Recently, my college priest and confessor, Fr. Moses Berry, fell asleep in the Lord. I was honored to be able to drive down for his funeral and remember why I was attracted to Orthodoxy in the first place: in the gold glint of the icons, the flickering candlelight, the billowing incense, and the congregational singing of the Divine Liturgy in Unexpected Joy, the parish where I was baptized and chrismated and communed, I discovered seemingly for the first time what it really meant to me to be a Christian. There is an ethos I discovered in the weekly practice of getting up, getting dressed, going to Liturgy, sitting in the quiet of the Church as services began, waiting patiently to make confession, seeing the wry smile of Fr. Moses as he absolved me or saw me come in, and watching the dust and daylight intermingle with myrrh in the still morning air as people trickled in, by twos and threes, and the world began, “Blessed is the Kingdom of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…”
I will never hear that voice again in this life. The funerary practice of the Last Kiss has a certain heartbroken sorrow to it: I have kissed his hand, his cross, and his Gospel Book a final time in this life. When we pray for someone’s memory to be eternal, we ask God to remember them, and we pray that their memory may radiate in the world for a blessing: but we also express our longing that what we have called the Last Kiss God will revoke with the thousand and thousand more that Catullus asked of Lesbia (carmen 7) or that the Magdalene sought to give to the risen Christ. The man himself, of course, is not gone: it is only his soul which has departed his flesh for his reward, the body recommitted to the Earth-Mother who lovingly gave it and now takes it back into herself again. He like all the saints is alive to God, and therefore he is alive to us, and to me, I know, like Christ even more visible now that he is gone than when he was here, if I have eyes to see.
Every time I revisit Unexpected Joy I am reminded how much longer ago that time in my life, including my spiritual life, was. I have written in this dispatch before about my weird and uncomfortable ecclesial wanderings: I got married in a Greek parish in St. Louis, urban, wealthy, and an altogether different experience than the rural OCA parish with all of its Ozark idiosyncracies that I was baptized in. In some ways I appreciated those differences—I study and teach Greek and Latin, and there’s something homey for me about being able to sing the Liturgy in Greek; I’m much more inclined towards a Mediterranean Christianity than a Slavic one; etc.—but in other ways I resented them. So did my spouse, and around a year and a half after our marriage our place in that community became unsustainable for various reasons, few of them well-understood by those around us (despite our best efforts to seek support and be known and loved). I transitioned to Catholicism in an attempt to find a middle ground that might be more workable for us, only to find that Catholic life on the ground in St. Louis was not what I wanted it to be either, with the liturgy unmoving where the people were generally sane and the more traditionalist communities deeply alienating for all the typical reasons traditionalism is alienating. (I also had an epically poor experience teaching in a Catholic private school in the area: the most bizarre experience of my entire professional life, in fact, which I won’t go into here.) And I was changing across these years, recovering my earlier-life progressivism, fully allowing some of the deconstructive studies I’d done in college and grad school to do their work on my life of faith as well as on my mind, and finding myself on the other side of the theological, political, and social spectra from the friends and connections I had in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy.
There are steps I wish I’d taken in this history that I didn’t, and steps that I took that I wish I hadn’t. In hindsight, I think the way that I had learned Orthodoxy simply did not make room for the idea that I could have stayed and simply been dissident on the things that had always been problems for me: the popularity of exclusivist eschatologies, the enduring anti-Judaism of Orthodox liturgics and attitudes on-the-ground, the clericalism, the penchant for anti-intellectual guff at the parish level. It did not occur to me that I could be Orthodox without subscribing to those things: I did not have sufficient distance to realize that the all-or-nothing approach does not categorize the religious belonging of most people in the world. Nor had I yet internalized that my religious community does not actually need to match my ideas, or my ideals, to be my community. There are plenty of dissident Orthodox, Catholics, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and so on. They may not lead their communities, represent them, and their functional capacity within them might be inhibited by leadership and other strictures, but they exist: and arguably, they are the most authentic members of their communities, because they stay despite their beef. It’s one thing to sell yourself heart and soul to something you completely believe in: it’s a harder, more honest, and more mature faith to wrestle with God under a nocturnal guise and not let him go until he blesses you with a new and better name. I also had not undergone the therapeutic work of self-inspection to realize the early-life traumas I was carrying and the ways I was looking to religion and church to fix them (psychological trauma and religion can be a potently dangerous mix). In a life of seemingly ceaseless transitions between place, people, experiences, situations, and the like, too, with the insecurity of my youth, the prospect of joining or leaving a community has never registered as heavily for me as I know it does for others, at least not until I found myself in this ambiguous vallis lacrimarum I now live out my religious life in.
So, I wish I had stayed Orthodox. I’ve flirted with going back, and I may ultimately do so; short of doing so, I know that I can function in a liturgically high-church, theologically liberal Anglican/Episcopal setting with ease. But even while I wish I’d handled things differently, at the same time, I think my wandering might have been the only way I could clock any of this. When I was Orthodox, I was constantly trying to square a circle: I was always trying to untangle the various knots of theology, history, and providence into something that made sense of the various things I knew to be true, including my attachment to Orthodoxy, that simply didn’t fit together into some kind of coherent theory. Instead of figuring out how it could be that Orthodoxy was the “true Church” but Catholicism and Protestantism could also be the true Church, somehow, by being crypto-Orthodox in some increasingly strained way, the simpler and truer answer was always that that language was simply insular navel-gazing, and the “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church” of the Creed is eschatological, not historical. It was always true that Orthodoxy’s anti-Judaism, liturgical, theological, and customary, is deeply sinful: there’s no pivot that can make it okay. Rome had the right take in simply revising such things out of their liturgy.
But I probably would have kept trying to do that sort of reconciliation forever had I not been forced out of my situation by my circumstances. The personal stakes of ecclesial affiliation or disaffiliation forced me to reconsider my beliefs: why, for instance, did Orthodoxy, which professed to be my true Mother, keep asking me to sacrifice vitally important relationships to her demands without offering me much in the way of personal support in return? What kind of mother does that? What kind of fathers were the priests who could not hear when I was struggling and offer me something like sympathy and solidarity before trying to give me instruction—what kind of dad cares more about who he wants his kid to be than the kid themselves?
So enter Fr. Moses again: he was the only priest I knew that, when told about what was happening and why in my ecclesial affiliation and movement, fully accepted it and never once gave me any ounce of grief. I’ll never forget the word he spoke: “I want you to love Jesus. I don’t want you to belong to a club.” In the years since I formally left Orthodoxy for Catholicism, he remains the only priest, Orthodox or Catholic, to have said such a thing to me. The Catholic priests I’ve known have been largely interested in whether I could hack it with what the Church expects, both intellectually and practically (and politically, for that matter). The other Orthodox priests that I’ve appealed to with interest to come back, to rejoin the Church and live out my days as a contented layman within it, have reacted with what I can only describe as thinly veiled disgust to the fact that I left at all. These include the other three priests apart from Fr. Moses who presided at my wedding. The third of these, the last I spoke to about the possibility of coming back, gave a very brief, austere “Six months and we’ll talk about it” response. (My tongue-in-cheek reply: “Just like in the Parable of the Prodigal Son!”)
Fr. Moses alone of the priests I’ve known had as his primary interest in relationship to me the desire to show love, receptivity, warmth, and guidance when sought, not imposed from above. He was not interested in turning me into a statistic or a success story, but simply helping me become a better follower of Jesus, and believing a little bit better that God loved me. He was, and is, the face of God the Father as a good and loving parent, the only son I’ve known of a Mother Church that cares more about her kids than her canons. Wherever I wander, I have that witness of his in my heart.
