By Walt Garlington
While there remain some flinty, hardened Baptists, Presbyterians, Pentecostals, and others here in Dixie, the general religious tendency among Southerners – owing to their innate hospitality and graciousness – is towards a form of Christian ecumenism, in which the Christian believer stands above all the various Christian traditions and partakes of what he likes from each of them.
But the unspoken assumption – that all of the so-called ‘branches of the tree of Christianity’ are equally valid, proclaiming the same message, only dressed up in slightly different outward clothing – is untenable. A cursory look at some of the main dogmas of each will tell us that these are different creatures with different ends in mind.
Take salvation itself, for instance. Both Roman Catholics and Protestants view this mainly through a legalistic, accounting lens: Mankind has incurred a sin debt that must be paid in order to satisfy God. Roman Catholics earn the credits to do this by doing various works – going to Mass, going on pilgrimage, helping the poor, etc. When they do these things, the superabundance of merits that Christ earned by his life and death are transferred to their “accounts.” When they have earned enough merits/credits, they are able to enter Heaven. If they earn more than they need, they become saints.
Protestants take essentially the same structure, but instead of earning credits/merits by works, they receive all they need and more through faith alone in Christ’s atonement. Their sin debt has been paid; they stand confidently before God; and they count every saved believer to be a saint at the moment of his conversion. And because all believers receive a superabundance of Christ’s merits, it is impermissible to honor any of the saints in a special way.
The Orthodox do not accept this arrangement. For them, salvation has to do with man’s deepest being. At the moment of the Fall, human nature was damaged. Christ’s mission was to heal the wounded nature of fallen man by uniting it to His own pure and holy divine nature (thus allowing us to receive from His divinity by uniting us to His human body), to make it whole again, not to cancel metaphysical debts, not to assuage the wrath of an “angry God.” By being united with Christ in baptism, we are able to begin the process of that healing. All of the devotional acts of an Orthodox believer – receiving the Holy Eucharist, prayers, fasting, prostrations, alms for the poor, spiritual reading, and so on – are toward that end: healing the wounds of our nature so that we can be united to God, which was our goal from the beginning: to become gods (Psalm 82:6), to acquire the “likeness” of God (Gen. 1:27), to be “partakers of the divine nature” (II Peter 1:4). Those who have acquired the likeness of God in this life, through self-denial and love for God and neighbor, who are so full of the uncreated Grace of God that it overflows from their lives into the lives of others, manifesting in wonders and miracles – these are the Orthodox saints.
These kinds of theological differences reveal themselves in various ways within the world. The attitude towards monasticism is one of them. Monasticism has been one of the chief means by which the Christian faith has been spread throughout the world, particularly in Western Europe. Indeed, the most effective missionaries of the English, whether St. Aidan to Northumbria in the north or St. Augustine and those who accompanied him to Kent in the south, were all monks. Yet many Protestants view monasticism very unfavorably, to the point that they consider it a corruption of Christianity that must be wholly rejected. Thus would they deprive the Church of one of her best tools in spreading the Faith and saving the lost sheep.
Roman Catholics, in the evolution of their dogmas, have turned monasticism into a social services operation, as a means to bring relief to the poor and suffering. Mother Teresa is a prime example of this new monasticism.
The Orthodox view it differently, as a means of escaping the distractions of the world so that one may pursue God with all his “heart, soul, and mind” (St. Matthew’s Gospel 22:37), gaining a crown of voluntary martyrdom. Caring for those in need has never been absent from Orthodox monasticism, but it is not the main note as it is now in Roman Catholicism. Rather, the encounter with Christ in the heart, reached through difficult ascetical exercises, is what they are mainly after.
We could go on with this, regarding predestination, the Pope, the Holy Eucharist, the essence/energies distinction, and so on, but hopefully the point has already been made: Protestantism, Roman Catholicism, and Orthodoxy are different faiths with different ends that manifest in different ways in the world. There are three different Christs being preached in each of them. If we try to cover over these differences by saying that each of them has a measure of the Truth while also containing a measure of error, we are admitting that the devil has gained the victory over Christ. For Christ established the Church, the abode of the Holy Ghost, precisely to safeguard the Truth without error (John 16:13). If we say that the Church is a mix of Truth and error, we make Christianity no better than any of the heathen religions, which contain within themselves the same failure to preserve the Truth untainted, the same mixture of Truth and falsehood.
If this is the attitude Dixie is going to take regarding the Truth, we might as well all become Perennialists and be done with the Christian Church as such. But if we want Dixie to be a truly Christian people, then we will have to decide which of the three divisions possesses the True Faith, which is the True Body of Christ, the keeper of Truth without error, and join ourselves forever to it.
One of our guides and intercessors on that quest to find the Truth could be the ever-memorable Fr. Seraphim Rose (+1982), who experienced within himself the agony of answering this exact question of where Truth could be found. Interestingly, he once took an ecumenistic stance much like Dixie’s present one, attempting to stand above all religious traditions, before finding his home in the Orthodox Church:
For years in my studies I was satisfied with being ‘above all traditions’ but somehow faithful to them…. When I visited an Orthodox church, it was only in order to view another ‘tradition.’ However, when I entered an Orthodox church for the first time (a Russian church in San Francisco) something happened to me that I had not experienced in any Buddhist or other Eastern temple; something in my heart said that this was ‘home,’ that all my search was over. I didn’t really know what this meant, because the service was quite strange to me, and in a foreign language. I began to attend Orthodox services more frequently, gradually learning its language and customs…. With my exposure to Orthodoxy and to Orthodox people, a new idea began to enter my awareness: that Truth was not just an abstract idea, sought and known by the mind, but was something personal–even a Person–sought and loved by the heart. And that is how I met Christ.
The fate of Dixie rests on that choice: Either we will be for and with God or against Him. Again from St. Seraphim:
The whole history of Israel is this history between belief and unbelief, between following God and turning away from God. And the history of Israel becomes in the New Testament the history of the Church, the new Israel. And the history of humanity from the time Christ came to earth until now is the history of the Church and of those peoples who either come to the Church or fight against the Church, or come to the Church and fall away from it. World history, from that time to this, makes sense only if you understand there is some plan going on, which is the plan of God for the salvation of men. And you have to have a clear understanding of Christianity, of what Orthodoxy is, what salvation is in order to understand how this plan is manifested in history.
The mention of Israel is instructive for us at this present moment. God did not allow any denominations to arise in the Old Testament Church of the Jews. When Korah tried to do this, he and his followers met a horrible end (Numbers 16). Only the worship established by God through Moses and preserved without change by the holy judges, kings, prophets, priests, etc., was legitimate. Why should we think the Lord has changed in this regard when it comes to the New Testament Church established by Him on the foundation of His Holy Apostles?
Simply put, He has not changed His mind. St. Paul the Apostle declares as much when he says, for instance, “What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, do; and the God of peace will be with you (Philippians 4:9).” Which of the three Christian divisions has done what the Apostle Paul commanded, has kept the Apostolic teaching unchanged?
Everything hinges on that question for Southerners, for what good will it do us to receive our independence from DC, or have a good economy, or perfectly protected borders, etc., and yet not be at peace with God?
May the Most Holy Trinity have mercy on all of us here in Dixie and help us to answer that question rightly – guiding us beyond our superficial ecumenism and into the Holy Orthodox Church.
Walt Garlington is a chemical engineer turned writer and editor of the website Confiteri: A Southern Perspective. This longtime Southern Baptist, then Anglican, was united to the Orthodox Church in 2012 and makes his home in Louisiana where he attends a GOA parish.
