Mother Russia: A Reminiscence

I'm not quite sure I can call this a reconciliation experience. I have for some time had something of an infatuation with Eastern Orthodoxy. In fact, when I went through the standard Lutheran post-adolescent drift away from Christianity, the Orthodox classic The Way of a Pilgrim was one of the decisive elements in my return. But for whatever reason, I had never stepped foot in an Orthodox church.

Then a couple of years ago I was in Russia on business. Unlike typical business trips, this one left some free time for non-business activities. I was in Nizhny-Novogorod, so after visiting the house where Maxim Gorky was born, there wasn't a lot of typical touristy stuff to do. Naturally I wanted to see some churches, and let me tell you...Wow!

So Nizhny doesn't have anything like St. Basil's Cathedral, but for someone who had never seen a Russian Orthodox church before, all of them are awe inspiring.

My first experience was with a group of co-workers. First, we visited a monastery where after a small contribution the monk who was trying to get us to leave gave us a tour and (through a Russian co-worker who translated for us) gave a very motivational speech about St. John the Baptist ("Sometimes you have to preach to explain," our interpreter said). Later we visited a church whose name my Russian co-worker translated for us as "the Church of the Death of the Mother of God." We happened to be there during a worship service, and I was very uncomfortable as our mixed, mostly non-Christian, group stood in the "tacky knicknack shoppe" area and observed.

As it happens, however, because there are only two flights a week out of Nizhny, I had a Saturday morning free and was able to return to the church of the Dormition for Divine Liturgy. It was then that it became a place of prayer for me. The liturgy was, of course, in Russian and I only know about three words in Russian (no one taught me the Russian word for lip). I think I picked up "спасибо" ("thanks") a few times.

But it turns out that this language barrier was, for me, the greastest blessing of the whole visit. It allowed me to notice the non-verbal aspects of worship -- the sounds, the smells, the sights and the motions -- most of all the motions.

The sounds: there seemed to be a choir somewhere, but I never did figure out where they were, which was brilliant. Listening to these beautiful, far off voices singing something that I couldn't entirely comprehend...it's a wonderful metaphor for worship.

The smells: incense, incense and more incense. I thought of the refrain I know from Ash Wednesday services, "Lord, may our prayers rise like incense in your sight...."

The sights: this particular church, and every church I saw in Nizhny, had a full iconostasis, which was stunning, but beyond that, the arched walls of the area where the laity worship was covered with icons. Having these images of the saints "looking in" on the liturgy -- from behind, from above, from all around -- gave me, for the first time, an experiential knowledge of what is meant by worshipping with the whole Church.

The motions: Lutherans think they move around a lot in worship...sit, stand, kneel...but we've got nothing on the Russian Orthodox. First, they don't sit. They don't have pews. They would just be in the way. Throughout the service, everyone was constantly prostrating, bowing and making the sign of the cross. At first, I watched the people next to me and tried to keep up, usually half a step behind. Eventually I picked up on some of the auditory cues and began doing things at the right time (to the extent that there is a right time -- there was quite a bit of variation). I saw what it means to worship God with one's body. Anyone who speaks of "just" going through the motions in worship hasn't truly noticed what the motions are capable of.

All of this showed me a side of worship I never knew. I haven't been able to even approximate the experience in a Lutheran service, but the mere memory of it calls me deeper. It reminds me that there's more going on than meets the eye.

Transendence and Immanence

I recently started reading Paul Laughlin's book, Getting Oriented: What Every Christian Should Know about Eastern Religions but Probably Doesn't. I picked this up because I had previously read Laughlin's Remedial Christianity and found it a good mental exercise. I disagreed with a lot, but he worked through some good topics. I came into this book expecting more of the same.

The thing that had bugged me most in Remedial Christianity was Laughlin's rather uninspired exploration of the ideas of transcendence and immanence. And, to my chagrin, I got more of the same in Getting Oriented -- exactly the same.

I think it would be fair to say that one of the things Laughlin is dissatisfied with about traditional Christianity is that it has too much transcendence and not enough immanence. He wants to reinvent Christianity to fix that.

But I think the real problem is that Laughlin's insistence on rigid categories blocks him from seeing the immanence of God that is proclaimed in the Christian tradition.

Laughlin offers two definitions each for transcendence and immanence. He defines "high octane" immanence as a view wherein God (or Ultimate Reality) permeates, saturates or infuses everything and everyone "as their very essence" while "high octane" transcendence is a view wherein God is wholly Other. He complements these definitions with a "low octane" immanence that is God present in the world "but only in a manner of speaking: as an agent acting upon it" and "low octane" transcendence as a God (or Ultimate Reality) that is beyond comprehension. Using these definitions Laughlin claims that Christianity offers a view of God that involves high octane transcendence but low octane immanence.