My personal history in the Christian faith often serves as something like a cipher for my thinking about Christian history in general. There’s an advantage to that—I’ve been around, so I know what the options are and how we got here—but there’s also something of a disadvantage to that, as it means that I’m more likely to see those themes in the history of the Church directly relevant to my own experience and perhaps outsize them in their historical importance. So I freely admit that what follows here is something like a freewheeling conversation between my Christianity and Christianity as a historical phenomenon, one whose dialogical character I do not mean to pass off as objective, disinterested inquiry but a deeply personal act of wrestling.
So, my ideal contrafactual history of Christianity goes something like this. The original Jesus Movement, headed by James the Just and the desposynoi, the family of Jesus, in Jerusalem, with Kepha/Peter as the head emissary of the Movement to the Jewish communities in the Land and abroad, would never have ceased to exist. Texts like Q, any other literature composed in this earlier community, and any texts valued by them would take primacy in the Movement’s sectarian literature over the epistles of Paul or the Gospels, including John’s Gospel. The Gentile Christianities that take their origin from Paul and John the Elder would still exist, but with their original deference to the Jerusalem community as anchor. They would be contextualized by this relationship even and especially when laying claim to absolute, unimpeachable apostolic or prophetic authority, as Paul clearly does in his extant letters, often out of anxiety for his real standing vis-a-vis James and Peter. The adversus Iudaeos tradition of rhetoric in Christian texts would never have been crafted, and gentile Christians alongside Jewish followers of Jesus would continue to be very much ensconced in local synagogues, hearing Moses preached in every city. The Jacobean halakhic ruling—that gentiles in Christ can be saved but should demonstrate their faith ultimately by joining Israel—would coexist with the Pauline, that gentiles by faith, baptism, and Spirit have become legitimate children of Abraham already.
Local communities of Jesus followers, in mainstream synagogues, in their own synagogues, or adopting other forms of community life as collegia, local guilds devoted to the ethical teachings of Jesus and to liturgical worship of the Jewish God and Jesus as his messiah, would be free to adopt the decisions they saw as most correct and to affiliate with the federations of local communities they felt most kinship with, acknowledging or not the authority of local, itinerant, and foreign offices in the Jesus Movement. The ethical component of these local chapters would have continued to be primary, informed by local Jewish communities and their readings of Torah in addition to the teachings of Jesus, and culminating in the Eucharistic banquet on Saturday evening at the conclusion of the Sabbath, when the common collection for the poor was made and distributed together with the meal at which Jesus’s flesh and blood were ritually consumed as the messianic bread and wine.
The language of apocalyptic hope for the Kingdom and the sapiential, philosophical language of the immanentized advent would coexist in their prayers; charismatic powers and informed, scholarly teaching would be available everywhere. The intellectual tradition of these communities as philosophical schola would be governed by free inquiry, research, and free speculation, with no central authority governing the boundaries of licit belief: beyond the most simplistic and rudimentary baptismal confessions, nothing would be formally dogmatized. Officeholding would have remained equally open to men and women and never have been reinterpreted as a hieratic clerical class. No monepiskopos would ever have emerged as the singular head of an entire city’s communities other than as an elected role ideally in a synodal situation and minimally with the caveat that he exercised no formal power over traveling prophets or local scholars. Christians would have ideally embraced the self-conception of Hellenistic Jews, which embraced their spot in a pluralistic empire. The empire would not have Christianized and Christianity, in turn, would not have Romanized.
Now, in many respects, what I’m describing is what Christianity was like in the first four centuries, with some differences. But of course, the loss of the Temple in 70, of both (or all three, depending on how one wants to count) Jewish-Roman Wars, and the pressure to distinguish Christianity as acceptable in Roman eyes did cause Christianity not only to separate gradually from Judaism but also to distinguish itself from its rabbinic sister in vitriolic tones. Christianity did eventually formalize its officeholding to exclude women from most roles, to invest power in the monepiscopal bishop, and to invent a theory of apostolic succession to justify his plenipotentiary power not only over sacramental order but also over teaching and prophetic authority. And, Christianity did eventually become the state religion of the Roman Empire by the end of the fourth century, centering dogmatized theology as the grounds of union and the crisis of belonging or exclusion.
I regard all of these as mistakes, but I also concede that they are facts, and they are in some sense unalterable both in their facticity and in their posterior effects. Christianity may have begun as an apocalyptic, messianic sect of ancient Judaism that cut widely across Jewish sociological boundaries and was attractive to many non-Jews who through it acquired a kind of para-Jewish status, and it can be thrilling to imagine what it would be like to simply restore that state of affairs, as Messianic Jews and several Jewishly-inspired (sometimes authentically, sometimes not) Protestants and Catholics (and some scattered, disorganized Orthodox individuals) sometimes do. But from the Jewish point of view, and I say this both as a scholar and as someone that has spent several years hanging out in local Jewish communities and who taught in a Jewish Day School for two years, nothing could be less desired or desirable for most folks. There are a growing number of Jews who do not have personal stakes in or memories of Jewish anathematization of Christians or suffering under Christian rulers; there are a growing number of Jews born to intermarried families with Christian parents who feel that it would be more reflective of their identity if they could dually belong; there are Christian converts to Judaism that sort of bring Jesus with them—not the Christian Jesus, per se, but positive evaluation of Jesus as a Jew and as a Jewish teacher who can have some insightful things to say for Jewish living and thinking; there are Messianic Jews, who raise all kinds of questions for Jews and Christians alike, whether either group wants to answer them or acknowledge them; and there are Jewish scholars of Jesus, his Movement, the New Testament, and Christianity, who positively acknowledge the inherent Judaism in these things even while having no qualms about calling out the anti-Judaism that has shaped the Christian Tradition and its consequences. All of that is real, and it might eventually culminate in some new perforated boundaries between Judaism and Christianity that will be fun, exhilarating, trying, dangerous, and possibly amazing for future generations to explore. But we’re not really in a place yet where Judaism and Christianity can once more have a reciprocal relationship like that. Christians, especially Western ones, have done a lot of work to forge a new relationship with Jews and Judaism, religiously and theologically, but they often oversell both the extent and impact of the new relationship, usually for the same kinds of apologetic purposes that, say, white people in the United States like to exaggerate the accomplishments of the Civil Rights movement.
Likewise, Christianity’s Romanization of its power structures and its culture is a factum. It was already going on in the intellectual reformulations of the Jesus Movement in the second century, well before it was rewarded with Roman power. Christianity is, after all, a phenomenon of Hellenism and of Rome as much as of Ancient Judaism. We literally cannot engage with the Christianities of the Mediterranean and Europe—Chalcedonian Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism—without engaging Greco-Roman society in various local iterations and temporally successive phases.
This is most evident not only to Jews or Muslims but to non-Roman Christians: Non-Chalcedonian Orthodox, especially of Syria, Egypt, Ethiopia, and India, and the Church of the East. Consider the sheer number of things explicitly derived from Hellenistic and Roman political culture that are still normal in Christianity: episkopoi and diakonoi; the use of a diocese as an administrative unit; the concept of a kleros-class of community officials; the concept of worship as leitourgeia, “public service”; the use of the basilica as the standard model of a Christian church; the use of Greco-Roman figural art, including of pagan gods, as the standard model for iconographic and statuary depictions of Christ, Mary, and the saints; in Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and high-church Anglicanism, prayers for the emperor or king, or imperial/monarchic models of the papacy that transpose those qualities onto the Pope; patron-client style relations in the hierarchy that encourage the conglomeration of power and wealth and the cover-up of their abuse for immoral ends; justifications for war, violence, torture, execution, xenophobia, and harsh social and physical punishments for perceived crimes or states of being; certain sexual preferences and codes around divorce; clerical/hierarchical titles (“Father,” “Master,” etc.) and various accoutrements (including physical thrones, scepters, crowns, and the like); the very Pentarchy of Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem that vied for power and shaped ancient Christian history often so viciously. Then there’s the more indirect ways that Christianity was Romanized through this evolving culture: these are the people and places that decided, for example, what books Christians would read at church, what things they would believe, what jobs they could or couldn’t have, and so on; and many more besides. To simply acknowledge all this as “Christendom” paints with a lazily broad brush. Yes, it is, but more to the point, it is Christianity’s absorption into Roman culture, Christianity’s reinvention as an extension of Roman society as much as if not more than Rome’s induction into the Christian mystery.
