The South African pioneers of African freedom, like Tiyo Soga, Pixley kaIsaka Seme and J.J. Xaba would never have stood for xenophobia, President Thabo Mbeki said at a gathering in Tshwane this afternoon.

He was speaking at the National Tribute in Remembrance of the Victims of Attacks on Foreign Nationals and South Africans held in the Pretoria City Hall. I went with our Archbishop, His Eminence Metropolitan Seraphim, Archibshop of Johannesburg and Pretoria, and Father Athinodoros Papaevripaides (usually known as Fr Athos Pappas for short).

It was an interesting gathering. It was a relatively warm and sunny winter afternoon. The city hall was crowded with a couple of thousand people, and there were several members of the cabinet and provincial premiers there as well. There were also some of those who had been displaced in the violence, and relatives of some of those who had been killed. A choir sang while we waited for the meeting to begin.

The meeting opened with the choir singing the national anthem, and few people joined in. Unusually, for a “national” occasion, there were no raised fists or hands on hearts. It seemed a bit like a football match being played in a foreign country. Four religious leaders led opening prayers — Hindu, Jewish, Muslim and Christian. Then there was an opening address by the Mayor of Tshwane, Dr G Ramopkgopa.

The Minister of Safety and Security, Charles Nqakula have a brief report on efforts to deal with the attacks, and said that investigations so far had shown that the attacks were orchestrated by criminal gangs. A young person from one of the affected communities, Thabiso (I did not catch his surname) spoke on the action community members had taken to bring back the people who had been chased out, and to organise the community to protect them. Another community leader from a different place told a similar story. Bishop Ndanganeni Phaswana of the Lutheran Church noted that South Africa was not the only country that had experienced such violence, and alluded to the recent violence in Zimbabwe.

The Dean of the Diplomatic Corps, Ambassador Abdalla Alzubedi, then spoke about the attacks on behalf of the diplomatic community

Those criminal attacks were condemned by the government and the people of South Africa as well as by other governments and peoples of the world in solidarity with the victims and their families and their countries of origin from which many of them of them had come to South Africa as refugees seeking better political, social and economic environments.

He too noted that such violence was not unique to South Africa but was found in many countries of the world, and he called for a concerted effort by all the nations of the world to find remedies. The picture shows His Excellency Ambassador Abdalla Alzubedi (on left) with His Eminence, Metropolitan Seraphim, the Orthodox Archbishop of Johannesburg and Pretoria.

There was a video clip of a younger Thabo Mbeki, then Deputy President, saying “I am an African”, and then he spoke, pointing out that the pioneers would not have countenanced xenophobia for a moment, and that their vision was Africa-wide. He singled out the leaders of the Ethiopian Church in South Africa for special mention, saying that their vision of a century and more ago was for a church that united Africa. I found that especially interesting, because of my own historical studies on the Ethiopian Church. He emhpasised that the majority of South Africans still hold to that vision, and that racism, chauvinism and xenophopia are the view of a minority.

There was a final vote of thanks and summing up of the proceedings by Ebrahim Rassool, Premier of the Western Cape (seen in the photo with Archbishop Seraphim). He, like the other speakers, apologised for the violence that had occurred, and thanked the civil society organisations and religious bodies that had not only helped with food, blankets, accommodation and so on for the displaced people, but had given the government valuable advice on how to deal with the situation. He thanked the police and members of the civil service for their efforts to track down the perpetrators. And he reiterated the determination expressed by other speakers that we must never allow this sort of thing to happen again.

I’m not a journalist, and I don’t normally mix with the movers and shakers and the rich and famous, so I’m probably not in a position to analyse what was going on there. Political journalists, who see political leaders week by week and measure the smallest changes in the political climate may have a different idea about the significance of this event, and the mood of the gathering. So my take on it is that of an ordinary citizen, but some things struck me.

1. There was a mood of both contrition and determination. Contrition for having allowed such things to happen. There was no mincing of words. The government speakers were apologising for failing to protect people and their rights under the constitution by allowing such things to happen. I got the impression that people in government had found it a sobering experience.