He says the traditional Western God "must impact the Universe from beyond it through creative acts, rather than as an abiding, inherent, indwelling, intelligence" (his emphases). I don't think this is right. I think traditional (and especially pre-Enlightenment) Christianity describes God precisely as an abiding presence in the world.

After describing the high octane versions, Laughlin says, "In a perfect world, that would be that: 'transcendence' and 'immanence' would each have a single, univocal meaning...." I think this statement reveals more than he would like. He allows that this being an imperfect world they each have a "second" meaning. What he doesn't seem to allow is that they each have ranges and shades and subtleties.

Laughlin's conclusions about Christianity seem to follow from Christianity's firm and non-negotiable insistence on the ontological difference between God and Creation. Combine that with his narrow categories, and you can't conclude other than he does. But throw out the categories, and we have all kinds of possibilities. What is needed, I suggest, is an acceptance of the fact that Christianity wants to proclaim both high octane transcendence and high octane immanence, even if we lack the terminology to do so simultaneously.

Laughlin dismisses Christian mysticism as an insignificant minority report, but I wonder if he realizes he is throwing all of Orthodox Christianity in that statement along with some very deep and influential streams in the West.

He says the "weaker sort of immanence does not allow for God to become the world or anything in it." Now you would think that statement alone disqualifies Christianity for this type of immanence. But Laughlin kind of dismisses it as "the exception that proves the rule, perhaps" and in any event says Christians "would not see it as a theological compromise, simply because of its unique, once-and-for-all character." In other words, we're committed to transcendence over against immanence and aren't going to let the Incarnation distract us from that.

Now here's where he really gets my goat. He says, "every other Christian theological issue and topic including the understanding and treatment of the cosmos, time and humanity, must begin with [the insistence on God's ontological transcendence] and continue to honor it, in order to maintain the basic monotheistic framework of the faith, at least as it is traditionally understood" Ummm, Dr. Laughlin, that was the boat. You just missed it.

In point of fact, I would maintain to the contrary that every other Christian theological issue and topic, including our ideas about God's immanence and transcendence, must, absolutely must, follow from the Christian proclamation of the Incarnation.

Anotioch and Alexandria

History is always instructive and Church history especially so. A lot of noise has been made in recent years about the fallacy of viewing early Christianity as a homogenous whole with one theology. Fingers get pointed at Irenaeus as the architect of orthodoxy, but even that is a gross oversimplification.

Those of us who haven't been raised to mistrust the Church have inherited a romantic notion of the early ecumenical councils from Nicea to Chalcedon where the bishops all came to agreement and the Church as one taught and practiced the orthodoxy they defined. Of course, it never happened that way.

The Council of Ephesus (431) is a particularly interesting case in point. We're told that the Council of Ephesus is the council at which the term "Theotokos" ("Mother of God") as a title for Mary received official Church blessing, and Nestorianism (the teaching that Christ existed as two persons -- a human person and a divine person) was condemned. But if you scratch just below the surface you discover that Ephesus was all about resolving a dispute between Antiochene Christianity and Alexandrian Christianity.

The council was precipitated by a feud between Cyril of Alexandria and Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople and former prodigy of Antioch. Nestorius asked the emperor to call a council to resolve the issue. The Alexandrian contingent got there first, quickly condemned Nestorius, upheld the Theotokos title and called it a day -- all this before the bishops from Antioch arrived. This is the official council of record. When the representatives from Antioch did arrive, they held their own council which condemned and excommunicated Cyril.

So far, it sounds a good bit like modern denominationalism. And I think it is. I contend that Antioch and Alexandria represented the major feature of the types of denominations that emerged from the Reformation -- namely, they each had their own theology which they held to be sacred. And in a manner worthy of the 16th century, they named anyone who disagreed with them as anathema.

But the really interesting thing about the Ephesus controversy is that they worked it out more or less to everyone's satisfaction. The leaders in Antioch agreed to dispense with the two persons doctrine while acknowledging two natures in Christ. The leaders in Alexandria agreed to dispense with their monophysite tendencies while acknowledging that Christ is one in person. The result was the formula of Chalcedon which though dressed up as dogma is really compromise. No doubt Alexandria and Antioch continued to practice and teach their distinctives, but the unity of the Church was also recognized and preserved.

Notably, many of the Alexandrian Christians felt Cyril had betrayed them by accepting this compromise and the result was one of the earliest schisms in the Church as the Coptic Orthodox Church became distinct from the rest of Eastern Orthodoxy (and still maintain that they are the ones preserving the purest apostolic tradition). I believe a similar thing happened on a smaller scale on the Nestorian side.