To be clear, I don’t have some view of the Greeks and Romans as so base and terrible that a Greco-Roman Christianity would be an inherently bad thing. I think that the Greeks have offered world culture some pretty irreplaceable gifts. Same with the Romans. I read and teach their literature and speak their language as my day job: I think the Romans were an amazing, brilliant people, too, and I think some of the things listed above are either good or net positives for Christianity that Christianity can say it explicitly owes to the Romans and the Greeks. Likewise, for example, I think it is good that Christianity absorbed Stoicism, Middle, and Late Platonism from late antique Roman society, because I think Christian theology (and Jewish theology, for that matter) are more rational when one can say that the God of scripture is also the God of philosophy. I think Roman Christianity has produced some undeniably beautiful visual, aural, olefactory, and even tactile and gustatory art (as odd as it might sound to say) in liturgical arts and architecture. I think the Romans were generally good at administrative, dualistic, left-brained kinds of thinking and that the diocesan model of the episcopate allowed Christianity to enjoy more than a thousand years of expansion in the areas that variously laid claim to Roman heritage and status (Romanitas, broadly conceived). I’m not anti-Roman, culturally speaking. Indeed, if anything, as an American descendant of Southern Italian immigrants who makes his money teaching classics, there’s some sense in which the Greeks and the Romans simply are my culture, and not just a culture I study. But like every culture, I acknowledge that the Romans had light and darkness in them. And so I’m instead against the very specific way in which Christianity became a tool of Roman imperialism, of the Roman libido dominationis, the dark side of being Roman. And I’m critical of the way that that part of the Roman heritage seems to have endured in later Christianity more strongly than the positive sides of Romanitas. Most clerics and laypeople of either Orthodox or Catholic persuasion don’t get a genuinely classical education these days, even if they go through a program at home or at school that calls itself that: many seminary grads can’t read Hebrew, Greek, or Latin with any competence and they aren’t trained to read the texts as literature (never mind Aramaic and Syriac), so much as fuel for apologetics, moralistic ethics, or anti-modern virtue signaling. Sparingly few get a history education worth a damn enough to teach them how to do history on the texts; and most are not philosophically educated either, displaying no awareness that to establish the literal meaning of a text is something different from determining its value to history is something different from determining its value to philosophy and therefore to theology, etc. This is reductive and I’m sure there are numerous counterexamples, but the sense I get from talking to friends who have been through seminary or perusing the education reported to me by clerics I know is that they are mainly taught to do two things: represent the institutions they’re going to serve, and manage the people that will be in their care effectively, but not necessarily how to love them.
Anyway, my point is that the good parts of being Roman are generally the Hellenistic cosmopolitanism, the quotidian humanism of a Plautus or a Catullus, the social provision of Byzantium, and so on, but modern Christians don’t usually do much of that stuff. Their inheritance from Rome is instead the power dynamics that construct rhetorical enemies—religious, political, social, whatever—against which to play off their Christianity, that deploy excommunication, schism, and other flexes as ways of ensuring conformity of thought and life, that keep women out of meaningful power in Catholicism and Orthodoxy, that exclude LGBTQ people, and so on. It’s all the Roman bullishness without any of its sophistication.
Those power dynamics are equally evident in the history of Christian theology. I would have preferred that, short of my above catalogue of desiderata, the East Syrian tradition of Christian theology and spiritual ethos would have endured longer and more prominently than anything West of the Euphrates. Christianity as a Silk Road religion, peddling salvation as transcendence shoulder-to-shoulder with Buddhism, Manichaeism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Islam, seems to me more appropriate as the faith of an itinerant, convivial prophet whose apocalyptic and sapiential preaching was revised into a philosophical way of life in the subsequent generation than as the state cult of the empire that put him to death as a social rebel. Syriac, the language of Eastern theology par excellence, is a late dialect of Aramaic, one of the quotidian languages the historical Jesus spoke (alongside Proto-Mishnaic Hebrew and Koine Greek). That does not, sadly, make the Syriac tradition any more philo-Judaic: the Syriac Fathers are some of the most virulently anti-Jewish of any of their colleagues, though their polemics are contextualized somewhat by the fact that outside of the Roman Empire, under Sasanian rule, they were minorities together with Jewish communities not officially patronized by the state as the official cult (though one of the officially tolerated ones for the most part). Where Greek and Latin Fathers criticizing Jews and Judaism carries with it the actual threat of physical violence to Jewish communities and spaces, Syriac verbal abuse happened in a context where the rabbis who put together the Bavli were perfectly free to respond in kind.
Syriac theology, though, reflects both the liturgical and narratological origins of Christian thinking more closely than does its Greek cousin and has a commentary tradition that more closely reflects the practice of postbiblical Jewish exegesis of scripture than the philosophical/Platonic practice of the ante-Nicene Fathers further West. When Syriac did acquire a Neoplatonic flavor, too, Syriac theologians nevertheless reflected more closely and carefully the logic of the major terms of the Christological debates—ousia, hypostasis, prosopon, and their various Syriac equivalents—than did the tradition represented at Ephesus and Chalcedon. Indeed, I contend that the Syriac theological tradition, especially around the person of Christ, is closer to the Christologies of the New Testament in their Second Temple Jewish setting than those of the Great Church. I’ve argued all that here, here, and here. In a nutshell, I think the model of the prosopic union—that the man Jesus and the Divine Son are united in one common, composite prosopon, or outward manifestation, in his life, that the Word assumed this man and was pleased to dwell in him in fullness not via hypostasis (which the Word logically does everywhere) but via prosopon—more closely describes the way we should think of Christ from the ground-up, intrahistorical perspective. The model of hypostatic union—that divinity and humanity are united in the one hypostasis of God the Word, as Cyril of Alexandria argues—is true from an eternal perspective, but it is so because the hypostasis of the Word is the one hypostasis of the entire world, thinking and speaking eternally. The two can be understood as complements, as Chalcedon attempts to gesture towards (but I don’t think the council’s definition sticks the landing). The issue comes down to equivocal uses of terms like ousia, hypostasis, prosopon, and their Syriac equivalents when they cannot be predicated in the same way of both God and creatures. God’s ousia consubsists eternally and fully in and as the Trinitarian hypostaseis, who interpenetrate one another and are each one the full God in the particular mode of subsistent existence that that hypostasis is. But from the creaturely point of view, an individual hypostatization of an ousia does not fully realize that ousia, which is its potency, in a completely actualized prosopon in this life. Metaphysically, our own natures, subsistences, and personae are ontologically dependent on the divine ousia (of which are natures are simply cooled diminutions), our hypostaseis derived secondarily from the hypostasis of the Father in and through the hypostasis of the Son and by the hypostasis of the Spirit. If God is ousia and hypostaseis, then the only sense in which we are too is metaphorical or analogical. And therein lies the rub, that hypostatic and prosopic unions can be complementary ways of describing the mystery of theandric unity in Jesus from different starting places.
