The Orthodox Century?
Don't know how long this article will be available on Christianity Today's website, by Antiochian Lebanese-American theologian Bradley Nassif, but it's not very triumphalistic, and has as much advice for Orthodox as for Evangelical Protestants. We always need to get back to our roots in Truth.
(CT is a mostly Evangelical magazine, but sometimes Orthodoxy pops up in its pages, as they indicate at the link.)
(CT is a mostly Evangelical magazine, but sometimes Orthodoxy pops up in its pages, as they indicate at the link.)
posted by me at 11:27 AM
3 Comments:
"More and more Orthodox, as they explore the early church afresh, see that there are parts of its ancient liturgies that seem to have no biblical justification and that we cannot simply regard the Reformation and the last millennium in the West as nothing more than a sideshow."
Hooboy, spoken like a true Evangelical Protestant! Unfortunately, this line is from Nassif's "The Orthodox Century" piece.
Now this may "play in Peoria" to the Evangelical Protestants whom Nassif seems to identify with, but to this Orthodox Christian (a former evangelical Protestant) it reads like a Trojan Horse.
We don't need no stinkin' Protestant Reformation in the Orthodox Church. Been Evangelical, done that.
Nassif has obviously had one sip too many of the Kool-Aid served by his evangelical Protestant peers.
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Yeah, for that reason I almost didn't post it. I don't know what parts of the Liturgy he's talking about, or why - that wouldn't have meant anything to his CT audience. He did say "seem to," though that may just be what Wikipedia calls something like a squirm statement. Frankly I can't imagine many Orthodox meeting his description outside of some "cradle" 'iconoclastic' (not in the technical sense, at least not technically!) graduates of seminaries (of any denomination). Yes, we have some - don't all religions? - but they're not influential among the pleroma of the Church.
I'll also offer that what some Orthodox don't find in the Scriptures, others manage to - the "Oh yeah, that's right!" phenomenon.
Finally, just because something might not be obvious in Scripture doesn't mean it's not o/Orthodox. For us Scripture is part of the larger Holy Tradition. Not everything in the ancient Orthodox Tradition that underlay all Western Church history, got included in Scripture. 'If they'd tried, I'm not sure all the books in the world could hold it all' (cf. John 21:25)!
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