Dear friends, I pray that the blessings of the Nativity, Theophany, and impending Presentation of the Lord have richly descended upon all of you. The Nativity season gave me some time to observe and reflect on the current state of Christianity in our nation and to try and make sense of some of the things that have occurred on the Christian scene in the last 20 years or so. Growing up as a Methodist gave me my first taste of American Christianity and a particularly native one at that. Though it was of course imported into this country from Great Britain and in large part responsible for the Second Great Awakening through the efforts of its Arminian proponent, John Wesley, and his Calvinist counterpoint, George Whitefield, it represented to me what I would come to recognize as the comfortable pew, and especially suited to the 1950s era into which I was born.

Methodism has always had a social conscience, largely the result of Wesley’s insistence that faith was itself something that could indeed be lost, not to mention salvation, and that the Christian profession needed to be something other than simply an intellectual assent. One needed to feel something, to actively participate in the very real experience of God in our lives. The favorite Methodist maxim, “In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, and in all things charity,” spread to a host of other mainline churches, and along with it an ossifying sense of being Establishment. But over the years its membership, along with most of the churches of historical provenance, began to decline.

As the founders of these Reformation and Post-Reformation churches undoubtedly experienced the same sort of upheaval and loss of control over original unifying principles, modern American Protestantism seems rather mystified at what was happening to it. Much of this confusion began to be fueled by the prevalence of highly liberal and deconstructionist theology that began in the mid-1800s. For churches that ostensibly relied on the Bible for the sole source of their faith and authority, though, truth be told, few of them actually did, the undermining of the holy Scriptures was the equivalent of removing the pope of Rome and telling the Roman Catholics that he was never coming back. This is what happens, especially in the Orthodox view, when one sets anything or anyone essentially above the Church.

This liberal theology was not a one-time thing. It would continue to erode and deform the elements of historical faith still present in these denominations, eventually leaving these good people gasping for some pure, pollution-free teaching. Unfortunately and despite some renewal and continuing elements in many of these churches, none would be forthcoming. It’s difficult to put the de-mythological cat back into the bag once it is released.

Unfortunately, what happens in this kind of scenario is rarely a return to the sober and reasonable. Usually reactionary elements set in, and a strong leaning to the far opposite end of the see-saw takes place. Hence, after a number of years, for these things move slowly, more and more traditional or fundamental people began to make the move towards churches that were opposed to the liberal and perceived hostile theologies that were creeping into their beloved churches. Splits came and then more splits, as it became apparent that the criterion for who stepped over the line and when was not so easy to determine, and that determination itself was highly subjective, as one could say about the Protestant world in general, I suppose.

This of course caused those on the theologically—and increasingly politically as well, as the two began to couple hand-in-hand—progressive side of things to retreat even further into the recesses of the theologically indeterminate, so that once-held basic beliefs about Christ and his Church were so widely dismissed that there wasn’t much left of Christianity there, except for the vaguely, and again highly subjective, sense of moral purpose, especially as reflected in political activism and causes. This is a generalization, of course, as trends on both sides have been present for about several hundred years now. Fundamentalism has been around about the same time as the first hints at the denial of the divinity of Jesus Christ from established Church bodies, or at least some representatives. For some reason, Protestantism has found it difficult to maintain itself on the road, instead veering to one side or the other. Orthodoxy provides the needed steering, if only we will get into the car—but more on that in a moment.

I don’t always watch interview programs, but over the holidays I happened upon the Charlie Rose Show on PBS, and what I heard during an only 15- to 20-minute segment of that program certainly shocked even me upon realizing how far the liberal side of Protestant Christianity has drifted. His guest was a woman named Serene Jones, an Oklahoma native and graduate of Yale University Divinity School, where she obtained an M.Div. and a Ph.D. in theology, only to teach there for 17 years before assuming another position, that which was subject of the interview. Union Theological Seminary in New York is the oldest multi-denominational seminary in the country, and a traditional bastion of liberal destruction theology.

Ms. Jones has assumed its headship and is the first woman ever to do so. Union Seminary, which sports such luminaries as author Frederick Buechner and theology professor Dwight Hopkins, also hosted for a short time the eminent and well-respected Lutheran theologian and pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a fact that Jones seemed to take particular delight in. Of course, Bonhoeffer might dispute her glee, especially as he said of the institution that

The students [there] are completely clueless with respect to what dogmatics is really about. They are unfamiliar with even the most basic questions. They become intoxicated with liberal and humanistic phrases, laugh at the fundamentalists, and yet basically are not even up to their level.

Well, Charlie Rose failed to inquire about that. And this is not pick on Serene Jones, or at least not too much, but she is representative of the remnant of a once-great, or at least more traditional, branch of Christianity that now seeks refuge in, for instance, faith traditions ranging from Baptist to Buddhist to the blessedly undefined. Your $44,607-per-year tuition will get you a wide variety of coursework, including “Womanism, Feminism, Queer Theology, and interreligious studies.” Now, this is from their website, so check it out if you don’t believe me.

