A Light From The East (Book Review)

What is Orthodox teaching, what makes it unique, and how can Protestants use it? Best book I've ever read on this subject.

If the home picture of this blog wasn’t a clue, I have deep respect for Orthodoxy. The practices I’ve gleaned from the Greek Orthodox have brought me closer to God. I wear an Orthodox prayer bracelet (the Orthodox version of a rosary) daily and often call myself the most (capital “O”) Orthodox Protestant you’ll ever meet.

Having just finished it, this is, by far, the best book I’ve yet read for Protestants to understand the depth and uniqueness of Orthodox teaching.

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1929852

Google Books has the first 30 pages or so available online for free.

Rather like the Matrix, practitioners claim (rightly) that Orthodoxy can’t be explained and must be experienced. This book explains why. While Catholics recently rediscovered the Theology of the Body (the current Pope likely wants to memory hole that), the Orthodox never lost it. This book explains how those differences came about, and they’re far deeper than even I ever suspected.

I’ve posted this chart before.

I always thought the divergence began with the separation that occurred at the fall of Rome, culminating in the Great Schism 600 years later when both sides came back together. The roots are deeper, maybe even stretching to the apostolic era.

The Roman Empire wasn’t just Roman

The Roman culture of military authority and law is what held the Empire together. Rome was a multiethnic empire though, so under this common legal system, different people groups maintained their distinct cultural ways. The largest and oldest of these people groups were the Greeks. And the Greeks were a people not of law but of mind.

“Hellenistic culture produced many brilliant philosophers who explored profoundly what human reason could (and could not) offer; Rome produced no great philosophers. Rome’s gifted pursued law rather than philosophy. Even those who, like Cicero and Seneca, appeared philosophically attuned were really interested in ethics — practical application [sic] of thought to life”¹

Rome has its echo of Homer in Virgil, but there is no Roman Plato or Aristotle or Epicurus. While Greek intellectual thought certainly influenced Rome, it did not transfer nearly as readily as Roman legions.

The story that came out of Jerusalem about the Jewish God who became a man thus encountered 2 distinct cultures, a legalistic Imperial one and a more introspective Greek one, centered in Rome and Athens respectively, each of which filter the story through their own lens.

“Without departing from the teaching of Christ and the apostles, the church nevertheless spoke to these cultures in ways their people could understand. Those who responded to the gospel also incorporated it in terms of the concerns they already knew and the questions they traditionally wrestled with.”

They were doing what we do, trying to distill the meaning for their own lives out of the testimony of the Scriptures and testimony of the apostles.

“Because of this, different emphases and stresses in teaching and preaching emerged in the 2 halves of the Roman Empire. They did not contradict each other, but were nevertheless different, each a relevant response to the distinct culture into which the gospel had come.”²

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?”

By the 2nd century, this divergence of cultures had become quite dramatic.

When I teach Greek philosophy, my students are struck by the Greek focus on rationality and reason. But in fact, both Plato and Aristotle were very aware that intellectual reason alone could steer you wrong. This skepticism is the reason Plato posits the heart as the governor between gut (emotions) and head (reason) — too much of either is fatal. For more on this, see my PHIL 101 Plato article. Not surprisingly, the intellectual Greeks tried to baptize Plato.

“In the Eastern part [of the Empire], Clement of Alexandria and his student Origen sought points of similarity and contact between the Christian faith and the leading philosophical systems — specifically Platonism.

By contrast, in the Latin West, Tertullian responded with a trenchant challenge, ‘What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?’ In Tertullian’s estimation, Greek patterns of thought could not be appropriately adapted and adopted by Christians.”³

The divergence here is even deeper than it appears. Clement is writing in Greek. He is an academic (an egghead) with a pretty serious ascetic streak.

