Stump the Priest: Converts and Culture

Question: "How can someone best assimilate into the ‘culture’ of Orthodoxy even picking up other national customs without losing their own nationality (being of the USA for example)? How do we find that middle balance of taking the good and leaving the bad from our own culture?"

There is no such thing as a generic Orthodoxy. Our faith is handed to us by particular people, who come from particular cultural expressions of the faith. Consequently I think a convert can only embrace the particular expression of the faith as they receive it, in the context that they have converted in.  Some converts have gone so far as to actually try to adopt the ethnic identity of whatever Orthodox Jurisdiction they convert into -- I have even heard of cases in which people Russified their surname. This is of course ridiculous, and is neither necessary, nor helpful.

When I first encountered the Orthodox Faith, it was in the Russian Orthodox context. I was never under any illusions that I could become a Russian, nor did I have any great desire to do so. When the Orthodox Faith was brought to the Slavs, they embraced many aspects of the Orthodox Byzantine culture that brought them the Faith, but they remained Slavs, and with time, they in turn made the Faith their own, and a new Orthodox culture developed. You could go back one step further and talk about the Jewish culture of the Apostles, and the interaction that the Greek converts had with it, which ultimately developed into the Byzantine Greek culture. So while I am not a Russian, nor could I ever become a Russian, my experience of Orthodoxy came in a Russian package, and so I am Russian Orthodox, and love and appreciate the best aspects of Russian culture. 

Anything in any culture that is contrary to the Orthodox Christian Faith has to go. But anything that is good or virtuous in a culture can be embraced. The Greeks certainly did not give up the best aspects of their culture when they embraced the Christian Faith, and the Church has been enriched by the Greek Christian culture that came out of that. The same is true of Americans. Anything that is good in the culture that you have when you enter the Church you get to keep.

And while we have to embrace the expression of Orthodoxy as we receive it, since we live in a context where we have many other cultural expressions of Orthodoxy, we should resist the temptation to look down on other practices that are no less authentic, but nevertheless different than what we are familiar with.

Someday, God willing, we will see a distinctly American Orthodox culture, but attempts to force that into existence prematurely have met with bad results, and I think this fails to understand how Orthodoxy changes a culture. The Russians did not decide one day that they were going to toss out Greek culture, and concoct a Russian version of it. It happened naturally, as their national Church matured. The American Church has a very long way to go.

However, none of this means that those of us whose language is English need to have the services in a foreign language. The texts of the services have all been translated into English, and so there is no reason why we should not use them.

What a convert should do is try to learn what they can from the most pious and mature Orthodox Christians they encounter in their parish, and emulate them. You will inevitably find some faults in such people, and so those things you should not follow. And you certainly should not emulate the bad habits of those who have grown up on the Church. For example, many Orthodox Christians have a bad a habit of coming to Church late, or coming to Church inconsistently. Ignore the bad example of those people, and imitate the ones that are doing what they should be doing.

One temptation for any convert is to take things to extremes, and so finding the balance is something that you have to work towards. For example, while we can and should learn from monasticism, unless and until you go to a monastery, you should not try to live like you are an Athonite monk. For one thing, it's not going to work, and you are likely to have the wheels of your faith come off at some point. Keep your focus on trying to live like a normal pious layman, and if God leads you to a monastery eventually, you will be a lot more likely to work out your salvation there, if you have learned how to work it out in a balanced way, while living in the world.. We should always remember the wise words of St. Poemen the Great: 

"Everything that goes to excess comes from the demons" (Benedicta Ward, translator, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, The Alphabetical Collection (Kalamazoo: Cistercian Publications, 1975, 1984 revised edition), p. 185.).

For More Information:

 Renewing the Mind: Acquiring an Orthodox outlook

Acquiring an Orthodox Mindset (a section of articles from Orthodoxinfo.com)

A Pilgrim's Podvig (an account of my own conversion)

The Colors of the Russian Church

A Pilgrim's Podvig

Someone suggested I write about why I became Orthodox in 750 words or less. Well, this is just about 18,000 words over that limit:

A Pilgrim's Podvig

I had made a few attempts at this in the past, but I always felt like those attempts only told part of the story, so this time I went big, and began David Copperfield style with "I am born", and went from there.

This article is peppered with hyperlinks, because unless someone followed a very similar path to mine, there would be too many references that would not be understood.

