Orthodox

Having finished the book, The Story of Christianity, by Justo Gonzalez (San Francisco: Harper, 1984) — and now going back over the parts of it that I highlighted — I realize one simple fact concerning the reason I even picked it up in the first place. I was trying to see how close the Western fringes of the Celtic church matched the early church in Jerusalem and then in Egypt. But what I find is a continental church history having absolutely nothing to do with that virginal outcrop. Questions of Gnosticism, apostolic succession, hierarchy, and world powers had not seemingly touched the far Western church. It could not seriously be argued that a return to the Orthodox Church or any of the Oriental churches today would return the Western church to its original condition, as these are not what they once were when they sent the first emissaries to the West.

Only a fool would argue that Constantine had no great influence on the church. Of course, it just took a lot longer for that influence to reach the far West — through various stages and kinds of conquest. I probably highlighted a quarter of the earliest chapters in the book. To be sure, the church was completely different in the mainstream than on the fringes after that and had normed everything according to Constantine. For all of that norming, there remains much influence of folk religion in the areas where the church has always been strongest. Folk religion aside, we may deduce that, had Constantine not arrived on the scene, each region would still have marked its worship with its own culture. The Council at Nicea did not create an orthodoxy that did not exist among many church gatherngs already — it just spelled it out officially and enforced it with the backing of the state from then on. Ironically, a new church was created out of this merger with the state that undermined it ever since.

Let us turn to Gonzalez again to note some of these changes (which, as I say, had nothing to do with the far West):

Until Constantine’s time, Christian worship had been relatively simple. At first, Christians gathered to worship in private homes. Then they began to gather in cemeteries, such as the Roman catacombs. By the third century there were structures set aside for worship. The oldest church that archaeologists have discovered is that of Dura-Europos, which dates from about A.D. 250. This is a fairly small room, decorated with very simple murals.

After Constantine’s conversion Christian worship began to be influenced by imperial protocol. Incense, which was used as a sign of respect for the emperor, began appearing in Christian churches. Officiating ministers, who until then had worn everyday clothes, began dressing in more luxurious garments. Likewise, a number of gestures indicating respect, which were normally made before the emperor, now became part of Christian worship. The custom was also introduced of beginning services with a processional. Choirs were developed, partly in order to give body to that procession. Eventually the congregation came to have a less active role in worship.

Already in the second century, it had become customary to commemorate the anniversary of a martyr’s death by celebrating communion where the martyr had been buried. Now churches were built in many of those places. Eventually, some came to think that worship as particularly valid if it was celebrated in one of those holy places, where the relics of a martyr were present … [Gonzalez, 125]

Isn’t it interesting that even Gonzalez begins to use the word “church” in a meaning that begins to shift almost imperceptibly from meaning the “body of believers” to meaning a “building”? He does not offer an explanation of this, perhaps because it was unconscious on his part or perhaps because its usage is so common now that he felt no need to explain.

As to the practice of collecting relics — particularly dead saints’ bones, I suspect this falls under the category of regional custom. I cannot imagine the early Jewish believers doing such a thing. I find its normalization particularly interesting. It may have served a culturally relevant purpose in its point of origin, but it might have been ill received in a place where the inhabitants were not naturally disposed to harboring such relics. Example: in my own culture, we do not maintain such things — not because we are afraid of death as some have charged, but because we consider such relics unclean. I remember how horribly shocked I was the first time I saw pictures of the Sedlec Ossuary in Czechoslovakia. I thought it must be some kind of anti-Christ place filled with fallen priests of the Black Arts. Now I realize that this must be how the culture of that day redeemed a tragedy of slaughter.

I found the origin of the incense quite fascinating. The oldest churches worship with all the senses. I was brought up to worship with none of my senses except common sense, and even that could be debated. My faith was much more interiorized and I felt it a mark of security that if I should ever lose sight, sound, taste, and the rest, I could still find God in my soul. But should I really say I lost all these senses in worship? If so, I was “taught” to do so, but it was not the reality of my daily life. Once more church culture is “churchy” because it is not where we really live.

After reading of the Celtic dislike of structure and love of nature, I realized I had not lost that heritage in my private life, no matter the enforced church culture. The night skies filled with stars were my ceiling. I could imagine Abraham looking at the same stars in the desert. I remembered the smell of freshly plowed dirt and the scent of soon-rain in the air, full of mystery and engagement. To me, this always evoked the Creator –who else would have put it there? Perhaps that was my heaven and my incense all along. My institutional church only fooled themselves into thinking they had snuffed out that nonsense.

