James Krotov

6.2.94

On the book:

Don Fairbairn.

PARTAKERS OF THE DIVINE NATURE:AN INTRODUCTION TO EASTERN ORTHODOX THOUGHT.

Draft. March, 1991. Prepared for the Staff of New Life Soviet Union, Campus Crusade for Christ.

The book is a nice review of Eastern (Russian) Orthodoxy: not the usual piece expected for the mass-Evangelical thinking stereotypes. The author makes a clever attempt to study the original sources of Russian Orthodox theology and to find not only shifts but points of covergence with Evangelicals. He makes a true effort to understand Russian Orthodox theology and his intellectual brightness makes his efforts rewarding.

However, the success of Fairbairn is limited by his purpose which is is not proclaimed, but implicit. It is not simply to study Russian Orthodoxy and to give a comparative analysis of it, but to give the Evangelical missionary a practical guide: how to convert people from Russian Orthodoxy to Protestantism. Such a pragmatical foundation inevitably influences the investigator even if he is as brilliant as Fairbairn. I hope to show that there are some crucial points of mediation where Fairbairn instead of trying to make a bridge between different types of theology, falls victim of the more easy way: to construct a wall with a one-way entrance through it: from Russian Orthodoxy to Protestantism.

Because of his aim, Fairbairn has neither the time nor the wish to investigate the basic differences in mentality, in cultural patterns of thinking. He knows and writes that the religious peculiarities of West and East are only part of the broader context. Certainly you can use his advice and get converts; sure, there are millions of Evangelicals in Russia now. But sooner or later the basic patterns of Russian cultural thinking will influence them and they'll become very different from the patterns of belief and behavior expected by their Western co-believers. Moreover, sooner or later these differences will show themselves in rites and theology. That doesn't mean that Russian Evangelicals sooner or later are doomed to return to Russian Orthodoxy. They can become very unique in their Evangelicalism. Then American Evangelicals will be as puzzled as a bald eagle who hatched a cuckoo.

***

Eastern Orthodox theology reflects a specific reception of time. It is not only a lineary process: beginning, stages, and goal. Time also isn't a circle (as in pagan conceptions), with the end attached to the beginning, with eternal repetition of stages, by this endless imitating of eternity. Orthodox thought is trying to investigate in detail the relations between time (as a lineary process) and eternity. Time is lineary and in this sense it is under eternity, as the Earth is under the sky. Time is free from God's will, it is a part of the "sovereign" kingdom of the sinful world and one of the consequensies of sin. But time is created not by any evil God but by the only true Creator. Due to this, He is the God of time, He rules over it, and His eternity coincides with the time when God will show Himself to people, during His Epiphanies.

For the Protestant mind eternity is out of touch, it is before the beginning and after the end. For the Russian Orthodox (Eastern Orthodox, Medieval, Roman Catholic) mind, eternity is not inside time but present in it. Past and future moments can not be in the present but the present can include past and future. Eternity is not equal to time but time sometimes can be equal to eternity. It seems to be very illogical - but we are speaking about feelings and cultural perceptions of Russian Orthodoxy.

This feeling of relations between time and eternity lies under several phenomena which are so exotic (and erroneus) to Fairbairn (as well as practically all Protestant authors).

Authority. Fairbairn states that the Protestant view is: "Our insistence on the responsilility of individual believers themselves to seek truth in the Bible and to serve as a check on potential misuses of Scripture by a person or group of people. If a group proclaims a false interpretation, other Christians who have access to the Bible can recognize the error and correct it."

Such a view can be easily adopted by the Russian Orthodox as well. We shall only point out that bishops and councils are also "groups"; negatively, we shall point out that the history of Protestantism is a history of endless failures of different groups "to correct" each other's interpretations. But in the present context it is more interesting to note that the Orthodox tradition (and Catholic also) includes in the entity of "persons and groups" not only those alive but also the dead and unborn. They also are present in the plenitude ("pleuroma" in Greek) of the Church as the plenipotential judges and creators of the tradition.