Anyway, as I was saying, the Syriac Christological models are in some sense closer to the biblical language of Christianity’s Second Temple origins and more interested in utilizing that imagery as the centering metaphorical logic of the abstract ideas employed in describing Christ than in the reverse. This in some sense makes the Syriac tradition closer to Judaism even as it is so verbally vicious in response to it (and in some way, that’s to be expected: we are often the most belligerent to those with whom we have the greatest similarity and therefore the most consequential differences). Christ the Tabernacle, Christ the Temple of God—the Johannine Christology—simply is Syriac Christology. Indeed, the very language of the prosopon, the “face,” is more essentially biblical than the language of ousia and hypostasis which otherwise occur unsystematically in biblical literature and are more obviously Platonic in origin. I don’t think this is a point against them as essential (pun intended) organizing concepts, but I do think that it’s a point in favor of the Syriac tradition that its essential concern is to know the face of Christ as simultaneously the face of God, the place where we may appear before God’s face, as the Psalmist so often desires to do in the Jerusalem Temple, as Moses did on the mountain, as Elijah did when he walked out lifnei Adonai, etc. At the same time, they are also potentially more open to the idea that the incarnation is an ongoing or cyclical event, at least to my mind, than Christologies of hypostatic union. If the man Jesus is not a separate hypostatic reality from the Son even in the derivative, tensed sense of creaturely identity—if, in other words, Jesus lacked this thing that we call a human hypostasis and was only the eternal, divine hypostasis of the Son—then it is theoretically possible to see the mystery of the incarnation continuing in a qualified sense in those who attach themselves to Jesus and conform to him; which, fair enough, I do think that that’s the ongoing mystery of the incarnation. But there’s not much room for the idea, in that scheme, that the Word might simply be pleased to indwell a particular human being at another time. Christians may not wish to have that kind of parity with other faiths that might be able to accommodate their avatars or prophets as also manifestations of the Word, but I will point out that from within the biblical tradition, the idea that the indwelling of the Word in human flesh is in some way limited to Jesus is actually problematized by the texts themselves. As I’ve argued here, the idea that Jesus is God humanized and the human being deified calls back to a long tradition of divine humans and incarnate powers of the deity in Ancient Israel and Judah and Second Temple Jewish texts. And as I’ve described here, God and Christ alike are thought to have several bodies by Ancient Jews and Christians. So at a minimum, if one reads the texts and wants to synthesize them in some way, I think a model of prosopic union in which Christ’s one face (prosopon) being the site of convenientia between the Divine Son and the humanity of Jesus, the place where the Word is pleased to dwell because of Jesus’s superior justice (and, if one prefers, pneumatic conception, birth, etc.), requires that we take seriously the idea that a long chain of prophets, priests, and kings prior to Jesus were also human homes of the Word, however we want to stack them in relationship to Jesus; we have to also accept that Mary, the saints, and the Church at large are human bodies of the Word as well. It’s not a very far step to including in that others beyond Christianity’s bounds.
But we don’t look to the Syriac models of Christianity because that “lost” Christian world died out in the thirteenth century, when it was crushed by widespread Islamic crackdown on its ubiquitous presence in the Near and Far East. The “Nestorian” missions spread throughout what are now Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, “Central Asia,” and China are long since gone. We tend to think of Roman Christianity, both Eastern (and Byzantine) and Western (and “Roman” in the more usual sense) as “normative” Christianity, as the alleged center of gravity for Christianity, despite the fact that at the height of their respective powers Timothy II the catholicos of Seleucia-Ctesiphon laid claim to the shepherding of far more Christian souls than either the Ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople or the Roman Pope. The representatives of the Jacobite and Nestorian wings of the Syriac world are now minority and diasporic communities spread across the West, some of them (like the Chaldaean Catholic Church) refolded into Western hierarchical structures or else decimated by Catholic missionizing. For someone in my position, for as much as my heart belongs to the Church of the East, my spatiotemporal reality is quite clearly a world shaped by Christianities of Roman origin and persuasion (even and perhaps especially at their most Protestant). So we have to rewind, as it were, from the what-was-and-may-have-been of the Syriac Christian world to the what-was-and-now-is of the Roman Christian world.
That world begins from the Chalcedonian conclusion to the Christological Controversy and can be broadly traced through the schism between Constantinople and Rome on the one hand and the Protestant Reformation on the other. Like I said, these are broad strokes, but they reflect the fact that this is a Christian world thoroughly committed to very Roman means of dealing with ideological and cultural dissent. Cards on the table, I find the Christological Controversy generally a sign of Christianity’s failure, not its success: not because there was some original metaphysics of Christ’s personhood from which everyone that didn’t assent to either Ephesus or Chalcedon historically departed—that’s absurd—but because it was manifestly a period of Christian history where abstract theorization of Jesus’s identity took precedence over actual obedience to his commands of, among other things, love for enemies, humility, free surrender of riches, and so on. Cyril of Alexandria and his enemy Nestorius were both effectively thugs, but Cyril was by far the worse of the two, running a small empire-within-the-empire through the institution of the Alexandrian patriarchate and weaponizing his influence against Nestorius, all the while ignoring Nestorius’s pleas to hear him out. (Again, Nestorius was no innocent, but I do think Cyril systematically and, to no small degree, purposefully misunderstood him.) The ensuing conflicts—several of them quite literal, physical ones—between Dyophysites (“Nestorian” and Chalcedonian), Miaphysites, and others reflects a Christian culture where tokenized ideas about Christ (poorly understood by the uneducated populace who were often riled up by the advocates of different positions to make their point with force when they could not convince by persuasion, as happened at Ephesus as well as the Robber Council of that name as well) took precedence over the imitation of Christ.
In a sense, this is how I understand the majority of the history of the later Christian schisms of the Mediterranean and Western Europe: arguments over nothing presented as though they were about something. I get that a good deal of personal identity and invested importance is attached to things like the Chalcedonian Definition, the Filioque, the role, status, and authority exercised by the Papacy or the Ecumenical Patriarchate, local theologoumena and liturgical preferences, whether Psalms 19 and 20 are recited at Matins, and so on. I at one time also thought these meaningful. I get that many people understand themselves by these boundaries and have quite emotional attachments to them as walls that must be guarded, lest the barbarians at the gates get in. I just don’t share the perspective that these things are relevant now, if they ever were, or that they deserve prosecution. Even when the theologies in play in Christianity do have some kind of intellectual or moral consequences—I think, for instance, that Aquinas’s belief that God simply doesn’t love everyone equally (ST I.24) is horrific—the fronting of them as legitimate causes of Christian dispute or separation strike me as childish, though consequential childishness insofar as they often exact their price in human lives.
Yet even where these communities dissent, they seemingly agree on the following ideas: there are certain ideas that are allowed and certain ones that aren’t; there are certain practices that are allowed and certain ones that aren’t; and there are theoretically supposed to be people invested with enough power to exact not only consequences within the religious community but also, ideally, in secular society. Even today, one can hear the faint hint of regret in the voices of many Catholic and Orthodox clerics especially that they do not have the secular power to do much about the things they perceive to be immoral or heretical—the latter of which anyway is the evidence of a vestigial vocabulary, a concern that implicitly calls back to a time when they might have had the ability to simply force such people to be different. The seemingly endless Protestant debates about theological orthodoxy and participation in the culture wars are not much different: they also reflect a desire that Christianity should have the power to clean house internally in the ways deemed fit by the powers that be as well as to exert that will over others. It’s a logic of domination all the way down.