I really didn’t know whether to post these thoughts here, but I didn’t have time to do it justice otherwise. I’m off to do other things for a while after this.

In tracing back the lineage of the ancient church in Britain, I find that it was more Orthodox than Catholic in the beginning. There is now a British Orthodox Church that is under the Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. It was founded in a bid to bring the Isles back to its first church.

I did further investigation and I find a more rigid structure in the present Coptic Orthodox Church than I think ever existed in ancient Britain. I suspect that the strict structure never got a foothold there, that the Coptic Orthodox Church has undergone some shifts since the original carriers of the Gospel made it to the British Isles and that what we are seeing of today’s Coptic Orthodox Church and the Orthodox Church are results of serious changes very close to (but not identical to) the root of the Church. It is nearly impossible to distinguish that there ever might have been a time when geographical divisions with bishops did not exist, but the earliest records indicate this new kind of governmental division to be a serious change. The Lord sets the solitary in families, not in geographical divisions and not in institutions.

My suspicions are that to place oneself under the Coptic Orthodox Church might be to go back to the historical roots on the one hand but to negate them on the other (historical changes in the mother church and the lack of direct influence of the mother church on the British church in the beginning). There is great reason to suspect that the entire idea of what is “the Church” had shifted very early in Church history, judging by The Didache’s account of how to recognize an apostle-prophet. That in itself throws great suspicion on the idea of dioceses and parishes with a top-down structure. It simply does not exist in The Didache. Others might argue that it is a matter of the Church coming into maturity after The Didache was written, but I think that Church history shows that the Church did not mature — if anything, it was fairly well dumbed down in many ways by overbearing structure. We’ve seen the evidence of that in our own day.

All said, I think that God has had people in all places at all times. Many practices developed in the various strains of church through the centuries that are worth recognizing. It may sound a little odd, but sometimes I think that when the Lord said, “I was in prison and you visited me,” it applied to crossing the lines of religion and helping our fellow believers in captivity. But that is my fleeting thought.

In centuries past, people could not just cross the lines and fellowship with one another. We have technology and access to information to thank for some of the barriers breaking down. God deals with individuals in various ways and in His own good time. In bygone days, people did not seem to realize that they could not beat new opinions into people and so they unwittingly oppressed one another in the name of God. One’s conviction is like one’s own blood. It is a holy thing and we should never attack that which is sacred by earthly means. Those who love the truth will find God, and they do not have to have perfect understanding in all matters of the faith to be known of Him. Was it not while we were yet sinners that Christ died for us?

Psa 68:6a God setteth the solitary in families:

One organized church I know of that really comes close to what I think I see of the early church is the Orthodox Church. There are some other disqualifiers, which I won’t go into just now for the sake of brevity. I decided to visit the local OC one day and found out that the major difficulty for me was culture shock and the inability to keep track of who was doing what next. I met a few people who managed to overcome this. It does raise the question of how a small ethnic body can live so long in a new country and fail to reach out to the prevailing culture. On the other hand, it stands to reason that they will preserve the ways they know because it has been handed down to them since old. The beauty of being Greek and Orthodox is that there can be no question of who their spiritual fathers are. Their story is an unbroken line, unlike the story of much of Europe and other parts of the world. But it is significant, because the Lord says He sets the solitary in families – not church meeting halls.

Much is made in some places of Apostolic Succession, and though I believe these people when they say they have an unbroken line of bishops, I cannot find a biblical mandate for this as a litmus test of true church-worthiness. One would think the rest of us are all bastards, but I think it better to say that some of us do not know who our fathers in the faith were. Yet we cannot say we have no fathers going back to the beginning, for we would not be having these conversations if a line of people had not begotten us in the spirit. I will even go so far as to say that if we each knew our successive line of spiritual begottenness, we would find that we all trace back to one or more of the Apostles. I was hoping my years of genealogy research would not go to waste, and apparently they haven’t. Such a thought would not have crossed my mind had I not been keenly aware that all families in the earth are old, though a few smug individuals think they have the pre-eminence in old families.

