Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective. By Daniel B. Clendenin, Baker, 176 pp.; $14.99, paper
A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy. By Nathaniel Davis, Westview Press, 381 pp.; $75, hardcover; $27.50, paper
The Price of Prophecy: Orthodox Churches on Peace, Freedom, and Security.By Alexander F. C. Webster, Eerdmans, 388 pp.; $19.99, paper
Because of its numerical insignificance and the marginal position it occupies in American life and culture, probably not many people have observed the profound changes taking place in the Eastern Orthodox Church in this country. The Orthodox themselves, however, cannot help being aware of them. First, they know (and are often perplexed) that more and more Americans are manifesting an intense interest in this ancient expression of the Christian faith. For example, even five years ago a survey conducted by Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press, the most prestigious Orthodox publishing house in this country, revealed that three-quarters of its books and journals were being purchased by non-Orthodox readers.
Second, the actual circumstances within Orthodox parishes–those almost intangible elements that determine their atmosphere and tone–appear and sound different nowadays as Roman Catholics, and especially Protestants, continue to join up in record numbers, even by whole congregations. The latest yearbook of the Encyclopedia Britannica lists the Eastern Orthodox Church among the fastest-growing religious bodies in the United States.
These thousands of newcomers are normally of extractions different from the traditional Eastern European or Middle Eastern lineages of Orthodoxy. Also, their families have generally been in this country much longer than most of the older Orthodox. Moreover, they tend to be very literate and articulate on matters of religion; the vast majority have studied their way into Orthodoxy. The older members of my own congregation often remark on the superior, better informed understanding of the Orthodox faith manifest in our recent proselytes.
In response to this new American interest in Orthodoxy, the Protestant theologian Daniel B. Clendenin has written the very useful “Eastern Orthodox Christianity: A Western Perspective.” Clendenin outlines his theological study by means of four characteristic features of Orthodox religious experience: a deep sense of divine mystery in its worship, the love and cultivation of the arts (once again, especially as these pertain to its worship), recourse to authoritative tradition in its theology, and the deification or divinization of human nature as the goal of the Christian life. He assesses each of these aspects in a presentation so lucid, fair, and sympathetic that this reviewer, an Orthodox parish priest, is disposed to recommend it to his parishioners by way of introducing them to their own faith!
THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
When average Americans become familiar with Orthodox Christians in their neighborhoods, a first impression is probably one of bewildering disorganization. Although they are members of the same church and enjoy among themselves a remarkable unity of doctrine and discipline, the Eastern Orthodox in this country are currently divided, nonetheless, among a dozen or so jurisdictions along largely ethnic lines. Since such was not the case at the beginning of the present century, this canonical anomaly needs an explanation.
The Russian Revolution is the source of the problem. Prior to World War I, all the Orthodox Christians in the United States, no matter what their national origin, were under the ecclesiastical authority established by the Russian missionaries who brought the religion to these shores in 1793. The communist oppression of the Orthodox Church in Russia following the revolution, however, caused the Orthodox hierarchies in Greece, Syria, Serbia, and elsewhere to fear for the spiritual well-being of their immigrant communities in America. So, starting in 1922, they began one-by-one to send other bishops here, all of them responsible and obedient to established hierarchies back in their “old countries.” Thus was created what the Orthodox themselves now consider a jurisdictional nightmare.
Humanly speaking, none of these things would have transpired without the Russian Revolution. Indeed, from several perspectives to be examined presently, that revolution has arguably exercised more general influence on Orthodox history than any political event since the Edict of Milan in 313. Even now it is difficult to take the measure of that unique and sustained persecution by the Soviet government. In a book review published just after his death, the historian John Meyendorff commented that “never in any place except the Soviet Union was there such a prolonged, systematic and bloody attempt by a totalitarian state to suppress religion within such a huge geographic area” (St. Vladimir’s “Theological Quarterly,” Vol. 36, No. 3 [1992], p. 301). Properly to understand Orthodoxy in this century, then, it is useful to examine its relationship to the Russian Revolution and the subsequent history of the church in that country. A good text for such a study is Nathaniel Davis’s “A Long Walk to Church: A Contemporary History of Russian Orthodoxy.” In minute, exhaustive detail, but with great sensitivity to social, political, and even theological shadings, this Protestant historian sympathetically chronicles the ups and downs, but mainly downs, of the church in Russia from 1918 to the fall of the Soviet Union. As this fine and helpful study shows, that history was more nuanced than is usually supposed, its contours largely determined by the varying policies and personalities of both the Soviet and ecclesiastical leadership. Most important to Orthodoxy’s very survival under Stalin, for example, was the great support that it gave to the Soviet Union’s war effort. It is astounding to observe how the church’s support of the Soviet government never wavered during all those years of torment from the same government. Somewhat more difficult to read, largely because its complicated subject precludes a continuous narrative thread, is “The Price of Prophecy: Orthodox Churches on Peace, Freedom and Security,” by Alexander F. C. Webster, the new academic dean of the Ukrainian seminary in this country and the only Orthodox writer reviewed here. Relying chiefly on Russian, Romanian, and American sources, Webster critically documents the attitudes, public statements, and policies of the leaders of the Orthodox Church relative to political and social questions. This book, sponsored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C., has been well received among those watchers long distressed by Orthodoxy’s relative lack of an international prophetic witness against oppressive governments.
To say that Webster’s book is the hardest to read of the three under review, however, is no negative reflection on his skills as a writer, for the material itself is very distressing stuff. Much more than Davis, who generally refrains from expressing moral evaluations, Webster argues that, with very few exceptions, the Orthodox hierarchy in the Soviet Union from the beginning of World War II, and in Romania after the war, was thoroughly compromised by its collaboration with Communist regimes. His is a sad narrative of insincere ideological proclamations, deceptions, and even direct advocacy of Communist governments over a half-century during which some bishops bore KGB code names. Most notable among the latter is the present Patriarch of Moscow, Aleksii II (Ridiger), one of the two most powerful bishops in Orthodoxy and the only individual, I believe, to be criticized in each of these three books.
Webster’s case against some church leaders, especially in the Moscow patriarchate and in Romania, is absolutely withering. Although I am unable to describe his criticisms as either unjust or excessively harsh (indeed, I would be hard pressed to fault his book in any way), I cannot find it completely in my heart to make Webster’s reproaches my own. Doubtless I will not be his only reader disposed to make greater allowance for the extraordinarily trying circumstances in which those Iron Curtain bishops found themselves.
Perhaps Patriarch Aleksii I (Simansky), who ruled the Moscow patriarchate from 1945 to 1970, may serve as an example to illustrate my (overly soft-hearted?) disinclination to second Webster’s numerous censures of the Russian and Romanian hierarchies. Relying on recently uncovered Soviet and chiefly KGB sources, Webster documents Aleksii’s enthusiastic cooperation with communism in impressive detail. As Webster tells the story, I would feel no sympathy for the bishop at all. But then I turned to Davis’s description of that same Aleksii. There I see a dreadfully oppressed man enduring poverty almost to starvation during World War II, desperately ministering to a diminished flock in besieged Leningrad, even shoveling snow to clear a walkway to the cathedral between German bombing raids, and finally reduced to celebrating the Divine Liturgy all alone after the other ministers and the whole choir had perished from war, famine, and disease. Contemplating such things, any disposition I may have felt to criticize Patriarch Aleksii simply evaporates from my soul.
THE LEGACY OF OPPRESSION
The story of Orthodoxy in this century is largely a tale of martyrdom. More Christians have died for their faith since 1900 than in all previous centuries put together, and the majority of these have been Eastern Orthodox. Another enormous example, though less well known than the Iron Curtain, is Turkey. As this century began, about one-third of the citizens of that country were Greek Orthodox; only 5,000 of them now remain, the others having been killed or forced out by sustained persecution. Egyptians, Cypriots, Armenians, Serbs, Georgians, and others have likewise added to the martyrology in this century.
