A Third Alternative?!

It has been difficult trying to figure out where to start this discussion. A few people have asked good questions recently that seemed like good starting points. My friend Scott, for example, whose childhood faith parallels mine (ie. attended the same large Baptist church, lived for the same evangelical summer camp, and got baptized together) asked if the Orthodox church isn't just the same thing in different cultural clothing. That is, don't Protestantism and Orthodoxy have "the same Jesus, same Bible, [just] different styles"?

It's a good question, and one that I hope I can answer adequately. But in order to, eventually, do that I have a lot of ground to cover first. So, I think it will be best, and easiest, if I start by recounting what originally drew me to Orthodoxy. (Hopefully Shannon will post soon too about her side of the story.)

It is slightly ironic that it was not until my time at a thoroughly evangelical university that I started this journey toward Orthodoxy. My mother, I just learned last week, was baptized, as an infant, in the Ukranian Orthodox church, and, while I always knew that my grandma and grandpa, long ago, attended an old fashioned church very different from my familiar Baptist mega-church, I never knew that it was one of the three major branches of Christendom, and I certainly didn't know anything about it. Growing up in North America in the 20th Century, I was aware of several dozen different varieties of Protestantism, but beyond that it was just the Catholics.

And Catholics, I was led to believe, were hopelessly wrong about Christianity. I don't remember very many explicit, systematic denunciations of Catholicism in my church, but even from passing remarks and the occasional half-answered question one quickly learned to smugly recite a few of their fundamental flaws:

-They worship Mary

-They believe that the bread and wine actually turn into the real flesh and blood of Christ

-They think priests can forgive your sins and that you earn forgiveness by saying enough Hail Mary's

-They think the Pope is perfect and doesn't sin

Anti-Catholic sentiments among evangelicals have abated in the last 10 or 15 years, thank God, and in general evangelicals have a more nuanced understanding of the above mentioned issues--which, I hope you see, are grossly oversimplified or distorted. But understand that this was the climate I grew up in. Evangelicals, in my experience, weren't openly hostile toward Catholics but there was always a tacit condemnation of their egregious beliefs and practices.

So it was something of a revelation when, in my Introduction to Theology class at TWU, the professor began speaking of the Eastern Orthodox church. "What!?," I thought, "You mean there's a church that is a) not considered outright heretical and that is b) neither Catholic nor Protestant??" As we learned a little more I became even more intrigued. For I learned that:

- while the Orthodox certainly accord Mary great honor, she does not play the same allegedly essential role of "co-redemptrix" that she does in the Catholic church.
- And while they take seriously Jesus' words that the bread is his body and the wine is his blood they do not seek to explain how exactly this might be the case, as the Catholics do with their theory of Transubstantiation.
-I didn't learn much about the role of the priest in forgiveness and their view of penance at the time, but I was heartened to learn that...
-They have no pope nor corresponding theological difficulties. The church is still governed by council.

Here then was an orthodox (small 'o') church that was emphatically not Protestant and, at least upon first glance, shared none of the qualities of the Catholic church that rubbed my inherited qualms the wrong way.

After that discovery, any time the topic of Orthodoxy was offered as an option for papers or projects in any of my classes I snatched it up. And thus began my current religious peregrination.