Certainly that makes the hermeneutical problems twice as complicated as in the Protestant tradition. But I also am aware that the Protestant tradition in itself is not as simple as Fairbairn or other Evangelicals proclaim it to be to members of Russian Orthodoxy. "Orthodox Christians see no need for such checks and balances [as Evangelicals] because they believe the Church as a whole has the authority to determine what is true," writes Fairbairn. Actually it is quite the opposite: Orthodoxy created a much more complicated system "of checks and balances" having included in them sacraments, saints, and Christ Himself! We havn't "removed human and sinful elements from the concept of the Church," we have surrounded these elements with a great amount of balances. The Orthodox do not hope that the problem of authority can be resolved easily. But we hope that God as the Head of the Church can resolve it by His will. Of course the thinking "that the Church is God's direct manifestation in the world" (Faibairn's absolutely correct formula) is part of the feeling that eternity is constantly manifesting itself in time.

God. The insistence in God's unknowability is connected with the perception of revelation as a process through which eternal Truth comes to the world of time. This process can never be fully or adequately expressed in terms of human language, because time is one of language's fundamentals and so the essence of language is incompatible with the essence of God (a nice example: language gives us a chance to ask the absurd question, "What did God do before creation?")

Certainly, the Eastern Orthodox perfectly well know the places in the Gospel calling us to know God (John 1:18, 17:3, Philippians 3:8). But we distinguish two concepts of knowledge: one is identical with the ancient Middle Eastern Bible mentality, the second with ancient Greece and Rome, mentality of the great philosophers. One is the knowledge as a process of love to somebody, an infinite going inside one's person without damaging either participant of love. Such knowledge is the knowledge of marital love, as it is present in the Song of Songs.

The second concept is empirical knowledge through science, through mechanical analysis of some object. To know something in the first sense you must love this, to know something in the second sense you had better kill this and then investigate it. The first kind of knowledge is infinite and risky. The second is limited, with strict criteria for success.

So when Fairbairn writes: "The Eastern emphasis on God's unknowability leads to the belief that the purpose of theology is union with God rather than knowledge of Him," he makes a false opposition. I hope I make the point that union with God is just the same as knowledge of Him. It is to Russians.

Creation, Atonement, Salvation, and Deification. "It seems that the Orthodox do not view Adam and Eve as being in fellowship with God at creation," - writes Fairbairn. He proceeds to discuss the problem of the Fall and return (deification in Orthodox thought). But it is useless to argue because he doesn't make an investigation of what it is to Orthodox of "being in fellowship with God." Before the Fall or after the Last Judgement, or whether in God there is process? Is there development? Is there nothing close to the essence of time with the possibility of growth?

Most Orthodox theologians will say "no" to the idea of development in Paradise or in God Himself. As far as I know, only Berdyayev wrote that the essence of God would be impoverished if understood as stable, that denying of movement in God is characterictic to Aristotele, not the Bible. But it seems to me, that on the mental level all Eastern Orthodox theologians agree with Berdyaev. Even without the Fall Christ would appear to Adam and Eve, but He was not revealed to them before the Fall. The Tree of Life, the symbol of the Eucharist, was waiting for people. So there is a possibility of some development in the life in God and with God, and the development is characteristic not only to "this world," but also to eternity. Fairbairn failed to describe the deep feeling of the Eastern Orthodox man of salvation as process. To us deification, or becoming like Christ, begins long before the Fall and will never be stopped, it is permanent and infinite because God is a topless mountain of Love and Grace.

Fairbairn comes to the understanding of this when he writes: "Theosis is a process rather than an instantaneous change". He is most generous in asserting that this idea is close to the Evangelical understanding of the work of Holy Spirit. And yet he accuses Orthodox theology in "a confusion of justification and sanctification." It comes as "a failure to distinguish between justification as God's free acceptance of unworthy sinners and sanctification as the process of becoming righteous, a process which involves human activity and effort."

For Evangelicals justification is a momentary act and sanctification is a process; justification is an impulse of eternity and sanctification belongs to the dimension of time. For Orthodoxy both are at one and the same time impulses and processes. Practically speaking, that means that in everyday spiritual life, in the elaborate system of aesthetics, man is called to simultaneously feel the glory and joy of Christ's eternal Resurrection, of His evernew and free gift of Grace, of salvation, and awareness of Christ's eternal Cross, of man's everlasting sin and weakness.