Only recently while learning more about the Northumbria Community did I give a lot of thought to the early church in Europe before most of it became Roman Catholic. Finding names for the European churches becomes tricky, as they were autonomous, stretching from Turkey to Ireland. Some refer to this broad collection as the “Celtic Church”, though not all were Celts. There is some basis for this name, given that the Irish churches evangelized huge parts of the world. I think of the term “Celtic Church” as a loose descriptor more than anything else. I’ve done a lot of research on the Web and my impression is that the name is up for grabs by a lot of people who make it what they want. I know of one Celtic site run by people who are essentially Calvinist Reformers — I don’t know why they weren’t satisfied being Baptists or Presbyterians. I found another with a fascination for knights and ladies (what has this to do with the Body of Christ?) and many other strange forms of church.

Nevertheless, I had to take the Northumbria Community’s research into their Celtic past seriously. They have done a lot of footwork, thus saving me the headache. They are located in the north of England, in the area connected with well-known saints like Patrick, Columba, and Aidan. Many confuse St. Patrick and the Celtic Church with a strictly Irish Church. This thinking is too limited, in my opinion. Since the topic I’m addressing can be very complicated, I will attempt to use my own heritage to illustrate the connection between culture and the narrative of our organic spiritual lives.

I bought the book, Celtic Daily Prayer: Prayers and Readings from the Northumbria Community, to see what these people had to offer. I found myself strangely unable to identify as completely with their founding saints as they did. I wondered why and then realized that part of the reason is that I’m not living in the actual land of these people as they are. My family has undergone the resulting culture shifts of living in the New World. Their story is partly my story but not entirely. I discussed these findings with a friend and will share here some of my notes (I said they might be a bit raw/rough and they are…) In fact, I was trying to discover God’s design in the way we come about our faith organically.

I first began by debating the possibility that our traditional church meeting styles, which so many simple churchers detest, might actually have been indigenous to part of Europe even though it was imposed on the whole by Constantine. Perhaps it naturally works better some places than others. The Romans had their meeting halls and the Vikings had their mead-halls. How could the idea of meeting in halls instead of houses be totally foreign to all? I wrote to a friend:

The truth is, we ARE descendants of much Greco-Roman culture. Those were the first Gentiles that Peter and Paul went to. As I was thinking of my own background, it’s Viking/Celtic/Germanic…what could I use from that culture? There was NO Viking church culture originally, as I know it. all my Viking ancestors (and believe me, I’ve traced them) were all pagan Odin worshipers until they became French and then English. I can, at best, only borrow the culture of my mother’s forbears in Scotland and Early England. That would loosely be the “Celtic” church which is much like Orthodoxy only in smaller groups. K– and I talked about the Celtic monastic communities that St. Patrick was a part of. Well, it’s something to think about.

What I discovered, to my great surprise, is that although I am not very Irish by most people’s estimation, I probably owe more to St. Patrick than many of the Irish. My father’s family name traces back to a tiny hamlet in York (lines have been redrawn to put it in Lancashire). It is fairly near Northumbria. Part of my mother’s family hails from the Scottish Lowlands — we are from Scott of Buccleuch. Although they were Scots, they were originally Irish who later pushed into southern Scotland long after Patrick evangelized the Emerald Isle. In fact, he set up operations in northeast Ireland, within what was probably their homeland. More emissaries left Ireland for Iona and the North of England. Later they turned to the the south of England. Clearly, some of my ancestors were Christianized before the coming of Roman Catholicism to the isles. My people were in the right places at just the right times to include these as spiritual fathers: Patrick, Aidan, Cuthbert, Columba.

DNA studies have revealed that English populations share nearly identical DNA as Ireland. It is essentially Celt; the Germanic has been far overblown. I see it now. My fathers are not the fathers of Roman Catholicism at that point in time. They were the saints of the Irish church whose spiritual roots derive from the Desert Fathers of Egypt. (Alexandria, here I come.) Even my father’s family from Germany was likely evangelized by Irish church emmissaries (some of whom weren’t actually Irish). I have obviously found my earliest European “fathers” of the faith. Easier than I thought. I told my friend:

We don’t all have exactly the same line of “fathers” in the faith, though they all tie back somewhere to the beginning. The Lord sets the solitary in families because it is families who share their experiences….musing here.

[Continued]

These past two nights have definitely helped me feel I am making some kind of headway in understanding my journey a little better. It all started with when I posted “Universal, Beautiful Ideas.” Of course, Alex is right that I will have few takers. That’s okay. I don’t know why I felt to post it. Maybe it’s sort of like yellng into a great chasm and hoping someone will shout back from the void.

Today the pieces are making sense. Alex shared his insights into playing “Jew” as a means of spirituality (or something like that). And then I realized I have even done the reverse: played like the people who raised me when it didn’t “feel” right. Wow! So freeing.

