Orthodoxy and Literalism Incompatible

Contemporary discussions in various scientific disciplines such as genetics, physics, archaeology, linguistics, climatology, ecology, and cognitive science have serious theological implications. They provide a Way between the shoals of literalism and liberalism that have fatally shipwrecked Western Christianity. Unfortunately, these implications are often lost on both scientists and churchmen.

Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, the Orthodox Church has never condemned science. The Fathers of the Church were scholars of the science of their day. That science conceived of the world in ways that seem foreign to us, or, to be less kind, they seem naïve, even silly. The world isn’t a ball sitting in the center of a great sphere through which we can see stars when the blue sky doesn’t obscure them. The world is not composed of just four elements: fire, are, water, and earth. The land doesn’t float on the ocean. There are no griffins, phoenixes, or unicorns in the world’s zoos. One doesn’t have to read long in the Bible or the Church Fathers before encountering beliefs we now know to be mistaken. Despite this, Orthodox still consult these works, not for scientific matters, that would be missing the point, but for their spiritual edification. Errors are simply overlooked as the common plight of being human.

To the Roman Catholic churchmen of Galileo’s day, the astronomical ideas of the ancients were sacrosanct because that was how the world was described in the Bible. Literal interpretation of the scripture trumps observation with your own eyes, a viewpoint still extant. Galileo’s eyewitness claims threatened the entire basis of Christian doctrine, according to the theologians of the Roman Catholic Church. And they were right, according to their own lights. If one could disprove statements of fact in the Bible or the Church Fathers, the whole edifice of Christianity could topple.

Orthodox Christians, on the other hand, have no problem with Galileo or his successors. Since Galileo, modern science has continued with its pesky observations, unhindered except by its continued quest to rid itself of the biases of the scientists themselves. Above all, modern science desires to observe the world as it is, freed from the blinding shackles of preconceived ideas. Modern science simply seeks the truth, an enterprise Orthodox Christians readily applaud. We have no wish to contemplate our own intellectual edifices, but to come to know the Living God, who is Truth Incarnate. Both traditions seek the same clarity of vision, the vision to see things as they really are.

Orthodox Christians understand that Christianity is a path, a Way, leading to a goal: theosis, the mystical union with God. We are very particular about how we describe the Way, yet we know we are not describing the Way at all, but simply pointing out the Way for others. When we do directly describe the Way, we do so through symbols, the greatest of which is the Symbol of the Faith, the Nicene Creed. This Symbol succinctly describes the Way in the deeply coded linguistic synthesis of Hellenistic and Hebrew words, yet this venerable Symbol does not exhaust the Way or, these days, even describe it to someone unaware of the deep meaning behind each word. The Creed, like the Gospels themselves, is deceptively simple.

The Orthodox Church is a community that maintains the consciousness of the old world, the Biblical world, the time before Galileo, while placing no stress on believers to reject evolution or any other scientific teaching. This is because the Holy Tradition, the highest authority in the Orthodox Church, teaches that the Bible, the Symbol of the Faith, the writings of the Holy Fathers, the decisions of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, all of which are held in almost equal regard, are each pointers, indicators, and signposts, leading to the “strait and narrow Way” to God, who is only actually “known” in theosis.

Humans are spiritually ill, to use another common Orthodox metaphor, under the influence of “passions”, congenital weaknesses toward various kinds of egocentric self-preserving behaviors that impede the development of healthy community and thus healthy individuals. We do not consider salvation a “personal” matter. Salvation is enacted in the here and now and in community. Love requires other people, even enemies, to shine forth.

The purpose of the Church, the Eucharistic community, is to enhance the power of the “still, small voice” of the inner “light of Christ” to purify the self from within. This is accomplished, above all, through prayer, not understood ritualistically, but mystically. The elaborate liturgical practices of the Orthodox Church are there to create an environment where a person can find Christ in one’s own flesh.

Despite its intense mystical leanings, the Orthodox Church places great emphasis on the actual, physical creation. All sacraments are enacted through simple material objects: water, oil, bread, wine. Additionally, incense of every variety, sprouted wheat, laurel leaves, rosewater, vessels, vestments, icons and architecture are employed in the elaborate rituals of the Church. The spectacle of an Orthodox congregation vigorously crossing themselves while kissing icon after icon, relic after relic, observing obscure fasting rules and endless services causes confusion to Westerners, as they equate this kind of behavior with the most slavish medieval literalism. (Sadly, it is often confusing to Orthodox themselves, not only among converts from literalist Christian sects, but from centuries of theological erosion in areas of the Church under heavy Western ideological influence.)

The Orthodox place such emphasis on the material because they believe in an incarnate God, born of the “Birth Giver of God” (the unfortunate literal translation of Theotokos). The images of Theotokos and Theanthropos, Mother of God and God-man, Mary and Jesus, Madonna and Child, Platytera and Pantocrator, are ubiquitous in Orthodox Churches. These titles emphasize through paradox that the Mother who did not bleed and the Son who did together locate the nexus of the meeting of the Divine and the Human. Defining that nexus came at great cost, but despite the derision now given to ancient controversies such as whether Jesus Christ was “homoousios” or homooiousios” (the addition of single iota) with the Father, Orthodox Christians understand that these battles were over something vital; they preserved the boundaries of the Way, ensuring a safe path for future generations.

A study of Church History shows the Way becoming obscured and being restored repeatedly. The original monastic movement was one such restoration, Saint Symeon the New Theologian, another. Because the Orthodox Church carefully preserves and interprets the various Symbols of the Way through its liturgy, this sound form of words is always ready to receive the breath of the Holy Spirit and come back to life. One only need have “ears to hear.”

This is the Orthodox Ethos in summary. It is a radically different way of being Christian, at once more mystical and magical, more practical and human, than the reified intellectualism of the West. The Orthodox like to get their hands dirty. Contrast an Orthodox baptism, with the slippery, oily baby plunged into a basin full of water and then thrust into the arms of the waiting godparent to the dainty procedure of dropping a few drops of water on the forehead. The world is a messy place, but hidden within in it is the Way described of the Holy Tradition. It’s time to get our hands dirty by considering the new perspectives science can bring to the Tradition while keeping our vision clear as to our goal: the unity of the whole human race in a society of loving care devoted to the full flowering of each person.

Keeping with its practical emphasis, Orthodox theologians have had a lot to say about the ethical implications of modern technologies, but since science operates in a different sphere altogether, the need to respond to it is felt less intensely.

Western Christianity has left a burnt field; whole nations no longer believe in the nightmare “god” who covered Europe and then the whole Earth in blood. It’s hard to be devoted to a “god” complicit in the genocide of the indigenous people of one continent while enslaving those of another. And this “god’s” reign of terror, despite his weakened state, has not ended. One finds it hard to condemn atheism after watching Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell. Liberal Christianity, the supposed answer to this dilemma, was dead on arrival, along with its self-defeating pronouncement that God is dead. It only survives as a kind of liberal social club for sentimentalists.

In this environment, it is all too tempting to find common cause with “other conservative” Christians on the “social issues” while finding their brand of Christianity incomplete and unsatisfying. Orthodox Christianity has a Roman polity while Western Christianity is feudal. It is that incipient feudalism in the structure of the West, the inherent deference to the privileges of power that Jesus condemned, which is foreign to the Orthodox. In our ethos, where we mentally still live as free citizens in the Roman Empire, with its supple balance of individual and societal needs, there is no place for the pharisaical rigidity of contemporary Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christianity.