For the next couple of weeks, I am going to write a number of posts on the book Thinking Orthodox: Understanding and Acquiring the Orthodox Christian Mind, by Eugenia Scarvelis Constantinou. In short (as the subtitle suggests), the book focuses primarily on two things. First, it discusses the fundamental difference in the basic outlook, mindset, and very way of thinking between Orthodox Christianity on one side, and both Catholicism and Protestantism on the other side. Second, it articulates the way to acquire, or more accurately develop, an Orthodox mindset.
The reason why I want to write a few posts on the book is because the book has helped me further crystalize in my own head why I have never fully felt a part of, not only the Evangelicalism of my youth, but “Western Christianity” as a whole. As Constantinou discusses in her book, “Western” Christians, be they Catholic or Protestant, simply have a hard time understanding “Eastern” Orthodox Christianity because the very way both Western and Eastern Christianity even goes about seeking truth and understanding the contours of the Christian faith is just different.
Consequently, Constantinou occasionally mentions how, even when Western Christians come to embrace Orthodoxy, they still have a tendency to try to impose a Western mindset and way of thinking on Orthodoxy, and it just doesn’t work. Now, chances are you might not really know what I’m even talking about that yet—and that is the purpose of this brief book analysis series: to actually explain what that means.
In any case, I want to state up front what my biggest takeaway from the book has been. Like I said before, I grew up in the Evangelical world of the 70s-80s, and although there was much about it that I still look back upon fondly, I never really felt like I fit in that world. Even as I got older and went off to Regent College in Vancouver to get my first master’s degree (in the New Testament), even though that Regent College experience was one of the most transformative experiences in my life, if I were honest, I never felt like I really fit in there either.
In fact, there have been (for lack of a better term) two “A-HA!” moments in my spiritual journey. The first came halfway through my second year at Regent College, when some of my friends convinced me to go with them to the Sunday night Compline service at Christ’s Church Cathedral in downtown Vancouver. I hesitated going at first because, quite frankly, it sounded “too Catholic” to me. Nevertheless, I decided to go. We actually got there a minute late, and the service was just starting. For those who do not know, the Compline service is about a 30-minute liturgical service in which there are candles, incense, and a choir who sings the psalms and other ancient Christian prayers—that’s it.
In any case, I remember walking in from the buzzing city street into a dark, candle-lit, incense-filled quiet church, with the choir members silently walking back to the choir loft as a bell was tolling. My very first thought (and this is coming from someone who has gone to church his entire life) was, “This is the first worship service I have ever been to.” There was something about the holiness of it all that didn’t just speak to my soul—my soul was immediately immersed in it. There was something about the ancient liturgy that opened me up.
The second “A-HA!” moment came a number of years later, after I had moved to Little Rock for a teaching job. I had done quite a lot of reading over the years on more ancient Christian practices and Orthodox Christianity in particular, but had never attended an Orthodox service, because I had never lived near an Orthodox Church. It just so happened that there was a Greek Orthodox Church in Little Rock, so early on in that fall semester I decided to check it out. As soon as I walked in the church, I distinctly remember thinking, “I’m home!” In fact, after the Liturgy, I remember going to Starbucks and writing a short poem that began, “I know in my heart I’m a man from the east.”
All that is to say is that, whereas Constantinou makes it a point that it is really hard for Western Christians to understand Orthodoxy because Western Christianity just has a different way of thinking—a different mindset—when it comes to the Christian faith, I feel my mindset really has always been Orthodox, and that is why I never have felt like I really “fit in” with the decidedly Western version of Christianity of my youth and young adulthood. In that sense, I’ve always felt like I’ve been in a kind of exile.
Within a few of years of my epiphany that Sunday in that Orthodox Church in Little Rock, I joined the Orthodox Church, only to find myself moving to Alabama a year later, to a place where there is no Orthodox Church within 70 miles of where I live. Consequently, although I had finally felt “spiritually at home” for about four years in Little Rock, I again find myself an Orthodox Christian in a state of exile. I’m coming to see that when it comes right down to it, the Christian journey is one in which you are in a state of exile most of the time…or at least are on a journey in the wilderness.
All that said, I am going to be discussing Thinking Orthodox over the next couple of weeks. I don’t know how many posts I will write—I’m guessing perhaps four or five. I hope these posts don’t come across as just some sort of “intellectual inquiry” into Orthodoxy. As you’ll hopefully see as I discuss the book, if they do come across that way, then they really aren’t reflecting the Orthodox way of thinking. In fact, the heart of the difference between the “Western mindset” of both Catholicism and Protestantism and the “Eastern mindset” of Orthodoxy centers on how both Catholicism and Protestantism place an unhealthy and elevated emphasis on human intellect and reason. You can see this at work in medieval scholasticism and modern books on systematic theology, where there is this obsession with trying to fix everything within Christian theology into airtight formulas and definitions that can be intellectually explained and rationally proved.
