Gotta say I agree with Charlotte Allen's dismissal of the new book about Orthodoxy by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, which she reviews in today's Wall Street Journal. I read much of the book in galleys a couple of months ago, but didn't finish it. If you really want to learn about Orthodoxy, there are much better books for the lay reader (I'm currently reading an excellent one, "Light From the Christian East," by James Payton, a committed Reformed Christian college professor who writes a clear explanation, from a Western perspective, of how Orthodoxy differs subtly but profoundly from Western Christianity. I'm learning a great deal from this book, and can't recommend it highly enough.)
Anyway, I found the partriarch's book to be mostly dull pious bromides. That's no sin, I guess; lots of religious figures write boring, well-meaning books. But I kept wondering when he was going to talk about the challenge presented to Christians by Islam, which he can see as well as anybody, living as he does in a leading Islamic country. The patriarchate in Istanbul is on its last legs. The Turkish government has long persecuted, and continues to persecute, Orthodox Christians there. By Turkish law, the Patriarch has to be a Turkish citizen, which is to say, born in Turkey. But the Greek community there, owing to persecution, is vanishingly small, and Orthodox Christians in Turkey aren't allowed to train their own priests there. It's a horrible situation, one that I understood much more clearly from having been to Istanbul in the past year. I think it would be utterly disastrous to Europe to allow Turkey into the EU, because Turkish migration into Europe would be unstoppable -- and it would permanently Islamify the culture of Europe.
Yet the Patriarch has nothing to say about the Islamic challenge -- not the reality of the present moment, not with insight about how Orthodox Christianity, which has suffered for centuries under the yoke of Islam, managed to endure. Nothing. In my view, Charlotte gets this exactly right:
Nonetheless, Bartholomew devotes the bulk of his book to anything but the mortal threat to his own religion in his own country. High on his list of favorite topics, most with only a tangential relationship to Orthodoxy, is the environment. He has won the nickname "the Green Patriarch" for the decade or so he has preached the ecological gospel, largely to liberal secular audiences in the West. "Encountering the Mystery" is in large part a collection of eco-friendly platitudes about global warming ("At stake is not just our ability to live in a sustainable way but our very survival") and globalization, adorned with a bit of theological window-dressing, that today's secular progressives love to read.Regarding globalization, Bartholomew cannot decide whether global capitalism is bad ("there are losers as well as winners") or good ("We must learn, therefore, both to think and to act in a global manner"). Plus, we must "transcend all racial competition and national rivalry," "promote a peaceful resolution of disagreements about how to live in this world," and yadda, yadda, yadda. Islam comes into play in the book only in terms of another bromide: a call for "interfaith dialogue."
On first reading, this exercise in fiddling while the new Rome burns seems pathetic, presenting a picture of a church leader so intimidated by his country's Islamic majority that he cannot speak up for his dwindling flock even as its members are murdered at his doorstep. Bartholomew's book presents an eerie mirror image of the concerns of aging, culturally exhausted, post-Christian Western Europe, happy to blather on at conferences about carbon emissions and diversity but unwilling to confront its own demographic crisis in the face of youthful, rapidly growing and culturally antagonistic Muslim populations. The suicide of the West meets the homicide of the East.
On the other hand, Bartholomew's "green" crusade across Western Europe may actually represent a shrewd last-ditch effort to secure a visible profile and powerful protectors for his beleaguered church. The patriarch has been an incessant lobbyist for Turkey's admission to the European Union, and his hope has been that the EU will condition Turkey's entry on greater religious freedoms for all faiths.
I told a Greek priest friend weeks ago that the Patriarch's book struck me as mostly a plea to make Europe wake up and come to his rescue by bringing Turkey into the EU -- which would be culturally suicidal for Europe. Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so. If you want to encounter the mystery of Orthodoxy, by James Payton's book, or even better, try Kyriacos Markides' un-put-downable "The Mountain of Silence."
One last remark: I pity Patriarch Bartholomew, well and truly. He, and the community he pastors, are in desperate times. He could be the last in an unbroken line of patriarch of Constantinople, going back to the early days of Christianity. He is in a terrible position, and suffers things Christians, Orthodox and otherwise, living safely in the West can hardly imagine. Yet this is not the book one would have expected from a man in his tragic historical position. Or rather, this is not the spiritually heroic book one would have wanted from a man who could very well be the last patriarch left to turn off the lights in Christian Byzantium.
Incidentally, if you want to know more about the situation of the Orthodox in Turkey, check out Josh Trevino's beautiful essay here.