But what was astounding in this interview is that the name of Jesus Christ, or even God, was not mentioned once. Ms. Jones was eager to admit that “she is not the type of Christian who believes in miracles,” and that Christianity has been fomenting hatred all through history. When Rose pressed her for an example of this, all she could come up with were, of all things, the Crusades. I could hardly believe that a woman with her education and position knew so little about Christian history as to fall back on this little devil, only a footnote in history, really, and not once mentioning all the good that Christianity has done in the world, far more than any other religion ever has. In fact, Christianity can be said to be the good in the world, perhaps the only good.

For Ms. Jones, even despite the fact that she sees the world in a horrible state and at a definite crossroads, the last thing she wants to do is to promote religion of any kind—Goodness, no!—which made her a rather pathetic figure in my mind: a woman concerned about the fate of the world, yet denying the very power that can make it whole. This is the predicament of modern liberal Christianity, and Orthodoxy shares it to the extent that much of its ecumenical work has been geared towards these types of churches.

But there’s another side of this story, the one that seems to be experiencing the most phenomenal growth, the appearance of churches that are intentionally non-affiliated with mainline churches, and many times the theology that gave them growth, in independent congregations of a distinctly make-it-up-as-you-go-along mentality. These groups vary greatly in their acceptance, rejection, or simply ignoring theological tenets. Most all claim to use the Bible as one of their foundational sources, but even that very definition is subject to a wide variety of belief and interpretation. There are some that seem to border on the purely superstitious in many ways, like the Harvest [International] Family Church in Geneseo, New York, which, aside from a rigorous, fundamental set of tenets, offers dream interpretation online for only $35.

Others border on orthodox proclamation, like the Living Stone Church in San Antonio, a hardy Pentecostal outfit, though their belief about the Bible—“In its original writing, it is inspired, infallible, and inerrant”—brings up a whole host of questions that are common and peculiar to these organizations. Which versions of the original writings? Do translations lose inerrancy? And what if the originals, like much of the Hebrew Old Testament, are corrupt or non-existent today? Yet the abandonment of genuine experiential Christian faith that is a core of belief that one can stand on is something that is spawning these new churches, yet are seemingly devoid of interest in the great and continuously consistent tradition in Orthodoxy’s possession.

If the Bible was to suddenly disappear, so would these churches, but they would also have Orthodoxy to recreate it for them: not from memory, but from its own living experience with uniting itself with Christ. These new churches, created from scratch, while depending on a tradition coming from the Orthodox Church, are admirable in their attempts to find their way out of the maze of conflicting theologies and faithless proclamations so prevalent in the liberal churches. In a way, each of these paths represent very distinct American traits: rugged individualism and fundamentalism. At first glance, we might think that these are antithetical to one another, but they touch on the religiosity and innate goodness of the American people that have always found ways around the tension between these two.

It’s almost like the freedom declared for the individual’s choice is limited only by his or her own desire for constraints on that choice. For it is only when desire is given boundaries that the human being finds rest, satisfaction, and contentment, yet these things, found in such a mix in this and other similar societies, actually inhabit an environment where the most one can hope to find is packaged in parcels of partial truth, and embracing these parcels sometimes creates temporary churchly situations that one can live with, even if an unsatisfactory itch for something deeper remains.

Orthodoxy is the answer to that dissatisfaction. Orthodoxy is the glue that can hold together the variance of the American scene. Its tenets certainly are as exalting of the human person in the spiritual realm as American philosophy of the human person in the political arena, and there is no reason why the two cannot meet. The broad and historically refreshing example of the Founding Fathers of this nation find their temperance in the Orthodox faith, a faith that connects them to a much greater tradition, one whose profundity and life-altering possibilities fill in the holes where mere affirmations of the rights of mankind, no matter how inspired, fall short.

With the discipline and utterly respectful attitude of the Orthodox Christian faith of every human being created in the image of God, both the liberal Christian who has lost sight of the power of Jesus Christ and his very unique message, while maintaining a yearning for a more just world and fairness for all people, and the more fundamentalist Christian seeking to recapture the power and message that so enlightened and inspired the earliest Christians, yet lacked the sense of connectedness to those in heaven and on earth that have gone before, find their meeting place. Orthodoxy holds it all together, offering unassailable doctrine within the confines of a wider message that is as all-embracing of the things found in the goodness of the created world as in the arms of the Savior himself.

This is why we must leave the various ghettos of our own creation and enter the realm of those seeking that which they have not been able to find. We must talk, preach, pray, and reach all of those whom the Lord God has prepared to receive his message. This is our ministry, our goal, and our command, and it transcends any and all partitions that beset our contemporary Church life. Ethnic or cradle, native or convert, the Lord is asking all of us to get busy and to do it now. Let us move forward in confidence and bring the disparate pages of American Christianity into one firmly bound book. We really don’t have a choice if we consider ourselves Orthodox Christians—even if the accomplishment of all these things would be nothing but, well, miraculous. After all, we are the kind of Christians who believe in miracles. And may God bless each and every one of you.