This is a sharp paradoxical state of mind and heart, which was expressed by St. Siluan in XXth century in his statement: "Hold yourself in Hell and don't despair." I am justified, yet I am lost because I didn't manage to reach sanctification. I am lost because I didn't manage to be sanctified. Yet I mustn't despair because I am permanently justified and sanctified by Christ. I must think that I cannot reach salvation (justification and sanctification) by my own efforts, but that does not mean that I must stop trying. Any efforts I must consider the success of God.

The debate can be made more explicit by comparing two feelings of "reality". Fairbairn once opposed "symbolic" and "real". This is very curious, because for the Orthodox "symbolic" is real in a very profound sense. Many catechisms begin with explaining "symbol": a bridge between two kingdoms, a part of eternal reality embodied in this reality. Moreover, in Russian thinking, symbol is more real than reality in the usual sense. The Eucharist is more the source of life than a normal piece of bread, that is why in Orthodoxy the words of Pater Noster about bread are often understood as the words about Christ.

It seems that on the theological level Evangelicals lack this paradoxical feeling of God.  A mystic lives beyond words and that is why he is not bothered by the paradoxes of positive theology. Protestants live a more profane existence than is normal for Russian Orthodoxy. Western Protestants try to exterminate everything contradictory by words, not by  silence. That is a typical Russian Orthodox assessment of Protestants and that is why Russian Orthodox believers  are usually arrogant towards there Protestant brothers.

The debate is correctly shown by Fairbairn. He errs by trying to prove that only Protestants have the full truth. The collision of two types of thinking and two ways of theological expression of one and the same Truth can be compared with the hot debates between physicists in XIXth century: those who thought that light was a fraction, and those who believed light was a wave. The truth is that light is simultaneuosly fraction and wave - quantum.

***

Saints and icons. Fairbairn fails to understand the Eastern Orthodox mentality properly because he learned about it through books only and, what is worse, he didn't use the books describing the religious practices of Orthodox people, the everyday devotio. In the matters mentioned above that is not a catastrophe, but in the question of icon it is. He studied the history of the theological debate around icons, but these debates are only part of the problem.

The clue to the riddle of icons can be seen in three facts. First and the most ardent (and at times the only) supporters of icons were monks -- the people who spend the largest part of their lives than anyone praying in front of them. Second, Orthodoxy created a specific style (styles) of icon-painting. Third, Russian Orthodox often say about the icon "namolennaya" -- "one which has been used in prayer a lot."

All three facts mean that all the buzz about icons being sources of energy (and it is proper in this situation to unite the cult of saints with the veneration of icons) doesn't explain anything in real life. It is as impossible, silly, and ridiculous to stand in front of the icons waiting for sanctification as it is to stand there to receive a sunburn. If you are not just a phoney Christian coming into the church for five minutes to burn a candle, but if you are staying in the church for hours (and this is Orthodoxy), then inevitably you will not just venerate icons - you will preach in front of them. The icon is a means for praying, it is not an aim. And to pray in front of the icon is a Christian prayer, not a pagan, it is a talk with Christ or with a Christ-like and Christ-revealing saint.

The icon is not an idol then, it is spring-board. This explains why the favourite type of icon is Our Lady with the Child. The pray is so important that the icon in front of which nobody prays is nearly defiled. The icon is sanctified both by God's grace and by human praying. The specific style of icon-painting demonstrates that Orthodox Christians understood all the risk of venerating part of the material world. That is why they've created a specific aesthetic of the icon which must make it symbolic, a part of Paradise.

***

It seems that the main problem of Orthodox-Evangelical dialogue is the presence in the minds of each side of some areas which are typically not thought of. These areas don't coincide in Orthodox and Protestant mentalities. Maybe, to understand such "blind spots" we must investigate the historical roots of each confession. Different fields of theology were investigated, because different types of heresies or enemies stood in front of Orthodoxy and Protestantism. Orthodox people can't imagine thinking about self-efforts, Protestants - about the ways by which grace is acting in the world. Both sides are equally guilty only when refusing to think about opposite sides as equal in faith and reason. Let us pray for such limitations in thinking to be overcome by the Love of Christ.