Eastern Orthodox priest Father Thomas Hopko has a featured podcast<\/a> on Ancient Faith Radio that I have recently started listening to. Recently he triggered quite a bit of controversy for a commentary about a visit he made to Wheaton College in which he talked about why Eastern Orthodoxy cannot endorse evangelical Christianity as being orthodox. It was very interesting to process the very different criteria by which Hopko defines orthodoxy. I would like to review several of the points he made and then offer how I would chart out a possible ecumenical relationship between evangelicalism and Orthodoxy. I think that the apostolic succession and traditioned ground of Orthodoxy is what a true conservatism looks like; the problem with the sola scriptura priesthood of the believer in evangelicalism occurs when we farcically try to make a conservatism out of what is inherently progressive. A progressive evangelicalism can relate to the genuinely conservative Orthodoxy the way that a saxophone relates to the steady bass-line of a jazz improvisational piece.<\/p>\n I have written before that the Greek word doxa<\/em> has two meanings which actually represent the different understandings of orthodoxy in evangelicalism and Eastern Orthodoxy quite well. In classical Greek, doxa means \u201copinion.\u201d Evangelicals tend to follow this version of doxa in defining orthodoxy to mean the \u201cright opinion\u201d about God. The Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Bible introduced a new meaning of doxa by using it to translate the Hebrew word kabod<\/em>, which means \u201cglory.\u201d This is the doxa of the Eastern church, which understands orthodoxy as \u201cright glory,\u201d or worshiping God in the right way. I think this distinction is corroborated in the points that Hopko made in his two podcasts \u201cAn Orthodox Assessment of Evangelicalism\u201d and \u201cEvangelical Dialogue.\u201d Here are the ones I found most significant:<\/p>\n 1) Worship is the original canon<\/strong><\/p>\n According to Father Hopko, the most primal foundation of apostolic succession is the worship tradition itself. He notes that the Pauline epistles for example are built out of hymns from the original worship tradition and commentaries critiquing problematic worship practices like the Corinthian Eucharist. Hopko says that original ancient Christian worship is \u201cderived in the law and the prophets illuminated by Christ.\u201d He considers there to be a line of continuity back into Jewish tradition even to its origins in Abraham. Hopko says, \u201cThe traditioning of faith in its lived form was in worship\u2026 [and subsequently] the lived tradition was enshrined in the writings.\u201d So for Hopko, it is not merely that a church infrastructure put together scripture, but that the even more primal means by which God breathed scripture is in the worship tradition itself.<\/p>\n 2) Worship is ecclesiology<\/strong><\/p>\n Not only is apostolically continuous worship the basis for scripture but it is the means by which the body of Christ is constituted. Hopko says, \u201cThe church is not identified with some synod of bishops\u2026 The church is actualized in the scriptures, the sacraments, the services of the church that are objectively given in history.\u201d He uses the phrase \u201cobjective worship\u201d a lot in his two podcasts which I interpreted to signify his belief that the most essential phenomenon of worship is the agency of the Holy Spirit \u201cecclesiating\u201d people into a real objective body of Christ which is \u201cconcretized sacramentally not institutionally.\u201d Hopko writes that \u201cthe church is a mystery that has institutions, not an institution that has mysteries\u2026 [It is] not an organization that has teachings, but a teaching that has organizations.\u201d This is why the church itself is untainted by the corruption and sin of its leadership and institutions, because ekklesia<\/em> is the \u201cgathering\u201d work of the Holy Spirit.<\/p>\n 3) Heresy is discerned through worship<\/strong><\/p>\n Father Hopko shares the Greek for 1 Corinthians 11:18-19: \u201cI hear that there are divisions (schismata<\/em>) among you\u2026 Indeed, there have to be factions (haereseis<\/em>) among you to show which of you have God\u2019s approval.\u201d The word that cognates as heresy in our language, haeresis, <\/em>means \u201cfaction\u201d in Greek. It is a teaching which causes faction in the worship community. Hopko points out that Paul is actually explaining a benefit of the haereseis. They are part of the ongoing apostolic discernment process \u201cto show which of you have God\u2019s approval.