Just Another Jim

Just Another Essay

Four Toddlers Toddling

Essay Posted February 26, 2008 by James E. Nelson

Kallistos Ware, Greek Orthodox bishop, retired professor from Oxford, and well-known author, is currently on a lecture tour of the United States. Brenda and I had the opportunity to hear him Tuesday, Feb. 19, in Troy, Michigan (just north of Detroit). We had made previous plans to visit our son in Rochester, NY the weekend before. When we found out about Bp Kallistos, we decided to come home via Detroit so that we could attend the lecture.

I belong to a couple of Orthodox list serves and I found out about the speaking tour there. The messages went something like this:

This typically uplifting world wide web conversation reminded me of a group of British authors I discovered thirty years ago, and how they impacted my life because they impacted my soul.

The story actually begins back at Montana Institute of the Bible (which later changed its name to Big Sky Bible College while I was a sophomore) and the monthly ritual of looking longingly through the pages of the CBD catalog when it arrived in the mail. Before there was a world wide web, and long before there was an Amazon.com, Christians had to get their books from a catalog because, as anyone who knows who’s been in one, Christian bookstores don’t carry books at all (other than the Left Behind series and any book with the word “purpose-driven” in the title, along with a few study Bibles). The purpose they are driven by is coffee cups, pencils, posters, and sun catchers with rich and deeply meaningful Christian sayings on them.

Christian Book Distributors, on the other hand, not only had books, they were the king of Christian book world. Usually they were cheap. During my college freshman year a book by John R.W. Stott almost always appeared on the cover of the CBD catalog, complete with a seductively low price. Soon my friends and I were buzzing about John Stott because he was so wonderfully different in tone than the typical classroom fair we were receiving at college.

Eventually the Academic Dean stood up in daily chapel and said that Montana Institute of the Bible didn’t endorse books by John Stott and a handful of other authors popular on campus. (A.W. Pink was the other author that sticks in my mind.) They didn’t ban these authors, but they discouraged us from reading them because they weren’t quite as committed to the basics as they ought to be.

This seemed odd because Stott held to all five fundamentals of the faith from which Christian fundamentalists got their name (inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, the full deity and humanity of Christ, the Holy Trinity, and the literal and premillennial return of Jesus Christ). On the other hand, he was a “world evangelical.” He was one of the most famous names associated with the Lausanne Conference held a few years earlier in 1974 and one of the primary authors of the Lausanne Covenant, an Evangelical manifesto that combined the Evangelical intellectual tradition with its genius for evangelism. Lausanne was a high water mark in the history of evangelicalism, but many of the signers of the covenant were suspect among American Christian fundamentalists, and because he associated with them at Lausanne, we were warned away from John R.W. Stott.

And this baffled me. Stott was wonderfully joyful and positive in his outlook. His vision for the church’s potential was infectious. His biblical exegesis was sober and thorough. He was respectful of others, but took them to task when he felt others were wrong. I felt I had much more in common with John Stott than I did with the college I was attending.

Stott introduced me to the world of British Evangelicalism, which was even more taboo on campus than Stott. The tempest over John Stott passed in a couple of months, but the British evangelicals were deeply suspect by the college all the years I was there. Over my college career, along with John Stott, I discovered the joys of Thomas F. Torrance, John Polkinghorne, and Timothy Ware. Torrance’s and Polkinghorne’s books weren’t even allowed in the library. At this point I believe Ware’s The Orthodox Church had been written, but none of us had ever heard of it. All I had read at this point were articles and monographs that he had written.

It was John Polkinghorne, the Cambridge theoretical physicist turned Anglican priest, who encapsulated what I found so attractive in these writers. Polkinghorne’s joy in discovery was utterly captivating. His wonder at the world (both physical and spiritual) was infectious. From an academic point of view I was never particularly impressed with how Polkinghorne combined his science and religion. I found Thomas Torrance’s approach to the science-religion question much more intellectually rigorous and completely consistent with in his theological framework. Polkinghorne lacked that same consistency, and at times his interweaving of science and theology seemed like a bad patch job.

