[Frederica-l] Emerging Ch & Ordoxy / a "supernatural" question

[Frederica at aol.com]

Precipice Magazine invited me to answer some questions about the Orthodox 
faith, in particular relating to the Emerging Church movement; here's my rather 
garrulous reply. The Emerging Church is an ad hoc movement, or "conversation," 
among (mostly) young Protestants, who are exploring new ways to be the church, 
as Baby Boomer approaches & modernism generally run out of steam. Postmodern 
young people find much appealing in premodern ancient Christianity (esp 
icons), so I hear from Emerging Church folks regularly. My answers here are 
off-the-cuff and not that well organized--email interviews tend to be like that, for 
me--but perhaps it will be helpful to people interested in the early church, or 
the emerging church, or both. 
here it is at Precipice 
_http://www.precipicemagazine.com/frederica_mathewes-green_interview.html_ 
(http://www.precipicemagazine.com/frederica_mathewes-green_interview.html)  
and the same thing on my own website 
_http://www.frederica.com/writings/the-emerging-church-and-orthodoxy.html_ 
(http://www.frederica.com/writings/the-emerging-church-and-orthodoxy.html)  
On a related topic: One Emerging Church leader I spoke with told me that he 
could never accept Orthodox "cosmology" because it includes belief in evil 
spirits (and I think, by extension, the so-called "supernatural" in general). The 
Precipice editor I was emailing with said that he thought that would be a 
minority opinion, and that most Emerging Church people have an openess to 
spiritual realities that comes naturally with their rejection of modernism. He 
referred to his own background in the Vineyard Church.  
I'd like to hear from youall about this--not so much about evil spirits, but 
the other end of the question. Have you had experiences when you felt you got 
a message from God? Does this happen regularly to you? What is it like? (A 
friend told me that it was like a strip of paper moving through her mind with 
words on them. It's not like that for me.)  
My hunch is that this experience is really pretty common among Christians; 
that even people who would say "God doesn't talk to me" have at least one or two 
stories they could tell. I was thinking of writing a book of my own 
experiences in this regard -- I have decades' worth of journals, as I tried to write it 
all down along the way. Reading that into the computer using my new 
voice-recognition software sounds like a great way to get used to using the software, 
and also spiritually refreshing to revisit a lifetime of blessings and "words" 
from God. But before I launched in I thought I should get an overview of how 
rare or common this experience is, at least among this limited pool of people, 
so I can get an idea how to frame introductory material. How does God "speak" 
to you? What miracles, dreams, visions, angels, healings, "suspicious 
coincidences" or "synchronicities" have you experienced? THese things definitely 
require discernment, and self-deception or counterfeit is a real possibility. But 
sometimes it's the real thing. What's your story?  
here's the Precipice interview: 
******** 
1.) Can you offer some insight about how the Orthodox Church understands 
evangelism? Do you feel that, overall, that it is considered a priority when 
compared with Protestant Evangelicalism? 
The Orthodox Church has a beautiful history of evangelism -- but, 
unfortunately, it is largely history. A factor we tend to forget, which has made the path 
of Eastern Christianity so different from that of the West, is that for the 
most part they have not been free. Many Orthodox lands have been under Muslim 
rule for over a millennium, virtually since Islam began. (Was it Chesterton who 
said, don't ridicule the Balkans for being so bellicose; if they hadn't 
fought Islam to a standstill, we'd be fighting the same battles in Paris.) Russia 
and the Slavic countries, on the other hand, just emerged from nearly a century 
of Communism--20 million Orthodox died for their faith, including hundreds of 
thousands of pastors.  
Orthodox who immigrated to the US think of themselves as outsiders for a long 
time. You see a bit of this in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding," where the child 
Toula compares herself unfavorably with the slim, blonde girls in her school. 
Orthodox for the most part are not European, their languages don't use the Roman 
alphabet, and they eat very different foods, so they are inclined to cling to 
each other. (The branch of Orthodoxy my family joined is Arabic, which must 
bear an extra degree of ethnic prejudice.) Setting out to evangelize their 
neighbors just wouldn't occur to them.   
(An aside on that: all Orthodox Churches teach the same faith, and apart from 
spats here and there, are in communion with each other; even the ancient 
split between Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonian churches has been bridged. So we 
could say that today's Greek, Indian, Ukrainian, Ethiopian, Russian, etc 
Orthodox are akin to the Italian, French, German Catholic churches a century ago. 