2. There was also a reaffirmation of the ideals of human rights, freedom and welcoming of refugees, and a determination never to allow this kind of thing to happen again. There was concern that the foreign media, especially, had speculated that the ideals of liberation, freedom and democracy were dead, and that there was a new inward-looking chauvinism and ubuntu was dead. Ambassador Alzubedi told the story of a freedom fighter who had been seriously wounded and taken to the morgue, where he woke up, and, realising where he was, began shouting that he was alive and demanding to be let out. A mortuary attendant said, “Well the doctors say you’re dead, so just lie down quietly.” The ideals, he suggested, were not dead, and would not lie down.

3. There was also a bit of a wakeup call from civil society and religious leaders in particular. Sometimes in the past one has sometimes had the impression that ANC leaders, especially those who spent a long time in exile, down-played the part played by religious leaders in the liberation struggle, and tended to be a bit stand-offish towards them. The response of civil society organisations in general, and religious groups in particular, to the crisis seems to have made quite an impression.

4. But there didn’t seem to be many people there from the new leadership of the ANC, and that cast a bit of a pall over the proceedings. There were all these people expressing determination never to allow this kind of thing to happen again — but will they still be here after next year? And when President Thabo Mbeki announced that three people from the freedom struggle had died recently, it seemed to rub the point in. Have the ideals really been passed to the next generation?

In the previous post I questioned the belief of some theologians that “theology of religion” was all about whether one could find salvation in other religions. The question assumes that “other” religions have a similar notion of salvation to Christianity, and that “salvation” is what they are all about. I pointed out that the concept of “salvation” is not central to all religions, and that even Christians can’t agree about what “salvation” is.

In at least some parts of the Christian blogosphere there has been considerable discussion about the “penal substitution” theory of the atonement (”penal” was the “p” word that I couldn’t remember in my previous post). As an Orthodox Christian I have found the discussion somewhat unreal, as Orthodoxy has never had the juridical understanding of the atonement developed by Anselm of Canterbury, nor the penal substitution refinement of it, developed by Calvin. As Stamoolis (1986:9) puts it, following L.A. Zander, “The East was not influenced by Anselm: its soteriology is different from that of the West”. As I wrote in my doctoral thesis on Orthodox mission methods:

The schism of 1054 took place in the lifetime of Anselm of Canterbury, and he wrote his Cur Deus homo? a few years later. While the schism of 1054 appears to have been mainly about the Western addition of the filioque clause to the Symbol of Faith, and its attempt to impose that on the East (Runciman 1988:90-91), the heritage of Anselm is at least as significant in accounting for the differences in the style and method of mission following the eleventh century. Yet even this goes back a long way. At the root of the different understanding of soteriology is a different understanding of sin, and especially a different understanding of “original” sin. Again, as Stamoolis (1986:9) puts it, following L.A. Zander, “The East was not influenced by Augustine; its anthropology is different from that of the West”.

And, because I’m lazy and don’t like typing lots of stuff, much of what follows is also taken from my thesis, though I haven’t bothered to indicate all the quotes.

A favourite verse of evangelical Protestants in evangelising is Romans 3:23, “For all have sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God”. For the evangelical Protestants, the emphasis is on the “all”. They tend to use the verse in support of the contention that there are no exceptions to the universality of sin; all men are sinners, therefore all men need to repent. For Orthodox Christians, however, the emphasis is on the glory of God. The verse is almost tautologous, because to “sin” means to fall short, to miss the mark. In the Protestant use, the verse is ripped out of its context, and interpreted in individualistic terms. Evangelical Protestants interpret “all” to mean “every single individual”, though from the context it is clear that St Paul was comparing and contrasting Jews and Greeks — those who had the benefit of the Mosaic law and those who did not. For Orthodox Christians, this verse means primarily that we have all missed the mark, and the aim, the target that we have missed is the glory of God. And the very word “Orthodox” itself implies the remedy — instead of the curved path of the arrow veering from the target, or falling short of it, Orthodoxy is the straight (orthos) path to glory (doxa).