\u201d This is not simply a rational quest to represent Biblical truth most accurately, since the canon itself was weeded through as part of this apostolic process, but rather a Spirit-led journey mediated primarily through worship tradition in which disruptive teachings are flagged and thrown out. I find this understanding corroborated in Paul\u2019s pastoral epistles to Timothy and Titus where he evaluates false teachings not according to a standard of \u201caccuracy\u201d but according to their disruptive quality:<\/p>\n Titus 1:10-11: \u201cThere are many rebellious people, full of meaningless talk and deception, especially those of the circumcision group. They must be silenced, because they are disrupting whole households<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n 1 Timothy 1:3-4: \u201cStay there in Ephesus so that you may command certain people not to teach false doctrines any longeror to devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies. Such things promote controversial speculation<\/em>s rather than advancing God\u2019s work.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n A helpful illustration of this understanding of heresy is the 5th century Nestorian controversy. Constantinople Archbishop Nestorius was\u00a0 scandalized by the way that a popular Christian hymn gave the title theotokos<\/em> (God-bearer) to Mary since it seemed to deify Mary and impugn the eternal nature of God by implying that God had been born in history. Nestorius didn\u2019t have a problem with Jesus being both divine and human; he just wanted to say that the divine nature did not \u201cdevelop\u201d in Mary\u2019s womb but was transfused instantaneously into the human infant Jesus upon birth. So he said that the church should call Mary christotokos<\/em> instead of theotokos<\/em>, which got a whole lot of people up in arms since he was changing the words to an important hymn.<\/p>\n From an evangelical perspective on heresy, Nestorius\u2019 concerns would have been completely in bounds as a possible interpretation of how God\u2019s Word became flesh (John 1:14). Though Biblical texts were used to argue for and against it, nothing within the Biblical canon condemns Nestorianism outright. Moreover, evangelicals would be sympathetic to his concerns about Mary. Ultimately Nestorius was condemned not because scripture refuted his teachings but because they clashed with long-standing liturgical tradition and \u201cpromoted controversial speculation rather than advancing God\u2019s work.\u201d I wonder how many Nestorianisms we have among the controversial speculations of Protestants, not only among those who are considered \u201cliberal,\u201d but also those who invent cage fighter Jesuses with Dionysian heavenly Fathers, thinking that disagreeable and conservative are the same thing.<\/p>\n 4) Hopko\u2019s evaluation of the evangelicals<\/strong><\/p>\n To the Orthodox, scripture\u2019s primary function is liturgical. They read more scripture in their weekly eucharistic service than a week\u2019s worth of evangelical \u201cquiet times.\u201d Their daily prayers are scripture-soaked, rather than following the Western romantic valorization of \u201csincere\u201d and spontaneous \u201cHey God\u201d talk. Hopko shares that an Orthodox bishop cannot be ordained unless he can recite the entire book of Psalms from memory. (How do our memory verse drills compare to that?) The way that Orthodox learn Christian truth is by acting out the story of the canon through liturgy. Hopko says about our evangelical worship services: \u201cThat\u2019s not worship; that\u2019s a concert and a lecture.\u201d<\/p>\n Hopko considers the ecclesiology of evangelicalism to be \u201ca church without apostolic succession, without traditions, without objective worship, without sacramental life that is given to the person who enters, without a very particular moral and ascetical life given in the community by the tradition of the community.\u201d Western Christianity is comfortable with a rationalistic packaging for truth, but what Hopko is saying is that right opinions aren\u2019t good enough, since much of Christian truth is a experiential, meta-rational encounter with God through worship. The rational aspect of Christian truth is a secondary reflection upon the objective pneumatological reality of worship.