The work is underway to make a united American Orthodox Church of the array 
currently still identified by immigrant background. But there is this difference 
from 19th Roman Catholic churches, however: in Orthodoxy there has never been 
an expectation that the churches need a single earthly ruler, ie, a pope. 
Orthodoxy is organized at the level of "people, tribe, tongue, and nation," and 
that is felt to be just about right. Unity comes from common belief instead of 
external organization--an endoskeleton rather than an exoskeleton. Rome and 
western Europe were part of this arrangement until roughly a thousand years ago, 
when papal claims to rulership could no longer be ignored.)  
There is an American organization to support missions at home and abroad, the 
Orthodox Christian Mission Center http://www.ocmc.org/  , as well as a relief 
organization, the International Orthodox Christian Charities 
http://www.iocc.org/ . Both great organizations, but certainly not as developed as Protestant 
and Catholic missionary & relief efforts.  
The historic pattern or style of evangelism is interesting, however, compared 
with the West. While Rome decided to do everything in Latin, in order to 
guarantee uniformity, in the East the emphasis was on making the faith 
understandable. So the Scriptures and liturgies were always translated into the 
vernacular, and where there was no written language, missionaries would devise one. In 
the 4th century, St Mesrops Mashtots developed a language for the Armenians, 
and (I love this) he based it on the decorations he saw on their homes and 
around their windows; he wanted to give them an alphabet that they would find 
beautiful. In the 9th century, Ss Cyril and Methodius developed an alphabet for 
the Slavs, and in the 19th century, Russian missionaries who crossed the Bering 
Strait to evangelize the peoples of Alaska ended up devising alphabets for 6 
different dialects. Orthodox missionizing prefers to retain and honor elements 
of native culture as far as possible, which in Alaska, eg, included retaining 
totem poles. The book "Orthodox Alaska"  
http://www.amazon.com/Orthodox-Alaska-Theology-Michael-Oleska/dp/0881410926 by Fr. Michael Oleksa does a good job 
of using the Alaska mission as a template to explore what Orthodox evangelism 
is like.  
2.) I have found that many Evangelicals are surprised to hear that the Holy 
Spirit is so central to the experience within the Orthodox Church. I think this 
is because they equate a "spirit-filled" church with a charismatic, 
Pentecostal context. Can you describe the Orthodox understanding of what the moving of 
the Holy Spirit amongst the community looks like? 
It's funny, but I've noticed that people who come into Orthodoxy from a 
Pentecostal or charismatic background can be the ones who have the easiest 
transition. Orthodoxy is, after all, a premodern church--so it includes a natural 
expectation that there are miracles, healings, angels, and so forth. When you 
start expecting those things, they start to happen. A few years ago we had a 
family visiting that included a 3 yr old girl. During coffee hour she saw my 
husband (the pastor) and told her mom, "There's the man who was singing with the 
angels!"  
We also have an ancient liturgy that gathers the community to pray over the 
oil that will be used to anoint for healing during the coming year. My husband 
told me one year that he knew of three people who had arisen from deathbeds 
after being anointed with this oil.  
The worship, of course, is not "free" like it might be in a charismatic 
church. The thing that struck me abt the liturgy when I started attending was how 
*intimate* it is. There is a real theme of humility, tenderness, and intimacy 
that you don't get in Western formal worship. In fact, it is not "formal" in 
that sense. There's much less fussiness than we had in our Episcopal "high 
church" worship. The worship is gorgeously beautiful, but not stuffy; the kind of 
beautiful, joyous combination you aim at for Christmas dinner or a wedding 
reception. And a service like the one for the anointing oil puts in the priest's 
mouth prayers that are almost embarrassing, as he stresses to the congregation 
that he is a sinner, that his thoughts are sinful and unworthy, that the power 
does not come from him but from God alone. 
Orthodoxy also expects that there are evil spirits. I was talking with an 
Emerging Church leader a couple of weeks ago, and he indicated that this would be 
a "deal breaker" for him. He said that Jesus performed exorcisms on people 
who today we would diagnose as having bipolar disorder, for example.  