Man is created in the image and likeness of God, and the Greek fathers distinguished between these. The image of God in man is that of a unique person, free autonomous and creative — and this is a characteristic that we as human beings still possess. The image of God in man was not destroyed in the Fall. The likeness of God has, however, been distorted or lost through sin — kindness, gentleness, generosity, patience, joy, peace, love (Oleksa 1993:355). This likeness of God was not a static condition in Adam and Eve — it was something they were to grow into. What sin has done is to reorient us in harmful and self-destructive directions. Sin has distorted, but not destroyed, the image of God in man. And because of the effects of sin, we cannot reach the likeness of God by our own efforts. God has revealed himself to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three persons, yet undivided. No individual can be “like God”, because God is a communion of persons, and Orthodox teaching therefore asserts that salvation is personal but not individual. And this understanding is also, to some extent, found among the Western fathers too, who speak of us dwelling in the land of unlikeness. Salvation is the restoration of the likeness of God in man, becoming, by grace, by God’s energy and power, like God. This process is called theosis or divinisation in Orthodox theology, and it is one that catechumens are invited to begin at baptism (Oleksa 1993:356).

In Western theology, especially since Anselm, the juridical understanding of the atonement had been based on the idea of sin and evil as being primarily something that God punishes us for (Rodger 1989:28). In the Orthodox view, however, sin and evil are primarily something that God rescues us from. Salvation begins with being released “from the bondage of the enemy”. Salvation is in the first place a liberation from bondage (Hayes 1993:168).
“Original sin”, in the Orthodox view, is therefore not a kind of genetic inheritance, something carried with us, that we are born with, inherited from our ancestors, as Western theology tends to assert (Cross & Livingstone 1983:1010). It is better to picture original sin as something external, something environmental, not something that we are born with, but rather that we are born into (Cronk 1982:45; Hopko 1983:30; Davies 1971:205-205). We are born into a world that has been stolen from God, and has become a prison. We are born into a world that lies in the power of the evil one. We are citizens of the kingdom of Satan by birth. We are among the goods that the strong man holds in his palace. We are born literally possessed by the strong man (Lk 11:21). In the exorcisms preceding baptism the devil is dispossessed of his ill-gotten gains.

One manifestation of this difference in understanding of “original sin” between the East and the West can be seen in the Roman Catholic doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. According to this teaching, God miraculously intervened to remove the stain (macula) of original sin from Mary at the moment of her conception. Orthodox theologians have generally rejected this teaching — not because they believe that Mary was conceived sinfully, but because they do not believe in the maculate conception of the rest of us (Ouspensky 1987:338; Hopko 1984:42). For Orthodox Christians, original sin is not so much a “stain on the soul”, as a condition of the world into which we are conceived and born. We are not conceived maculate, but we become maculate by our collaboration with the evil around us (Hopko 1983:30; 1984:43).

SALVATION

If sin is falling short of the glory of God, salvation is being redirected or reoriented towards the target, the glory of God, or the likeness of God. As Oleksa (1993:356) notes, catechumens are invited to begin this process at baptism. Before being baptised, the catechumen stands at the entrance to the church, facing east, bareheaded and unshod, and the priest breathes three times in his or her face, and makes the sign of the cross on the catechumen’s forehead and breast, and then prays that the catechumen’s delusions will be removed, that they will be filled with faith, hope and love, and will come to know the Holy Trinity, that they will walk in God’s commandments and be pleasing to him, that their name will be written in the book of life and that they will be joined to the flock of God’s inheritance, that God’s name will be glorified in them and that they will rejoice in the works of their hands and their generation so that they may praise, worship and glorify God all the days of their lives (Hapgood 1975:271). This is a prayer for restoration and reorientation, for salvation and wholeness. But it is immediately followed by four prayers of exorcism.

In the exorcisms the present condition of the catechumen is sharply contrasted with the future condition envisaged in the prayer described above. Before God can receive the catechumen into his heavenly kingdom, he or she must be delivered “from the bondage of the enemy” (Hapgood 1975:273). “Conversion” therefore, is not merely a mental activity, an exchange of one set of ideas for another, an acceptance of a new worldview or a new ideology. Conversion is “fleeing from ‘this world’ which has been stolen from God by the enemy and has become a prison” (Schmemann 1974:20). The whole world lies in the power of the Evil One (I John 5:19).

