Several weeks ago, in an article in The New York Times, Serge Schmemann pointed to a possible "new collision of East and West." The East the article referred to was the Orthodox East, and the West was the West of NATO, the West of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. The Balkan crisis, it seems, has brought to the surface evidence of underlying fault lines between the historic Christian East and the Historic Christian West.
In the midst of the Balkan tragedy Orthodoxy has moved from "religion news" to "hard news." This suggests that it is necessary for us to take a careful look at the implications of the present moment for Orthodox mission and for the Orthodox role in American culture. And I would suggest there are direct implications for the vocation of Orthodox thought and witness in America, for the vocation of St. Vladimir's Seminary and for the mission in church and society to which graduates of the seminary are called.
In American Orthodox thinking, the theme of mission has taken a central place. We constantly speak of planting missions, we organize mission conferences, we are concerned about mission to Americans and mission to new immigrants. And we correctly see this mission emphasis both as our faithfulness to the Gospel and as our engagement with American society.
There are two tendencies in the Orthodox orientation towards mission in America. One tendency regards Orthodox mission simply as part of the American pluralist experience. In this view, Orthodoxy is one of the major faiths in America, and thus naturally takes its place in the competitive American religious setting as one point on the religious spectrum, as one aspect of the Christian presence in America. This approach might be called assimilationist.
The other tendency sees American culture and its Western Christian foundations as utterly alien to the Orthodox faith. In this view, Orthodoxy in America must live in opposition to other Christian bodies and maintain a position of hostility to American culture. This approach might be called confrontational.
These two approaches are at the same time contradictory and similar. At the philosophical and psychological levels, the assimilationist and confrontational approaches are mutually exclusive. They embody very different world views and personality types. At the level of function, however, they play identical roles. Not only assimilationism but also confrontational function as types of American religious experience. If the great sin of assimilationism is its acceptance of the view that religious faith offers "options" and "choices," and is thus part of the free market of religious ideas, then confrontation fully partakes of this sin because the exclusivist position functionally is part of the religious free market, offering spiritual choices and religious options.
Both approaches -- assimilationist and confrontational -- have tended to concentrate on the salvation of souls, one by one, as the primary vehicle for mission. Certainly, the priority of the salvation of persons is pastorally and spiritually sound. Yet it is curious that the question of the cultural context of Orthodox mission in America has not been addressed adequately. It is curious because the Orthodox experience of mission has traditionally engaged culture. Mission has been oriented both towards persons and towards cultures. Both cultures and persons have been transformed and baptized by the Orthodox church in mission. Thus, such peoples as the Greek, Romanian, Russian and Serbian (as illustrative examples) have been formed by the Orthodox Church through mission as the salvation of persons and through mission as the shaping of culture.
Our situation in America, of course, is very different. Orthodoxy in America did not enter into a pre-Christian cultural setting. The one exception was Alaska, where the Gospel was first preached by Orthodox missionaries, and where indeed the native culture was both baptized and transformed by Orthodoxy. When the Orthodox faith was introduced to the United States more than one hundred years ago, America was a Christian society -- primarily Protestant, but also Roman Catholic.
As everyone knows there have been sharp differences between Protestantism and Roman Catholicism . Indeed, it is obvious that Protestantism is born our of conflict within Western Christianity which was centered at Rome. Yet Roman Catholics and Protestants share the same historical trajectory, have debated the same questions, and face the same theological dilemmas.
One sign of this shared history and shared memory is that the Western Christian outlook, whether Roman Catholic or Protestant, as a rule does not include any consideration of Eastern Christianity. I should state now, and even emphasize, that among the best specialists in the Eastern Christian tradition today are Roman Catholics and Protestants. The Eastern Christian world, due to the historical cataclysms it has endured under Islam and Communism, has fallen behind in scholarship. Nevertheless, it remains true that the Western Christian outlook, while claiming inclusivity and ecumenical breadth, is in fact habitually confined to the Western Christian experience, and tends to take the western part of Christianity for the whole.
This can be seen in the course offerings of divinity schools and seminaries, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. A history of Christian thought, as a rule, takes a student on an intellectual journey to visit Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin -- as if there were no Cappadocians, no St. John Chrysostom, no St. Gregory Palamas.