Orthodoxy is not so interested in exorcisms and demonic possession, however 
-- while that no doubt still exists, it's extremely rare. But there are all 
those other references to the devil or evil spirits in Scripture, eg, "I saw 
Satan fall like a lightning bolt from heaven," or Jesus' temptation in the 
wilderness--there were no witnesses to that, so we know about it only because Jesus 
decided to tell his disciples the story. He must have wanted to equip his 
disciples for such attacks. St. Paul and St. Peter also stress the presence of evil 
spirits and how to guard against them, and those passages aren't about 
exorcisms or poltergeist tricks. It's a shame to toss all that good advice 
overboard, when virtually every generation of Christians before us has taken it soberly 
and seriously.  
so, yes, demonic apparitions and tricks are very rare. The most common way 
evil spirits work is by insinuating thoughts, which may entice but might just as 
well cause despair, self-hatred, fear. Hebrews 2 says that the evil one has 
always controlled the human race through fear of death. Being alert to 
disabling thoughts, and knowing how to repel them, is a large part of Orthodox 
spirituality. Even if you stumble at the thought of evil spirits, everyone believes 
in the existence of unwanted, debilitating thoughts. The content of Orthodoxy 
is a "science" of spiritual growth, a set of spiritual disciplines that heal 
the "tree" from the roots, so it can bear good fruit. The whole aim of Orthodoxy 
is to saturate the entire person with the presence of Christ, so that we are 
literally Christ-bearers. The word for this is "theosis" -- like a cloth soaks 
up dye by osmosis, we soak up Christ by theosis.  
BTW, a good book that gives an "inside view" of what this spirituality is 
like in practice, with all it's "spirit-filled" elements, is "Mountain of 
Silence" by Kyriacos Markides. 
http://www.amazon.com/Mountain-Silence-Search-Orthodox-Spirituality/dp/0385500920 I should warn that the author is coming from a 
very idiosyncratic place; he is a sociology professor who has come to fervent 
belief in miracles, evil spirits, theosis, and he is profoundly in awe of the 
wisdom of the Orthodox Church. What he doesn't get so much is Jesus. In his 
subsequent book he makes it even more clear that he thinks we need a version of 
Orthodox spirituality that acknowledges that it is divisive to insist on the 
necessity of Jesus Christ, and recognizes the universality of the path to 
enlightenment. Strange, isn't it? Lots of people say, "I like Jesus but I have no use 
for the church" -- he's the opposite. Anyway, what makes this book so valuable 
is not the words of the author, but the transcripts of taped conversations he 
had with a very experienced, though pretty young, abbot. The book has become 
very popular among Orthodox because of the way this abbot explains Orthodox 
spirituality and practice; there really is no other book that is as accessible 
to contemporary non-Orthodox readers. So I recommend it, but read Fr Maximos 
closely while taking the connecting authorial material with a grain of salt.  
3.) In At the Corner of East and Now you mention that while Protestants tend 
to see Orthodox and Catholics as closely related brethren, Orthodox tend to 
see Protestants and Catholics this way. Can you explain the difference in 
understanding? 
It's funny, but I remember when my editor was going over that chapter, he 
wrote in the margin that I needed to give some examples of what Protestants and 
Catholics disagree about; as a Jewish man, he didn't know what they were.  
It took me a very long time to grasp how Orthodoxy is different. As I said 
above, there is really no book that encapsulates it. I learned, I guess, the 
old-fashioned way, the way people have assimilated this faith from the beginning, 
by going to worship and listening. The words of teh services are very rich 
and full of teaching. The feast in early June of the Council of Nicea, for 
example--the hymns recount it all thoroughly, explain what Arius taught, why he was 
wrong, what teh council decided, etc. Since worship has been in the 
vernacular through history, even illiterate peasants could get a thorough theological 
education, just by going to church and listening. 
Gradually, gradually, over several years, I began to grasp how it differed 
from both Catholic and Protestant traditions. First, there is an expectation 
that every Christian (every person, actually) is called to this transformation in 
Christ. It's not just for "mystics" -- in fact, there is no word for 
"mysticism" in Orthodoxy. There is just the normal Christian life. We don't have 
pietistic (some would say narcissistic) "spirituality", because the essential test 
of growth in Christ is humility and active love for others.  