Salvation as liberation
The English words “redemption” or “liberation” can be used to translate the Greek apolutrosis, which means a loosing, unbinding or setting free. Apolutrosis could refer to the setting free of a slave or prisoner. In the Orthodox understanding, there are two aspects of this liberation or freedom: the “freedom from” and the “freedom to”. We are freed from bondage to sin, evil, the devil and death. We are freed to become what God intended us to be — free creatures created in his image and likeness. These freedoms are inseparable. “Liberation from demonic power is the beginning of man’s restoration. Its fulfilment, however, is the heavenly kingdom into which man was received in Christ, so that ascension to heaven, communion with God and ‘deification’ have truly become man’s unique destiny and vocation” (Schmemann 1974:26). Because we are in bondage to the devil, evil and death, we cannot attain the life of God. But by his Death and Resurrection Christ has bound the strong man, set us free from sin and death, and opened the way to the heavenly kingdom. As St John of Damascus put it in his joyful Paschal hymn, sung by Orthodox Christians at the Paschal Vigil:

This is the day of Resurrection. Let us be illumined, O people. Pascha, the Pascha of the Lord. For from death to life and from earth to heaven has Christ our God led us, as we sing the song of victory (The Paschal service 1990:30).

By his Ascension and the Descent of the Holy Spirit Christ has raised our human nature to the heavenly places, and sent the indwelling power of God himself to enable us to be “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pe 1:4). We enter the heavenly kingdom by baptism.

In the first exorcism the priest says

The Lord layeth thee under ban, O Devil: He who came into the world and made his abode among men, that he might overthrow thy tyranny and deliver men; who also upon the tree didst triumph over the adverse powers, when the sun was darkened and the earth did quake… who also by death annihilated Death, and overthrew him who exercised the dominion of Death, that is thee, the Devil (Hapgood 1975:272).

In the exorcisms preceding baptism we are first prised free from the power of the Evil One, and then, facing the west, the direction of darkness, renounce his kingdom. This turning to the West and renunciation of the Satan is thus “an act of freedom, the first free act of the man liberated from enslavement to Satan” (Schmemann 1974:27). We then turn (convert) to the East, and accept Christ as King and God (Hapgood 1975:274). This is very similar in form to a secular naturalisation ceremony in which one applies for citizenship of another country. One first renounces one’s old citizenship, and then accepts the citizenship of the new country. So we renounce our former citizenship in the Kingdom of Satan, and accept new citizenship in the Kingdom of God. In the world there is a difference between citizenship by naturalisation and citizenship by birth. In baptism, however, we are born again by water and Spirit (John 3:5; Titus 3:5). We are not second-class citizens of the heavenly kingdom. “What you have come to is Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem where the millions of angels have gathered for the festival, with the whole Church in which everyone is a ‘first-born son’ and a citizen of heaven” (Heb 12:22-23).

The declaration of allegiance is completed by the recitation of the Symbol of Faith, and the catechumens then bow down before the Holy Trinity.

The point here is that the candidate for baptism is not free to voluntarily renounce Satan until he or she has been prised from Satan’s clutches by the exorcism. Liberation precedes renunciation and the declaration of allegiance. The people of Israel could only enter into the covenant with God at Sinai after they had been rescued from the clutches of Pharaoh at the Red Sea (Hayes 1992a:55).

