does that guarantee that people are going to be less-likely to engage in white-collar crimes or any of the other things that we talked about. No, it doesn't.

The point is to extend this faith beyond where we are, being aware of this at all times. So that the kind of values that we profess here and the politeness with our relations with each other, that this carries over when e are driving in downtown Edmonton. When we are parking our car, when we are perhaps in a hurry to get someplace. When we're getting in or out of the elevator in our office building. There are many times when we are really not very nice people and I'm just mentioning the ones that are really not personal.

Male: We are all hoping that we can have another ecumenical council and that we could have one bishop for all the Orthodox Churches of America. We have this idea that’s what we’re looking for. Of course, that depends on the unity of all the churches. The question is, the division started a long time ago. In fact there was no unity because of good reasons. I’m pretty sure there was another[inaudible 00:49:24] and the Church was in disunity for certain reasons, and I’m sure that these reasons are justifiable or not. Because the Chalcedonians [inaudible 00:49.56]

F. John: You see, there were a lot of other factors. Let's just stick to the Chalcedonian Non-Chalcedonian for the moment. There were a lot of non-theological factors involved. Let me mention those quickly first. By and large, the Churches of those groups who were in favor of the dogmatic decisions, decrees of the Council of Chalcedon were those that were supportive of the imperial authority. They tended to be also, in most places, aristocratic and favoring even a certain chariot party, a certain baseball league. There were many sociological factors entering into this. They also, in many cases, tended to be the non-Hellenized, the non-Greek population of the empire. Syriac is distinct from Greek. Coptic is distinct from Greek. Armenian is distinct from Greek.

Many factors entered into this that did not have anything to do with theology. What is more important to recognize at this point  ...  two things. First of all we no longer have this empire and the emperors that in many ways shaped the lives of our Chalcedonian Orthodox Churches. Second, at this point because of that rediscovery of our past, the historical study that I was mentioning in Patristics and other things, theologians on both sides have recognized that the points that divided, largely verbal, and a question of people using words trying to say the same thing but using different words and a different vocabulary.

It's easy to say that theologians of that period all spoke Greek, read well in Greek, thought in Greek so also today. Everybody in world writes in English, speaks in English but bad English and then it was often bad Greek. You don't always understand the same words in the same way. What does it mean to speak of something as existential? That was a big word in the 1950' and the 1960's. People meant so many things by this, so also the technical vocabulary of theology in the period of the 5th century and 6th century. There were ... the situation is different now as it was then.

At this point, as I was saying, after long discussion not only at the level of theologians but also Churchmen and otherwise, there is the recognition that even though we used different formulations, in fact the Christological faith is the same. The result is in some places, in Greater Syria for example, in Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere but especially in Syria, there is everything short of bishops concelebrating with each other between Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox.

Before things got terrible in Syria I've been to Aleppo and my hosts were the Eastern Orthodox and the Oriental Orthodox bishops. We'd have service in the Oriental, we'd have service in the Eastern. When we were in the Oriental Church, the Eastern bishop would enter the altar and do absolutely everything. The one thing that they didn't do together is serve the Eucharist together. If you are in a town ... in a village that is Syriani then it's Oriental. The clergyman who presides and if someone goes there so the bishop who presides is the bishop of that community. You go to some other communities maybe it's the other way around.

If you are married in one village it counts in the other village, the other community. You have mutual registration of marriages, baptisms and of everything else. I'm not explaining this very well at this point but in some places where these communities actually live together, there are very close relations. In many parts of the United States we have this possibility of very close relations, much closer cooperation than would be the case if we were living in a monolithically Eastern Orthodox or monolithically Oriental Orthodox situation.

Male: I have one question for you, Father Counselor. What do you believe is the [inaudible 00:55:20]

Female: Sort of. I don't know what's that expression. What I encountered at [inaudible 00:55:26] years ago was ... my first encounter was the difficulty of a different language. And then my brother [inaudible 00:55:34] It was like a spiritual beginning. That was a wonderful thing for many, many years and then after about maybe five or ten years the leadership is horrible. It was embarrassing. [inaudible 00:55:58] they say come and see through the Church, I was often embarrassed [inaudible 00:56:06] here and there, right?

F. John: But we're over here, right? That is true. Again notice here and in many places the disconnect between what we say and what we claim. The way we actually appear and the way we actually act. I don't know of any easy solution for this at all. Here is actually a situation not unique to the OCA, it's across the board in the various Orthodox jurisdictions in North America and I'm sure elsewhere. Ease of communication makes a big difference here.