But his method wasn’t the point at this stage of my development. Polkinghorne was clearly full of joy. He approached the world—both the scientific and theological world—with open arms. I was seriously reading both Polkinghorne and Torrance while living in Hays, Kansas, and attending a Reformed Presbyterian church there. The church was a timid and frightened place although the worship was intellectually rigorous and gloriously biblical. (For those who have attended a Reformed Presbyterian church, I suspect you know exactly what I am talking about.)

In contrast to that church community and the very suspicious college I had come from, Polkinghorne and the other British Evangelicals were joyful, hopeful, and full of childlike wonder. In their presence my heart began to thaw. For the first time my spirit began to open up. I recognized that Christianity was something more than an intellectual exercise or game the point of which was to find the error in the other person. When I left Hays, I left fundamentalism behind, largely because of the influence of the British Evangelicals.

Of course Timothy Ware wasn’t technically a British Evangelical. But I had never heard of Eastern Orthodoxy at this point beyond it’s existence as an odd curiosity. I assumed that Ware was an Anglican. Some of the things he wrote about worship seemed a bit exotic, but Anglicans were exotic to me at that time.

Ware then disappeared from my radar screen for several years. He was on the intellectual map at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary because both the theology and worship departments were very serious about moving away from the silliness of constant change and the hubris of inventing the church all by ourselves. Louisville and the Office of Theology and Worship were very serious about the recovery of historic Christianity, and in that context writers like Ware, Lossky, and some of the Greeks in Thessaloniki and Athens (whose works would not be translated into English for another decade) were important interpreters of the primary sources. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when we nearly converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, that Timothy Ware, who had by this time become Bishop Kallistos, became significant in my reading.

But when I read that Bishop Kallistos Ware was coming to Detroit on a list serve, and then read the immediate critical responses to this news, the memories flooded back of my days in Bible College and all those poor frightened rabbits who were my instructors, so afraid of the wolves that roamed the theological world, so timid and unsure in the confidence of their own faith that they hid in the cozy but terribly dark warrens of fundamentalism rather than stepping out onto God’s good, green earth and challenging their opponents directly.

Over the next couple of weeks I ruminated on my initial wondrous discovery of Timothy Ware and the other Brits. I was reminded of something Alexander Schmemann wrote in For the Life of the World:

Without the proclamation of this joy Christianity is incomprehensible. It is only as joy that the Church was victorious in the world, and it lost the world when it lost that joy, and ceased to be a credible witness to it. Of all accusations against Christians, the most terrible one was uttered by Nietzsche when he said that Christians had no joy” (p. 24).

For me these four men were not only the embodiment of that joy, but also my path out of the fear and sniping that is the exact opposite of Christian joy, but so typical of American Christian fundamentalism.

On the other hand, having rediscovered Kallistos Ware in the last couple of decades, I didn’t find him particularly joyful this time around. His writings are plodding and a bit tedious. His lectures (of which I’d heard the first part of several on Ancient Faith Radio) were boring beyond measure. He’s even aware of just how boring he is. In nearly every lecture series of his that I’ve heard he tells the story of how he fell asleep during one of his own lectures! The story goes sort of like this: “. . . And slowly I became aware that the voice droning on in the groggy distance of my dreams was my own. I slowly realized I was standing in front of the students and I was teaching them, but I did not have the slightest idea what I was saying.”

As the day of the lecture drew near, I wondered just what it was I found so joyful in Ware back in the late 70s. But as the evening at St. George church in Troy., Michigan progressed, I was reminded that joy is not the same thing as entertainment or humor. I was in the presence of a winsome (albeit boring) man who loved the church dearly but needed to say some difficult things. How he approached those difficult things was the very essence of joy.

The event was sponsored by St. Andrew House, a Pan-Orthodox organization in metro Detroit that seeks to overcome the jurisdictional divisions which mark the Orthodoxy in North America and some other areas of the world. Their board includes an area bishop as well as members from many different jurisdictions and parishes in the Detroit area. The evening began with a representative of St. Andrew House who gave a brief history of the organization and introduced the bishop associated with St. Andrew House. He in turn gave a brief history of the jurisdictional problems in North America and introduced Bishop Kallistos.

Both the introducers did a bit of scolding. The reason for the jurisdictional mess is well known. In the pre-communist era, North America was within the jurisdiction of the Russian patriarch. But with the creation of the iron curtain, the patriarch was no longer able to provide pastoral oversight to the American church. At the same time and for the same reasons (the wars and political changes in Europe and the Middle East, Orthodox Christians streamed into the United States as political and economic refugees. With the Russian church unable to provide leadership, these people turned to the churches of their homelands.