The hard form of this ideology in all three communities is integralism, the active pursuit of a society constructed on “Christian” guidelines with teeth to punish people that run afoul of it; the soft form of it, though, is a kind of restorationist mentality around “Christian culture,” which is often the gateway drug to integralism. The idea that there is some lost golden age of “Christian culture,” which has been destroyed by “modernity” (however understood), is enchanting but also in equal parts destructive: it naturally leads to integralism because once someone identifies that what they mean by “Christian culture” is really just the culture of European Christendom at some arbitrary point in its history, they will also come to the logical (and diabolical) conclusion that the only way to recapture that lost glory is to recreate society in the desired image. On the way to that end, the apocalyptic enclave separated out from the world—cue Rod Dreher’s comical Benedict Option—will be the workshop for the new Golden Age. Take it from me: when I was in college, this is how I found myself becoming Orthodox, pining for lost eras of Christian history, and then suddenly more comfortable than I would have otherwise been with ideas I find repugnant, the folly of which I could only really see when I removed myself from the insular world I had fallen into. I was never a far-right sympathizer, but I liked to think of myself as a “classical conservative” committed to the dignity of a lost Christian society that I thought could and should be restored for a time; though I insisted I was not to be lumped together with the emergent, latently fascist sector of American society, I can see with perfect clarity now how hollow the distinctions I drew must have felt to people who knew me during that time. Sure, I wasn’t advocating that people of other faiths, or women, or sexual minorities should have some kind of inferior status in my ideal society: the kind of Christendom I had in mind was a naively benign and powerless statehood. But in reality, this was just a reflection of my own ignorance of the things I was saying and claiming to believe. States run on power, the exclusive power to commit violence within a defined territory over a defined citizenry, and they either do so on the basis of things we might consider ethnic or religious distinctives or they do so on the basis of middle-ground principles that are less specifically confessional in character and therefore invite and harness pluralism. Both premodern and modern iterations of that second tendency are in abundant evidence in the historical record, but rarely if ever has there been a confessional state that has treated its minority citizens with all the dignity they deserve. (Not even modern liberal states succeed at doing that.)
It was taking a long look at my own life experiences and the ways that I had uncritically absorbed an elitist sort of Christianity which did not conform to my own background and values that shook me out of that game. I come from a lower-class, broken family, I grew up itinerant and largely poor, and I struggled with many of the same social issues that many children of divorce and of alcoholics struggle with. In this supposedly glorious “restored” Christian culture (read: imagination made real), I would not be a beneficiary but a serf. But it’s not just me: that kind of society does not reflect the sort of world that most people, including most Christian people, actually want. This observation forced me back to my own youth, back to the basically liberal principles I had learned from school and from the likes of late night (Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert), to the working class values I had absorbed from my father in his better days, and to the people around me, whom I loved, whom I realized were alienated by the traditionalist characteristics of the faith I had embraced.
But this come-to-Jesus-moment in my own life also forced me back to Christianity’s youth—to the insight that what Christianity had become over the course of its long history was something very different than what it started out as and that this might not be all for the better. At one stage of coming to know Christian history one is right to say that what Catholics, Orthodox, and high-church Protestants like Anglicans and some Lutherans are doing is a lot closer to what Christianity has been from the early centuries and to what Jesus and the apostles were doing than are most low-church evangelical expressions of Christianity more popular and familiar in the United States. This stage can take someone far into the “ancient faith” and, for me at least, it gave me a genuine degree of intimacy with Jesus that I would not have otherwise had. That Christian ethos I learned in Orthodoxy, the ability to simply stand in the nave and sing the prayers and light the candles and occasionally help out in the altar, to receive the Gifts and do my prayers as best I could and fast and so on, and that overriding concern that Fr. Moses imparted to me of love, loving God and loving my neighbor—all of that is something that came from putting myself in that context. But at another stage, one comes to realize that there’s a quantum leap between Jesus, crucified as an enemy of an occupying empire, and the prophetic, apocalyptic, messianic movement that grew up around him and was led by his various disciples, and the collegial groups that they created in and around the Mediterranean and in the Near East, on the one hand, and the Great Church on the other, the imperial Christianity of the fourth century that is in some sense the model for all Christianities ever after, indeed, responsible also for the very idea that there is some singular, consistent “Christianity” that exists as a set of ideas or practices that is “pure” and can be recovered if we just do…something, whatever that something is, whether it’s change our church to be what we imagine the original Christians to have been like or join what we think is the original Church or try to take the reins of society in hand and steer it in a direction we want to go. The Jesus Movement is not equivocal with Christianity, and Christianity is not equivocal with the Christianity that was patronized by the Romans. Realizing that recreates the original crisis—if I’m not in the original, most pure version of this thing, do I need to make a change to go there?—but with the caveat that no one can go back home to that cradled infancy, no one can return to that Ithaca of Christian Origins and set up shop there. It’s gone—as gone as the Byzantine Christianity of the fourth century or the Catholic Europe of the High Middle Ages or the Tridentine culture of the Counter-Reformation or the Early Modern Catholicism on the eve of Vatican I and the interconciliar period prior to Vatican II. It’s all gone, gone away down the river of time into oblivion, and we are here. So what do we do?
In Middot 2:2, we are told that when it still stood “All who entered the Temple Mount entered by the right and went round [to the right] and went out by the left, save for one to whom something had happened, who entered and went round to the left.” There’s something beautiful about a text that, rather than submit to the ancient tendency to focus on the general or the ideal as though it were the real, pauses to consider the person out of place, outcast, or going the wrong direction in a crowd (something that’s happened to me plenty of times.). [He was asked]: ‘Why do you go round to the left?’ [If he answered] ‘Because I a am a mourner,’ [they said to him], ‘May He who dwells in this house comfort you.’” Fair enough: mourners may need some public comfort for their mourning, and it’s hard enough to go worship the God of Life with an authentic kavvanah in the face of debilitating death or illness of a loved one (I know well enough). But there are other reasons for the reverse circumambulation offered too: “[If he answered] ‘Because I am excommunicated’ [they said]: ‘May He who dwells in this house inspire them to draw you near again,’ the words of Rabbi Meir.” There’s something lovely about this: the excommunicant (מנדה) is not really, fully excommunicated, but remains part of the community, on its peripheries. The blessing offered is that God would inspire the community to reach out to the excommunicant and draw him back in. Rabbi Yose’s advice that follows assumes that the depiction of the excommunication as potentially unjust is wrongly conceived, and says instead that the blessing ought to be “May He who dwells in this house inspire you to listen to the words of your colleagues so that they may draw you near again.” I confess that I like that advice less, but I still like the idea that the “in-crowd” remains the “colleagues” or “friends” (חברים) of the excommunicant.
I utilize this story to identify what I take to be the bedrock principle of the Christianity I want, the only Christianity I can see surviving into the future: one that does not consider anyone disposable. We read frequently of the decline and death of churches, particularly in the West, but we never pause to honestly, forthrightly assess why that decline is happening, at least not in a way that matters (never in synod, council, or even parish meeting). It’s not that the West has secularized; it’s not that Christianity is dumbed down too often, as Bishop Robert Barron often remarks; it’s not the Devil; it’s not even bad liturgy. It’s very simple: clericalism, tribalism, and abuse. Christians are very good at showing they simply don’t give a damn about the people who will not submit to their control. We do not love, and we are not known for our love. In a world where the church no longer has the power to pressure us, legally or socially, to be part of its community, we are less likely to willingly submit ourselves to tyrannical bishops, priests, and other religious leaders, less likely to want to close ourselves off from the world in an enclave that rails against “modernity” or a laundry list of favorite sins (usually, and boringly, reducible to some list of changing norms around sex, gender, and marriage). We are less likely to tolerate abuse of ourselves, our families, or our friends. If we get nothing out of a religious experience other than pain, we’re unlikely to keep throwing ourselves into that experience if we don’t have to. And even the things we do get out of the experience—some sense of security, of awe, of beauty, of connection to the sacred, of good teaching, whatever—will erode over time if we do not basically feel like we belong because we are loved, rather than because we are behaving or believing correctly.
This is invisible to clerics, I think, who either don’t have families or whose families exist mainly as an extension of their ministry. A friend of mine who had trained to become a priest before jumping out of the discernment process, with whom I taught at a Catholic private school, once expressed his surprise at the realization that most ordinary people will willingly abandon the church for the sake of their families, if the church proves to be a detriment to their physical, emotional, or spiritual health. He was unmarried, and it made sense that he would be surprised, having given his life to serve the church in varied ways, that for other people religious commitment does not necessarily mean commitment to a religious institution. But it’s no less true a statement: most sane and rational people have a line beyond which whatever nominal commitments they have, be they religious or political, evaporate. Just like any organism, there’s some point at which the threat to their survival is likely to wake them up out of the stupor. Those lines are very likely to be drawn around their homes and, hopefully, their trusted friends, too.