Clement’s approach was tailored to reach the educated intelligentsia and those steeped in Greek culture. He believed that, just as the Mosaic Law provided background to prepare Jews to come to Christ, so pagan philosophy provided the background that could prepare the pagan for faith in Christ. ⁴

Meanwhile, Tertullian is considered the father of Latin theology, writing in the imperial instead of the intellectual language. He’s a lawyer and relatively well connected politically in Rome.

I’m by no means saying that Clement was right and Tertullian wrong. In fact, Protestants would point to Tertullian’s skepticism of Tradition as the first evidence of “sola scriptura”. But even by the 2nd century, the two halves of the Church (Greek and Roman) are culturally and linguistically separating. Clement didn’t, but he could reasonably have asked Tertullian, “What has Rome to do with Jerusalem either?”

When the gospel leaves Israel, it encounters a Greek culture that is highly intellectual; meanwhile Rome’s attitude is, “we don’t have time for your Hellenic navel gazing; we’re busy running the world.” And these divergences are getting worse.

Key differences between East and West

Western Christianity became increasingly focused on law.

“In the Roman legal tradition, concerns about status before the law, guilt and justice, debt and credit were foundational. Consequently, Western Christian theology, ecclesiastical practices, and piety all came to reflect concerns and matters that belong in a court of law — specifically God’s court. This was true already in antiquity; it remained so throughout the Middle Ages in the West; it is the unmistakable concern of the Protestant Reformation as well.”⁵

It is from Rome that ideas like propitiation and substitutionary atonement originate. You have a “sin debt” that has to be paid for — Roman. You are saved by Jesus’ blood — Roman. Salvation becomes legal, almost transactional. Outside of a Roman legal framework, such ideas were nonsensical, but within the Western Empire, they carried the day. (Note, again, I’m not claiming these are wrong — Saint Paul uses similar language in some of his letters — but this legalistic focus accelerates in the West over the centuries.)

Meanwhile, the East developed a very different view, one that could be summarized in Jesus’ words, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow Me.”⁶

“Questions of guilt and legality or satisfaction and payment were not the main issues for Eastern Christianity, focused instead on the struggle between good and evil, light and darkness, the process of salvation, and the communion with God. Christianity in the East was reserved about the capacities of human reason to express the mysteries of the faith. Already present in antiquity, these remained central in subsequent centuries; and they continued to the present day.” ⁷

Here is the origin of theosis — oneness with God — as the goal of salvation. There’s nothing transactional about this; it’s a lifelong process of learning to overcome sin and darkness so that one may walk in the light in full communion with the Lord — to become a Saint. Many Protestants may see something like this in their own holiness teachings, but it’s a pale shadow. Seen from the East, Catholic and Protestant theories of salvation look like 2 slightly different colors of the same legalistic brush.

Orthodox? What’s that?

As the West and East diverged linguistically, even the term “orthodox” began to be treated differently.

For both Western and Eastern Christians, the term orthodox is reserved for what is especially prized in Christian faith and practice. The term is a combination of 2 Greek words: orthos meaning ‘upright’ or ‘proper’ and doxa which means ‘opinion’ or ‘glory’. In Western Christianity, orthodox focuses on strict doctrinal precision.⁸

To the Latin Church and its Protestant derivatives, being orthodox means holding the “upright opinions” about God — believing the correct things.

“Orthodoxy picks up on the other meanings of these Greek words that are combined in the term. In Eastern Christianity, orthodox is used for that which gives ‘proper glory’ to God. Teaching is a necessary ingredient, but is not itself the focus. Orthodox [is] a style of life and worship that is faithful to the Christian message. Such faithfulness — which requires but is not limited to truthful teaching — gives proper glory to God.”

A modern Evangelical would likely criticize this as “works based salvation”. What matters is your beliefs! But in truth, any pastor who preaches on the book of James will find himself grasping at Eastern strains of thought even without realizing it.

But perhaps no idea diverges more between East and West than theology.

