Learning about Orthodoxy

Because we didn't know very much about Orthodoxy, we set out to learn. And we were living in a small town in Utah at the time. The closest Orthodox parish was about two hours from us. I reached out and contacted the priest (who lived in Idaho at the time) and started asking him some questions. I pulled from boxes the books on Orthodoxy I had bought years before when I had first started collecting icons. And we turned, of course, to social media.

Here are some of the first videos I remember us watching together:

The Jesus Prayer

Learning to Pray

Confronting the Fire of God's Love-- Fr Barnabas Powell

Orthodox Boot Camp, Session 1: Fr Barnabas Powell

Orthodox Boot Camp, Session 2: Fr Barnabas Powell

Orthodox view of Salvation  to this day, this video has probably had one of the most profound impacts on how I view God. While we had been attending our Bible Study, we had been discussing theology with people from a primarily Baptist background, which was consistent with Darren's upbringing. Because I had come from a Latter-Day Saint background, the general conception was (and mostly correctly so) that I generally knew nothing about real Christianity.

But I knew that what they were telling me didn't really sit well with my own experiences of God. They told us that God cannot look at sin, so that when God looks at us, he sees Christ in front of us. And that the most important part of Christ's suffering and dying on the cross was to die for our sins. This is penal substitutionary atonement theory. One of its primary tenets is that Christ died to satisfy an angry God. You will often hear evangelists say, "God is love, but..." And after that "but" comes "He is also a Just God." They like to focus on the "just" part. That somehow God was so angry with mankind that his own Son had to die to make God less angry. How would that make a parent less angry?

Anyway, this view differs from the Orthodox view of salvation.

According to Orthodoxy, God never turns away from us. Humans can't make God angry. Humans can't make God anything. Father Barnabas Powell (see videos below) likes to say, "God's just fine." It's really ridiculous to think that anything as puny as a human being could make something as huge as God angry. Angry enough that He would demand a blood sacrifice.

In Orthodoxy, the real work of the cross was the resurrection that came afterwards. Before Christ's resurrection, mankind was separated from God by The Fall. Everyone who died went to Hades. After Christ's resurrection, he went down into Hades and pulled everyone out.

The Resurrection of Christ is the central event in the liturgical year of the Orthodox Church and is understood in literal terms as a real historical event. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was crucified and died, descended into Hades, rescued all the souls held there through man's original sin; and then, because Hades could not restrain the infinite God, rose from the dead, thus saving all humanity. Through these events, he released humanity from the bonds of Hades and then came back to the living as man and God. That each individual human may partake of this immortality, which would have been impossible without the Resurrection, is the main promise held out by God in his New Covenant with humanity, according to Orthodox Christian tradition.

The Orthodox also do not believe in a Hell of fire and brimstone, a Hell of eternal conscious torment. What could a man do in his short period on earth to warrant being tortured for eternity?

The Eastern Orthodox Church... teaches that both the elect and the lost enter into the presence of God after death, and that the elect experience this presence as light and rest, while the lost experience it as darkness and torment... Hell as professed in the East is neither the absence of God, nor the ontological separation of the soul from the presence of God, but rather the opposite—Heaven and Hell are the fully manifest divine presence, experienced either pleasantly as peace and joy or unpleasantly as shame and anguish, depending upon one's spiritual state and preparedness. 

Sin is viewed in Orthodoxy not as a list of bad things that people do, but as a turning away from God. Repentance is a turning back.

Eastern Orthodox Christians hold that man was originally created in communion with God, but through acting in a manner contrary to his own nature (which is intrinsically ordered to communion with God), he disrupted that communion.

Because of man's refusal to fulfill the "image and likeness of God" within him, corruption and the sickness of sin whose consequence is death entered man's mode of existence. But when Jesus came into the world He Himself was Perfect Man and Perfect God united in the divine Hypostasis of the Logos, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Through his assumption of human nature, human existence was restored, enabling human beings, the fulfilment of creation, through participation in divinity by incorporation into Jesus Christ.

  St. Athanasius:

The Word of God came in His own Person, because it was He alone, the Image of the Father, Who could recreate man made after the Image. In order to effect this re-creation, however, He had first to do away with death and corruption. Therefore He assumed a human body, in order that in it death might once and for all be destroyed, and that men might be renewed according to the Image [of God].^[14]

Salvation, or "being saved," therefore, refers to this process of being saved from death and corruption and the fate of hell. The Orthodox Church believes that its teachings and practices represent the true path to participation in the gifts of God. Yet, it should be understood that the Orthodox do not believe that you must be Orthodox to participate in salvation. God is merciful to all (emph. mine).

The Orthodox believe that there is nothing that a person (Orthodox or non-Orthodox) can do to earn salvation. It is rather a gift from God. However, this gift of relationship has to be accepted by the believer, since God will not force salvation on humanity (emph mine). Man is free to reject the gift of salvation continually offered by God. To be saved, man must work together with God in a synergeia whereby his entire being, including his will, effort and actions, are perfectly conformed with, and united to, the divine.

When I first learned this, my whole being said, "Yes." This is the truth. This is consistent with everything that I understand about God from my own experience as a living, breathing person.

So, everything about Orthodoxy is meant to prepare us for God's presence, so that we can experience it  pleasantly, as peace and joy.

Now, Orthodoxy, to the western mind, can seem very strange and foreign. I would even go so far as to say it can be a culture shock. Not just the theology, but also the worship itself. Last week, we went out to dinner with some Orthodox friends who are both former Latter-Day Saints. The husband converted before the wife did, and she went through the process of converting while they were courting. He said to her at one point, "We don't go to church to learn. We go to worship."

And that is absolutely the best way to think of it.

When you walk into an Orthodox service, you are stepping into a heavenly stream of worship that is continuously occurring in heaven, without beginning and without end. We just participate in small moments of it. We step into the stream-- the worship is a living thing-- and when we step out of it, the worship continues, just as a stream of water continues to flow and exist beyond our experience of it.

When we are at home, we also participate in this stream. We stand in front of our icon corners to pray. We have our eyes open, and we pray out loud, ancient prayers, the same prayers every day. We join the stream, just as we do standing at church in front of and surrounded by icons of saints, which represent the saints who are very much alive in a realm we cannot see in our human state.