Male: You raised some interesting points and true enough it really leads to more and more conversation. One thing that I want to touch again and ask you Father John is your reminder to us of the significance of baptism. It Is incredibly important and in some way, some sort of antidote. Even [inaudible 00:57:22] as we united ourselves to Christ. What comes into my mind is that it is something exotic, something good in the Gospel of Christ. In a way it is a kind of mixed approach to spirituality or something like that. I was wondering what you could say about the Orthodox identity that resulted from emulation and contradiction. [inaudible 00:58:20] who would call themselves spiritual but not religious.

F. John: Uh-huh. A lot is certainly being said on this subject. I'm not very good at saying much at this subject. Usually people who say, "I'm spiritual but not religious." have a very high opinion of themselves and their spiritual acumen. (laughing)

Even in the 19th century there were those who said, "My spiritual experiences going to Lake Louis and seeing the sunset." You've run into things of that sort. The cult of individualism that lies behind this, the suggestion that the individual, that,"I am the one who counts and anyone else's insights, whether theirs. That's their problem." The view of the human that Orthodoxy teaches and that we believe basic to being human suggest that we are human in community and human in relationships with others. Hence that wonderful early Christian maxim, I believe, of St. Cyprian of Carthage, one Christian, no Christian.

Another thing that is, I think, important to keep in mind here is  ...  this would be a biggish word but I think everyone here is familiar with it, the escalogical thrust of Christianity. It is not static. There is a movement in hope towards something new, unknown but ultimate. This challenge of looking beyond the present moment, looking beyond our present needs to the possibility really great, dramatic and wonderful that is in God's hands and not in mine. That may be also helpful when speaking to people who are spiritual but not religious.

I think, it's also helpful simply when speaking especially to almost anyone, to begin with being biblical. Again, this is especially true in Christian when you're speaking to other Christians and I don't mean to proof-text. I mean really appropriate the Gospel which is  ...  runs against what North American society, I would say especially United States but Canada has much of the same ethos, aiming at success, individual fulfillment and without a greater concern for other people. The decline of altruism in our North American society, i think is really very frightening.

Female: [inaudible 01:02:32]

F. Matthew: Yes, there is  ...  let me mention another example. It's one of that sociologist that I was mentioning, Peter Berger I believe. [inaudible 01:03:10] please don't quote me on this, who was on talk shows and so on. She had developed her own religion, Sheilaism. (laughing)

I think, very easily will construct their own religion. It may seem to them very attractive but I would say that a more productive pastime would be knitting. (laughing)

Female: [inaudible 01:03:56] (laughing)

F. John: Yeah, I would say though that one positive thing here, even Sheilaism where all the wackiness, is that very often people want to engage in discussion. I don't mean to belittle this. On Thursday I was mentioning a case, let's say a child of yours comes and says, "I think I'm a Buddhist." or attracted to Buddhist. This isn't meant as an occasion for an argument, it's an opportunity to have an important conversation. St. Innocent of Alaska was wonderful at pointing out whenever one of the native peoples, whenever anyone around us expresses an interest or asks a question, pay very careful attention. Don't turn him off.

A person who says or remarks on the beauty of creation, or seeing God's hand in this but doesn't see anything at all of the divine of the Church or the things that the Church does, this still allows some possibilities of conversation. Sometimes people will enter in a discussion of religion supposing that they already know what you believe. They will have these conceptions about what you believe. What your values are. One of the biggest problems is, I would say in our society right now, at least in the United States, is that when people hear the words Christians they consider what are the groups that get the most play on the internet and in the media. They have in mind, even a rather limited version of evangelical. Pardon me?

Female: [inaudible 01:06:13] Westboro Baptists.

F. John: Westboro Baptist, yes. Thank you. You get it. This is the picture that the word Christian conveys to many people. We have an opportunity to present a different picture not by saying, "You're wrong and those are really terrible people." granted they are. I think the way to begin is by showing ourselves at our best, at our most baptismal.

F. Matthew: Thank you, Father. I appreciate you talking in this meeting. In particular [inaudible 01:07:05] (laughing)

F. John: I would have to consider that.

F. Matthew: Because I think there is much to consider in our lives as Christians. You have laid out for us [inaudible 01:07:39] identity as Christians. So thank you Father John. It's great having you here.

F. John: Thank you. Thank you also, Father Matthew for presiding tonight at this. Moderating the discussion. David was here on Thursday and you have filled in at