I have spent the last hour doing something nicely different: sitting in our TV room without listening to the constant barrage of noise and distraction which constitutes most of the televised offerings. Instead, I have spent a good and wholesome hour reading THE JOURNALS OF FATHER ALEXANDER SCHEMEMANN 1973 – 1983.
It is a remarkable book with great insights by a man who is honored in Orthodoxy. My sense was that the book started out rather slowly, but as the recorded years go by, page after page, the insights that Fr. Schememann sets forth become deeper and more profound, at least to my thinking. (I am hardly one to do deep theological critique, I can only speak to what speaks to me.)
On Page 212, Fr. Schememann wrote the following:
“The ‘death of Christianity’! It sounds horrible. But is it so? It constantly seems to me ( and gives me inner light and joy) that the death of Christianity is needed, so that Christ would be resurrected. The deadly weakness of Christianity lies in only one thing – forgetting and neglecting Christ. In the Gospel, Christ always says ‘I’ – he says about Himself that He will come back in glory, as a King. One must love Him, expect Him, rejoice in Him and about Him. When nothing of Christianity will remain, only Christ will be visible, and neither revolution, nor Islam, nor hedonism will have any power left. Now is the time for the prayer, ‘Come, Lord Jesus . . .!’”
I stopped to ponder what Fr. Schememann wrote and wonder what his view would be on the state of Christianity some forty years after his death in 1983? I wonder, with his deep concern for Orthodoxy in America, how he would view the current explosion of interest in Orthodoxy, which is being seen in so many parishes in this country. My own small parish now has at least twenty catechumens in various stages of approach to the Church. In the next two weeks we shall be entering several of them, including whole families, into the Church.
Is this a good sign? Perhaps it is the nascent stirrings of a profound change yet to come in American Christianity. In a hundred years the whole religious landscape of America may well have changed from Christianity to a reversion into what was once called “The Way.” I understand Fr. Schememann’s statement that the death of Christianity is needed. What we have in America is not the Christianity which was birthed with the Apostles and nurtured into maturity in the succeeding centuries. It is a bastardization, a comfortable amalgam of politics, cultural influence, and social concerns, neatly wrapped in packages which come with different labels depending upon your desire and tastes. Do you want Jesus with homosexuality labeled as “love.” Well, then, take the package marked “Episcopalian” or “Methodist” and fornicate to your little heart’s desire! After all, it’s love, doncha know, and how dare you be against love?
Do you think Capitalism is a great economic system, despite its abominable track record of grinding the faces of the poor? There are several nice packages available for you, all of which are various brands of “Independent, Bible-Believing Christian Fundamentalism.” Or perhaps you have a taste for the flavor of strict justice in which God comes down as the “Mighty Smiter” and casts all His enemies into a flaming eternal furnace of fire, to be tortured forever because they “deserve it.” Well, look no further than the Roman Catholic Church and her offshoots, such as Calvin’s Presbyterianism. The Christ of these religions is expected to soon return and start whuppin’ some ass!
If none of these religions appeal to you, there are a thousand or more offshoots, cults, and general whackos who parade around their bizarre beliefs under the banner of Christ’s name, while at the same time, the merest investigation of history show there is no teaching of theirs present in the beginning of the Christian faith. They are the inventions of men with darkened minds, some of which beliefs, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons, have long ago been condemned as heresies. It is little wonder that Fr. Schememann felt as he did regarding the death of such an noxious and abominable stew of religions which calls itself “Christianity.”
With the exception of an accident, or things like an aortic aneurism bursting, death is usually a protracted process. One can be informed of the terminal nature of an illness and yet live even for a decade or longer before expiring. I see the death of Christianity in the same light.
The beginning of the infection was, in my opinion (as well as that of some scholars whom I have read) the melding of the Church to the Roman Empire in the fourth century. Over the course of the following centuries, the interests of the Church turned from Christ to that of the empire. The cultural milieu of the empire influenced the thinking of the Western church, with no greater example in my mind than that of the morphological development of God from Father and Healer into Judge and Torturer. (i.e. the idea of an eternal hell of punishment). The soteriological vision of East and West are miles apart in their differences, and these differences are going to have to be addressed if there will ever be rapprochement of the two.
I also wonder what Fr. Schememann would think of the current condition of Orthodoxy in America. I have read more than one Orthodox writer who has stated great concern that the Western (Protestant and Catholic) converts coming into Orthodoxy are bringing their theological baggage in with them and creating an Orthodoxy which is divorced from that of hundreds of years ago. This is, however, not entirely a recent phenomenon. It appears that the Orthodox East has a history of accepting certain folk lore, such as the Ariel Toll-Houses, and making them a dogmatic requirement of the faith, even though such an idea is nowhere found in Scripture. It is amazing how we can argue over the slightest of things rather than sticking with the Scriptures and the ecumenical councils.
If Orthodoxy itself is to survive without corruption, what must be done to keep the corruption of men’s thinking from dragging it down to death? There is a reason that converts to the Orthodox faith can be annoyingly zealous. We left religions that gave us crackers and juice and called it a banquet. We smelled the aroma of a feast in Orthodoxy.
We don’t want that feast replaced with crackers and juice.
Muddling Through Life 