Another difference from Western Christianity is that this transformation 
includes the body as well as the soul. There isn't the duallism that keeps 
troubling the West. This is why, in the early church, they gathered the bloody 
remains of martyrs and placed them under the altar (in Revelation, John hears the 
voice of the martyrs crying out from beneath the altar). The body of a 
Christian, not just his mind or soul, literally participates in Christ ("partakers of 
the divine nature" says St Peter), which is also evident from their belief that 
the Eucharist is really Christ's Body and Blood. Post-Communion prayers speak 
frankly of the physical Eucharist passing "through me, to all my joints, my 
kidneys, my heart" -- un-squeamish about that. Perhaps Platonism/duallism 
didn't take root in Eastern Christianity bec early Christians were so often in 
debate against "philosophers," who were recognized as pagans. We still use many 
ancient hymns that celebrate the victory of Christians over "philosophers." 
(also re duallism, St. Augustine had virtually no role in Orthodoxy, and his 
explication of Original Sin doesn't fit Orthodox understanding of the Fall's 
effects.)  
A big factor is that Western theology was based on the Scriptures in Latin 
translation, and as radically as the Reformers broke with Catholicism, they 
still unknowingly built on the same Latin-language thought-world. (St. Augustine 
could not read Greek well, and was led astray by a mistranslation in Romans 
5:12). An example is the NT Greek word "energeia," energy, which appears all 
through St Paul, eg, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for God 
is energizing in you, both to will and to energize for his good pleasure." 
But there was no Latin equivalent, so when Jerome made his translation he used 
"opus," work. A sculptor creates a statue and that is his opus, but it is 
separate from him; he's not "energizing" within it. So you see that this creates a 
very different sense of whether and how God is present--the reverberations go 
on and on.  
In Orthodoxy, salvation is a free gift, entirely by grace (grace is an aspect 
of God's "energy," rather than a separate created thing). We are saved by 
being rescued from the power of death and the evil one, like the Hebrews rescued 
from Pharaoh--not by Jesus making a payment to the Father. That theory didn't 
develop till the 11th century, after the East-West split. Substitutionary 
atonement strikes native Orthodox as strange and somewhat repellent. Though, as I 
said, they emphatically believe in salvation by grace, so you see how it cuts 
across Western categories.  
Those are just some of the examples of where Protestants and Catholics ahve a 
theological "family resemblance" that Orthodox don't share. It gets even more 
complicated when the terms have just a shade of different meaning. I've been 
Orthodox 14 years and I'm still learning. Sometimes I think I'll try to write 
the book that would sum all this up, and sometimes I think it can't be done; 
you can't get it any other way than by living it, soaking in it.   
4.) Can you name a couple of the most common 
misunderstandings/misrepresentations you come across- in terms of North American conceptions of the Orthodox 
Church? 
Probably the major misunderstanding is to visualize the early church as 
united under the rule of Rome. In that view, the Orthodox broke off to become a 
smaller, headless, inconsequential group--identical to Rome in every way, except 
frozen in the past. But a moment's reflection show the early church wasn't 
like that. All of the 7 "Ecumenical Councils" were held in the East. The great 
majority of early Christian documents--the Desert Fathers, the Church 
Fathers--are written in Greek (including the New Testament). Constantine the Great was 
ruler over the Roman Empire, after all, and though he moved his capital to 
Byzantium (which he renamed Constantinople), it continued to be the Roman Empire 
for another thousand years. In Turkey today, Christians are still known as 
"Rum." 
Of course in the West, the version of the story where Rome is the center of 
everything is the only version people hear. It was frustrating during the 
"DaVinci Code" furor to hear this reflexive elision, that there were Christians in 
Jerusalem, and then everything vanishes except in Europe, and then we're 
talking about a painter who lived 1500 years later. The entire Eastern side of the 
story, where Christianity goes into Africa and Asia and flourishes, is 
ignored. Also, much of what the Reformers reacted against in medieval Rome is not 
part of Orthodoxy. In my new book, "The Lost Gospel of Mary," 
http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Gospel-Mary-Mother-Ancient/dp/1557255369 , I try to discover through 
ancient texts how the Virgin Mary was originally seen, and as I say in the 
Intro, "the early middle-eastern church was not the medieval European church."   