Then when I had that conversation the other day with the Orthodox priest and realized I had found a somewhat kindred soul….and then when he gave me a piece of advice that was exactly what the Lord had been telling me….(another brother confirming the same scripture the very next day!)….well I saw the Body at work — across the lines — even though I had been taught to see Orthodox folk as nominal, name-only Christians. Well, that is going to change and I shall now set people straight about such matters. I have seen with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.

I thought about all the avenues that God’s people walk down. I know people who walk with the same name brand of people and grow past some of it. Some never do, of course, yet they may still be faithful in what they understand. Others go far from home, searching, searching, searching for answers. I always wondered what part of me was a product of my times and my socialization instead of my faith.

Most of my “free ranger” friends are decidedly Protestant, evangelical and somewhat Charismatic in behavior even if they think they’ve left all that behind (the Shadow knows). I often think all they left was the building and took the furnishings with them. Others are casting off all restraint and running after every wild idea they can find–maybe to prove to themselves that they aren’t stuck. And still others envision a home church that differs little from an organizational one except in size and legal status.

Maybe this is all a part of our culture. We in the West have had unimaginable freedom to pick and choose for ourselves. Others lacked this freedom or they truly felt comfortable with what they had always known. But I see that each approach includes some who speak the same thing and are of the same mind with their siblings across the way. We speak in the “language” we understand. If we can understand a language besides the one we grew up with or if our own language has shifted through much admixture, well — linguists have always said that language is living and changing. Perhaps our expression of spiritual things is partly a matter of language as well.

Maybe I can illustrate with my own dialect. It is a Frankenstein of an accent, made up of many pieces of other dialects. It should be “Texan” — and it does have many Texanisms — yet it’s not essentially “Texan.” Many things have affected it. Living in parts of Texas with varying linguistic conventions, moving from small town to large cosmopolitan city have affected it. Having a mother who insisted on perfect diction and made me self-conscious made a difference. So perhaps did studying speech, drama and two foreign languages. And so did growing up in a day when sounding regional and being ashamed of the provincial made some of us lose the stronger part of the accent. Working in international districts took its toll also. So when I go back to my old town, I am shocked that I cannot make the sounds easily any more, though I have a good insider’s perspective on local idioms.

It may be that expression is sometimes mistaken for function in the church — or worse: heresy or “dead religion.” Some believe that if we operate in a different register than the norm of our culture that we are not practicing “biblical” fellowship or giftings or graces. Ours must, therefore, be a different faith or “another gospel” — not the faith once delivered to the saints. Perhaps many strange practices no more designate a different faith than they designate an accent.

I heard a priest talk about “dimensions of the faith” once. That’s a good way to put it. I’ve never liked the dimension I was thrown into. Mine was evangelistic, preaching centered, teaching, prophetic, mission minded. I could have left that group and joined the other groups nearby where the distinctions involved poor-peopling, and working oneself to death for the gospel instead, but that was not my register either. And maybe I could have gone into youth ministry, but experience has proven me to be unfit for that.

I remember trying very hard to evangelize when I was younger. I found out how lousy I was at that. Believe me, if I could have found a way to fit into anything, I would have! It was all about performance and I was a ballerina in hobnail boots.

Somewhere along the line I realized I was better praying for people, being their friend, walking beside them and helping them find the next step on their own journey. The Charismatic brand of intercessory prayer I was taught didn’t work for me. I still don’t keep lists and I don’t let people use me to nag God into doing what they want. I pray as God brings things to mind. Have seen a lot of neat things happen, too. I wanted to heal people’s souls because I could see that so many were frustrated and had no idea how to go on. I wanted to stop chasing miracles and travel with God just for the sake of His company. Maybe it’s just the way I was wired.

I preferred chant, meditative types of music, silence, cantor singing above popular choruses, show tunes and choppy hymns. I grew apart from the thought that the physical senses did not count and allowed myself to appreciate fine art and music as valid expressions of faith — which makes far more sense to me than women with pink hair and orchestra bands. Why weren’t those things allowed under this category?:

Phl 4:8 Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

Why weren’t those part of the Pauline principle? The sights and sounds I loved were natural expressions raised into the heavenlies — divine cries of the spirit-man to God. Oh, why was that so wrong!?! I suppose because it was not particularly pentecostal or evangelical. And there were too many farmers around or something.

John saw the souls in heaven and said they were redeemed “out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation.” Maybe there’s more to that than meets the eye.