Eastern Orthodoxy through Western Eyes by Donald Fairbairn
Garvey, John
Eastern Orthodoxy through Western Eyes Donald Fairbairn Westminster John Knox Press, $19.95, 216 pp. John Carvey This book is at once illuminating, sympathetic, and critical. Donald Fairbairn, a...
...He emphasizes the central place of the idea of deification, or theosis, in Orthodox theology...
...If, for example, I constantly insisted that my wife prove her love for me, it would ruin our marriage...
...If we cannot be confident that the way God has revealed himself is the way he really is, then what...
...This leads to a different sense of what the Fall means...
...But no entity called the essence of God exists...
...Its great strength is that, instead of making note of those elements that Orthodoxy has in common with Western Christianity, and then describing some of the differences, Fairbairn shows why the Orthodox see things as they do...
...He shows that the West has traditionally emphasized the unity of God, and the East has emphasized God's Trinitarian nature...
...All of this said, the sincerity of the question is both moving and important...
...For example, as a Protestant he is not comfortable with the Orthodox emphasis on tradition, rather than the Bible, as the basis of church life, but he presents the Orthodox position sympathetically and makes it clear to Protestant readers (who will probably be his largest audience) that this does not necessarily diminish the Bible in Orthodox understanding...
...This does not deny the total contingency of creation, and God's essence is so radically other that it is unknowable...
...Pope John Paul II has said that he hopes for the unity of the churches so that the church can learn to breathe with both lungs, and the honesty, compassion, and humility with which this evangelical thinker looks at his fellow Christians offers many reasons to hope that perhaps it really can be done...
...To state the question differently, can we really be confident that the way God has revealed himself to us is the way he really is in himself...
...Fairbairn takes the differences seriously, and he is right to ask the Orthodox some questions about nationalism, and particularly about popular Orthodoxy...
...They apply as well to the tolerance Catholics have had for syncretistic approaches to Catholic practice, especially in the mission field...
...Orthodox readers will find some passages strange, but here we may have to employ the sympathy Fairbairn shows us...
...Fairbairn may fall into this difficulty...
...In discussing other major differences between East and West, Fairbairn is careful and always fair...
...God exists only as three eternal persons, each of whom possesses the same essence or nature and the same characteristics (attributes...
...From the Orthodox point of view, humanity was not originally in total fellowship with God, falling from that high estate because of Adam and Eve...
...This applies also to sola scriptura...
...The essence of God is precisely that: an idea that has no concrete existence...
...Orthodoxy's rejection of the filioque," he writes, "reveals the same concern that lies behind its insistence on apophatic theology: the desire not to allow God to be turned into an abstract, philosophical idea...
...The word of God is Christ himself, not the Bible...
...To the extent that we allow people to believe that anything or anyone other than Christ saves them, or if we allow the centrality of Christ to be diminished in any way, we do in fact betray the gospel...
...He writes that "the sharp distinction that the Orthodox draw between the essence and energies of God could lead to a crisis of confidence in God's character...
...Fairbairn is good on many of the differences and insists that, in almost all cases, the Orthodox position is not inconsistent with a truly Christian vision: it comes from a different, less legalistic place than the Western...
...These reservations aside, this is an excellent book, a fine example of the way ecumenical discussion should be conducted...
...This question is not rhetorical...
...Fairbairn is not afraid to raise serious questions in a serious way, and his desire that the traditions learn from each other is presented in a searching, humble, and thoroughly honest way...
...In actuality, I fear that sometimes this approach to Christian life leads people to see God not merely as unknowable, but also as distant, aloof, and unpredictable...
...Both sides can learn from these different perspectives, he believes...
...From the start the human vocation was to become capable of that partaking, and the Fall knocked us away from the true path...
...Donald Fairbairn, a professor at Erskine Theological Seminary, writes from an evangelical Protestant perspective...
...In the radical words of Athana-sius, "God became man so that men might become God...
...In intention, apophatidsm seeks to enable us to bow before the unknowable, mysterious God, so as to be united to him...
...His presentation of the Orthodox understanding of the Trinity is also solid, and goes beyond the usual discussion of the filioque (the clause introduced by the West into the creed, speaking of the Spirit as proceeding from the Father and the Son) to take up an important and pertinent point not usually made in this discussion...
...We are born into a broken world in which we have become slaves to death, and it is this fate that Christ saves us from...
...Indeed, it isn't, and the fact that it can be asked, and the question framed this way, shows the distance between the cultures of the evangelical Protestant West and the Orthodox East...
...Fairbairn rightly says that the ways in which the East and West formed different visions have much to do with the differences between Roman and Greek culture, which led people to frame theological explanations in distinctive ways...
...Although there are major differences between Catholic and Protestant understandings of the Fall and the idea of Original Sin, both concepts have their source in Augustine, a theologian who had no influence on the Orthodox...
...The explosiveness of the filioque controversy derived from the desire of both East and West to safeguard against the potential errors they saw in the other side's understanding of the Trinity...
...We participate in them, through the sacraments, through prayer and ascetic struggle...
...His book could serve as an introduction to Orthodoxy, but it is more than that...
...If "Lord have mercy" can be said once, by the publican or anyone else, it can be said more than once in a litany...
...The constant refrain of the Orthodox liturgy is, 'Lord have mercy.' Is this a confident prayer, or does the repetition of the prayer indicate that some-perhaps many-people have no confidence in God's mercy...
...The worry that God's revealed outer life might somehow be different from his unknowable inner life seems misplaced...
...Evangelical Protestants, and many Catholics, have a need for certainty, for being sure that something is true, and finding that assurance either in a more or less literal interpretation of the Bible, or in infallible papal pronouncements...
...he relates this to the apophatic tradition of Orthodox theology-that is, the emphasis on God's unknowable nature, and the need for what has been called "negative theology" in the West...
...Orthodoxy rejects the Augustinian idea that we have inherited Adam's guilt...
...Fairbairn is at home with the best modern Orthodox theologians and deftly presents their understanding of the church...
...but God's "energies" are themselves divine, and uncreated...
...Until the need for certainty is dropped, true faith, real trust, and the kind of confidence that enriches every human relationship can't be born...
...While Orthodox will disagree with some of his readings and interpretations, on the whole he does an excellent job of demonstrating that there really are significant differences between the Western (Catholic and Protestant) approaches to Christianity and the Orthodox approach...
...He also raises critical questions for the Orthodox and is, in general, clear about our weaknesses as well as our strengths...
...If we insist that we can know nothing of God's inner life (of God as he exists in his communion between Father, Son, and Spirit), then can we really be confident that God's outer life (his energy by which he makes himself known to us) is consistent with his inner life...
...There is in fact, and there always has been, something more than the Bible involved in authoritative Christianity...
...If the danger of the Orthodox approach is that the Son and Spirit might come to be seen as less than the Father, the danger of the Western approach is that the personal relationship of God as one who has been revealed as three divine persons will be overshadowed by an impersonal idea of God...
...There was a Christian community before there was an agreed-upon canon of Scripture, and it was the Spirit at work in that community that allowed the community to exclude the Protoevangelium of James and include the Book of Revelation, which almost didn't make it...
...This question stands whether our theology is apophatic or not...
...Human beings were created to share the life of God...
...One way must learn from the other to enrich the fullness of a Christian vision...
...The human vocation from the start has been to obtain this life, a process through which we become more and more like God...
Vol. 130 • April 2003 • No. 7