But that was a long time ago, and both introducing speakers chided the various American jurisdictions and their bishops for not solving the problem, even as they yearned for a pan-Orthodox council to untangle the mess. Their criticism is certainly justified. The jurisdictional mess is a stumbling block to the work of the church and a sin. They were not incorrect in calling attention to this.

But in stark contrast to this, Bishop Kallistos never once scolded nor chided the church in his own words. At one point he quoted a length a Greek theologian who scolded the church for this situation, but before reading it he warned that these were harsh words and after reading it, Ware apologized for offering up such criticisms.

Rather, Ware offered up a positive vision for what the church should be as well as a theological framework to achieve what he talked about. In the Q&A following the lecture he addressed certain specific issues related to Orthodox/Anglican relations, then Orthodox/Coptic relations, as well as Orthodox/Roman Catholic relations. He also addressed the difficulty of Orthodox relations with the larger non-Christian culture. But in all those discussions, he observed what is and offered suggestions for what might be, but never once scolded anyone for our current sins.

As the evening came to a close I realized that it was precisely this sensibility that is the expression of the bishop’s joy. It is also the very thing that make fundamentalists of all stripes angry. Ware has no need of delineating the sins of the Orthodox Church because he is not threatened by it. His God is truly bigger than all that. He simply offers a better path and says, go and sin no more. He is also perfectly willing to rub shoulders with the sinners without reminding them that they are sinners.

St Paul says that true love doesn’t insist on its own way. Later he says love bears all things. If we turn that around we could say that true love not only doesn’t point out other people’s faults, it puts up with them. After reflecting on the lecture, I suspect this is at the root of what I recognized as Ware’s sense of joy. There is no hint of condemnation, only welcome. There is no dwelling on past sins, only words of encouragement toward a better way.

In contrast, when we focus on the objective truth of the matter, that very focus draws attention to the faults of others. Becoming that intimately aware of the faults of others leads us to correct, criticize, and condemn. I propose that this is the difference between the British Evangelicalism of the late 70s and its American fundamentalist counterpart. Fundamentalists were focused on the truth of scripture while the British Evangelicals were focused on the joy of the Kingdom. Put into today’s context, Bishop Kallistos is focused on the joy sacramental life and all that it can produce: holiness, unity, evangelical fervor. In contrast, many American Orthodox are focused on the details of jurisdictional differences, and what steps need to be taken to overcome them. In both cases one vision leads to peace and joy while the other leads to criticism, anger, and defensiveness.

From the perspective of those focused on “the objective truth,” the rather open-ended position of a John Stott, a Timothy (Kallistos) Ware, a Thomas Torrance, or especially a John Polkinghorne seems out of kilter and wavering toward untruth and eternal condemnation, or even worse, liberalism!

But now, after reminiscing about my introduction to the British Evangelicals thirty years ago, and reflecting on the recent lecture of Bishop Kallistos Ware in Detroit, I have a different way of conceptualizing the joy expressed by each of these Christian thinkers. They are like toddlers. (And can we be anything more than that? Even our most profound thoughts about God are baby thoughts when seen in the light of his over-arching glory.) As we watch them go about their work, we see them toddle step to step, tilting dangerously far in one direction, careening off in another direction for a step or two, but all the while grinning and babbling excitedly, and making their way surely and precisely (although not always directly) toward the object of their joy.

Jurisdictional disarray is not the object of Bishop Kallistos’ attention, and because he is focused on the object of his joy, he won’t bother making jurisdictional disarray the object of his consternation either. Is a toddling baby going to stop toddling in order to tell another toddler how to walk upright and straight? Nope. They enjoy toddling about far too much. Thank God I had the opportunity to watch Ware, along with Stott, Polkinghorne, and Torrance toddle about the theological crib. Their example got me up on my own feet. And I’m still toddling about babbling happily (although often incoherently). Unfortunately, I still have a bit of fundamentalist in me. I spend far too much time telling others that they need to stand tall and walk straight.

Copyright © 2008 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
You are free to distribute as long as attribution and web address is included.
Site support by C T E K