After 15 years as an Episcopalian priest, Gary Mathewes-Green could no longer tolerate being under the authority of apostate bishops. He and his wife, Frederica, both adult converts to Christianity who had attended seminary together, began looking for a denomination that still honored the traditional creeds and moral principles. The dissident Anglican branches wouldn’t do, because Gary “felt he couldn’t climb further out from the branch to a twig; if anything, he had to return to the trunk.” The couple briefly considered the Roman Catholic Church, which allows married priests in Gary’s situation, but they were repelled by some of the theology, by the authoritarianism, and by the prospect of working under the supervision of people whose thinking resembled that of the Episcopal bishops whom they were fleeing.
Gary eventually came to the Orthodox evangelist Fr. Peter Gillquist, who answered his theological questions, convincing him that Orthodoxy taught salvation by grace, not works. Frederica remained reluctant for a while to desert the sinking ship of liberalized Anglicanism, reasoning that there was a special need for chaplains on the deck of the Titanic. She also says that it is typical among couples converting to Orthodoxy for the husband to be gung-ho from the start, and for the wife to take more time getting used to the idea. True to form, Frederica now can’t imagine ever not being Orthodox, writing that she “tasted and saw, and nothing can compare.”
Facing East gives readers a chance to taste Frederica’s experience and to compare it with their own. It is the story of a year in the life of Father Gary’s young missionary congregation (Antiochean Orthodox) in the Baltimore area, a family diary of a liturgical year. I found it sufficiently charming to read aloud to my wife over several weeks in our after-dinner routine. We are Presbyterians who are just as satisfied with our local church (but not our denomination!) as Frederica is with her Orthodox community. Although our ship isn’t sinking, we still found much in her account to admire.
For one thing, Orthodoxy provides a magnificent aesthetic experience. Worshipers absorb the faith not by hearing about it but by reliving the gospel and the Passion in the liturgy. This gives them a sense of contact with the historic Christian tradition that is often missing in services that are centered on the sermon and more closely tied to contemporary culture.
Second, Orthodoxy is demanding. Participating in the fasts and in the long services (often standing) discourages the attitude, so prevalent among Protestants, that going to church should be something like watching television.
Finally, the Mathewes-Green parents seem to have persuaded their daughter and two sons to share a good deal of their enthusiasm. I need to hear of no further wonders. Those children are potentially more impressive answers to prayer than a thousand miraculously renewed icons.
Did I say that Orthodoxy as practiced by the Mathewes-Green family is demanding? Not if you compare it with the disciplined life of Seraphim Rose, a character straight out of the days of the Desert Fathers.
Born Eugene Rose in San Diego in 1934, he came to San Francisco in the 1950s to seek wisdom of the gnostic kind, studying Oriental lore under Alan Watts. Eugene had the makings of a superior academic mind, including an amazing gift for learning languages. He also had a devotion to seek Truth rather than fashionable knowledge, and to live for God rather than for a career. This inherent sanctity made him unsuitable for a life in the mind games of academia. In fact, it made him unsuitable for a career even in the Orthodox Church, where he was constantly in conflict with manipulative bishops.
Eugene had virtually stumbled into Orthodoxy, falling under the influence of a saintly prelate called “Archbishop John.” Able to see straight through his church’s flawed exterior into the patristic understanding of Christianity at its heart, he never looked back. With his friend Gleb (later Abbot Herman), he founded a monastery in the Northern California mountains west of Redding, living there an arduous life of monastic asceticism and scholarship. As Father Seraphim, he died of an intestinal infection in 1982, at the age of 48, leaving volumes of inspired but loosely organized writings, mostly in the form of lecture notes or articles published in the journal Orthodox World.
I cannot even begin to evaluate his achievement in this brief essay, except to say that I have rarely encountered so penetrating an intellect combined with so generous a spirit. His biography by a brother monk may seem overlong for some readers, but it is packed with fascinating details I wouldn’t have wanted to miss.
One common criticism of Orthodoxy is that it reflects a “Dark Ages” mentality. Father Seraphim would have been proud to admit that he was trying to recapture the mindset of the early Christian centuries. I was taught to see pre-Reformation church history as the story of the Church of Rome, with Augustine and Aquinas leading to Luther and Calvin. From the Orthodox viewpoint, the main story is not Rome, but a turbulent, glorious millennium of church councils and inspired patristic scholars, followed by a tragic second millennium of schisms and decline. Frederica summarizes it eloquently:
For the first thousand years, the thread of Christian unity was preserved worldwide through battering waves of heresies. The method was collegial, not authoritarian; disputes were settled in church councils, whose decisions were not valid unless “received” by the whole community. The Faith was indeed common: what was believed by all people, in all times, in all places. The degree of unity won this way was amazing. Though there was some local liturgical variation, the Church was strikingly uniform in faith and practice across vast distances, and at a time when communication was far from easy. This unity was so consistent that I could attribute it to nothing but the Holy Spirit.
When the unity of Christendom was broken, and papal autocracy substituted for collegial deliberation, the Western Church was free to develop in a direction that led to such disasters as the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the sale of indulgences. The Protestant Reformers meant to return to the roots of Christian belief, but their formula of sola Scriptura failed to prevent waves of further schisms.
Whatever Protestants may think of specific Orthodox doctrines and practices, we should respect the motives that brought people like the Mathewes-Greens and Seraphim Rose to Orthodoxy. At bottom, they are the same motives that launched the Reformation. There is a passion to dig beneath centuries of accumulated accommodation to the spirit of this world, to rediscover the treasure of authentic gospel truth that was proclaimed and defined at the beginning. Whether Orthodoxy has all the right answers or not, it is profoundly attractive to people who are asking the right questions, and who want to find the trunk of the tree rather than to crawl further out on a branch.
One thing we can learn from Orthodoxy is to take the long view of Christian history, seeing the Reformation as one episode in a much bigger story. Throughout the twentieth century, Christianity seemed doomed to wither away under the devastating critique of scientific investigation and the vast social changes that rendered faith (so the experts explained) simply irrelevant. In the end, it is materialism that has withered.
What name shall we give the third millennium? I like to think that we are coming to an Age of Reconstitution. Christianity is not dead or dying, but poised for a new beginning in a world that needs the Good News more than ever. We need to stop multiplying schisms, to set aside the tools of worldly power, and to give the Holy Spirit a chance to help us rediscover the truth that once united us. Those of us who are not inclined to join the converts to Orthodoxy can nonetheless rejoice to have them as worthy partners in that great work of healing.
Phillip Johnson is professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Defeating Darwinism (InterVarsity).
Copyright(c) 1997 by the author or Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture Magazine. For reprint information call 630-260-6200 or e-mail BCedit@aol.com.
Sep/Oct 1997, Vol. 3, No. 5, Page 22
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