Essays on Eastern Orthodoxy
The Same Words, Used Differently
Essay on the Christmas Season and Orthodox Use of Language
January 12, 2006
I think I’ve figured it out! It’s the same words; they’re just used differently!!
Well, actually, I knew that, but today I have a story about it.
It’s a story about an estranged brother and sister that was recently featured on This American Life (a radio program distributed by Public Radio International). Their family was secular Jewish but the brother had a personal crisis during college that led him to convert to Christianity. He eventually joined a fundamentalist charismatic Christian community (a commune actually) on an island near Juneau, Alaska. The sister, on the other hand, never had a personal crisis as such and went on to a very happy and fulfilling life as a completely secular lesbian Jew, living in relationship with another woman.
An observant person can immediately discern the source of the estrangement.
The brief documentary was done by the sister as an attempt to understand her brother’s conversion to fundamental charismatic Christianity. By the end of the documentary she developed an appreciation for why her brother converted, but she never did understand why he would do such a thing nor the radical difference in authority systems that separated secular liberal American culture and Biblically oriented Christianity.
My sensibilities were certainly on the side of the brother, and in the end he came out as the open minded one while the sister's liberal secularism sounded offensively judgemental and narrow minded. But one thing the sister said about why her brother’s faith offended her struck a particularly deep chord within me. She had traveled to the commune in Alaska and was spending time with her brother. (In other words, it was on his turf.) Not surprisingly, they talked a lot about spiritual and religious things. At one point she asked him to describe heaven. He said he would need to look it up in the Bible. This offended her because she felt she had lost her brother to a system of blind belief. She responded to him that she didn’t want to hear what the Bible had to say, she wanted to hear what he had to say. He said in turn that since the Bible was his authority, he needed to check with it first before answering.
In an editorial aside following the conversation she described her brother in the following way. “The house is still there and the window is still there, but there’s a curtain over the window so you can no longer see in. His Christianity is the curtain. When I talk to him, I’m no longer talking to him, but to his Bible.”
This is one of the things that bothered me deeply about the Christian culture I was a part of in Bible College. The Bible was authoritative in such a way that the personality and individuality of all of us students was somehow subsumed under a particular set of phrases, verses, and concepts. Brenda and I jokingly called this the “Love ya brother” mentality. We were part of a mission group for one year. What we discovered is that there was a fundamental dishonesty within the group. There were real issues between the various pastors, but those personal feelings and the resultant strife didn’t fit into the template of the Christian faith that they had to live within. As a result, the party spirit and dissension was covered over with a false sense of Christian cooperation that was passed off as Christian charity. It was summed up in the phrase, “Love ya brother,” that the two key leaders of the mission would most often say to those that they particularly disliked or were getting ready to kick out of the mission. When the President of the mission slapped me on the back one day, and said, “Love ya brother!” with a bit too much enthusiasm and sincerity, I knew our days were numbered with that group.
This template of Biblical and quasi-Biblical words, phrases, and ideas--which were rooted in a commitment to a radical Biblical literalism and an adamant belief in the sovereignty of God which trumped all personal and individual feelings and actions--created a barrier between the world in which we lived and a real person buried and suffocating underneath all that baggage. When I heard the sister say it, I had this gut reaction that she got it exactly right: “The house is still there, the window is still there, but there’s a curtain (of the Bible) over the window so no one can see in.”
This led me to a profound dilemma after Bible College. How can I be committed to the truth of scripture when this way of expressing it is so offensive to me? The mainline Presbyterian solution to this was largely to become secular. While I had lingering doubts about this for the two decades I was a part of the denomination, it seemed a much better solution than the “Love ya brother” mentality that I had left in disgust.
Over time I discovered that there was a deeper and more important question, a better way of formulating the issue. How do I integrate the truth of scripture into my thinking process and sensibilities? Biblical literalists generally do this in a rather literal manner. But the words and phrases of scripture are from a culture of long ago and more often than not (in my opinion), those words and phrases obfuscate rather than clarify the issue. The Biblical literalist can hide behind the words of scripture and thus not deal with the real issues at hand in contemporary culture.