That way of going about doing theology reflects a decidedly “Western mindset” that sees theology as a primarily intellectual and rational endeavor to somehow “prove God.” By contrast, although Orthodoxy isn’t against intellectualism and rationality, it declares that God simply cannot be intellectually grasped by the human mind because He is so much bigger than what the human mind can rationally understand. Therefore, Orthodoxy accepts a whole lot more ambiguity, uncertainty, and paradox when it comes to encountering God. In fact, perhaps that is a good way of saying it: Both Catholicism and Protestantism, when it comes right down to it, tend to view God (and Jesus Christ and the Gospel—all of it) as something to be intellectually understood, whereas Orthodoxy views God as someone to be encountered in your very soul.
As Constantinou relates in the Introduction, she was an Orthodox Christian who was a Religious Studies major at a Catholic university. As she took her theology classes, there was just a sense of “offness” she felt that she couldn’t quite figure out. She says she “often experienced an unsettled feeling, a disconnect, a religious cognitive dissonance. The information given in class occasionally seemed ‘off’ somehow, and this puzzled me” (8).
She further gives the example of what happened in one of her classes when the Catholic professor posed a question to the students (who were mostly either Catholic or Protestant), “If the bones of Jesus were discovered, and it was confirmed that they really were the bones of Jesus, would you still be a Christian?” To her astonishment, every person in the class said they wouldn’t lose their faith and they would still see Jesus as a great teacher and philosopher. Her response was, “If the bones of Jesus were discovered, I would be outta here! I would no longer be a Christian!” I completely agree with her. And, like her, I am shocked when I hear self-professed Christians give that kind of response, not simply in regard to the resurrection of Jesus, but to a whole host of things in regard to the traditional (and Orthodox!) Christian faith.
In fact, to be quite honest, I’ve seen over the past few years a whole bunch of self-described “Ex-Evangelicals” who have left Evangelical Christianity, and have done so in a rather angry, disillusioned manner. They express open disdain and disgust with the over-politicization that has happened within Evangelicalism (and they’re correct on that), and they criticize Evangelicalism for its insistence of “absolute certainty” on a variety of theological claims (and they’re right to do so). I hear many of them talk about “embracing mystery, uncertainty, and doubt,” but it doesn’t seem to me that what they mean by that is what Orthodox Christianity means by that.
To be blunt, it seems to me that many “Ex-Evangelicals” aren’t so much “embracing mystery, uncertainty, and doubt,” as they are simply rejecting the false certainties of Evangelicalism and then turning around to embrace equally false certainties found on the opposite end of the American political spectrum. And some simply are using that as a mantra to justify rejecting anything within Christianity and the Scriptures that they personally don’t like. Sorry, that’s not Christianity. Embracing mystery, uncertainty, and doubt doesn’t mean remaking Christianity into a religion that reflects your own individualistic preferences. That kind of mindset actually reflects a hyper-individualistic and Enlightenment way of thinking.
All that is to say that I see a peculiar thing going on in “American Christianity” these days. A whole lot of people aren’t just seeing the clear and obvious deficiencies in American Evangelicalism, they are livid about it and feel completely betrayed it. But instead of diving deeper and considering that underlying problem with the “Western mindset,” they are just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic. Perhaps that is too stark of a way to put it, but I think there is something to that image. If you don’t get the proper mindset—as Constantinou will say later in the book—if you don’t learn to acquire the actual mind of Christ (and not just amass information about him)—you’re probably not going to be able to see clearly what the Gospel is all about. Does that sound harsh? I hope not…but I think it is true, nonetheless.
So there it is. If that interests you, be looking for my posts on Thinking Orthodox over the next couple of weeks.
I think your analysis that many Evangelicals are simply rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic is apt. and born out by the evidence. Case after case could be cited in which someone realizes that the fundamentalist evangelicalism they were taught doesn’t hold up under serious scrutiny, yet instead of reassessing and looking at other more robust expressions of Christianity simply abandons the faith altogether, totally oblivious to the fact that what they are abandoning is a silly caricature of true, authentic Christianity. And if such a person is a well-known pastor, evangelist or scholar they then often feel compelled to write a book telling everyone why they’re leaving the faith.