<\/p>\n Regarding heresy, evangelicals are notoriously schismatic. Instead of doing the hard work of discerning our way to compromise through the Spirit\u2019s guidance, our equation of orthodoxy with \u201caccuracy\u201d causes constant disruption and \u201ccontroversial speculation\u201d which leads to the rupturing of communion. We often fall victim to our spiritual pride which causes us to interpret our ideological opponents as cynically as possible in order to be able to say that we<\/em> have finally figured out what\u2019s right while everyone else has it wrong.<\/p>\n 5) My response to Hopko and why I think evangelicalism must be progressive<\/strong><\/p>\n I had expected that listening to Hopko\u2019s take-down of evangelicalism would fill me with some kind of pleasure since I have a lot of criticism for my fellow evangelicals myself. But actually he made me want to stick up for the evangelicals and convinced me that I\u2019m supposed to remain one. I think that people who read the Bible at face value with fresh eyes and a dissatisfaction with the interpretations of the past have a very important role to play in God\u2019s ecclesial process. It\u2019s just that they shouldn\u2019t ever think of themselves as being conservative, because their role is inherently progressive.<\/p>\n True conservatives act in defense of a tradition and stick up for ancient wisdom against those who anachronistically call it patriarchal, racist, bigoted, and so forth. They battle against unfair caricatures and oversimplifications of historical processes. A true conservative will find kind things to say about Constantine and even the late medieval scholastic theologians who triggered the Reformation. A true conservative is willing to stay in communion with the church even amidst theological disagreement out of trust that the Holy Spirit has not abandoned the church\u2019s apostolic discernment process.<\/p>\n A true conservative is the opposite of ideological because s\/he knows that \u201cthere is nothing new under the sun.\u201d True conservatism is above all cautious and patient; it hates hastily formed arguments that disrespect the intricacies of truth. A true conservative cannot be contemptuous of history and the authority of the interpretive tradition of a text, which is precisely what many self-imagined evangelical \u201cconservatives\u201d are.<\/p>\n What we have today in evangelicalism is a farcical \u201cconservatism\u201d that is really populism. To stake your theological system upon the perspicuity (self-evidential clarity) of scripture is to adopt the 17th century liberalism of Descartes which seeks a \u201cCogito ergo sum\u201d rationality that transcends tradition. Choosing \u201cright opinion\u201d over \u201cright worship\u201d is a choice to privilege my rationality over a tradition that I have to entrust to the Holy Spirit.<\/p>\n It makes sense when the grassroots radical Reformers like the Anabaptists promote a democratization of scripture interpretation as an openly populist, progressive stance against magisteria. What creates monstrosity is when I try to say that there is no interpretive process involved in reading scripture, because (my interpretation of) the Bible is simply truth.<\/p>\n If \u201caccuracy\u201d in reading scripture is your only criterion for orthodoxy, then there\u2019s no reason to stop at a grammatical-historical account of Biblical \u201cinerrancy\u201d and not go all the way through to a historical-critical account in which you try to get to the bottom of why Matthew\u2019s Jesus says \u201cPharisees\u201d when John\u2019s Jesus says \u201cJews,\u201d so that Jesus\u2019 words inevitably become Matthew\u2019s words tailored to his polemical context, which ends up undermining the authority of the text.<\/p>\n Thus, a \u201cconservatism\u201d that does not submit to history or tradition as a rubric needs more than accuracy as an objective. That\u2019s why it comes to measure the accuracy of its beliefs according to the \u201cKantian\u201d terms of objectivity: if my interpretation is difficult for me (or people in the culture around me) to accept, then it\u2019s more likely to be true, because if it\u2019s pleasing to my sensibilities, then it\u2019s probably infected with my bias.<\/p>\n A tradition-less \u201cconservative\u201d will inevitably become a reactionary curmudgeon, because whatever is popular (among those I am reacting against) must be wrong since the truth cannot be popular without compromising its purity. It is this tradition-less-ness that makes \u201cconservative\u201d ideology into a competition to see who can make the other side cringe the most. The more crass you are in your analysis, the more truthful you\u2019re being, like that woman who wrote<\/a> in the National Review that the reason the Sandy Hook shooting happened was because there weren\u2019t any adult men on campus.<\/p>\n