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I imagine I was like many of my western missionary colleagues when it came to the Orthodox Church in those early days after the break-up of the Soviet Union—namely, naïve. The little thought I had given to Eastern Christianity had found easy (read: ignorant) bliss in the idea that in studying the Roman Church I pretty much had the Greek one down too. Just different “bells and whistles” on this exotic eastern model. Imagine my surprise then when an Orthodox cleric once said, “It’s you Protestants who are closer to Catholics than either of you are to us Orthodox.” What?! In the years since, I have come to see that in many ways my Orthodox friend was right … and in other ways, I’m not so sure. In the brief space allotted here I’ll try to elaborate something of what I mean.

Even those who have seriously engaged the American kind of Orthodoxy that is not particularly associated with an ethnic group (Greek, Russian, Serbian, etc.) should realize there are significant variances between what they may have seen here and what missionaries engage in other parts of the world. For one thing, there is less nationalistic flavour to American Orthodoxy. As the Epanagoge, a 9th century classic expression of Byzantine Church-State synergy relates, Orthodoxy does seek to identify itself as the ‘soul’ of the State.¹ Such identification translates in the mind of many nationalities into a blurring of political/cultural and religious boundaries. “Russian and Orthodox—synonymous words,” bluntly asserts the “Beware, Protestants!” poster plastered in Kyiv trams in the early 1990s. Likewise rumbling deep in the Russian soul is the dictum of the great Russian writer, F. M. Dostoyevsky, that “a Russian without Orthodoxy is but a drone, not a person.” Ethnic identity tied to one faith is generally foreign to us in this land of immigrants, but elsewhere on the globe it is not. And unfortunately for Orthodoxy, in these other lands the Orthodox faith gets dragged into the tribal pride that infects us all to one extent or another. Xenophobia and other dark sides of nationalism are painted with Orthodox colors in Russia today.

This absence of nationalism in America Orthodoxy is part of the reason why my Ukrainian colleagues in Kyiv consider us to have a kinder, gentler Orthodoxy, a “sanitized version” here, as they say. Another contributing factor is that Orthodoxy in America was heavily influenced in the 20th century by a particular group of Orthodox intellectuals who found refuge in Paris from the Bolshevik Revolution. The “Parisian School,” with well-known names like Georges Florovsky, Sergius Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky and later John Meyendorff, advanced a “neo-patristic synthesis” calling Orthodoxy back to its traditional roots in the Church Fathers. The result was a return to the spirit of the early church that was, for one thing, more respectful of Scripture and less encumbered by 20th century politics. The dismissive attitude to the apostle Paul by Russian Orthodox apologist Deacon Andrei Kuraev, “Certainly the word of the Savior himself means more than the word of an apostle,”² is as unpalatable to American Orthodox as it is to us.

Orthodox Distinctives

These matters of context aside, Orthodox East and West do share a basic ethos and common way of telling the Christian story. Here was where I eventually learned that the priest was right … Orthodox are different from Catholics and Protestants. In the introduction to his fine book about Orthodoxy, Eastern Orthodoxy Through Western Eyes, Donald Fairbairn does an admirable job of sketching the contours of what might be called the “Eastern Way.”³ Categories he uses to distinguish the Orthodox way of doing Christianity include concepts of group (East) versus individual (West); personal, mystical participation (East) versus legal (West); pictorialimage oriented (East) versus meaning-text oriented (West); Christian life as a process (East) versus Christian life as a condition (West); and finally truth found in the Church in its entirety, i.e., Holy Church Tradition (East) versus truth found in a particular source of authority (Bible or Magisterium—Papacy) that stands over and above the Church (West).

As a western person with a western training, I found that my day-to-day encounters with these eastern currents proved very enriching for my own theological formation. Orthodox emphasis on concepts like the communion of the saints, the lex orandi which fixes theological reflection firmly in doxology, worship, and prayer, and the Christian life as theosis which takes very seriously Peter’s words about us as “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet 1:4), all filled out areas in my own understanding of God and his ways. Methodologically, I find Orthodox theologians to be unabashedly Trinitarian in their reflection. Rather than a mere beginning point for dogmatics that develops syllogistically and rationally from there, as is typical in western systematics, the Trinity—Christianity’s true glory—is the golden thread woven throughout every locus of doctrine. Ecclesiology becomes not just doctrine about the church; it is about the church through the lens of the Trinity. Anthropology is not just doctrine about humanity; it is about humanity through the lens of the Trinity. Etc. Here the Trinity is what it should be—Christianity’s trump card to all other religions in the marketplace. Rather than sheepishly tiptoe around the subject because of the hard “Trinitarian Math” (3 = 1), Orthodox seemed to celebrate the Trinity more than I did.

I further appreciated Orthodoxy’s basic conservatism. Although the claim that they are the Church that has alone retained the faith and practice of the apostles is perhaps too bold (as we shall see below), it was the Greek east that stood up to the novelty of the Papacy the west was pushing. The filioque controversy, which today remains the shibboleth (from the Orthodox perspective) dividing east from west, was born from the east’s vehement protest against some late (6th century) additions by the western Church to the ecumenical Nicene Creed.⁴