“We can get caught up in being so Orthodox that we forget to be Christian”
-Fr. Seraphim Rose homilies
Both extreme left and extreme right function to keep the faith becoming too rigid or too formless. Many would say our present condition is one of relativism, false ecumenicalism, thin or absent borders, a destruction of distinctions, and so we need a strong Right traditionalism to protect the Church from postmodernism, subjectivism, and the endless deconstruction that eats away at our heritage like acid.
Frankly, I think those who blame "trads" are out of touch, surely it is liberal Christians who are in the vast majority, simply look at opinions on gay marriage. Trads are a small but vocal minority on the internet, the average Catholic Church, or Orthodox, will will be deluged by liberalism.
I tend toward the traditional stance myself, however it does have its problems.
Oftentimes Trads will turn dogmas into an idol, worshiping not the living God but the correct theological answers. Ironically, this is very much a protestant, modern conception of religion. I've written on how religion is a modern invention HERE.
What we affirm is the experience of the Church, the theories about those experiences are what we call theology. The experience of the Church is that Christ has forgiven our sins, however even Bishop Barron will say he doesn’t exactly know what that means, though Catholicism has many ideas on this.
John Bossy in his book Christianity in the West 1400-1700 is surely correct that that “Creedal orthodoxy” replaced Communitas as a supreme virtue, and Christianity became a system of beliefs and moral behaviors….
This was also compounded by the change from transformative knowledge (being formed into a certain way of being by liturgical attunement) vs informative knowledge.
Marshall McLuhan and son note that the protestants hitched their fortune to dialectic over rhetoric and grammar, literacy becomes a substitute for the "communis sensus” birthing the Gutenburg Galaxy brain over audio communal doxological epistemology, HERE.
Instead of faith being a mode of perception, and religion being a “virtue” as it was for Aquinas, it become about concepts over resonance, information over initiation. See HERE.
Heck, even Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky writes,
“From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a doctrine, but exactly a community. There was not only a Message to be proclaimed and delivered, and Good News to be declared. There was precisely a New Community, distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited."
Francis Young points out "religion" was not about doctrines or dogma's, but ritual. You shared a meal with your god, there was a communion, a give and take, perhaps even an exchange of life - bios, biological life, from flesh and blood, exchanged for the life of God, to ZOE, spiritual life….
And John Behr points out that “Dogma” is really about setting boundaries, less about making positive statements about God beyond the basics.
Furthermore, Behr reminds us that dogmas cannot be separated from liturgy :
“The coherence of dogmatic reflection and scriptural exegesis, as practiced the context of a worshipping community and ascetic practices aimed at ‘putting on Christ’, is broken, however, when the ‘dogmas’ are extracted from this setting to be treated ‘systematically’…”
I tend toward the traditional stance myself, however it does have its problems.
Oftentimes Trads will turn dogmas into an idol, worshiping not the living God but the correct theological answers. Ironically, this is very much a protestant, modern conception of religion. I've written on how religion is a modern invention HERE.
What we affirm is the experience of the Church, the theories about those experiences are what we call theology. The experience of the Church is that Christ has forgiven our sins, however even Bishop Barron will say he doesn’t exactly know what that means, though Catholicism has many ideas on this.
John Bossy in his book Christianity in the West 1400-1700 is surely correct that that “Creedal orthodoxy” replaced Communitas as a supreme virtue, and Christianity became a system of beliefs and moral behaviors….
This was also compounded by the change from transformative knowledge (being formed into a certain way of being by liturgical attunement) vs informative knowledge.
Marshall McLuhan and son note that the protestants hitched their fortune to dialectic over rhetoric and grammar, literacy becomes a substitute for the "communis sensus” birthing the Gutenburg Galaxy brain over audio communal doxological epistemology, HERE.
Instead of faith being a mode of perception, and religion being a “virtue” as it was for Aquinas, it become about concepts over resonance, information over initiation. See HERE.
Heck, even Orthodox theologian Georges Florovsky writes,
“From the very beginning Christianity was not primarily a doctrine, but exactly a community. There was not only a Message to be proclaimed and delivered, and Good News to be declared. There was precisely a New Community, distinct and peculiar, in the process of growth and formation, to which members were called and recruited."
Francis Young points out "religion" was not about doctrines or dogma's, but ritual. You shared a meal with your god, there was a communion, a give and take, perhaps even an exchange of life - bios, biological life, from flesh and blood, exchanged for the life of God, to ZOE, spiritual life….
And John Behr points out that “Dogma” is really about setting boundaries, less about making positive statements about God beyond the basics.
Furthermore, Behr reminds us that dogmas cannot be separated from liturgy :
“The coherence of dogmatic reflection and scriptural exegesis, as practiced the context of a worshipping community and ascetic practices aimed at ‘putting on Christ’, is broken, however, when the ‘dogmas’ are extracted from this setting to be treated ‘systematically’…”
Vladimir Lossky, the great Russian theologian of the mid-20th century, wrote:
Knowledge is given to us by faith, that is to say, by our participatory adherence to the presence of Him Who reveals Himself. Faith is therefore not a psychological attitude, a mere fidelity. It is an ontological relationship between man and God, .....This faculty is the personal existence of man, it is his nature made to assimilate itself to divine life – both mortified in their state of separation and death and vivified by the presence of the Holy Spirit. Faith as ontological participation included in a personal meeting is therefore the first condition for theological knowledge.
From Introduction to Orthodox Theology, pp. 16-17.
Thus the little old lady in the back of the Church who gives an incorrect definition of the Trinity, but has been grafted onto the Triune life of God by participating in His life giving mysteries, is perfectly “orthodox.”
Amen
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