A vivid, concrete illustration of this powerful tendency to take the western part for the Christian whole is given by the excellent book by Donald W. Shriver, Jr., An Ethic for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics. In a review of Christian thought on forgiveness, the author begins with the biblical roots and with the gospel, and then discusses the theology of Augustine, the medieval Western developments, and concludes with a consideration of the Reformation thinkers, specifically Luther and Calvin. The section on Christian thought is given the unambiguous title "Forgiveness in Politics in Christian Tradition." Although there are some powerful references to Dostoyevsky, in essence the theological world presented in this valuable book is confined to the Western Christian theological debates and dichotomies.
Now this pattern of limited and selective Christian memory by no means begins and ends in the scholarly realm of intellectual and theological history. Ideas have consequences. A political and historical world view logically follows, and is applied to very contemporary issues.
In an excellent series of articles in The New York Times several years ago, we were given perceptive descriptions of the complex reality of the Balkan ethnic conflicts. The narrative clearly showed that nationalist extremism in former Yugoslavia is easily found in Serbian Orthodox, Croatian Catholic, and Muslim settings. But the "assessment" given by way of conclusion claimed that the extremism of Serbian Orthodox people flowed from the very nature of their religion, while for Roman Catholic Croats extremism today was an unfortunate exception. There was a most peculiar quotation attributed to a former professor of Philosophy at Belgrade University, stating that the totalitarian intolerance of the Yugoslav Communist regime was borrowed by the Communists from Serbian Orthodoxy.
If a Greek or Russian journalist were to present a similar analysis of Western diseases and pathologies, claiming that they flow from the very nature of Western Christianity, we would be led to believe that such an analysis illustrates extremism, anti- Westernism, intolerance, and fanaticism. And indeed this would be true. But the Western stereotyping of the Christian East is considered to be objective, a defense of liberal values and tolerance, and an expression of commitment to civilized behavior.
The prevailing historical perspective of our society is that civilization and rationality and tolerance are Western achievements. Barbarity, intolerance, and genocide are the inheritance of the cultures deprived of Western civilization. Never mind that the two world-scale genocidal political ideologies of the 20th century both originated in the soil of Western Christianity and the Enlightenment. The Marxist ideology catalyzed the violent death of tens of millions of people in the twentieth century on the basis of class hatred. The Nazi ideology caused the Holocaust of the Jews and the genocide of other peoples on the basis of race hatred. Both sets of ideas emerged from the very center of civilized Europe, from the very heart of Western civilization. And today's culture of death is not limited to the killing fields of Rwanda, or the extreme violence in Sudan or Afghanistan, or the ethnic cleansings of Bosnia and Kosovo. It is a powerful presence in the high schools of Littleton, Colorado, and Conyers, Georgia, and in the millions of violent acts called abortions performed in the humane and civilized Western World in the very name of tolerance, human rights, and liberal values.
Christian East and Christian West are clearly not geographical terms. While the most visible "encounter" of East and West is occurring along the fault line in the Balkans, the Christian East and Christian West today also meet in New York and Chicago, in Atlanta and San Francisco, as well as in Athens and Moscow. Since we are directly involved in this encounter, we know that identifying all that is good with Eastern Christianity is no more accurate than identifying all that is good with Western Christian culture. No disease or pathology of Western society is foreign to societies built on Eastern Christian foundations. No social sickness of the Eastern world is alien to the West.
Yet the divide of East and West is discernible not only in geopolitical terms but also in Christian ecumenism. The major underlying reason for the intense Orthodox discomfort in ecumenical organizations is that ecumenical discourse is usually defined by its orientation towards the theological issues flowing from Western Christian developments. The fact that Eastern Christian themes are the subject of special study and attention has not affected the fundamental direction of the ecumenical quest for Christian unity or provided a realistic corrective to the dominant Western ecumenical model. As Orthodox Christians engage in the necessary debate and dialogue of the Christian East with the Christian West, we are clearly called upon to make a critique of the Western selectivity of memory, Western self- satisfaction and even arrogance. But this critique of ours will be justified only if it embodies a call for authentic Christian catholicity and wholeness. If our critique falls victim to the demons of our own ethnic or religious tribalisms, to our own self-satisfaction and triumphalism, we will not succeed in bearing witness to the spirit and presence of Christ and to the light of the Gospel. Orthodoxy is true to itself only if it seeks too point the way to Christ and to Christ's Gospel, offering the whole Gospel to the whole world.