My New Blog: "From East to East"

Henceforth, I am going to do some of my "Orthodox" blogging on my new site: From East to East.

Please check it out.  I hope everyone will enjoy it.

It focuses on the intersection of Eastern Orthodoxy with Asian philosophies and religion.  Posts related to these things will be found there.

For other, more "traditional" Orthodox posts, I will still be using this blog.

Christianity as a Mode of Being

The essay that follows is an introduction to a series of essays that I would like to do on this blog.  All of them deal with the hiddenness, the paradox, the Mystery, and the apparent absence of God.  I would like to note that all of these essays—as opposed to the more traditional posts that I also want to include regularly—do not necessarily reflect a purely Orthodox view.  Errors in Church teaching that may (or may not) follow are purely my own.  These are simply honest reflections as I try to work out certain philosophical—as opposed to theological—views within my own (hopefully maturing) thought.

Christianity as a Mode of Being

     Much of what passes for Christianity today is nothing more than paganism.  Religions before Christ came into the world—before He gave Himself for the life of the world, and thus ended all paganism—were belief systems.  They were cultic, and it didn’t matter whether they were the cults of the Greek gods, the cults of Western Europe, or the pantheistic polytheism of India.  These paganistic systems were steeped in many of the same essentials: believe the right things to gain favor of your god(s) and do the right things—whether it was sacrifice or ritualistic worship—in order to not just gain favor, but to get specific things out of your deity.

     When looked at through the same lens as this brief definition of paganism, the current trends of Christianity are essentially the same thing.  Christianity of today is based on either believing the right thing—such as accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior—or doing the right thing—such as being sure to attend a church service on Sunday, or not use any profane language, or not drink any alcohol—in order to win the favor of God/Jesus.  The Christian cults that we have created in our “modern” world—cults that make nothing more than an idol of the Divine—are all about getting God to change His mind about us, as was ancient paganism.  However, early Christianity of the ancient East—the kind of Christianity these essays attempt to express—was different.  It was—and is, when still practiced—about us changing our minds about God.

     Christ did not give his life for the world in order to usher in the “right” form of paganism.  He gave His life in order to conquer death and to allow man to enter into a life lived in Him—in which we move, and dwell, and have our being.  But just what does this life lived in—and not just in, but through—Christ look like?

     The answer given by many Christians today—usually either “progressive” or “liberal” Christians—is that Christianity is a “way of life,” and that Christianity should be practiced, and should never be seen as just a belief system.  I sympathize with this approach to Christianity, and I would have to agree that it is a better or “higher” way to practice Christianity as opposed to the pagan variety, but I still think that it is wrong.

     Christianity as “belief system” ends up being just one form of belief amid the myriad of other pagan beliefs.  And the same is true of Christianity as a way of living—it is just one form of philosophical living among many others, for it becomes just that: a philosophy.

     Ancient philosophy—what I would call true philosophy, not the dull, academic armchair variety that is now in vogue—came out of paganism, and in many ways was the fullness of paganism.  And that’s precisely where the problem lies if Christianity is presented as a philosophical way of life.  Because the truth is that there are better forms of philosophy than Christianity.  For instance, if you just want to gain peace of mind, or be better equipped with handling the many stresses that daily life will throw at you, then certainly the philosophical, neo-psychological approaches of the different Asian religions are better suited.  And it’s not just the Asian religions, either.  The ancient Greek philosophies of Stoicism and Epicureanism are certainly better than any of the current crop of self-help masquerading as Christianity that pervades the bookshelves of “Christian” bookstores.

     And so the question now remains: If neither philosophical Christianity nor “pagan” Christianity is the answer, what is?

     If you want to truly usher in a life lived in Christ, then the answer must be that Christianity is neither philosophy nor religion but a mode of being.  It is a mode of being that encounters God.  And it is not an encounter with God that occurs just on Sunday morning, or when you pray, or when you practice anything that is liturgical.  It is an encounter that transcends and—yet at the same time—goes within all of these things.  It is an encounter not with a belief or a concept, but with the very Mystery that is God.

     It is an encounter on several levels.  The first—as just said—is an encounter with God as Mystery.  Anything that we make of God, or think of God, is not God, for as Evagrius Ponticus pointed out in the 4^th century: “God cannot be grasped by the mind.  If he could be grasped, he would not be God.”  This also means—and this is one of the major focal points of this book—that a life lived in God cannot be always “grasped” either.  Life is often hard, and it is often difficult.  It is filled with regret, pain, stress, and suffering.  To try to figure out the “why” of these things—such as trying to give them a concrete meaning through some sort of “God’s plan”—is to not live in the Mystery that is our Creator.  And this also means that we—who are made in the Image and Likeness of God—are also somewhat a mystery even to our own selves.  At the deepest parts of our beings, there is something unfathomable, beyond the realm to know.

     God, life, and our inner selves must all live in this very mystery of being.

     The second is an encounter with God as Christ, and, therefore, Truth as a Person.  It must become a relational mode of being.  As we encounter Mystery, and enter into Its very depths, we must discover that we are in relation to this Mystery that is Christ.  And if we are to do justice to Christ, then this relationship must be true by honoring all that Christ truly represents.  It can’t be some fake god of our own making—mythic, butler-ish, vengeful, you name it.  It must be the God of the cross, the God that suffered, and by doing so showed us the path that we too must follow—the narrow road that leads to life.

     It is also an encounter with God as Trinity, and God as hiddenness.  These, of course, are very closely tied with God as Mystery—you could say, in some ways, that they are one and the same.

     And, finally, it is an encounter with God as prayer.

     All of the essays that follow are attempts to express what it means to live out Christianity as a mode of being that honors and expresses all of these ways.  This is not an attempt to create some systematic theology that explains these various approaches and encounters—to attempt to do so would actually be a step backward, and would make all of this nothing more than another belief system, and therefore a regression back into paganism.  No, everything that follows are simply thoughts written down on paper; written as much for myself as for anyone else.  May you find as much solace—and sometimes discomfort—reading these words as I will attempt to find in writing them.