As one Orthodox priest says, when he went back and checked his Church History 
notes from Lutheran seminary, they covered the centuries btwn the Apostles 
and the Reformation in 3 pages. I guess if I could just persuade people that 
they don't know what Orthodoxy is, I'd consider it a good start.  
5.) Eastern Orthodoxy is a fast-growing religious movement in North America. 
Why do you think this is the case?  
Orthodoxy is fastest-growing in terms of percentage growth, but not in terms 
of numbers, I believe. The growth is undeniably due to conversions. In the 
jurisdiction (not denomination) that I belong to, the Archdiocese of Antioch 
(middle-eastern background, headquarters in Damascus on the "street called 
Straight"), the clergy are now 78% converts. This influx of educated, enthusiastic 
converts, lay as well as clergy, are bringing revival to the church. 
Historically, the church represented home-away-from-home for new immigrants, where they 
could speak the familiar language and eat familiar foods. I can sure understand 
that, when I picture living as an immigrant in Asia; the church attended by 
other Americans would be such a haven. But there is the danger that the church, 
obliged to fill so many roles, becomes a cultural emblem rather than truly a 
church. Praise God, I don't see revised, "updated," fashionable theology in 
Orthodox churches, but I sure do seem nominalism. When I travel and speak in 
Orthodox churches, longtime church members often tell me, "You converts are 
teaching us about our own faith, things we never knew." So there is renewal in 
Orthodoxy, though not at the numbers "fastest-growing" might suggest.  
6.) Can you explain why a postmodern generation might be attracted to 
Orthodoxy in ways that their parents and grand-parents might not have been? 
Something generational is happening with Evangelicalism, and I suppose we 
don't yet know quite what it is. There is persistent restlessness--I keep getting 
books from writers who are trying to define the problem and solve it, and 
everyone has a different theory. So I think one of the reasons postmodern folks 
are more open, to Orthodoxy as well as other alternatives, is that current 
Protestantism is less satisfactory than it used to be.  
Orthodoxy itself is appealing, I think, initially because it is visibly 
beautiful, and because it is rooted in something other than a Baby Boomer's bright 
idea. As an explorer draws nearer, he finds that it is more guileless and 
unstudied, less "organizational", than Roman Catholicism (Orthodox projects can be 
*very* disorganized, compared with Western standards. There's a saying, "I 
don't believe in organized religion, I'm Orthodox.") Eventually he sees that the 
center holding it together is a way of life in Christ, a "Way" to nourish the 
presence of Christ inside as it grows and overflows.  
At that point of exploration, everything reverses -- the icons, chant, 
prayers and so forth are no longer seen as appealing accessories, but as elements, 
outgrowths, of an organic life, the life of Christ's people continuing without 
interruption from the earliest days.  
The problem is that the person, a pastor or worship leader, who gathers some 
of these elements and places them in their own Protestant context, discovers 
that they immediately begin to fade. The reasons these worship elements have 
power in the first place is because they are rooted in an organic, continuing 
life. They have authority because they are part of that larger, communal, life. 
But when a person chooses and removes them, like cutting roses in a garden, 
they begin to die. The authority is no longer the living community, but the 
"chooser", the expert or worship leader who made the selection. He can't help but 
interpose himself, standing between the ancient community and the attendees at 
the worship he designs.  
I hasten to say taht of course not everyone is going to pack their bags and 
become Orthodox. Nor do Orthodox believe that you have to do that in order to 
be saved, not at all. I'm just recognizing an inevitability. You can't choose 
some elements of Orthodoxy without being a chooser. It's like recognizing that 
you can buy spices on your trip to Nepal, and try to cook the same dish when 
you get home, but it's not going to be the same. We are so plagued with the 
life-style, thought-style of being consumers. The expert chooses and removes 
worship elements, and each worshipper who comes in the door browses through what 
he offers and does the same thing. Profound community doesn't quite gel, not 
the way it does when you immerse in a continuous timeless faith. It remains a 
gathering of separate people who have chosen to be there, and who choose what 
they like and dislike.  