An Ode to Thomas Oden

I was raised in the Nazarene Church, and so when I felt a "call" to the ministry, I went to study theology at the nearest Nazarene University, which was Southern Nazarene University, in Bethany, Oklahoma, and attended there from 1986 to 1990. While, at that time, the Nazarene Church was still a very conservative evangelical denomination, the professors who taught in their Religion and Philosophy Department were not so much. My elder brother had attended the same school earlier in the 80's and the liberal professors he had were the conservative professors that I had... and they hadn't really changed. However the conservative professors had generally been replaced by professors who were even more liberal than the previous liberals. Much of the material I studied during that time was a labor to be endured -- authors that had little that inspired or edified -- but there were a few exceptions, and prominently among those exceptions were the books by the Methodist theologian Thomas Oden. Oden had been a student of the extremely liberal German biblical scholar Rudolph Bultmann, and so was very much a part of the skeptical intellectual environment that I found so unattractive. However, at some point in the 70's he began to apply the skeptical criteria of liberal scholarship back upon liberal scholarship, and ended up affirming that the "Ecumenical Consensus" of the first millennium of Christian history was "normative". I was introduced to his work in my systematic Theology class. He had at that time written the first two volumes of a systematic theology that followed the outline of the Nicene Creed. In that class, we used volume 2, "The Word of Life", which focused on those parts of the Creed that related to Christ. That book was so refreshing that I got me a copy of Volume 1, "The Living God", and read it as well. And I found that our library had his book "Agenda for Theology", which was I think then out of print, but was his theological manifesto, and explained how he had moved from being a Bultmanian to one who affirmed the authority of the Tradition of the Church. That book was later reprinted in a significantly revised form, under the title "After Modernity... What?" In my pastoral theology class, they also used his "Pastoral Theology" as a textbook, which went to the Tradition of the Church for guidance on how to deal with the practical issues of pastoral theology. Reading his works were not the only reason I eventually became Orthodox, but they were a part of a convergence of things that pointed me in that direction.

The third volume of his systematic theology was not published until 1992, and by that time I had been Orthodox awhile, and so was less eager to purchase a copy, though I always had the intention of eventually doing so, in order to complete the set. Just recently, I finally got around to it, and reading it has been a walk down memory lane. Reading the preface reminded me of what a radically different spirit I found in his writings in comparison with most of the material I had studied at SNU.

In the second paragraph of his preface, he wrote:

"At the end of this journey I reaffirm solemn commitments made at its beginning:

• To make no new contribution to theology
• to resist the temptation to quote modern writers less schooled in the whole counsel of God than the best ancient classic exegetes
• To seek quite simply to express the one mind of the believing church that has been ever attentive to the apostolic teaching to which consent has been given by Christian believers everywhere, always, and by all -- this what I mean by the Vincentian method (Vincent of Lerins, comm., LCC [Library of Christian Classics] VII, pp. 37-39,65-74; for an accounting of this method see LG [The Living God (volume 1 of his systematic theology)], pp. 322-25,341-51)

     I am dedicated to unoriginality. I am pledged to irrelevance if relevance means indebtedness to corrupt modernity. What is deemed relevant in theology is likely to be moldy in a few days. I take to heart Paul's admonition: "But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach a gospel other than the one we preached to you, let him be eternally condemned! As we [from the earliest apostolic kerygma] had already said, so now I say again: If anybody is preaching to you a gospel other than what you accepted [par o parelabete, other than what you received from the apostles], let him be eternally condemned [anathema esto]!" (Gal. 1:8, 9, NIV, italics added) (Life in the Spirit, p vii).

I can't remember in which of his books he said this, but I remember him echoing the above sentiments, and saying that he wanted the epitaph on his tombstone to say "He added nothing new to theology."

Thomas Oden is still a Protestant, and so one should not assume that I would agree with him entirely, but his devastating critique of Protestant liberalism and modernity in general, combined with his affirmation of the Tradition of the Church was an oasis in a spiritual and intellectual desert, and it pointed me in the direction of the Orthodox Church.

Illumined Heart: Interview with John Maddex

John Maddex


The Illumined Heart Podcast has a very interesting interview, which discusses the process of conversion that led John Maddex into the Orthodox Church. He is the founder of Ancient Faith Radio, and previously worked for the Moody Bible Institute Radio Network, and for Focus on the Family.

You can click here to listen