With this new formulation in hand I began to realize (1) that this was the heart of the issue between the old fundamentalists and the new Evangelicals back in the 40s and 50s. (Carl Henry and Harold Ockenga were on the front lines of this debate as they tried to save Fundamentalism from becoming an anachronism.) And (2) that even though the Evangelicals largely broke with the Fundamentalists over this issue, as time went on, the rank and file of the Evangelical movement lapsed right back into using Biblical language to avoid issues rather than clarify. It is the bane of a literal approach to scripture. When the words and concepts are only taken at face value, it is difficult to translate them into ideas that are helpful in a new culture and context.
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The Eastern Orthodox have a rather different way of incorporating the Bible into contemporary sensibilities. Like the Fundamentalists and Evangelicals (and in distinction from many if not most liberal Protestants) the Orthodox rousingly affirm that the Bible is primarily propositional and not existential in nature; that it is true and that it expresses “true truth” (to use a favorite phrase of the late Francis Schaeffer). The Orthodox are also largely literalists when it comes to scriptural interpretation. But they are not only literalists. Biblical sensibilities can be incorporated in a variety of ways. Orthodox Christmas hymnody illustrates this richly.
Orthodox poetry is both deeply theological and richly visual. It is not particularly accessible to the modern Western mindset because it is often so dense that its meaning can only be unpacked after hearing it multiple times. But these characteristics are important because Orthodox poetry works at multiple levels at the same time, expressing theological truth while providing rich imagery which speaks primarily to the emotions. The Hymn of the Nativity (which is sung three or four times during the Christmas Eve service) is typical of this richness:
Thy Nativity, O Christ our God, hath given rise to the light of knowledge in the world, for they who did worship the stars did learn from them to worship Thee, O Sun of Justice and to know that Thou didst come from the East of the Highest. Glory to Thee, O Lord.
The Orthodox celebration of the Nativity is more focused on the Wise Men than the Shepherds, and so the central Hymn of the Nativity concerns them. Notice the word play between stars and sun, between Sun and Son. Notice the implied change in the Wise Men. They thought they were seeking true knowledge from the stars and in the process stumbled across true (and living!) knowledge of a much greater magnitude (as expressed by the sun in distinction to the stars).
This is the big hymn, the central hymn of the Nativity Feast, but I would quickly add that more “traditional” themes (from the Western perspective) are also prominent, as can be seen in this excerpt from the Christmas Canon.
I behold a strange, most glorious mystery!
Heaven–the cave!
The cherubic throne–the Virgin!
The manger–the place where Christ lay,
The uncontainable God whom we magnify in song.
During the weeks that lead up to Christmas, other hymns take the central idea of the birth of Christ and tie it to themes from one end of scripture to the other. Two in particular come to my mind: There is a hymn about Jonah that is sung for at least three weeks prior to Christmas. The hymn says that Jonah was saved in the bowels of the fish and at the fulness of time he came forth from the fish like a fetus, to announce salvation to the world. The three young men of the Book of Daniel are also featured prominently. The fiery furnace was for them, a dewy womb which brought forth life and salvation. (These same themes appear prominently again during Great Lent, except that Jonah and the Three Children are linked specifically to the cross and tomb, the death and resurrection of Christ. Thus, in the poetry of the church, these two stories, which are literal at one level, become pictures and interpretters of both Mary's womb and the tomb where Jesus was placed after he was crucified. This poetic connection creates a remarkable interpretive visual and theological link between two things--the womb and tomb as well as the fiery furnace and belly of the fish--that seem initially utterly different.)
In these, and other similar hymns, the birth of Christ is tied both to specific Old Testament stories as well as to the great themes of salvation: the inexplicable union of judgement and mercy, the life-giving womb, and the incarnation, light and darkness, etc. But these themes and images are not repeated in a merely propositional way. They are, instead, woven together so that a great tapestry of biblical language, images, and ideas, as well as theological insights of the church through the centuries, is created as a seamless whole.
The result of this tapestry of images related to the Nativity is a way of understanding the birth of Christ which is thoroughly biblical yet not limited to the two birth narratives from Matthew and Luke. This leads to an endlessly rich understanding of the birth of Jesus Christ which is simply unavailable to Evangelicals and Fundamentalists who are committed to a solely propositional understanding of scripture. Because the tapestry of understanding is so rich, it means that when the question, “What does the birth of Christ mean to you?” the options for answer this question biblically are not limited to answering the question in the words of Matthew, or Luke, or Paul.
An astute reader of this essay may point out that Christmas lends itself and even promotes flights of poetic imagination. One does not have to look very far within Evangelical hymnody to find similar connections both to other parts of scripture and the world as a whole. That is arguably true. (I consider it arguable because so many of the poetic images of Protestant music and poetry are so shallow that they hardly count as being in the same category as the hymns about Jonah and the Three Children.) But, Christmas aside, Eastern Orthodoxy approaches the subject of heaven with the same poetic abandon (rooted in the same commitment to propositional Biblical authority), as they do Christmas and nearly every other significant Christian doctrine.
In the case of heaven, the Sunday morning worship service (or Divine Liturgy), in its fulness, is designed to mimic what heaven is like. The Divine Liturgy is largely based on Jewish worship antecedents, both in content, form, and even the garb of the clergy. A great amount of the service can be found in the Old Testament. There is a remarkable parallel between the book of Revelation and the Divine Liturgy. It is simply assumed within Orthodoxy (and this view is increasingly embraced by Western Christian scholars) that the book of Revelation is actually a spiritual commentary on the Divine Liturgy, that the Liturgy, in its basic form (having been largely adopted from Jewish worship) was already the normal Sunday morning worship in John the Evangelist’s day and that he interpreted the worship service itself as the judgement upon the world and the consummation of all things.
When asked what heaven was like, the brother (from the first story) was unable to answer because the answer was so glorious that it could not be put into earthly words. But being committed to propositional truth alone, he had only words to answer the question. He told his sister to hold on . . . he’d have to look it up in the Bible.
In a somewhat parallel event, Russian Prince Vladimir was looking for the true religion. He sent his spiritual representatives to check out Judaism, Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, and Roman Catholicism. When they returned after the long quest, they reported that Eastern Orthodoxy was the true religion. How did they know? It was not the Bible that convinced them. As the story is told, when they attende worship in Constantinople at the Church of Holy Wisdom (where there were dozens of priests and deacons and many, many, subdeacons, acolytes, and servers), they were, in essence, transported to heaven itself. In this worship service they recognized the truth and fulness of Christianity and they saw true religion. As a result, Russia began a process of conversion to Orthodoxy.
I left my Evangelical upbringing for the Presbyterian Church. Even though I was a Presbyterian minister for over two decades, that environment always remained foreign. It was often as if they had a different Bible than the one I grew up with. But Orthodoxy was like coming home. And yet, it was home without all the merely propositional baggage that had waylaid me on my journey to heaven. In Orthodoxy I have found, as I said at the beginning, the same words, but used differently, more reverently, more richly, and ultimately, more personally. In Evangelicalism, if I wanted to understand salvation, I had to understand Romans and Galatians because that's where salvation was explained. But in Orthodoxy, I need to know the stories of Jonah and Daniel if I ever hope to have a clue about what Jesus, much less Paul, is saying.
In short, it is a much more accessible approach to scripture. Rather than a curtain that hides the world from the real me, the Bible has become a new window in the house; but this time, it’s a window directly into heaven. I figure that if I keep my windows clean, the interested person should be able, not only to look inside of me, but right through me and on into heaven.
Copyright © 2006 James E. Nelson (Just Another Jim). All Rights Reserved.
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