Let’s talk about God

The word theology is theos (God) + logos (word or speech). Theology literally means “talking about God”. However, in the West (particularly in the late Middle Ages), this becomes a formalized academic discipline. A Catholic or Protestant becomes a theologian through academic study of the Bible and other theologians (Church tradition in Catholicism and bible commentary in Protestantism). Thus, theology stops “talking about God” and becomes talking about other theology, almost “talking about talking about God”, which isn’t the same at all. Medieval Western theology is parodied today as “how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” Books with the titles of “Systemic Theology of…” have fallen out of favor recently, but the idea is still prominent: theology is a system that can be (and must be) studied.

Meanwhile, the East, retaining more of the Hellenic skepticism of the limits of human reason, is wary of using imperfect human words to convey the mysteries of the divine.

“Eastern Christianity views talking about God [theology] as a hazardous enterprise. Since God has used human language to reveal himself to us, we can speak of him; since he has summoned his people to to proclaim him, we must. Even so, God will always remain beyond our best attempts to set him forth in our words. Orthodoxy has little confidence in human language when it comes to speaking about God.”⁹

Which begs the obvious question, how does one become an Orthodox theologian if not by studying theology? Answer: by “knowing” God not in an academic sense but in a Biblical one, the way Adam “knew” Eve.

“And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” Jesus prayer in the Garden as recorded in John 17.

It is an intimate knowing not an intellectual one. Perhaps eros and agape aren’t as separate as your Evangelical pastor, steeped in systemic Wesleyan-Arminian theology, might think.

“To know God in this way is necessary for al theology. Knowing God requires much more — and yet paradoxically, much less — than mastering a wealth of revealed information about God. Knowing God in this sense means communion with him, a fellowship between Creator and the creature … in intimacy. Knowing God in this sense means loving God without reservation.

In Eastern Christian practice, from antiquity to the present, meditation and contemplation are the paths to knowledge of God. Divine revelation offers a fountain for all such meditation, of course, but the Orthodox emphasis falls not on speech about but on silence before God.”

Are there echoes of this in Protestantism? Sure. But they’re pretty faint. And I’ve found that incorporating some of these practices into my own prayer life has brought me closer to God.

How did we get so different? Back to history.

The Great Schism was no big deal at the time

The Goths brought an end to Rome, so says your college Western Civ book.

In truth, Rome had ceased to be important long before AD 476. Constantine moved the imperial capital across the Aegean Sea to modern Turkey in the early 4th century, and any Roman family of any importance followed, quickly rendering the actual city of Rome a relative backwater. You go for nostalgia; maybe you keep a summer place; but only rubes live there full time. By the time the Goths sacked Rome, there wasn’t much left to plunder.

The Church followed this pattern. As the Empire became officially Christian, the Church’s life became bound up with Roman imperial rule, but in Constantinople (the East) not in Rome. The “Bishop of Rome” (the official title of the Pope) was increasingly isolated from both the legislative and theological actions of a capital 500 miles and an ocean away. Even after Rome itself fell, Constantinople continued to rule a massive Christian empire for another 1000 years, still calling itself the Roman Empire, defending Christians from Arabs, claiming territory, and developing further the distinctive Eastern religious doctrines we looked at above. This empire adopted Greek as its official language in the 7th century — the Eastern Church had never embraced Latin. While the Bishop of Rome did send delegates to the various church councils over the centuries, he was a single bishop from a distant and unimportant region who wrote in a dead language and was tolerated as an equal mostly for sentimental reasons. His influence was minor.

The divergence of doctrine and language between the churches of East and West caused problems, but this was nothing new.

“There were occasional rifts through the centuries, and ecclesiastical communion was periodically broken. Each of these, however, was eventually healed. Consequently, the mutual denunciations and excommunications of 1054 occasioned no particular anxiety at the time: people expected that that, as before, there would be eventual restoration of that communion.”¹⁰

Except there wasn’t. And the reason was the 4th Crusade.

The Church scores an “own goal”

The Roman Catholic Crusades were seen as pretty quixotic in the East. Constantinople had regular contact (often cordial but sometimes violent) with Muslim forces. Islam was a manageable diplomatic problem though, and suddenly, Rome (that distant and backwater place no one thought very much about) shows up with an army to go “defend pilgrims from the infidels”. The take in Byzantium was rather, “nice of you to notice, but what do you think we’ve been doing for all these centuries?”

Constantinople was glad for the help though, and while they didn’t send soldiers, they did help with logistics and intelligence. Roman Catholics had surprisingly military success considering they were fighting an enemy they had ever met in a part of the world they had never been. Rome took this as a sign from God and continued sending more Western knights, but war is expensive. In 1202, Rome hired Venetian sailors to transport the latest army to the Holy Land. Unfortunately, they sent the army C.O.D.¹¹ The Venetians demanded payment from the crusaders upon arrival, and the crusaders turned their eyes on the obvious wealth of Byzantium. 2 years later, they managed to sack the home of the only Christian empire left in the world.

“What followed was a 3 day rampage of destruction, slaughter, rape and pillage. Virtually all the riches of Byzantium were taken. The best found its way to Western Europe, where much of it can be found today in museums and private collections.

The devastation of Constantinople was was horrific, but more than buildings and riches, the Eastern Christians suffered the atrocities and horror of warfare at the hands not of infidel armies but of supposedly fellow Christians in holy warfare. It was this, not the 1054 schism that led to the deep chasm between Western and Eastern Christianity that continues to the present.” ¹²

This was the October 7th attacks in Israel, multiplied by a factor of 100, and with Christians on both sides.

The vast majority of the warriors in the 4th crusade never even went to the Holy Land or fought Muslims at all. They stole their fellow Christians gold and went home. This event has been memory holed in Western history, but it’s still raw in much of the East. Pope Innocent III condemned the behavior of the crusaders, but he didn’t return the loot. And the Arabs were left laughing while the Christians slaughtered each other. The Byzantines never fully recovered. To this day, much of the East blames the 1453 fall of Constantinople on the armies of the 4th Crusade. Pope Saint John Paul II finally apologized for the crusade in 2001, but it’s going to take a long time to heal and animosity of 800 years.

One could reasonably say that the explosion of Western European cathedral building in the 13th century was financed on stolen loot from Byzantine Christians. That the term “gothic” came to define this style of cathedral is perhaps the greatest linguistic irony of all.

Conclusion

“The West looks at a thing and asks, ‘let’s take it apart and see how it works’.
The East looks at a thing and asks, ‘let’s watch it and see what it does for a while.’ ”

Fr. Barnabas, Charismatic pastor turned Orthodox priest

That was Chapter 1-3 and the rest of the book lays out the differences in more detail. James Payton (the author is a Protestant professor) delves deeply into how the West’s “rediscovery” of Aristotle and Aquinas’ synthesis of his thought differed from the East’s earlier and less legalistic synthesis of Plato, how the Reformation didn’t actually change much (from an Orthodox perspective), and speculates on how the gulf may be more bridgeable than either side believes. He’s spent much of his life trying to find that path. Whether that’s possible, I don’t know, but I highly recommend this book if for no other reason than to educate yourself about how diverse the Body of Christ really is.

1. Page 23

2. Page 24

3. Page 24. Platonism here refers not to Plato’s teaching directly, but to the system of thought that sprang from it over the succeeding several centuries.

4. https://www.gotquestions.org/Clement-of-Alexandria.html

5. Page 25 (yeah, I know I haven’t gotten very far, but it’s a good book.)

6. Luke 9:23

7. Page 27 (eventually, I’ll get to the 30’s, really.)

8. Page 58

9. Page 59

10. Page 33 (yeah, I made it!)

11. For any Millennial or younger readers, that stands for “Cash On Delivery”, as in, you have to pay when you get the package. When I was growing up (you know, back when the dinosaurs lived — the 1980’s) it was common for UPS to take payment for packages and forward it back to the sender.

12. Page 34