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From Bishop Kallistos Ware of Dioklia. Wisdom for you, if you have a good mind and a better heart:
From the moment of attending that service at St Philip's, Buckingham Palace Road, I felt deep in my heart that I was marked out for the Orthodox Church. (The church, incidentally, has long since disappeared; it was demolished about four years after my visit.)
I am grateful that my initial contact with Orthodoxy was not through reading books, nor yet through meeting members of the Orthodox Church in a social context, but through attending an act of worship. The Church, according to the Orthodox understanding, is primarily a liturgical community, which expresses its true self through invocation and doxology. Worship comes first, doctrine and discipline second. I was fortunate, then, to discover Orthodoxy first of all by participating in an act of corporate prayer. I encountered the Orthodox Church not as a theory or an ideology, but as a concrete and specific fact, as a worshiping presence.
"This is what I have always believed..."
In retrospect it is clear to me that my mind was already made up on that summer afternoon in 1952. Before being actually received, however, I waited for nearly six years. In Britain in the 1950s it was a highly unusual step for a Western person to seek entry into the Orthodox Church, and most of my English friends did their best to dissuade me. "You will be a lifelong eccentric," they objected. "God has set you culturally in the West; do not run away from the quandaries and the challenge of your historical inheritance." However beautiful Orthodox worship might be, was there not (they asked) a tragic gap between Orthodox principles and Orthodox practice? Was not my approach to Orthodoxy too idealized, too sentimental? Was I perhaps looking for a security and protection that we can never enjoy here on earth, and should not seek?
Less predictably, most of the Orthodox whose counsel I sought likewise offered me little encouragement. They were honest and realistic — and for this I remain grateful — in directing my attention to the historical shortcomings of the Orthodox Church, as well as to the particular difficulties it confronts in the Western world. There was much in Orthodoxy, so they warned me that was very far from "heaven on earth"! When I approached the assistant bishop at the Greek Cathedral in London, Bishop James (Virvos) of Apamaea, he spoke to me kindly and at length, but urged me to remain a member of the Anglican Church in which I had been brought up. A Russian priest to whom I spoke in Paris gave me exactly the same advice.
At the time this puzzled me. In my reading about Orthodoxy I had quickly discovered that it claims to be, not just one among many alternative "denominations," but the true Church of Christ on earth. Yet it seemed as if the Orthodox themselves were telling me, "Yes, Orthodoxy is indeed the one true Church, but you should on no account join it.....
With hindsight I can appreciate better why Bishop James spoke as he did....
Orthodoxy possesses, not through human merit but by God's grace, a fullness of faith and spiritual life, a fullness within which the elements of dogma and prayer, of theology and spirituality, constitute an integral and organic whole. It is in this sense the Church of Holy Tradition.
In this context I would like to put especial emphasis on the word "fullness." Orthodoxy has the plenitude of life in Christ, but it does not have an exclusive monopoly of the truth. I did not believe then, nor do I believe now, that there is a stark and unmitigated contrast between Orthodox "light" and non-Orthodox "darkness." We are not to imagine that, because Orthodoxy possesses the fullness of Holy Tradition, the other Christian bodies possess nothing at all. Far from it; I have never been convinced by the rigorist claim that sacramental life and the grace of the Holy Spirit can exist only within the visible limits of the Orthodox Church. Vladimir Lossky is surely right to maintain that, despite an outward separation, non-Orthodox communities still retain invisible links with the Orthodox Church:
Faithful to its vocation to assist the salvation of all, the Church of Christ values every "spark of life," however small, in the dissident communities. In this way it bears witness to the fact that, despite the separation, they still retain a certain link with the unique and life-giving center, a link that is — so far as we are concerned — "invisible and beyond our understanding." There is only one true Church, the sole bestower of sacramental grace; but there are several ways of being separated from that one true Church, and varying degrees of diminishing ecclesial reality outside its visible limits. ..
My conviction that only within Orthodoxy could I find in its fullness an unbroken continuity with the Church of the Apostles and the Fathers was reinforced by two other aspects of Orthodoxy that I began increasingly to notice. The first was the prevalence of persecution and martyrdom within recent Orthodox experience — first under the Turks and then, in the twentieth century, under Communism. Here was something that linked the Orthodox Church of modern times directly to the pre-Constantinian Church of the first three centuries. "My strength is made perfect in weakness," said Christ to St Paul (2 Cor 12:9); and I saw His words fulfilled again and again in Orthodox history since the fall of Byzantium.