All of this provides a lesson that could be useful in our modern ecumenical situation. Conservatives in all branches of the Church maintain that we cannot budge on our traditional distinctives. But perhaps if we really look at what our fellow Christians in other denominations object to in our dogma we can discover that they have a point and we may even find a better way to affirm what it is our tradition is intending to preserve.

At the same time, we have the unfortunate reminder that there will be those who refuse to go along with even the best of compromises. Yet we can see that this is pretty much OK.

Ramblings on Free Will

Martin Luther is said to have looked back at his body of work late in his life and decided that his Bondage of the Will was one of the few things (along with the catechisms) he wrote that was worth preserving. Calvinists like to point this out. Lutherans have to live with it.

It's true that lack of free will is a cornerstone of Lutheran theology. How many times is Luther's explanation of the third article of the Creed quoted? "I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him..." This is a cornerstone of our theology. It's also a bit of an embarassment.

When I was in college a friend and I used to get together in various bars and talk about philosophy. It became a joke between us that no matter what topic we talked about it always came down to the question of free will. At the time, I was an unapologetic defender of free will -- completely free will to the point of making every human decision practically arbitrary. My friend, a dyed-in-the-wool post-modernist, found my position absurd (which of course it was).

Later I became a dogmatic Lutheran (really...I was). I took it as a given in theological matters that the human will is absolutely bound in matters related to salvation. This is where I now think it's a bit weird. The official Lutheran position has always been that our wills are free with regard to "things below" but that they are bound with regard to "things above" -- that I can make whatever choices I like with regard to civil righteousness, but that I cannot, apart from the Holy Spirit, come to God.

American culture will not tolerate any impingement on free will. We are, says the culture, masters of our destiny. And in the realm of religion this translates into theologies that Lutherans cannot tolerate because they are synergistic and semi-Pelagian. And most of these theologies are, in fact, objectively bad -- but not necessarily because they are synergistic.

Apart from being at odds with American cultural religion because of its position on free will, Lutheran theology is also at odds with the ancient faiths of Catholicism and Orthodoxy on these matters. Orthodoxy especially stresses cooperation with God in salvation. But Lutherans hear "cooperation with God," label it as "synergistic" and treat it as heresy.

I think this is a weakness in Lutheran culture.

I was leading a study of the Augsburg Confession once and one of the participants mentioned an idea he had heard once that the Sacrament of Communion is for Lutherans something like what altar calls are for Baptists. I liked that. A retired pastor who was in the class said that Luther wouldn't have liked that. "Why not?" I asked. He responded, "I believe that I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him...."

But that elipsis has content, right? It says, "but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel, enlightened me with His gifts, sanctified and kept me in the true faith." We confess that we don't have the freedom to come to God on our own power, but when would we ever have to do it by our own power?

Typical Lutheran presentations make the believer (or believer-to-be) into a marionette. God pulls the strings, and we dance. We take the saying, "Apart from me you can do nothing" and make it into "You can do nothing."

The Orthodox believe that they have found the middle way between Augustine and Pelagius. Pointing to the writings of St. John Cassian, for example, the Orthodox teach that God works in and through our will to accomplish our salvation. This was judged in the West to be semi-Pelagianism.

But it's only semi-Pelagianism if you make a sharp division between the human will and the work of God and set them against one another. It seems to me that this involves a false view of the nature of God's presence in the world. If the work of God is seen as super-natural in the modernist sense of some outside action acting on nature, then you have this problem. But if you see God's work as the manifestation of God's immanent presence within the world ("in me deeper than I am in myself" as Augustine says), then the problem goes away.

It's common to here Arminians say something to the effect that God is a perfect gentleman and would never impose salvation on us against our will. That idea has always struck me as deeply flawed -- God is God and so on. But the real issue is that God doesn't need to do anything against our will, because our will is capable of being a vehicle for God's presence in our lives. And I think this is the essence of the Orthodox doctrine of synergism.

Christ, Our Righteousness

I said in a previous post, "the key insight of the Reformation was that Christ is our righteousness." Some interesting discussion followed along the lines of just how far the word "our" could be stretched here.

In the new Finnish interpretation of Luther, this idea that Christ is our righteousness is pushed to its uttermost limits. In saying that Christ is present in faith itself, the Finns are claiming that our standing with God is a result of the presence of Christ in and with (and under?) the believer. The believer is treated as righteous by God because the believer, finally, is Christ.

This is taken to have some connection to the Orthodox doctrine of theosis. Athanasius said, "God became man so that man might become God." Luther said (in his lectures on Galatians), "Faith makes a man God."

One of the big difficulties with the Finnish position is that it requires us to believe that while Luther held these pseudo-Orthodox beliefs, they immediately disappeared with nary a trace in susequent Lutheranism. But there is one trace. Tuomo Mannermaa in Christ Present in Faith points to the Osiandrian Controversy.

For those without an obbsession with 16th century Lutheran dogmatics, the Osiandrian Controversy was one of the disputes meant to be settled by the Formula of Concord. Andreas Osiander disliked the idea of imputed justification. Against this idea, Osiander taught that God actually makes a Christian just through the indwelling of Christ. He was apparently opposed in this by everyone from Phillip Melancthon to Martin Chemnitz. The controversy is addressed in Article III of the Formula of Concord.

According to Mannermaa, the Formula got it wrong and thus led to the disjunction between Luther and later Lutheranism.

But Article III of the Formula of Concord provides some interesting material for reflection, particularly with regard to my claim above that "the key insight of the Reformation was that Christ is our righteousness."

In the Epitome, the FC does state clearly that "Christ alone is our Righteousness" (Article III, paragraph 1), but it is concerned with the question of what this means. This article rejects the idea that either Christ is our righteousness only according to his divine nature (the view attriubuted to Osiander) or that Christ is our righteousness only according to his human nature. The article says that Christ is our righteousness according to both natures, but then it adds "in His obedience alone." That is, it is our righteousness consists in have Christ's obedience imputed to us. At the risk of having my Lutheran membership card taken away, I'm not sure I buy this.

The Formula claims that "our righteousness before God is [this very thing], that God ... presents and imputes to us the righteousness of Christ's obedience." This has solidified into dogma in some circles. For instance, Reformed teacher Michael Horton can be heard to propound that we are saved by works, but we are saved by Christ's works not our own, Christ having fulfilled the "covenant of works" which Adam did not. This strikes me as very non-Lutheran (which is fine for Dr. Horton), but this section of the FC would seem to support it.

On the other hand, this same article of the FC-Ep says that "faith alone is the means and instrument whereby we lay hold of Christ, and thus in Christ of that righteousness which avails before God." Now this I like, and I think it has much ressonance with the Finnish idea.

The idea that we are accounted as righteous because Christ's obedience is imputed to us strikes me as theological bookkeeping. I dare say it is a theology of glory sneaking into the Lutheran confessions and becoming dogma. Against this, I much prefer the proclamation that in faith we "lay hold of Christ."

I confess to being somewhat wary of the language of Christ being present in me. There's a problem of scale here. I know that in the Sacrament we see that the finite is capable of bearing the infinite, but there would seem to be a danger here of slipping into what Mark Allan Powell calls "the image of the Microscopic Jesus" -- the idea that I may have "a very tiny Jesus inside me (sitting on that throne in my heart)." Or, much worse, the idea lends itself to the gnostic idea of a "divine spark" within each of us.

I prefer, instead, the perspective of finding myself in Christ (Col. 3:3). But I think this amounts to the same thing as the Finnish idea. And so, I would like to say (against the Formula of Concord) that our righteousness before God is this very thing, that we are found in Christ and Christ in us.

Crime and Punishment

I just finished listening to Crime and Punishment as read by George Guidall. I just can't praise it highly enough. If you haven't read this book, in the name of all that is holy, do so immediately (or get the audio version, which is wonderfully read by Guidall).

I came into it expecting a masterpiece of psychological fiction. I expected to find the dark inner depths of the human mind plumbed and exposed. I expected an engaging game of cat and mouse as the murderer seeks to escape capture.

What I didn't expect was one of the finest expositions of the Christian faith I've ever read -- but that's just what I got.

Now I have a tendency to read Christianity into everything. For instance, I think "Moonstruck" is a marvelous treatment of the book of Ecclesiastes, and I have a non-gnostic interpretation of "The Matrix." But in this case, I'm pretty sure the author intended what I found there.

This book is nothing short of the Theology of the Cross in the form of a novel. A favorite Orthodox character might ask, "Was it Theology of Cross in 19th century Russia?" Yes, apparently it was. And it's such good theology!

One of the most thought-provoking aspects was the role of the Christ-figure (a prostitute, no less) in Raskolnikov's redemption. In a modern American protestant allegory, the Christ-figure would take the punishment and the guilty man would get off scot-free, but here, the Christ-figure merely joins him in his punishment. There is sin-bearing to be sure, Sonia gives Raskolnikov her cross to wear, while she wears the cross of his victim. But still, he is sent to Siberian prison (where she follows).

What pleased me as much as anything was the way Dostoevsky resisted the temptation to make Raskolnikov's redemption quick and easy. He was not redeemed when he asked Sonia to read him the story of Lazarus, not when he confessed his crime to her, not when he confessed to the authorities and accepted his sentence, not even when she went with him to Siberia. Then, just when he has me wondering if Raskolnikov is beyond hope, we get this:

Suddenly he found Sonia beside him; she had come up noiselessly and sat down at his side. It was still quite early; the morning chill was still keen. She wore her poor old burnous and the green shawl; her face still showed signs of illness, it was thinner and paler. She gave him a joyful smile of welcome, but held out her hand with her usual timidity. She was always timid of holding out her hand to him and sometimes did not offer it at all, as though afraid he would repel it. He always took her hand as though with repugnance, always seemed vexed to meet her and was sometimes obstinately silent throughout her visit. Sometimes she trembled before him and went away deeply grieved. But now their hands did not part. He stole a rapid glance at her and dropped his eyes on the ground without speaking. They were alone, no one had seen them. The guard had turned away for the time.

How it happened he did not know. But all at once something seemed to seize him and fling him at her feet. He wept and threw his arms round her knees. For the first instant she was terribly frightened and she turned pale. She jumped up and looked at him trembling. But at the same moment she understood, and a light of infinite happiness came into her eyes. She knew and had no doubt that he loved her beyond everything and that at last the moment had come. . . .

They wanted to speak, but could not; tears stood in their eyes. They were both pale and thin; but those sick pale faces were bright with the dawn of a new future, of a full resurrection into a new life. They were renewed by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.

I'm speechless. And even still, even at this point, we do not find a theologian of glory waiting to appear. The ending is outstanding.

He did not know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering.

But that is the beginning of a new story--the story of the gradual renewal of a man, the story of his gradual regeneration, of his passing from one world into another, of his initiation into a new unknown life. That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.

Christ Present in Faith

I found out tonight that my church's adult education committee will, in fact, let me lead a class on anything I want. As of tonight, I'm on the schedule to lead a two week study on the new Finnish interpretation of Martin Luther's theology.

I've recently taken a hiatus from my journey through Fred Copleston's History of Philosophy in order to read Tuomo Mannermaa's Christ Present in Faith: Luther's View of Justification. It's quite a fascinating book.

The idea started when Dr. Mannermaa was asked to find a point of contact between Lutheran theology and Russian Orthodox theology. Now, it turns out that there is quite a lot of overlap to be found there, but for whatever reason, Dr. Mannermaa wanted to find contact specifically in the area of justification (probably because it is "the article on which the Church stands or falls"). And what he found was, that if you take Luther's words ontologically (for instance, when he says "in faith, Christ himself is present") you can discover throughout Luther's writings a harmony between his view of justification and the Orthodox view of theosis.

In the bit I was reading tonight Mannermaa was talking about the communicatio idiomatum (communication of attributes) that shows up frequently under various names in Luther's writings -- not the communicatio idiomatum between the two natures of Christ, but an analogous transfer of properties between Christ and Christians. This is the "happy exchange" taken to the nth degree. It's well agreed among Protestants that Christ took our sins on himself and we get his righteousness. But this isn't generally understood ontologically, which is the shift Mannermaa proposes. Christ is our righteousness!

Although Mannermaa doesn't cite this example in the book, the passage that jumped out in my mind is from Luther's later description of his "tower experience":

I meditated night and day on those words until at last, by the mercy of God, I paid attention to their context: "The righteousness of God is revealed in it, as it is written: 'He who through faith is righteous shall live.'" I began to understand that in this verse the righteousness of God is that by which the righteous lives by a gift of God, that is by faith. I began to understand that this verse means that the righteousness of God is revealed through the Gospel, but it is a passive righteousness, i.e. that by which the merciful God justifies us by faith, as it is written: "He who through faith is righteous shall live." All at once I felt that I had been born again and entered into paradise itself through open gates. Immediately I saw the whole of Scripture in a different light. I ran through the Scriptures from memory and found that other terms had analogous meanings, e.g., the work of God, that is, what God works in us; the power of God, by which he makes us powerful; the wisdom of God, by which he makes us wise; the strength of God, the salvation of God, the glory of God.

The classical Protestant understanding of "the righteousness of God" is that of imputed righteousness, so that in the above passage we might just as well read "the righteousness of God ... that by which God declares us righteous." But notice that the rest of the passage doesn't make any sense read that way. God doesn't declare us wise, or declare us strong, or declare us to have worked.... On the other hand, if you read this as Luther talking about a kind of communicatio idiomatum, it all falls into place!