As for the resurrection, the view that it doesn’t matter whether the bodily resurrection of Jesus was a literal historical event or not is the view held by scholars such as Jesus Seminar Fellows the late Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan. In their view the resurrection is a metaphor for a deeper, spiritual truth.
Prof. Ben Witherington III refers to this with tongue in cheek as “Resurrection Lite.” He describes it thus:
“’Resurrection Lite,’ or the resurrection of pure metaphor or even pure otherworldliness, was not what the earliest Christians believed in. ‘Less intellectually filling, still tastes great,’ was not their motto. They had an interest in historical reality, especially the historical reality of Jesus and his resurrection, because they believed that their faith, for better or for worse, was grounded in it.”
Yet if Jesus wasn’t literally bodily raised from the dead, as Paul asserts in I Corinthians 15, the whole show is off and Christians are a bunch of sad, deluded fools for believing in a fairy-tale.
Pax.
Lee.
Does the author engage with Plested’s Orthodox Readings of Aquinas or Russell’s Gregory Palamas and the Making of Palamism in the Modern Age? Any significant use of primary texts from major theologians in the Orthodox tradition like St Maximus, Damascene or Scholarios or on the Western side like Aquinas or any of the Catholic mystics?
I’m just curious what sources the author uses to substantiate the meta-narrative she’s suggesting exists between “the West” and “the East” in which they are monolithic entities with different theological methods and understandings of the relationship between faith and reason?
I’d have to go back and check, but overall, it is more of a “lay person” book, so it doesn’t get too technical in that regard. Generally speaking, Christianity in “the West” (i.e. Europe and America) has a different mindset than Eastern Orthodoxy.
I think whether it’s meant to be a popular or scholarly work, it should be able to substantiate its claims. It’s not outside the scope of a popular work; it’s a basic requirement for a good argument. The metanarrative described in the book is nothing new; it is a popular theme in 20th/21st century Orthodoxy writers, but in my experience it’s never substantiated by sources. I find myself confused by what seems more like mere assertions that ride on false dichotomies and caricatures of “the West” and “the East” than any demonstration of a real, fundamentally different “mindset”.
For instance, you write, in distilling Dr. Constantinou’s work:
“In fact, the heart of the difference between the ‘Western mindset’ of both Catholicism and Protestantism and the’“Eastern mindset’ of Orthodoxy centers on how both Catholicism and Protestantism place an unhealthy and elevated emphasis on human intellect and reason.”
How does one even manage to prove this? It’s so generalized that it seems impossible to do so without over-simplifying not just one entire tradition, but multiple entire traditions. When do we cross-over from healthy, measured use of reason to an “unhealthy and elevated” use? If we can’t answer that question, how do we intelligibly assert one tradition has and another hasn’t?
Surely as a well-researched academic on these matters, Dr. Constantinou would know that many of the Church Fathers emphasized the “human intellect and reason” on matters of theology. The Damascene, Maximus, and the Cappadocians- to name a few – all utilized philosophical proofs to *prove* God’s existence, known today as “natural theology”, one of the signature hallmarks of medieval scholasticism, of which she is so critical. This is nicely shown in Bradshaw and Swinburne’s – both Orthodox philosophers – recent work “Natural Theology in the Eastern Orthodox Tradition” and can be found by reading the first couple chapters of Damascene’s On the Orthodox Faith. How does any of this square with the above, quoted claim?
Consider what St. Nectarios of Aegina has to say:
“The Greek nation, led by natural knowledge of God to discover the truth, also knew that truth made known to man by revelation, and, by means of both, was guided to the highest truth…Philosophy discovers God in creation, increasing the longing for him in the heart…Philosophy’s considerations of the divine attributes taught man moral virtues, so that through these he could become like unto the divine, but such teaching alone is unable to raise man to the throne of God…philosophy is not an aim or final end, but a guide leading to Christianity, which overcomes philosophy’s short comings and perfectly satisfies the desires of the human heart.” – Concerning Greek Philosophy
Again, how does any of this square with the above claim that the use of reason in theology and it’s relationship to theology more generally is, as you summarize from Dr. Constantinou’s book, “the heart of the difference”?
What about Aquinas, surely one of the chief villains in this meta-narrative, who stated in his Summa Theologia, “Whoever, then, tries to prove the trinity of persons by natural reason, derogates from faith in two ways. (Part 1, Q.32, Art. 1)”? How does this square with the above claim?
In sum, my original question, which is ultimately more of a concern about modern Orthodox claims on this topic, remains. Perhaps the West is more eastern and the East more western than some would like to admit?