Posts Tagged eastern orthodox tradition
The Church: Structure and Authority vs. Freedom and Personal Experience
Posted by Dallas Wolf in Ekklesia and church on February 6, 2013
People often speak of the tension between what some call the Priestly vs. Prophetic strains of religion. This is where the priestly class controls the “temple worship”; Scripture, material, structures, creeds, laws, liturgy, and ritual. This is opposed to the prophetic strain which, in the words of Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, “was working for social justice, making a difference, solving problems, fixing the world, and bringing about the Kingdom of God.” I understand this concept of Priestly vs. Prophetic on a broad intellectual level, but how does this apply to the Christian Church? And more specifically, to the Christian Church at the beginning of the 21st century?
I think Fr. John Meyendorff, Orthodox theologian, captures the essence of the problem in the Christian Church both historically and currently. In discussing the Orthodox theology of the Holy Spirit, he observes:
“Thus, the theology of the Holy Spirit implies a crucial polarity, which concerns the nature of the Christian faith itself. Pentecost saw the birth of the Church – a community, which will acquire structures, and will pre-suppose continuity and authority – and was an outpouring of spiritual gifts, liberating man from servitude, giving him freedom and personal experience of God. Byzantine Christianity will remain aware of an unavoidable tension between these two aspects of faith: faith as doctrinal continuity and authority, and faith as the personal experience of saints. It will generally understand that an exaggersted emphasis on one aspect or the other destroys the very meaning of the Christian Gospel.”
“The life of the Church, because it is created by the Spirit, cannot be reduced to either the “institution” or the “event”, to either authority or freedom. It is a “new” community created by the Spirit in Christ, where true freedom is recovered in the spiritual communion of the Body of Christ.”
So, I object to the use of the Priestly vs. Prophetic model for understanding the Christian Church on the grounds that it tends to obscure the real issue. The real issue is “Structure and Authority vs. Freedom and Personal Experience”.
So, what is the state of the contemporary American Christian Church? I think that it can pretty well be summed up with a 2009 Barna Group poll of self-proclaimed American Christians. This poll disclosed that most American Christians do not believe that the Holy Spirit is a living force. Overall, 38% strongly agreed and 20% agreed somewhat that the Holy Spirit is “a symbol of God’s power or presence but is not a living entity.” The mere fact that nearly 60% of avowed American Christians do not believe that the Holy Spirit is a living force speaks volumes about the state of the contemporary institutional Christian Church, Roman Catholic and Protestant alike. Clearly, the “Structure and Authority” people “own” the contemporary American Christian Church, as they have convinced 60% of Christians that the Holy Spirit doesn’t exist as a living force. This precludes the possibility of exercising the personal freedom to experience a close personal relationship with the Holy Spirit! You can’t experience a relationship with a dead person. This is tantamount to the Church teaching its members that “God is dead”! Long live the Church…
God as a Remote Roman Magistrate Dispensing ‘Iustitia’ to Mankind
Posted by Dallas Wolf in First Thoughts, Theology on September 7, 2012
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The real defect in Anselm’s doctrine of atonement is that he built upon the action or the fears of a diseased and guilty conscience in its sense of alienation from God, instead of the pure and free consciousness of Him who is the type of the normal man… Alexander V.G. Allen, 1884 |
By building their theology backwards, with man in relation to God, the Western church also developed, not surprisingly, an anthropomorphized concept of God (i.e., attributed human characteristics to God). God becomes a distant (read “transcendent”) Imperial Roman Magistrate administering iustitia, the secular Roman idea of jurisprudence, on his subjects (man). Tertullian (c. 160 – c. 220 AD) was, among other things, a Carthaginian lawyer. He set in motion this hierarchical, magisterial, forensic, Roman view of religion. This concept was further refined later by his fellow Carthaginians Cyprian, and St. Augustine, whom we just met. Ultimately, St. Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) pushed this idea to its absurd limits in the Middle Ages. Anselm’s vision of God resembled a kind of remote, magisterial medieval lord (God) whose offended dignity could only be satisfied by the substitutionary death of his own son (Jesus) in atonement for his subjects’ (man’s) disobedience. This doctrine even has a Latin church name: satisfactio activa vicaria.[1]
Given the above discussion, it is clear that many of our Western Christian doctrines such as “election” and “exclusivism” (‘extra ecclesiam nulla salus’)[2] are Afterthoughts of man and neither inspired nor helpful theology.
Excerpt from the book “First Thoughts“.
Augustine’s Mistake: Backward Theology
Posted by Dallas Wolf in First Thoughts, Theology on September 4, 2012
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“Jewish thinkers concur with Pelagius’s position that no human being is tainted by the sins of Adam—but only by his own sinful deeds.” Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel |
Either God is all-goodness, but not all-mighty, or He is all-mighty, but not all-goodness.
Starting with Man and working backward in relation to God is exactly what happened in Western theology in the 3rd to 5th centuries. In his defensive apologetic zeal to discredit the optimistic British monk Pelagius for claiming that man maintained moral free will after the Fall and for rejection of the doctrine of Original Sin, St. Augustine walked right down the misguided path described in the preceding post. And the Western church, which includes Roman Catholics and Evangelical and Reformed Protestants, has been flailing around with this unsolvable problem, in italics above, for over 1,500 years and are no closer to an answer today than they were when they first made the mistake. Rather than re-think their theology, the Western church hardened its position into dogma and so it continues to struggle with the problem to this day. To discuss these Afterthoughts of man with some related additions including sin, heaven and hell, purgatory, faith and sacraments, would be to survey the history of Augustinianism through its various historical phases.
Excerpt from the book “First Thoughts“.
First Thoughts 