St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary - Faculty - John H. Erickson Orthodox Theology in a Changing World Installation Speech of Dean John H. Erickson September 14, 2002

We live in a rapidly changing world – of this I hardly need to remind you. We face the kinds of changes that human beings have known in every age – a new seminary president, a new dean, new faculty members and staff – changes that in fact are simply inevitable transitions. But we also face changes that are more far-reaching and portentous. The future may well be very different from what we possibly can imagine now, and it certainly will be very different from what past generations could have imagined.

We have some small experience of such changes already, in our everyday life. Languages once confined to distant corners of the world now can be heard almost daily on our streets and in our stores. Foods that once seemed quite exotic now are common fare, with tacos catching up with hamburgers in franchise sales. A host of new words and expressions have entered into daily use in just a few decades: internet, cyberspace, “virtual community,” genetic engineering, globalization. Now we even have specialists in “futuristics.” And few of us after September 11, 2001, need to be reminded about how small the world has become and how vulnerable we all are.

            How is Orthodoxy to respond to this changing world? A first and most obvious answer is that we must uphold “the faith once delivered to the saints,” that we look to Jesus Christ, “the same yesterday, today and tomorrow,” that we remain steadfast in the Tradition which has sustained Orthodox Christians throughout the ages. This is easy to say – and it is true. But it is harder to say precisely how we should demonstrate this fidelity here and now. We often take pride in our historic patrimony, in the treasures of our glorious past, and sometimes this tempts us simply to repeat select passages from the Scriptures, the canons, the lives of saints and the writings of the Church Fathers. But we should not let our love of the past and our nostalgia for the past cause us to forget another obvious and important truth: that Christ sent his followers into the world to “make disciples of all nations,” to proclaim the Word in each new cultural context. Orthodox theology in the future must remain faithful to Tradition, but for this very reason it must also be committed to mission – and this means that we must take seriously the world in which we live now. Dull repetition is not enough. In the future, Orthodox theology must address a host of questions that would have been unimaginable even a generation ago. It must faithfully proclaim the Word of God, but in ways that will engage all the new words - and the realities behind them - that we encounter and use in daily life today.

            Of the issues that Orthodox theology will face in the future, those relating to new technologies immediately spring to mind. New biological and medical technologies raise important questions about the meaning of life itself. These technologies on the one hand may advance the quality of life, or at least prolong it. But they also may dehumanize life and undermine the sanctity of life from its earliest moment. We also have to take into consideration new information technologies. In our churches today, “traditionalists” and “modernists” may differ on many issues, but both groups seem to be quite at home with the internet, and they reach wide audiences through well-designed websites. So far we have used these new information technologies to spread our theological words, but we have not yet ventured a theological word about the significance of these technologies themselves.

We need to evaluate the manifold implications of these biomedical and information technologies from a theological perspective. At any rate, we would be ill-advised to regard them simply as neutral “tools.” They are of course tools, and like any tools – knives, hammers, explosives, what have you – they may be used for good purposes or for evil. But new tools – new technologies – may subtly transform ways of thinking and acting, ways of relating to the world, ways of relating to one’s fellow human beings and to nature and even to God. A story is told about the first introduction of the horse – a new “tool” - to one of the native tribes of the Great Plains. A band of Utes from the Southwest, who long before had acquired horses from the Spaniards, agreed to sell some to the tribe, but they warned that this would result in a change of religion. The tribe’s way of life, its ways of looking at the world, and its values would be decisively changed by this new “technology.” We already are employing the new technologies of our own age, but we have not devoted much thought to what they may mean for our perception of reality, our sense of values, our attitude towards our fellow human beings, and our relationship with God.