Though the experience was painful, I continue to think that separating myself from a community that wanted me to either enforce its values on my family or to erect a wall of schism within my family was the right call. This might make the idea of returning a bit awkward, but I still think so, even as I’ve contemplated and still contemplate the idea of going back. My first line was around my spouse; my lines now include my child but also many friends whose dignity I heard regularly trashed in Orthodox coffee hours. The coffee hour can be a glory of the Orthodox or it can be a theater for the tongue’s capacity for evil. I have been to coffee hours that felt like family lunch on a Sunday and to those primarily devoted where to people gloating not to be Catholics, Protestants, gay, liberals—whatever. But in the wake of the Trump era (fingers crossed I don’t have to revise that line later this year), I also have a line drawn around what kind of retrenchant politics and social vision I’m willing to countenance as Christian. Orthodoxy has been attracting a steady stream of right-wing nut jobs for the last several years: largely, into places like the OCA and ROCOR, rather than into the more ethnic and, frankly, socioeconomically well-off communities like the Greeks, but all the same. Catholicism also draws its fair share of the far and alt-right, and Catholics in the upper echelons of our political establishment have worked very hard to bring their vision for a society where their morality is the law of the land to pass. The fetish for an unmetabolized apocalypticism is strong in some quarters of these communities—stronger, and uglier, than when I was most participant.
Wherever I end up hanging my hat (for good this time, one hopes), I have no interest in belonging to a Christian community that is still stuck in the apocalyptic infancy of the Jesus Movement, expecting the world to come to an imminent end, and clinging to the walls of an insulated community to try to protect themselves from nefarious influences flaring up in the early stages of the conflagration (a strategy that simply does not work, as has been demonstrated time and again in American history in particular). I have no interest in belonging to a Christian community whose method of conflict resolution—with other Christians, with non-Christians, with the force of cosmic change itself—remains the use of Roman imperium to settle issues from on high, choosing to save a favorite child at the expense of an unwanted one. I dream of a day where the political stain on the soul of Christianity earned in the Trump years, if not totally expunged, can at least be absolved through a balance in the ledger of genuine restitution to society at large.
More basically, though, I want a Christianity whose ethos is not constantly looking back over its shoulder or giving side eye (or worse a Kubrick stare) to its imagined or projected enemies. I want a Christianity that, like the pilgrims of Middot 2:2, meets mourning with empathy and separation with compassion, who minimally never sees our own people as beyond the circle of concern and maximally sees everyone as part of it. I want priests who preach the Parable of the Prodigal Son once a year to actually demonstrate it in their own lives and ministries, running to those thinking about coming back from afar off with the kiss, the robe, the ring, and the party. I want a community where even an excommunicant still has access to the Temple, to the Divine Presence within it, where one’s relationship with God is not held hostage by whether one has successfully sublimated to the community’s demands. We do not own God: this ought to be the first and last lesson every priest is instructed to learn. If the prosopon of Christ is the Temple of the Divine Presence in this world, that is to say, I am not trying to take away any sense of authority from the people tasked with maintaining the house’s dignity, but I do wish that clerics in particular remembered their actual role. They’re the servant staff, the attendants, the ministers; they exist because God wants to be close to his kids, not for their own sake. And I want Christians who understand the “enemies” of scripture, and the imprecatory character of biblical prophecy and psalms, as directed at those whom the Fathers took them to be: the demons, the passions, the evil that parasitically dwells in all of us but that is never to be confused with our truest, most basic essence, which is the image of God within.
A starting place for Christians is to begin to think of those who have disaffected from their communities with this kind of love rather than with the pain, anger, and demonization that is more usual for us. I think that for every excommunicant who is better described by Rabbi Yose’s follow up to Rabbi Meir, that is, who is simply dissident from the community’s authentic wisdom, there are far more people who fall into the margins of a community’s expectations and standards unwillingly or unintentionally, who receive the same censure. Group psychological and sociological dynamics obtain in churches just like any other human association, and our inborn sense to avoid those who do not meet the norms of our group and to embrace those who embody them or encourage them is just as active within ecclesial settings as anywhere else. This is Durkheim 101 when we apply the model to religion: our totem represents our group, the deification of our belonging, and it is in a natural, irrevocable state of competition with their group, their belonging. You’re either with us or with them, and if you happen to fall somewhere on the battle line between (like Arjuna mourning for his comrades at the opening of the Gita, say), then you’re really with them, not us.
I fully admit that this is in fact the apocalyptic idiom of much Second Temple Judaism and of the New Testament: I’m not denying that this language is to be found in our scriptures and that it motivates several of our early thinkers. But when I say that I don’t want to belong to a Christianity that hasn’t “metabolized” its apocalypticism, this is partially what I’m talking about: apocalypticism that has not been sapientialized to become mysticism will drive you nuts. The parousia didn’t happen, and frankly, it’s not going to happen within history (I at least don’t think so). The us vs. them logic of apocalyptic dualism, in which we can neatly divide the world into the kingdom of light (our folks) and the kingdom of darkness (those children of Satan over there), might obtain at some level of our vision, but it has to give way to the vision of the saints, that God is always, already “all in all” (1 Cor 15:28) now, even if we do not perceive it.
This also allows us to reassess the margins. The Jewish and Christian Traditions tell us in no uncertain terms that it is in the margins where we’ll meet God: not in the powerful nation, but in the weak and enslaved one; not in the glorious urban center, but in the wilderness; not in the rich and the mighty, but in the faces of the poor, the righteous but unjustly persecuted. If it is in Christ crucified outside the camp, being reduced by death to the state of being flesh, that the Word of God becomes flesh, then it is precisely in that exile that the Divine Presence goes to dwell, not content to remain either in heaven or in the holy city until all the exiles may come home (think also of the merkavah going to be with the exiles in Babylon in Ezekiel 1). I want a Christianity that acknowledges that with something more than just words: something more like action, something more like policy, not just through fetishizing “outreach” or one-and-done corporal works of mercy, but in the attitude that a local community has to its own people first, and to those beyond its borders second.
Hence, I want a sense of enduring collegiality for those who leave, not damnatio memoriae. When I was on my way out of Orthodoxy, one of those priests I mentioned earlier was particularly virulent in his opposition to my decision and open about his belief that I was in some sense damning myself. While we spoke periodically for a couple of years afterwards, he was ultimately happy for our occasional correspondence to simply die off, and he told me so the next time I spoke to him. I had reopened the correspondence to express interest in returning—I had even told him this is what I wanted to talk to him about. Yet he was equally as belligerent in this conversation as in the last one, insisting that my return was not fully genuine unless I met certain of his criteria for determining the authenticity of my interest (did I believe that Orthodoxy was the Truth, capital T? etc.). I found myself taken aback: I’d had dinner with this guy numerous times over multiple years, I attended his ordination, I knew his family, I’d been around in his life for the birth of his children, I’d taken the eucharist from him, and he had blessed the marital crown that adorned my head. And so the basic inhumanity I understood myself to possess in his eyes as a result of having disaffiliated from Orthodoxy, for the reasons I did, was arresting, and enough to ultimately convince me to hit the breaks on my eagerness to return. Amicitia and pax so easily withdrawn for honest dissent (implied already in the question about the trademarked Truth of Orthodoxy, as though the only legitimate cause for being, remaining, or returning to Orthodox Christian life is because someone has fully satisfied all of their abstract theological queries and qualms; what a dull life that would be) is meaningless when given.