Then follows the blessing of the water for baptism. Schmemann (1974:39) notes that water has a triple symbolism. Firstly, it is the symbol of life. Water is an essential element of life in the world, and so it has cosmic significance. Secondly, it is a symbol of destruction and death; it is the dark habitation of demonic powers. Thirdly, it is a symbol of purification, cleansing and renewal. And so the water is both exorcised and blessed. In the fallen world, matter is never neutral; if it is not used as a means of communion with God, it becomes the bearer and locus of the demonic (Schmemann 1974:48). In the preface to the blessing of the water, the priest says “Thou didst hallow the streams of Jordan, sending down upon them from heaven thy Holy Spirit, and didst crush the heads of the dragons who lurked there” (Hapgood 1975:278). This is typical of the multi-level scriptural references in Orthodox liturgy. It is a reference in the first place to the Theophany, the feast of the baptism of Christ, when the Holy Spirit descended (Lk 4:22). But the Theophany is seen as a fulfilment of the Exodus, announced in Isaiah 52:9-11:

Awake, awake! Clothe yourself in strength,
Arm of Yahweh.
Awake as in the past,
in times of generations long ago.
Did you not split Rahab in two,
and pierce the Dragon through?
Did you not dry up the sea,
the waters of the great Abyss,
to make the seabed a road
for the redeemed to cross?
Those whom Yahweh has ransomed return,
they come to Zion shouting for joy,
everlasting joy in their faces;
joy and gladness go with them,
sorrow and lament are ended.

Christians “experience matter as essentially good, yet on the other hand as the very vehicle of man’s enslavement to death and sin, as the means by which Satan has stolen the world from God. Only in Christ and by His power can matter be liberated and become again the symbol of God’s glory and presence, the sacrament of His action and communion with man” (Schmemann 1974:49).

There is thus a link between our baptism and Christ’s baptism in the Jordan. But there is also a significant difference. Our baptism is for the remission of sins (Ac 2:38), but Christ had no sins to be remitted. He went into the waters of the Jordan, at the lowest place on the surface of the earth, not to have his sins washed away, but to crush the heads of the dragons that lurked there, and to reclaim the world, and water in particular, for God. In a sense, he allowed himself to be fully immersed in the evil of this world, and threw down the gauntlet in a challenge to the powers of evil. His baptism was followed immediately by his temptation, in which Satan met him and responded to the challenge.

SALVATION AND EVANGELISM IN EAST AND WEST

I have noted that the difference between the Western and Orthodox understandings of sin was that Western theology tends to see sin primarily as something that God punishes us for, and that Orthodox theology tends to see sin primarily as something God rescues us from. I also noted that Protestant theology has tended to divide salvation into two dimensions or processes: justification and sanctification, while in Orthodoxy the dimensions were liberation and deification. Where Orthodox and Protestants have discussed these matters, much of the discussion has tended to revolve around the contrast between justification and deification in salvation. This has led to much misunderstanding on both sides. In part it is a result of the difference in the style of doing theology.

Western scholars who have been influenced by the Enlightenment tend to misrepresent Orthodox theology at this point. Bosch (1991:394), for example, quotes such scholars as saying that the Orthodox understanding of salvation was a “pedagogical progression”. Aulén (1970:13), however, points out that “the interpretation of the Christology of the period as ‘a work of the Hellenistic spirit’, intellectualistic and metaphysical in character, and of its doctrine of salvation as ‘naturalistic’, rests rather on the presuppositions of nineteenth-century theology than on an objective and unprejudiced analysis of the actual work of the Fathers.”

The Western misunderstanding of Orthodox theology is even clearer in Bevans and Schroeder (2004), two Roman Catholic missiologists. They analyse mission history in relation to six theological “constants”: Christology, ecclesiology, eschatology, salvation, anthropology and culture. They interpret these in terms of three theological models, which they call A, B and C, and there is a key figure who characterises each type. For Type A the key figure is Tertullian of Carthage; for Type B it is Origen of Alexandria, and for Type C it is Irenaeus of Lyons. The understanding of salvation in Type A is satisfaction, in Type B an exemplar model, and in Type C it is liberation (Bevan & Schroeder 2004:36f).

If one examines the six constants in terms of each model, it is clear that their Type C is closest to Orthodoxy. Type C’s Christiology, ecclesiology, eschatology, view of salvation, anthropology and view of culture are all Orthodox. This is not surprising, since Irenaeus is a saint of the Orthodox Church, and is regarded as one of the fathers of the Church, while Tertullian and Origen are not. What is surprising, however, is that Bevans and Schroeder, when looking at the constants in six different historical contexts, consistently assign Orthodox mission theology to Type B in all six.