In addition to issues of technology, issues relating Christianity and culture must be considered in a new light. We frequently hear the word “globalization.” I take this to mean that the world is growing smaller, that economic integration, facilitated by the free movement of labor and information, is bringing people closer together, so that all of us can enjoy a Big Mac or a Coke wherever we are in the world. Old national and cultural and ideological boundaries are being swept away. But along with globalization, and perhaps in response to it, we find that the world is also growing more fragmented and fractious. Not everyone appreciates MacWorld. Islamic fundamentalism is only the most conspicuous example of resistance to globalization – or rather to some aspects of it, for as we know all too well, those preaching jihad can be found almost as easily on the streets of Berlin or Paris as on the streets of Istanbul or Bagdad. So, paradoxically, in this age of globalization, particularities of all sorts – whether ethnic or national or religious or gender – increasingly are prized. Militants and activists battle culture wars at home and abroad, stretching the limits even of our own self-consciously and proudly pluralistic American society. How is Orthodoxy to respond to this new cultural situation? Do we have a theological word to offer?

We know that over the centuries Orthodoxy has shown a remarkable capacity to adapt to diverse cultures and even to transform and transfigure them. It is unnecessary to review here the accomplishments of Sts. Cyril and Methodius, St. Stephen of Perm, St. Innocent of Alaska, St. Nicholas of Japan and so many other great missionaries. We know that our faith can and should be expressed not just in Greek but also in Aleut and Japanese and Cree – and even English. We know that unity of faith is not incompatible with cultural diversity. But sometimes we Orthodox Christians are tempted to identify our faith with a particular culture, possibly even a past culture or an imaginary culture, so that it is hard for us to envision the possibility of new and different cultural expressions of Orthodoxy. Sometimes we are so enamored of our great cultural achievements of the past that we despair when faced by a future in which our Orthodox faith – indeed the Christian faith itself - seems to be increasingly marginalized. We are tempted to withdraw into sectarian separation from the world rather than engage it in fresh and creative ways.

We face this temptation in an especially acute way in America today and in other regions of the so-called “diaspora.” Will Orthodoxy ever be really at home in America? Will there ever be a truly American expression of Orthodoxy? Much here of course depends on what it means to be Orthodox and what it means to be American – questions that also call for reexamination. In any case, we should not simply give up in despair. Early Christians in the Roman Empire were a persecuted minority in a hostile environment, but they tried to engage and appropriate the best elements in the thought and aspirations of their age. We should do no less. And in addressing the thought and aspirations of our own age, in a critical but constructive way, in the marketplace of ideas and in the public square, perhaps we should also cast a critical glance at our own past achievements. We like to speak of the ways in which historic Orthodoxy has transformed cultures, transfigured cultures, or even “baptized” cultures. But in practice historic Orthodoxy has run the risk of being enslaved by the cultures with which it has become so closely identified – the risk of being too much at home whether in Byzantium or Russia or in some other “Orthodox” culture. And of course Orthodoxy could also become too much at home in America – too comfortable in its recently-won middle-class white Anglophone suburban respectability. We should remember, as Fr. John Meyendorff liked to point out, that the Church does not baptize cultures; it baptizes human beings, one by one. And in baptizing them, it gives them a new homeland, God’s heavenly kingdom – a homeland that potentially is open to people of every nation, every language, every culture.

In addressing the challenges posed by new technologies, the challenges posed by globalization and the culture wars that seem to go along with it, and the challenges of whatever else the future may bring, Orthodox theology can draw on many resources. In fact, the future of Orthodox theology may depend less on our willingness to address challenging new issues than on our ability to recognize the resources provided by our own Tradition. In our post-modern world, in which “book theology” has been losing its persuasive power, Orthodoxy’s living theology of sanctity can demonstrate the power of God’s grace at work in actual human life. The “theology in color” of the Orthodox icon can offer silent but eloquent testimony to the possibility of a transfigured cosmos. Orthodoxy’s liturgical ethos can offer a vision of wholeness, in which human beings in all their diversity are brought together into a single hymn of praise to God.

