On The New York Times website recently, Ruth Graham wrote about the surge of converts to Eastern Orthodox Christianity, driven heavily by young, conservative men who crave the grounding in tradition it provides. I was immediately struck by the resonances of this story with my own past.
I scrolled down and found Graham featured All Saints Orthodox Church in Raleigh, N.C. — the very church I visited when I was drawn to Orthodoxy.
It was 20 years ago this fall, and I was a first-year seminarian at Duke Divinity School. Ostensibly, I was training to become a Baptist pastor, answering the call I felt at youth camp when I was 15. But I was looking for the exit ramp.
Christopher Schelin
I arrived at Duke bearing the scars of the struggle between moderates and conservatives over the nature of Baptist-affiliated Louisiana College. I had been a partisan for my professors and their desire to maintain a broad-minded Christian school. We lost.
By the time I graduated, though, my sense of “we” was scrambled. I certainly couldn’t embrace the strict doctrinal and moralistic constraints of the conservatives. Yet what the moderates proposed instead was reactionary in its own way: an expressive individualism that elevated the personal quest for truth and fulfillment above all else.
I wasn’t alone. Several of my friends at Louisiana College would reject this dichotomy and eventually enter Christian communions that appeared to have deeper roots and a more sophisticated theology. Most of them would turn to Anglicanism. A few would convert to Orthodoxy, and I almost joined them.
The Orthodox tradition was intoxicating in its allure. In place of endless debates over biblical inerrancy and interpretation, it offered the assurance of a uniform and unbroken rule of faith. In place of a church calendar defined by fundraising appeals for the Cooperative Program and an admixture of civic holidays, it presented a cycle of collective rituals and disciplines to mark the life of Christ and commemorate the saints. In place of either personal salvation or self-actualization, it envisioned cosmic restoration.
“The Orthodox tradition was intoxicating in its allure.”
And it gave this bookish, hyper-curious theology nerd what he most desired: the certainty of having found, once and for all, the truth about life, the universe and everything.
Yet somehow, having become enchanted by Orthodoxy’s gleaming beauty, I stood just outside the walls of Constantinople, then turned around and left. I even found a way to remain Baptist.
There are a few reasons why this journey was interrupted.
Psychologically, the exuberance of discovering Orthodoxy like some buried treasure faded, allowing me to take stock and move more slowly.
Intellectually, Orthodoxy’s claims of unchanging adherence to the apostolic faith became suspect with a second look at the historical record.
For example, when I first read the letters of the early bishop Ignatius of Antioch at Duke, they were a startling jolt. The church was organized as a hierarchy, and you couldn’t do anything without the bishop’s approval. Apostolic succession and clerical authority were confirmed.
But then why does Ignatius bang this drum repeatedly? You don’t need to argue for something about which everyone agrees. Scholarship has demonstrated that his teaching of the “monarchical episcopate” was an innovation rather than the way the church always had been organized.
Spiritually, my classes (and classmates) at Duke showcased the vibrant witness of Christian faith in many expressions. Yes, in the words of Rev. Winn in the Times article, Orthodoxy could lead people to what is “healthy, true and beautiful.” But so do Anabaptists and Lutherans, Methodists and Pentecostals. I found the joy of what is called receptive ecumenism, or the mutual enrichment of learning from each tradition’s distinctive strengths and insights.
“I found the joy of what is called receptive ecumenism, or the mutual enrichment of learning from each tradition’s distinctive strengths and insights.”
Even as I turned away from the Orthodox Church, however, I was still besotted by the quest for certainty that animates today’s “OrthoBros.” Over time, I came to see my life as punctuated by periods of confident conviction overthrown by doubt and disarray. The truth was that Southern Baptists were the New Testament church reborn. Then the truth was, paradoxically, a form of postmodernism. After briefly finding the truth in Orthodoxy, I found it in Duke’s postliberal catholicity.
Each time, I made myself a theological home. Then that same curiosity that drove me to discover the truth would render me homeless once more. And now, like the biblical scholar Peter Enns, I tend to think of certainty as a sin.
Ironically, this is the point at which I’m in close agreement with part of the Orthodox tradition. The best gift I received from this branch of the Christian faith is apophatic theology, or the affirmation of the mystery of God beyond words and concepts. As the writer of The Cloud of Unknowing put it, “He can well be loved, but he cannot be thought.”
Herein lies meaning without certainty, beauty without borders, a truth that cannot be grasped.
I remain grateful for my period of flirtation with Orthodoxy and for the wisdom that tradition bears. I’m more cognizant now of its faults as well. I’ve embraced my Baptist identity, but not as a rock on which to build my house. Maybe we’re not meant to build houses anyway. But rather, in the mysterious journey of faith, we echo the words of the great Zen monk Eihei Dogen:
But do not ask me where I am going,
As I travel in this limitless world,
Where every step I take is my home.
Christopher Schelin serves as dean of students at Starr King School for the Ministry in Oakland, Calif., and as a senior research fellow at the International Baptist Theological Study Centre in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Together with a colleague, he is currently writing a history of the conflicts at Louisiana College.