For Protestants the emphasis is on the Word. Theologians have written about deification because it was the subject of argument and debate. But liberation (or redemption) was not debated or argued: for Orthodox Christians it was simply assumed. It is found primarily in the liturgy and ikonography of the church rather than explicitly stated in works of dogmatic theology (Hayes 1992a:56). Protestant theologians who read books about Orthodox theology without participating in Orthodox worship can therefore easily miss the point entirely. The experiential and enacted theology of Orthodoxy does not seem to them like theology at all, because it is not “systematic”. Again, to quote Stamoolis, “The East was not influenced by Aquinas, its methodology is different from that of the West.”

Schmemann (1974:21), writing about the exorcisms preceding baptism, notes this:

It is not our purpose to outline, even superficially, the Orthodox teaching concerning the Devil. In fact the Church has never formulated it systematically, in the form of a clear and concise “doctrine.” What is of paramount importance, however, is that the Church has always had the experience of the demonic, has always, in plain words, known the devil. If this direct knowledge has not resulted in a neat and orderly doctrine, it is because of the difficulty, if not impossibility, rationally to define the irrational. And the demonic and, more generally, evil are precisely the reality of the irrational.

Like Schmemann, I do not intend to systematically formulate the Orthodox teaching concerning the devil. But if liberation from the power of the devil is an essential part of the Orthodox understanding of salvation, then it is also an essential part of the Orthodox understanding of mission and evangelism, and will, or ought to, influence Orthodox mission methods. I believe that it also illustrates some of the differences that can be discerned between Orthodox and Western mission methods.

Bosch (1991:411ff) lists eighteen different understandings or definitions of evangelism that have been common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most of the debates, however, have been about evangelism as an activity. Evangelism is the proclamation of the evangelion, the good news, the gospel. But there has been very little discussion about what actually constitutes this evangelion. What is the content of the proclamation? What is the news, and why is it good? (Hayes 1992a:50).

For those who believe in the penal substitution of the atonement, the “good news” is that God isn’t going to thump you for your sins because he has already punished his sinless Son for the evil deeds of his sinful sons.

To Orthodox Christians, this looks like a disagreement between the persons of the Holy Trinity. In the Orthodox understanding, mission is trinitarian. The Father sends the Son and the Holy Spirit into the world to liberate it from bondage to the evil one.

Orthodox evangelism is thus different from the evangelism of those who believe in the penal substitution theory of the atonement. The content of the evangel, the good news, is different. The strong man holds his goods in peace until one stronger than him comes, not as a conquering hero, but in the guise of one of the prisoners, one of the inmates of the concentration camp. He breaks the gates of the prison with its bolts and bars (depicted in the ikon of the resurrection, where Christ tramples upon the doors of hell, while raising Adam and Eve from the abyss.

The good news is that

Christ is risen from the dead
trampling down death by death
and upon those in the tombs bestowing life.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aulén, Gustaf. 1970. Christus victor. London: SPCK.
Bevans, Stephen B. & Schroeder, Roger P. 2004. Constants in context. a theology of mission for today. Maryknoll: Orbis.
Bosch, D.J. 1991. Transforming mission: paradigm shifts in theology of mission. Maryknoll: Orbis.
Cronk, George. 1982. The message of the Bible: an Orthodox Christian perspective. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Davies, J.D. 1971. Beginning now: a Christian exploration of the first three chapters of Genesis. Philadelphia: Fortress.
Hapgood, Isabel Florence (ed). 1975 [1922]. Service book of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church. Englewood, NJ: Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese.
Hayes, Stephen. 1992a. Evangelism and liberation, in Theologia Evangelica, Vol. 25(2) June. Page 49-57.
Hayes, Stephen. 1992b. Mission as African initiative. Pretoria: University of South Africa. (Study Guide for Missiology IIIB Course, MSB302-G).
Hayes, Stephen. 1993. The IViyo loFakazi bakaKristu and the KwaNdebele Mission of the Anglican Diocese of Pretoria. Pretoria: University of South Africa, M.Th. dissertation.
Hayes, Stephen. 1998. Orthodox mission methods: a comparative study. Pretoria: University of South Africa. D.Th. thesis.
Hopko, Thomas. 1983. The Lenten spring. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Hopko, Thomas. 1984. The winter Pascha. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Oleksa, Michael (ed.). 1987. Alaskan missionary spirituality. New York: Paulist.
Oleksa, Michael. 1992. Orthodox Alaska: a theology of mission. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Ouspensky, Leonid & Lossky, Vladimir. 1989. The meaning of icons. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Ouspensky, Leonid. 1987. Iconography of the descent of the Holy Spirit, in St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly. Vol. 31(4). Pages 309-337.
Rodger, Symeon. 1989. The soteriology of Anselm of Canterbury: an Orthodox perspective, in Greek Orthodox Theological Review. Vol. 34(1). Pages 19-43.
Runciman, Steven. 1988. The great church in captivity: a study of the Patriarchate of Constantinople from the eve of the Turkish conquest to the Greek war of independence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schmemann, Alexander. 1973. For the life of the world: sacraments and Orthodoxy. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.
Schmemann, Alexander. 1974. Of water and the Spirit: a liturgical study of baptism. New York: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

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Orthodox theology, atonement, missiology, penal substitution

In a comment on my contribution to the missional synchroblog, Tim Victor said:

Though it appears that Buddhists and other Eastern views are more accepting I experience them as slowly attaining the same goal, i.e. in Krishna or in Buddha is real salvation but persist in your practice if you must in this life and you’ll come round at some point in the future. In that sense I feel that they’re evangelising albeitly through different methodology.

I feel that a discussion around ’salvation’ (in the broad sense of the word) through one path versus many paths requires much sensitivity and a discussion around the concrete rather than the abstract but also that it is worth pursuing at some point.

To avoid much repetition, I’d also like to refer to things I wrote in an earlier series of postings on theology of religions which provide the background to what I say here:

1. Notes from underground: Christianity: inclusive or exclusive? (Synchroblog)
2. Notes from underground: Theology of religions
3. Notes from underground: Theology of religion and interreligious dialogue
4. Notes from underground: Christianity, paganism and literature (synchroblog)
5. Notes from underground: Towards a theology of religions

Christian “theologians of teligion” have often divided Christians into three or four groups, Exclusivist, Inclusivist and Pluralist based on whether or not they believe that “salvation” is to be found in “other religions”. I have pointed out that this is not so much a “theology of religions” as a Christianity-centric theology of interreligious dialogue.

The main problem I have with it is that none of the books that have been written about the topic deal with the question of what “salvation” actually is. They fail to take into account that the other religions they refer to (but rarely examine) may have entirely different notions of salvation to Christian ideas of salvation, and may not even have any idea of “salvation” at all. The idea that religions are about “salvation” is primarily a Christian one, and the ideas of “religion” and “religions” arose in the milieu of Western modernity which was also Christianity-centric (the book to read is Peter Harrison, 1990. “Religion” and the religions in the English Enlightenment. Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 0-521-38530-X. Dewey: 291.0942).

Now as a Christian I have no objection to looking at things from a Christian point of view; and indeed I think that being Christian-centric or preferably Christ-centric is a good thing to try to be. But the problem with modernity is that it encourages people to overlook their own prejudices and distorted judgements and to present them as objective and as the Voice of Science.

In contrast to the Enlightenment point of view of religion (which was shaped by the historical experience of disputes between Catholics and Protestants in the aftermath of the 16th-century Reformation in Western Europe) my friend and mentor John Davies said (in a paper “Religion versus God” read to the Anglican Students Federation of South Africa in 1961)

The purpose of this paper is to suggest:

1. that religion is in itself a highly dangerous thing
2. that the faith of the Bible and the Church is not religious
3. that insofar as religious characteristics enter the faith and life of the Church they are hostile to its true nature and must be eradicated.