This is an anecdotal experience, but it’s one that I think has broad representation in many ecclesial circles: doubts, problems, and honest reasons to disaffiliate are often treated as moral deficits, and pressure is issued to shut them down or conform to the norm. Exvangelicals, whether they stay Christian or leave Christianity entirely, are deeply familiar with this. So are ex-Catholics (many of whom are only ex- because of the Church’s dishonesty about the abuse crisis and double standards around women and LGBTQ+ folks) and the so-called “Exodox.” (For any readers of mine considering becoming anything, I highly recommend looking at the reasons why people left before joining—especially Orthodoxy, which is typically opaque about such things. I had no idea anyone ever left as I was coming in.) The anxiety to preserve dogmatic and moral power over others is a long-lived characteristic of formalized Christianity, but it coexists with two other, equally long-lived facts about Christianity. First, most Christians have been so-called “cultural Christians,” affiliating with the Church without nevertheless demonstrating interest in fully subordinating their lives to the Church’s expectations and often dancing on the margins of what it considers appropriate.1 This is not a late feature of Christianity or a merely modern one, but an ancient one, one that has always been true: rhetoric that we are somehow the most lax or least sufficiently catechized generation of Christians, and that this is evidence of an imminent eschaton, is as old as Christianity itself. Second, the stories we read of the martyrs suffering under persecutions—apart from the fact that they are obviously rhetorical and literary works and not strict histories—and the formal theology of the Early Christians, including the moral theology, that we read from the Fathers should strike us as reflective of ideals and elite perspectives, not the ordinary stuff on the ground.2 The general rule of nearly all ancient history—we almost exclusively hear from the wealthy, the powerful, and the educated in our texts—is also true for Christians. Most Ancient Christians would have become Christians through families or friends, stayed Christians insofar as they found Christianity’s “religious technology” useful to them, and left Christianity when they came to find that the cost outweighed the benefit, or otherwise sublimated their Christianity to other aspects of their identity. Most, in other words, were kosmikoi or saeculares, sarkikoi, and so on: precious few were, claimed to be, or wanted to be something more.
That sort of raises questions about the way that any Christian community constructs its vision of the ideal member. From the evangelical sermons of my youth at conferences that encouraged me to “give it all for Jesus” or “be on fire for God” (never defined, of course, other than in the form of joining some missionary society when I was older and not masturbating) to the prioritization of Desert Father spirituality in modern Orthodoxy in the United States to the lionization of saints of questionable virtue in the actual details of their lives but mighty hagiography in Catholicism, I have rarely that the best kind of Christian someone should aspire to be is just the kind that tries their best given their actual, real-world circumstances. Now, to be clear, I like the Desert Fathers, I like the saints, and I aspire to become a saint myself, however humorous an idea that is from the outside (it’s hilarious to me when I reflect on it for more than thirty seconds); but I also acknowledge that I’m no St. Antony the Great or Francis of Assisi or whoever, and that actively trying to be would not only result in failure but would actually be deeply immoral in my own context. Asceticism is often a luxury: a more subtle luxury, because its explicit content is the forfeiture of luxury, but still a luxury insofar as the choice to renounce the world is one that some people get to make with impunity and others never even get to contemplate. I’m not putting down monks: I’m making the subtler point that monks take advantage of a unique opportunity not afforded to all people to spend their whole lives on their spiritual life, rather than having to find their spiritual life in the midst of the rest of life. If you’re the kind of person that likes to pray, and I am, being a monk might sound awesome for all the uninterrupted focus you get to cultivate on prayer; it’s a lot different to try to crank out a Vespers under your breath while you’re chasing around a toddler that just wants to watch Blue’s Clues & You and isn’t particularly tolerant of the fact that she can tell a lot of what you’re saying isn’t English.
Purely as a numbers game, this might be something all Christians have to accept: people who come, even people who join, are not often going to become permanent fixtures of their communities. But it also might be apparent to us from reflecting on our statistics of decline that the exclusivist bent many of us employ in our traditions and communities is not working to pressure people to stay. As a matter of strategy, it fails, long before we consider it as a moral question. It didn’t work on me, who at one time was about as devout and zealous about the whole thing as anyone can be, and I’ve seen it not work on other people, too.
What could attract people? What should this Christianity that I have in mind, that values everyone, that does not think of anyone as disposable, that does not force anyone to stay and does not withdraw fraternal love from those who leave, offer?
I’ve cycled through many answers to that question in my life of faith. Good liturgy is always a plus: I do think humans need mystery, and access to the sacred in a context that is beautiful and good, that gives them an experience, not simply an idea, about reality as it truly is or could be. But liturgy alone won’t cut it, I think. It’s true that the best liturgy I ever experienced was in Orthodoxy; the beauty of the Divine Liturgy alone was not enough to make me stay. Perhaps that’s a dulled spiritual sensibility on my part, but beauty that is not suffused with integrity is not really beauty, and that is a contextual, not an abstract connection, a demonstrandum rather than a per essentiam. Moral fiber is good, too, though I’m Confucian enough to think that goodness without ritual is not satisfying either: righteousness is better than worship, and when beautiful worship becomes a distraction from justice, it should be shunned, but obviously it’s best when the two are put together. An intellectually strong faith is also a thing devoutly to be wished: a faith unafraid of critical questions, reasoning, new data, revising opinions, confessing doubt or ignorance, synthesizing history and philosophy and theology with science and other forms of knowledge. But I know better than most that books don’t keep one warm at night, at least the way they’re meant to be used.
At the end of the day I think the only thing that will really draw and keep people in Christianity, any Christianity, and that which alone is worthy to be the defining mark of a Christianity worth having, is love. It sounds banal, but I don’t mean it to be, and it’s true. People want to be loved: and that means they want to be accepted for who they are, they want to be accepted for the oddities of their lives—the ways that they come in and go around the left rather than the right, so to speak—and they want to be allowed to think, speak, and act freely. Love requires freedom, so this love they desire from the Church—far from being something the Church should think of as a merited gift which she bestows only on the best-behaved children—is the very basis on which they are able to come to love the Church at all. A Church that is loving does not keep record of their wrongs and does not brow-beat them with a standard. A Church that loves is a Mother to her children, and a good mother, like a good father, does not choose some children at the expense of others, does not part ways with a child forever, does not remove them from her heart or prayers. Good parents in general accept that their children might become people very different from those whom they wish them to be: bad parents withhold or rescind love in response to changes in their children that they can’t countenance. Good parents also discipline, of course, and I’m not saying that love does not include discipline. But good, meaningful discipline is always an expression of love, and so proceeds from a stance of irrevocable inclusion. Love is inherently open to change: its authenticity is measured in its receptivity to that which flows in and the loose hand through which it allows all things to pass through. Love does not force, and it also does not coerce: love accepts, love hopes, love believes. Love waits for errant children and unwilling exiles. Love waits for mourners to come home to themselves again.
Let me go ahead and draw another lesson from Middot 2:2: the kind of love I have in mind is the kind of love best expressed as a sense of peoplehood rather than as a sense of creed. Christians are a creedal people, and I’m under no illusion that we’re capable of quite the same latitude as, say, Modern Jews enjoy around behavior and belief as metrics of Jewishness, though I do wish we could have more latitude, analogous latitude, that belonging was more important for us than either behavior or belief were. The kind of love which accepts people as they are and considers their belonging most important, more fundamental than the consequences of their freedom, is the love of peoplehood, of something which cannot be undone in them.
The concept of the Church as a people is deeply biblical—ekklesia means “assembly,” and comes from the Septuagint, where it is the normal translation of qahal, as in the “assembly” of Israel. Each local ekklesia is in that sense a kehillah—the local community that stands in for the larger collective. In a sociological context where the earliest Christians were Jewish and gentile frequenters of local synagogues, and where the synagogue provided the most foundational model of what the church could and should be like, it remains deeply surprising to me that all our modern talk about how to fix the Church never leads us to ask what’s going well in the modern synagogue that we might seek to emulate. Theoretically, the Church believes this sense of peoplehood is what baptism, chrismation, and the eucharist confer: they bind us to Christ, and therefore to one another, irrevocably, a people called out from among the nations, a people who did not previously exist, a new Israel (but not the new Israel or Israel, full stop), a tertium genus between Judaism and Hellenism, etc.
But in practice, we often confuse the Church’s peoplehood with our sectarian beliefs and hierarchies, and dilute the indelible sense of our belonging with the pressure of fitting into our institutions. Catholicism does this concept of the populus Dei better than Orthodoxy does, especially since Vatican II, and in the Orthodox world generally, the idea of Christians as a “holy nation” and “royal priesthood” is often deferred to the local nation or nation-state in which the Church finds itself. There’s a good here that’s twisted into an evil: the good is that Orthodoxy instinctively recognizes that the way to understand the Church is on analogy to the nation, but the evil that seems to easily bedevil the Orthodox world is the equivocation of the nation-state or the kingdom with the Church. Symphonia ideology aside, the current sins of, say, the Moscow Patriarchate are not exactly unheard of in Orthodox or Catholic history. They are symptomatic of the same confusion about the peoplehood of the Church as drives some Christians to believe they have the real covenant, or the real badge of belonging in the Temple that will never be destroyed, the incorrupt priesthood, calendar, and worship, whatever.
Given that the mystery of the Church is an extension of the mystery of Israel, we might have something to learn from the Jewish experience here. In Ancient Judaism, similar sectarian divides, institutional competition, and flirtation with statehood, independence, and secular power ultimately drove Judea into the First Jewish-Roman War, the Diaspora into the Kitos War, and ended finally in the Second Jewish-Roman War or Bar Kokhva Revolt. One of the fundamental issues in dispute among the sectarians was precisely who was the “real” or “true” Israel—certainly a question that also occupied the later rabbis, but one that they at least nominally answered by appeal to the idea that “all Israel has a place in the world to come” (m. Sanhedrin 10:1). That sensibility, of kol Yisrael, of ahavat Yisrael (bracket the modern nation-state for a moment and just think about the Jewish people, as a collective whole, with all their ethnic, political, religious, and sociological distinctions), animates Modern Judaism, and the ideals of Jewish pluralism that I saw in action as a teacher in a Jewish Day School, and that I value as a Christian outsider and admirer of Jews and Judaism. And it’s a spirit that I wish Christians had. I wish we, too, held fast to the notion that kol Yisrael has a place in the world to come—not just the Jewish people (though would that this didn’t need to be in dispute any longer for Christians), but the Christian people, too.
It’s just that the other things we trust in as our nominal tokens of Christian identity and specification are so fallible. Like the Zion theologians in the Book of Jeremiah who consider it blasphemy to say that the Lord will destroy the house, so too Catholic and Orthodox institutionalists often take such profound issue with the notion that the apostolic succession of their sees should ever be rewarded with God permitting them to be destroyed, exiled, reduced, or even completely replaced—and yet exactly that happened to the Jerusalem Temple. Qumran insisted that it had the true priesthood, that it was the new covenant, that it had the more ancient version of the cult—and frankly, maybe it did, in certain respects. But that didn’t prevent the Romans from wiping it out. We can keep drawling on and on about what makes us so exclusive and eternal, but in fact, everyone who has ever thought so was wrong—hubris, not wisdom, entertains the fiction that we have here some lasting city.
If the Church is a holy nation, we have to think about what kind of nation it is. Ecclesial institutions and the politics of exclusion they deploy to maintain their purity are the nationalism of nation-states, the nationalism of Christendom. But the Church as a nation is a nation of strangers and exiles: hers can only ever be a diasporic nationalism, to borrow Daniel Boyarin’s concept, one in which the Christian people are never settled, established, or empowered to use the violence of the state to enforce its will. Instead, we are on a pilgrimage to the Kingdom of God, one that we do not finish at some point in time and space. Indeed, our whole life as a people in this world is as though we’re piling into the nave late on the eve of Holy Saturday, waiting for Pascha to begin. That’s not how we’ve often lived as a people, but it could be.
It may well be too late for many individuals, and perhaps for society at large, for Christianity to prove that this kind of love is really what it is predicated on. I can’t detect a period in Christian history where this love—love for own people, love for the world—has been the normative, pivotal Christian virtue, against which all Christian sins are feasibly read as deficiencies. Christians talk a lot about love; we think God is love (1 Jn 4:8, 16). But for two millennia the majority of what we have shown the world is that when we don’t get our way, we’re willing to force people to go our way, and when people who were going our way suddenly start going a different way, we’ll go to great lengths to ostracize them so that they never quite escape the punishment of having dissented from whatever norm we wanted them to follow. My experiences are the least of these: Christianity’s wounded other people, and other groups of people, in much deeper, more personal, physical, and existential ways. So I suppose the Christianity I want is one that finally puts up or shuts up about this most fundamental promise on which it is supposedly built: that what God has revealed in Jesus Christ is the omnipotence of love over history, love that reconciles all things to God and God to all things, and that calls us into embody that same love in our own communities.
But I know Fr. Moses knew how to love like that—so I’m still here, trying my best.
See Nadya Williams, Cultural Christians in the Early Church: A Historical and Practical Introduction to Christians in the Greco-Roman World (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Academic, 2023).
For skepticism about the historicity of the martyrdom stories, see Candida Moss, Ancient Christian Martyrdom: Diverse Practices, Theologies, and Traditions (AYBRL; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), and eadem, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014). Basically, Christians were a mainly tolerated nuisance to Roman society with small pockets of formal persecution here and there, but to the psychology of some Christian figures and groups, this persecution was massive and constant, and this is what we find reflected in the martyrologies.
I wonder how much of the fact that religious devotion is basically optional for modern western people plays into the experience of "the weird" I think most of us have when we socialize with other church-goers. It's not that all of my neighbors go to church, and all of the Irish people go to the Irish parish; it's the ones who are motivated, probably a bit geeked out in the faith, who are most likely to be there regularly, where in the past their obsessions might be diluted and even checked by the more nominal, cultural expressions of faith. I wish all of my neighbors went to church, because I genuinely enjoy a good segment of them.
My experience in the Orthodox church was extremely weird in most of the social interactions I had. Overly "loving" - in a love-bombing sense - but then hyper-rigorous, anti-Catholic, Jay Dyer following, exvangelicals with a chip on their shoulder and the theological depth of a drying puddle after a light rain were a big part of their market. I was asked by everyone approaching me what church I was coming from, as it seems it was the norm for people to leave their protestant churches for a more intense experience with the One True Church. As it turns out, I was an atheist-agnostic, meditating, new-age occult seeker, psychedelic experimenting weirdo, but I just told them that I used to be a Baptist which was good enough - so I brought my very own "weird" to the mix.
I am so tired of having conversations about culture war topics with real-life Christians - "how likely are we to have a real election in the fall?" - "[random anti-trans gender-fear comment]" - "We don't do DEI [used to be CRT] here" and on and on and on. It's tiresome and extremely annoying, and I mostly avoid talking to any Christians at all. Thankfully I am happy in a seemingly progressive Catholic parish where the congregation mostly disappears after mass, and all of the literature that's been handed to me as come from Jesuits, so I am having an easier time.
I did actually used to attend a Baptist chuch when I was a teenager, and we were conservative, but not like people are now. We just didn't care that much and it wasn't so deeply part of my group's identity. We mostly likely eating donuts, playing stupid youth group games, and hanging out as friends who had interests besides church and politics. A lot of the kids were there because, surprise, their parents were there. It was cultural, not a hobby, which was simply better socially.
Many beautiful points of light in here. Among others, “the omnipotence of love over history” will sink in through my thick skin over time I hope. Thanks for sharing.