"Morals slapped onto the prevailing culture"
Since I announced that I'd become Orthodox, I hear from people here and there who are interested in Orthodoxy. One Dallas-area Evangelical man about my age wrote, and I invited him and his family to join us for worship at our church. I hadn't seen them since they visited that Sunday, and asked today if they were still interested in Orthodoxy. I worried a bit that the otherworldliness of it had been threatening. He replied that yes, they were still interested in Orthodoxy, and had been back to a mission parish of our cathedral parish closer to their home, and were moving closer to embracing Orthodoxy. He wrote further:
That has been my experience, however brief, of Orthodoxy. It's just so not-of-this-American-world that it reorients you entirely. In her wonderful book "Facing East" -- which I highly recommend to anyone curious about the daily life in an Orthodox parish -- my friend Frederica Mathewes-Green writes about how her husband, a former Episcopal priest, was a lot more eager to embrace Orthodoxy before she was. It seemed really demanding to her, she writes -- but that was the thing that initially attracted her husband. She's said to me in conversation how interesting it is to see men respond so strongly to Orthodoxy -- the challenge it poses is meeting a need in males that "easy-listening" Christianity doesn't.
I liked very much the phrase "little more than morals slapped onto the prevailing culture." The incisiveness of that phrase cuts like a stiletto thrust. I think the challenge faced by any religion -- and I suspect this is true of Orthodoxy in Russia, Greece and other countries in which it is the majority faith -- is to avoid becoming that. Either Christianity is radical -- meaning transformative at the root -- or it's little more than acculturated moralism.
We're just tired of our church/faith tradition looking like everything else in our lives, ya know? Much of Evangelical Christianity (even in "orthodox" "bible-believing" Anglican parishes, such as ours) is little more than morals slapped onto the prevailing culture. We both want - really, need - our faith tradition to be something NOT like the prevailing culture. Orthodoxy is other-worldly, and that's what [my wife] and I need to be equipped to live properly as Christians in this world.
That has been my experience, however brief, of Orthodoxy. It's just so not-of-this-American-world that it reorients you entirely. In her wonderful book "Facing East" -- which I highly recommend to anyone curious about the daily life in an Orthodox parish -- my friend Frederica Mathewes-Green writes about how her husband, a former Episcopal priest, was a lot more eager to embrace Orthodoxy before she was. It seemed really demanding to her, she writes -- but that was the thing that initially attracted her husband. She's said to me in conversation how interesting it is to see men respond so strongly to Orthodoxy -- the challenge it poses is meeting a need in males that "easy-listening" Christianity doesn't.
I liked very much the phrase "little more than morals slapped onto the prevailing culture." The incisiveness of that phrase cuts like a stiletto thrust. I think the challenge faced by any religion -- and I suspect this is true of Orthodoxy in Russia, Greece and other countries in which it is the majority faith -- is to avoid becoming that. Either Christianity is radical -- meaning transformative at the root -- or it's little more than acculturated moralism.
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