The world needs the full richness of Orthodox theology, Orthodox theology in all its aspects and manifestations, not simply routine repetition of verbal formulas, however venerable these may be. In bringing this theology to our changing world, seminaries like St. Vladimir’s have an important role to play. In order to do this effectively, however, they must remember that a seminary is different from other educational institutions. As I like to point out to entering students, St. Vladimir’s is not just another graduate school, whose goal is to produce prolific scholars in various autonomous disciplines. Neither is it just a trade school or professional school, whose goal is the training of competent practitioners. While we do have to be concerned about the academic and practical preparation of our seminarians, we also have to be concerned about their spiritual growth. The discipline of class attendance and study would be incomplete without the experience of community worship in the chapel, the emotional challenge of field education assignments in hospitals and hospices, and the asceticism of daily life with fellow students who can be annoying in so many different ways. So too, the seminary must be concerned about the spiritual growth of all those who teach and work and pray here. In a word, the seminary must try to realize in all aspects of its life what it teaches in the classroom.

To be effective, the seminary must also recognize that the technological, geopolitical and sociological changes that I described earlier affect not only “the world” out there somewhere, as though we ourselves could escape them. They already have profoundly affected Orthodox Christians throughout the world. In Russia and Eastern Europe, preoccupation with questions of national and cultural identity has spilled over into church life. Instead of bringing the Orthodox churches closer together, the fall of communism seems to have aggravated inter-Orthodox tensions. In the United States, massive new immigration has created new problems for pastoral ministry on the parish level. Because of such changes, the various Orthodox churches and jurisdictions, both nationally and globally, have become increasingly preoccupied with their own internal issues rather than with the issue of Orthodox unity. In addition, again both nationally and globally, Orthodox Christians seem increasingly to disagree about what constitutes authentic Orthodoxy, about the meaning of Orthodox Tradition itself.

How is the seminary to respond to such developments? In the past, before the fall of communism, we at St. Vladimir’s – we in the West generally – tended to see our role as preserving Orthodox theology for better times. We repeated what others had said before, just putting it into French or English. Now increasingly our role must be to show how this theology can engage our world today, in cutting-edge issues like social ethics, bioethics, information technology, religious and cultural pluralism, and the place of religion in public life. At the same time, we need to encourage a living and creative dialogue between those holding differing positions and points of view within the Orthodox churches. We must do our best to bring an increasingly fragmented Orthodoxy into unity and communion. In our own small way, we must demonstrate that unity does not mean the uniformity of MacWorld, that diversity and difference do not need to be expressed by jihad.

Concretely, this means that the seminary must become a place of dialogue, where people can speak out on issues of importance to them, but also where they can listen to what others are saying, in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Our theology often speaks about the dignity of the human person, made in the image and likeness of God. But how often we forget about this when we are debating theological issues! How often we demean and demonize those with whom we disagree! At St. Vladimir’s Seminary we must willing to listen as well as to speak – and this goes for faculty and staff as well as students. We must resist the temptation to offer superficial answers to complicated questions. We must be courageous enough to speak the truth, but we must do so in love.

            In doing this, no doubt we will be misunderstood in the future, just as in the past, despite our best intentions and efforts. For some, no doubt, what we say and do will seem like foolishness. To others it will be a stumbling block. Here it is important to remember the words of the Apostle Paul, which we heard this morning at the Liturgy of the Elevation of the Holy Cross: “The Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom; but we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness; but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (I Cor 1:22-25) If we scandalize or speak foolishness, let us be sure that we do not do so over the petty issues that are debated so vigorously in internet chat rooms or in the corridors of power in Washington and other world capitals. On this Feast of the Universal Exaltation of the Holy Cross, we are reminded of the need to get back to basics. Let us follow the example of the Apostle Paul, who in dealing with the Corinthians was determined “to know nothing… except Christ, and Him crucified.” (I Cor 2:2) The message of “Christ, and Him crucified” is scandal enough, foolishness enough, without our own contribution. But on this feast we also are reminded that in the cross lies victory – the victory not of passing empires but of God’s Kingdom, whose power is meant to extend to every corner of the world. May this seminary, in the future just as in the past, always witness to “Christ, and Him crucified”! May it share in the hidden power of the Holy Cross!

John H. Erickson, Dean
St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary