A Living Text

Several years ago someone wrote me and said this:

I also read the book Thirsting—- and read Becoming orthodox as well. My
personal opinion as a still Evangelical Protestant pastor is that Thirsting,
a well written book was over the top with regard to a converts tendancy
toward idealism. I would find that book as not a great place to start with
my devout protestants friends. At the same time knowing it has some
extremely valid points for seekers to consider.

I have been in deep Orthodox study for the last 3 years, attending many
orthodox services, talking with priests and Bishops and the laity and have
discovered many of the same issues that protestant churches struggle with.
It is not so much the system of either of the two paradigms but in living
out the faith on a daily basis. To live as a truly devout or pious person is
a rarity in the entire Christian world.

I have come to appreciate how similar our faith really is when it is
centered on the Holy Trinity and continual metanoia.

I would rather be exposed to a deeper faith by those who are living it out
each day then in all the books that have been written recently regarding
conversion. When somebody says come and see one really wants to see a
profound difference, true spirituality. Those who have as Saint Seraphim of
Sarov said, aquired the Holy Spirit-Inner Peace. There are so few on either
side of the schism that exemplify that today.

Writing in the New Yorker, Adam Gopnik says of G.K. Chesterton:

In these books, Chesterton becomes a Pangloss of the parish; anything Roman is right. It is hard to credit that even a convinced Catholic can feel equally strongly about St. Francis’s intuitive mysticism and St. Thomas’s pedantic religiosity, as Chesterton seems to. His writing suffers from conversion sickness. Converts tend to see the faith they were raised in as an exasperatingly makeshift and jury-rigged system: Anglican converts of Catholicism are relived not to have to defend Henry VIII’s divorces; Jewish converts to Christianity are relieved to get out from under the weight of all those strange Levitical laws on animal hooves. The newly adopted faith, they imagine, is a shining, perfectly balanced system, an intricately worked clock where the cosmos turns to tell the time and the cuckoo comes out singing every Sunday. An outsider sees the Church as a dreamy compound of incense and impossibility, and, overglamorizing its pretensions, underrates its adaptability. A Frenchman or an Italian, even a devout one, can see the Catholic Church as a normally bureaucratic human institution, the way patriotic Americans see the post office, recognizing the frailty and even the occasional psychosis of its employees without doubting its necessity or its ability to deliver the message. Chesterton writing about the Church is like someone who has just made his first trip to the post office. Look, it delivers letters for the tiny price of a stamp! You write an address on a label, and they will send it anywhere, literally anywhere you like, across a continent and an ocean, in any weather! The fact that the post office attracts time-servers, or has produced an occasional gun massacre, is only proof of the mystical enthusiasm that the post office alone provides! Glorifying the postman beyond what the postman can bear is what you do only if you’re new to mail.

Rod Dreher (Orthodox via the Catholic Church) comments on this:

Boy, does this feel familiar to me, and I can see now (from my own experience) why converts tend to wear on cradle believers (and vice versa: little exasperates a convert more than a cradle believer’s apparent inability to get excited about the Amazing Wonderful Church). Again, I can’t discern the justice of Gopnik’s judgment re: Chesterton’s writing, because I’ve never read enough of his apologetics to know. But this feels right to me. It also gives me insight into why I don’t have and never had that convert’s glow about Orthodoxy. I didn’t believe when I left it that Catholicism was a jury-rigged makeshift system, nor did I believe that Orthodoxy was a uniquely fabulous thing. I’m glad not to have those illusions about either faith, but it does take some of the romance out of the thing.

Rushdoony has an insight that I had never thought of before regarding the Ecumenical Councils:

It was this hatred of Biblical certainty that the early councils had to war against. The ecumenical councils of the early church were in their purpose and nature very different from the modern councils and ecumenical efforts of the church. First, the early councils had as their primary purpose the defense and establishment of truth, not unity. Unity had to be established on the foundation of truth, not truth as a product of unity. The councils came together for the purpose of conflict, the battle of truth against error, and any unity on other than the whole truth of Scripture was anathema. Second, the concern of the councils was primarily the faith, not the church. Institutionally, the church suffered because of the conflict, but theologically it flourished and ensured its survival and growth. The modern ecumenical movement, and modern councils, are thus in purpose and work in direct contrast to the early councils: their concern is with unity, and with the institution, not the faith primarily.

The Russian Orthodox Church seems to be actively intimidating Protestants in Russia. News here, video here. This is perhaps the result of misplaced fear and insecurity. I think that it will also be counter-productive in the long run. The Orthodox in the west have to compete in the open market of religion, if you will, whilst the Russians are using the iron hand to impose Orthodoxy. In the end I think that a more creative theology that engages with modernity will emerge from the West, and that the Church in Russia will stultify and wither if it is identified so closely with the State.

James Jordan has repeatedly argued that one reason we are not to bow to images is that the human person is a deep construct - we have levels within us that we are not even aware of. We don’t know all the reasons why God says to do or not do something, but we can assume that it is important if he says it because he knows our make up far better then we do. Bowing to statues and pictures does something to us over time that we are not aware of. This news may uncover some of the reasons why it matter. It says in part:

The term most often used to describe this new model of mind is “embodied cognition,” and its champions believe it will open up entire new avenues for understanding - and enhancing - the abilities of the human mind. Some educators see in it a new paradigm for teaching children, one that privileges movement and simulation over reading, writing, and reciting. Specialists in rehabilitative medicine could potentially use the emerging findings to help patients recover lost skills after a stroke or other brain injury. The greatest impact, however, has been in the field of neuroscience itself, where embodied cognition threatens age-old distinctions - not only between brain and body, but between perceiving and thinking, thinking and acting, even between reason and instinct - on which the traditional idea of the mind has been built.