And in the end:
Father Lazarus had warned me that I would find in the Orthodox Church "little generosity or heroism or real sanctity." In retrospect, after more than four decades as an Orthodox, I can say that he was much too pessimistic. Doubtless I have been more fortunate than I deserve, but within Orthodoxy I have in fact found warm friendship and compassionate love almost everywhere that I have gone, and I have certainly enjoyed the privilege of meeting living saints. Those who predicted that, in becoming Orthodox, I would be cutting myself off from my own people and my national culture have been proved wrong. In embracing Orthodoxy, so I am convinced, I have become not less English but more genuinely so; I have rediscovered the ancient roots of my Englishness, for the Christian history of my nation extends back to a period long before the schism between East and West. I remember a conversation that I had with two Greeks soon after my reception. "How hard you must find it," remarked the first, "to have left the Church of your fathers." But the second said to me, "You did not leave the Church of your fathers: you returned to it." He spoke rightly.
....
I Gotta say, People get a grip.
Anyway, I found the your review to be mostly dull unpious bromides. That's no sin, "I guess"; lots of religious conservatives write boring, well-meaning reviews.
The Author Ms Allen is obviously coping with some deep psychological issues "Orthodox Christianity is not dead yet"? However she's looking for "The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus." This is a woman who needs proof... facts... and knows intimately the history of Christianity.
What "version of Christianity" drives her? It’s driving her right off a cliff.
I do suppose though authors and/or editors of beliefnet or the illustrious Wall Street Journal must have some divinely inspired knowledge, us common folk lack.
If anyone ‘purports’ anything Ms Allen’s misguided, uneducated and nonfactual reviews lead the pack. I’m surprised at the many mistakes in her ‘facts’ and there are a lot, but then again when your outstanding sources are Philip Jenkins and Joshua Treviño you can’t go wrong.
Keep up the good work Allen you are Christian journalism’s “amazing” Glazer indeed. You keep searching for the historical Jesus and we’ll keep searching for the point in your reviews.
One last remark: I pity you, well and truly. O' Crunchy Con
I am consistently confounded by the defiantly caviler manner in which individuals address world leaders particularity Christian Leaders. The most grievous are those who use their platform to promote their own brand of chaos. Ms. Allen is certainly a grand example of this when assessing one text of His all Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. His All Holiness has dedicated his life to the task of worship and leadership of the church faithful . Within his embrace he also includes all creation and people of all faiths. So his concern on the environment for example is not a contradiction of his position but a natural extension of his position. I am not a journalist in reference to Ms. Allen I use the term lightly but I am a thinker. We have come to a place in our society that unless we represent scientologists we are treated with a basic neglect and are marginalized. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is a man of tremendous intellect, impeccable character and a steadfast strength in lieu of the precarious position of the church in the ‘secular’ state of Turkey. Religious freedom or tolerance is non existent and the oppression of the church goes largely unreported. This secular democratic states essentially lacks a Bill of Rights for minorities and considers non Muslims as not only second class citizens but less then human. They consider non Muslims pigs. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has consistently demonstrated the fortitude to continue his mission of service to all the orthodox faithful and the greater community. I am therefore encouraging this journalist to consider her position well; not for his sake but for her own. Ron you just continue to pile on to the frenzie your appetite to disparrage the Ecumenical Patriarch is inexplicable.
I am consistently confounded by the defiantly caviler manner in which individuals address world leaders particularity Christian Leaders. The most grievous are those who use their platform to promote their own brand of chaos. Ms. Allen is certainly a grand example of this when assessing one text of His all Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew. His All Holiness has dedicated his life to the task of worship and leadership of the church faithful . Within his embrace he also includes all creation and people of all faiths. So his concern on the environment for example is not a contradiction of his position but a natural extension of his position. I am not a journalist in reference to Ms. Allen I use the term lightly but I am a thinker. We have come to a place in our society that unless we represent scientologists we are treated with a basic neglect and are marginalized. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew is a man of tremendous intellect, impeccable character and a steadfast strength in lieu of the precarious position of the church in the ‘secular’ state of Turkey. Religious freedom or tolerance is non existent and the oppression of the church goes largely unreported. This secular democratic states essentially lacks a Bill of Rights for minorities and considers non Muslims as not only second class citizens but less then human. They consider non Muslims pigs. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew has consistently demonstrated the fortitude to continue his mission of service to all the orthodox faithful and the greater community. I am therefore encouraging this journalist to consider her position well; not for his sake but for her own. Ron you just continue to pile on to the frenzie your appetite to disparrage the Ecumenical Patriarch is inexplicable.
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