Undoubtedly this experience of martyrdom and oppression has been the occasion of extraordinary sanctity among some Orthodox peoples, but the effects of such persecutions, especially those in Turkey and Russia, have not been so positive in our own country. A few examples may illustrate this fact.
First, the Russian emigre communities, in both Europe and America, experienced great turmoil in the aftermath of the revolution. Because of the understandable inability of the Russian hierarchy to exercise proper pastoral leadership over these communities, various ecclesiastical ruptures occurred, and there have been further schisms among them even to this day. Some of these groups, including the most fervent, now find themselves out of communion with the rest of the worldwide Orthodoxy, and one fears that a complete healing of this situation may be a long way off.
Second, even among the Orthodox who are in full communion with one another, there is a continuing problem of jurisdictional disunity along ethnic lines. Since 1922, the flavor of Orthodoxy in this country has been decidedly ethnic, and consequently foreign. Moreover, conscious efforts have been exerted by some Orthodox authorities to accentuate that ethnicity. For example, although the nineteenth-century Orthodox immigrants to this country readily adopted the English language for their worship, there were serious efforts to reverse that process during the half-century following World War I. It is incredible but nonetheless true that a couple of million Americans now regularly worship in ancient Greek, Arabic, or church Slavonic, of which they do not understand one word in a hundred. Then they wonder why their children become Methodists.
Third, the governments of some of the “mother countries” have tended to regard their ethnic communities in America as outposts representing their national interests here. This situation has also hampered evangelism by Orthodox congregations. Webster notes, for example, that the public pronouncements and policies of the Antiochian Archdiocese, by far the most evangelical and fastest-growing Orthodox jurisdiction in America, nonetheless tend almost invariably to serve the political interests of Syria and Lebanon. I do not know, however (and, indeed, I positively doubt), that any pressure has ever been brought to bear on the Antiochian Archdiocese by either government. Sadly, one cannot with confidence say the same thing for the Greek government’s relationship to the Greek Archdiocese in this country. Moreover, it is a source of both embarrassment and scandal that any politician with even a faintly Greek name, no matter how dubious his lifestyle, suspect his churchmanship, or disreputable his moral views, can unfailingly anticipate the support of the Greek Archdiocese.
Fourth, often the Orthodox are simply insensitive to how unnecessarily foreign their church appears on the American scene. For example, many an American inquirer into Orthodoxy is quite “put off” when, on entering an Orthodox church for the first time, he encounters the flag of Greece, Ukraine, or even (in the case of my own parish until last year) Syria standing right up there with the icons! Well may he wonder if he has entered the embassy of a foreign power.
Fifth, largely because of his delicate situation in Turkey, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who is the other of the two most powerful bishops in Orthodoxy, is glad to have under his ecclesiastical jurisdiction the approximately 2.5 million Greeks living in the United States. Inasmuch as this circumstance affords him with what he perceives to be political leverage in dealing with a Muslim government in an often hostile environment, the current holder of that office, Patriarch Bartholomew I, emphatically does not want an independent jurisdictional unity among the Orthodox Christians in America. Indeed, to a 1994 American meeting of Orthodox bishops, including Greeks, who worked out initial plans to bring about such unity, his negative reaction was marked by a vehemence bordering on irrationality. Thus, put in simple terms, the well-being of Orthodoxy in America is currently being sacrificed to the political advantage of a foreign bishop. Indeed, the Ecumenical Patriarchate is the major impediment to jurisdictional unity among the Orthodox in this country, an unfortunate circumstance that significantly reduces the honor that high office should inspire and the prestige it would otherwise enjoy.
It is distressing to reflect on the diminished respect commanded by the current occupants of the two most powerful bishoprics in the Orthodox Church, both of them apparently good and holy men but victims of political conditions beyond their control and, each in his own way, historical symbols of the present problems of Orthodoxy in America.
Copyright (c) 1996 Christianity Today, Inc./BOOKS AND CULTURE Review
Volume 2, No. 2, Page 6
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