No wonder there is such loneliness. When I give speeches, I see the most 
audience reaction (chiefly, a kind of freezing-up and going silent) when I say the 
word "loneliness." But on the other hand, overcoming that by plunging into an 
ancient community will necessarily mean surrendering a lot of freedom, and 
surrendering your right to chart your own course, accountable to no one. I don't 
want to trivialize the difficulty of that choice, and again I'm not saying 
it's necessary to salvation. But it has been a blessing to me. I increasingly 
think that no one *can* chart their own spiritual course. You will inevitably go 
in circles, guided solely by the things you *already* think, the myriad 
unseen prejudices you already hold. I have become convinced that Orthodoxy 
continues the consensus of the original church, so it feels like a safe place to me.  
oh, another thing -- back to what I said above about miracles, healing, evil 
spirits -- speaking of postmodernism. Pomos are famously wide-open to 
spiritual things, but I expect them to draw the line well before *that* point. It will 
be an element of Orthodoxy that they find hard to take. The so-called 
"supernatural" (it's not "super", of course, but just God's energeia active in 
creation) is likely to make a postmodernist feel, more than anything else, 
embarrassed. Educated, sophisticated people just can't believe that. They may turn out 
to be more modernist than post-, on that point. There is more peer pressure 
flowing around nearly every decision we make than we recognize.   
7.) In your review of Mel Gibson's the Passion of the Christ, you identify 
concerns about the portrayal of Mary Magdalene; understandably suggesting that 
the portrayal was not rooted in a biblical history. I wonder- what do you do 
with Orthodox understandings that differ with the consensus of biblical 
scholarship on a certain issue? 
Here's an example of something that I've only recently begun to grasp about 
Orthodoxy. It's that the early church was singularly uninterested in the 
historical basis of the Old Testament. All they wanted to know was how it spoke of 
Jesus--"you search the scriptures, and them they are that speak of me," as 
Jesus said. They essentially went over the OT with a metal detector, looking for 
foreshadowing of Christ, and they went over it inch by inch, not the way you do 
when you're reading for story. An example is, Gabriel's word to Mary that the 
Holy Spirit would "overshadow" her is seen to be foretold in Habbakuk 3:3, 
the Holy One coming forth from a "dark and shadowed mountain". I think you'd 
have to read Habbakuk a whole lot of times before that occured to you. Perhaps it 
helped that they were hearing it read out loud in worship, chanting it; maybe 
that made similar words pop out.  
So the Orthodox understanding is often likely to be different than the 
consensus of biblical historical-critical scholarship. There is an expectation, as 
we've noted above, that miracles can happen and that angels and spirits exist, 
so such passages aren't automatically re-interpreted (though some passages are 
understood as mystery rather than history, eg, the 6 days of creation). In 
general, Scripture holds a very high place of authority--the highest written 
authority, and as the retired dean of St. Vladimir's Seminary says, Orthodox 
tradition is defined as the Scriptures rightly interpreted. Scholarly critiques 
would take a far back seat to that. 
8.) What do you personally find the most challenging about Orthodoxy? 
I keep finding that I have so much further to go. Well, to step back, the 
most challenging thing about Orthodoxy is that it dumps you right out at the 
place where it's you and Jesus and nowhere to hide. You have to deal with him. No 
excuses, no lies -- lies come from the evil one. As I continue to use the 
"workout routine" of the spiritual disciplines, I continue to discover that I am 
still lying to myself about so many things, I am still afraid, I am still 
lonely, and stubbornly choosing lonely freedom over loved humility. It's an endless 
struggle. I have been practicing the Jesus Prayer for 12 years, and I am 
still so far from "pray constantly." It's not a matter of feeling guilty, but more 
like recognizing that you are still flabby and out of shape and not ready to 
run the race. Orthodoxy keeps emphasizing God's compassion--taht's another 
thing I noticed early on, that it keeps stressing that God forgives us freely and 
welcomes us like the father of the Prodigal Son. But I keep holding back. 
That's the most challenging thing.  
9.) Do you feel the freedom to disagree (agreeably) with certain issues of 
doctrine within the Orthodox Church? How might you handle this differently now, 
compared with when you moved in Protestant circles?  
I guess as a Protestant, and a graduate of Episcopal seminary, I felt an 
"appropriate" (ha) pride in my own intellectual vigor. There is a vibrant 
tradition in Western theology, perhaps from the time of St. Thomas Aquinas, of 
theological debate. The problem, as one seminary prof explained to me, is that 
eventually all the possible new ideas have been thought of, so a person who wants to 
make his name has to advance a theory that is outlandish if not impossible. 