“It’s a revolutionary idea,” says Shaun Gallagher, the director of the cognitive science program at the University of Central Florida. “In the embodied view, if you’re going to explain cognition it’s not enough just to look inside the brain. In any particular instance, what’s going on inside the brain in large part may depend on what’s going on in the body as a whole, and how that body is situated in its environment.”

Or, as the motto of the University of Wisconsin’s Laboratory of Embodied Cognition puts it, “Ago ergo cogito”: “I act, therefore I think.”

William Ames writing in his Marrow of Theology discusses image worship:

Prayer is opposed by the use of representative images at or before which God is worshiped, even though the worship is referred not to the images themselves - subjectively, as some say - but objectively to God alone.

Superstition of this type is called idolatry, Exod. 32:5; Ps. 106:20; Acts 7:41.

If idols are themselves worshiped instead of God, this is the idolatry which violates the first commandment. If the true God is worshiped at an image or in an image, this is the idolatry which violates the second commandment.

Although such a worshiper does not in intention offend against the primary or highest object in worship, yet from the nature of the thing itself he always offends against the formal worship of God. In his mind a new God, who is delighted with such worship, is imagined as the object of his adoration; religious worship is also given to the image itself. This occurs even when the worship is not considered to be ultimately bound up with the image but is directed to God himself.

 Ramsay MacMullen quotes Bernardus of Angers, who said “…statues of the saints can by no reasoning be tolerated unless because of an ancient, incorrigible abuse and inborn habit of the ignorant” (MacMullen 128).

MacMullen writes:

This may be the place to mention early images of Jesus, with Paul and Peter on display in places of worship - a practice, it need hardly be said, originating neither in Judaism nor in primitive Christianity. Nor did it originate among the Christian leadership. The Council of Elvira of ca. 306 forbade it inside churches.

Claudius was Bishop of Turin from 817 until 827. He is another representative of the ancient tradition against image-worship and prayer to saints. He said:

If the images of the Apostles are to be invoked, why did they not suffer themselves to be prayed to in their lifetime? If you therefore worship a cross because Christ hung on such a piece of wood; why do you not worship all virgins at this day, since Mary, who bore Christ, was a virgin? And why do you not fall down and adore the mangers of asses and oxen, and such like swaddling clothes as Christ was wrapped in? Why do you not offer incense, and make vows to boats and ships, since he passed over the sea in such kind of vessels?

Besancon continues:

With peace within the church and the conversion of Constantine, Christian art in the strict sense began; its fundaments determined the centuries that followed. The powerful called for an art as lofty as their own “connoisseurship,” and artists now worked without constraint for the glory of the new faith.

There was already an imperial pagan art: only a slight shift was needed to make it a Christian art. The philosopher became Christ, the apostle, or the prophet. The theme of imperial apotheosis was transformed into the Ascension of Christ. The offerings of presents corresponded to the Adoration of the Magi, the adventus (the triumphal entrance of the sovereign) to Christ’s arrival in Jerusalem. In fact, court ritual provided a framework for Christian art. Just as artists represented the emperor and empress on their thrones, sorrounded by their entourage, they depicted Christ and the Virgin among the saints and angels. In Santa Maria Maggiore, the Virgin is represented as the empress. One of the first Christian paintings (from the first half of the sixth century), housed in Santa Maria Antiqua, shows the Virgin as the emperor’s wife, wearing the imperial diadem and the robes and jewels of her office.

There were constant exchanges between the Christian image and the imperial image. The latter transmitted its force to the former. In the imperial world, it was understood that the emperor’s image could be a legal substitute for the emperor’s actual presence. It took the place of his person. In legal proceedings, if the emperor’s portrait was present, the judge rendered his judgment without appeal, like Caesar in person. The legal and religious efficacity of the image was naturally transferred to Christian images. The icon was later heir to it (Besancon 109-110).

On the origins of Christian art and icons Besancon writes:
The development of a specifically Christian art was modest and extremely slow in the early centuries. The walls of the catacombs were marked with graffiti, sketches, signs, and symbols for initiates. Pagan symbols were often charged with a new meaning. The garden, the palm tree, and the peacock symbolized earthly paradise. The ship, a symbol of prosperity and of a fortunate journey through life, became the church. The erotic theme of Eros and Psyche came to signify the soul’s thirst and the love of God in Jesus Christ. Hermes, a symbol of humanity, began to represent the Good Shepherd. The sleeping Endymion became Jonah under the booth. There were many other scenes from the Old Testament as well: Daniel in the lion’s den, the three children in the fiery furnace, Adam and Eve. Only in the late second century did specifically Christian symbols appear: the miracle of the bread and fishes (a prefiguration of the Last Supper), the Adoration of the Magi (the gentile entering into the Covenant), Lazarus raised from the dead. Finally, arcane symbols arose, comprehensible only for the few: the vineyard, and above all, the fish, the ichthus, an acronym for Christ. These signs were found from Spain to Asia Minor and from Africa to the Rhine River, with no change in style or subject matter. The paintings were rudimentary: a few strokes in a limited spectrum of colors. They were not images of worship. The church was imposing no program. They were reminders, mementos of Christ or the Virgin, not portraits of them.