Anyway, as a Protestant, I not only felt free to disagree, I felt invited to 
disagree, and taht not disagreeing would be intellectually lazy. It's a funny 
thing, hard to express.  
In Orthodoxy there's a different history. It's more collaborative. It's as if 
the expectation is, we all want to grow in Christ--that's the only goal, 
there's no goal of theological exploration for its own sake. So anything anyone 
expresses is intended to be a contribution to that goal. At its best, when 
Orthodoxy is functioning well, the good stuff gets picked up and included, and the 
not-so-good (it's all well-intentioned; there is no intention of "making a 
name for myself") might percolate a while before being discarded. Someone told me 
early on that, no matter where you dip into Orthodox history, no matter what 
nation or century, the writings sound teh same; the writing style is the same. 
Strange but true. So there is this impulse to collaborate, pull together, to 
work on this one thing that unites us--rather than an impulse to pull away 
from the herd and be original and independently brilliant.  
There are some things Orthodoxy is united on, and when it comes to those I 
either agree, or hope to understand better. I can't think of anything that is a 
serious problem for me. Before we became Orthodox we believed in women's 
ordination, and I still have no problem with women being ordained in other 
churches, but I recognize tht they aren't in Orthodoxy. I don't understand fully. 
Apparently it has never been controversial, in all 2000 years, which alone tells 
you something, so there's no explication. However, Orthodox women saints have 
been preachers and teachers and theologian, they've acted as pastoral 
counsellors to both men and women, they've gone into new nations and single-handedly 
evangelized the people. I've given Sunday-morning sermons from Orthodox pulpits 
all over the country. So Orthodox women do as lay people a lot of things that 
might require ordinaiton in a Protestant church. I wrote an essay on this in 
Beliefnet.com last January: 
http://www.frederica.com/writings/womens-ordination.html  
But not everything in Orthodoxy has that kind of unanimity. EG, there was a 
time when the church was completely pacifist, and then, after Constantine's 
conversion, war was permitted (we don't believe in Just War, however. War is 
always tragedy and sin, but sometimes it's just going to happen.) I tend to be a 
pacifist, but I recognize that I can't prove this viewpoint consistently in the 
Church. So I'm on the board of teh Orthodox Peace Fellowship 
http://www.incommunion.org/ and this view is represented there. This is not really the same 
thing as "disagreeing" but it is navigating an unsettled point. It's strangely 
enough another one of those paradigm shifts in the east -- the noble 
responsibility to disagree, the honoring of the rebel, is a (relatively recent?) Western 
idea that doesn't occur in the East, because we see ourselves as partners in 
each other's process of transformation. Collaboration rather than 
disagreement.  
10.) How might an Orthodox see salvation in a different light than a 
Protestant Evangelical? 
I think I covered a bit of this above--I guess I'd say first that in one 
sense the view is the same, that is, the moment you believe in Christ you are 
"saved." If you died that moment, you would end up in heaven. But most of us don't 
die taht moment. We have all this time left over, days and years, in which we 
must choose moment by moment either to be surrendered to Christ or to 
withdraw. In Orthodoxy we are always being reminded of the example of Judas, who had 
every advantage of being in Christ's presence, Christ even washed his feet, 
yet he withdrew and fell. If he'd repented again he would have been saved, but 
he remained locked in his rejection. So we have a strong teaching that it is 
possible to "lose salvation," in the sense that you can fall away and reject it 
later on. This doesnt' happen suddenly but gradually, as your commitment 
weakens, one little tempting thought after another. So there is strong emphasis on 
clinging to the Lord and admitting your weakness, being humble and not proud 
abt spiritual strength.  
There are two senses of "salvation," then. One is the right-this-instant 
sense, and another biblical figure that Orthodox regularly recall is the Good 
Thief (also known as the "Wise Thief"), who was saved apart from any effort of his 
own by God's grace, just by calling out to Christ in humility. But another 
sense would be that day by day you are "growing in" salvation. By God's grace, 
on the last day you will endure to the end, and be one of teh saved at his 
right hand.  An Orthodox reply to "Are you saved?" is "I have been saved, I am 
being saved, I hope to be saved." 
 
********
Frederica Mathewes-Green
www.frederica.com



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