It is stupid to use the word `religion’ to mean Christianity. It is a misuse of words even in Europe and the UK. In this country it is highly discourteous to the non-Christian religious people. Here we see clearly that either Christianity is just one religion among many or it isn’t a religion at all.Let us make a tentative definition of `religion’. Religion is an attempt by man to escape from his circumscription by making and maintaining an association with a presupposed superhuman or transcendent reality. I avoid the word `God’ in the last phrase so that the definition will include not only theistic religions and animisms but also the yearnings of the Buddhist and the ethical humanist, and the group loyalty implied in African ancestor worship, and the pseudo-Christian nationalism that is so strong in the peoples of Western Europe and their offshoots (e.g. Land of hope and glory). The great thing about this religion is that it starts with man. It is due to man’s initiative, man’s searching, man’s desire to find something greater than himself that he can stick to like a barnacle.

Now with all due respect to the good non-Christians, and to those great men like Toynbee who are offended by our `scandal of particularity’, we say that Christianity is unique, it has a different start. The Bible all through speaks of God’s initiative, not man’s: not man’s ideas, but God’s action; not man’s attempts, but God’s success.

I say `religion is…’; it can be a thing, definable. Christianity isn’t such an entity at all. I can’t define it. It is not, it only speaks; and when it speaks, it speaks of God.

So we come to the other half of the title. We have attempted a definition of religion - how about defining God? I cannot. The two terms are not comparable at all. I can really no more talk about `Religion versus God’ than I can about `Beetles versus Calvinism’ or `The breast-stroke versus polarized light’. What can I say about God? That he is Father, Son and Holy Spirit? Yes, but this is no definition - it gives no account of God as a thing or even a concept, but only in terms of relationship. This is all he has shown us about himself. All heresies were, and are, religious attempts to say about God what he himself has refused to say, to soften the paradox, to make attractive fiction out of intractable truth. Truth, as Chesterton said, is always stranger than fiction, because fiction is a product of the human mind and therefore congenial to it. The Catholic Church has said, in effect: God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit; what that means, we can’t say. It’s all we know and we’ll have to make do with it. We cannot understand God, he stands over us.

Let us see how this works out in God’s word. First, we must treat this word as the word of God. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount (Mt 7:24). Jesus shows us that he gives us his word only on condition that it holds unconditional power over us. We are not to select, interpret, apply, test or consider this word, nor are we to make it an aim or ideal. We are only to hear and do it. It also is not for us to understand - it stands over us. The Bible does not depend on our opinion for its importance; it is important because it is God’s judgement. Either we decide about the Bible, or in the Bible Christ has decided about us.

What does the Bible say about God? The history of God’s people, the Church, starts with Abraham. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob live in the promised land, but all they really possess there is a grave, the cave of Machpelah bought by Abraham (Genesis 23). They have all and they have nothing; they live by faith. God’s servants do not possess him, they are possessed by him. The people of God now, the Church of Christ, is in the same position: we claim all kinds of things for ourselves, but the only thing which is truly ours is a grave, the cross.

Now I am aware that there are some evangelical Christians who have distilled that into an empty ideological slogan, and who parrot “Christianity is not a religion but a relationship” without really understanding what it means or being able to explain what it means. Nevertheless the question remains: is Christianity just one religion among many, or is it not a religion at all? And even though we use the terms “religion” and “religions” for convenience, we should bear in mind that they carry a lot of cultural baggage from their origins in Western modernity, which can distort our understanding not only of Christianity, but also of other “religions” as well.

So what about Tim Victor’s idea of a discussion around “salvation” in the broad sense of the word?

A blog is not really the best medium for such a discussion, because it starts with one person’s idea, and elicits responses to that idea. Also, what I’ve said up to this point is little more than clearing the ground for such a discussion. The discussion hasn’t really started.

And if there is to be a discussion on those points, the ideal thing would be for different groups to say what they believe “salvation” means to them, if it means anything at all, and if the main point of their religion is not “salvation”, then what is it?

Even among Christians, there is little agreement on what “salvation” is. I’ve seen great debates in the blogosphere about the “p___ atonement” — I can’t remember what the “p” stands for - in my old age my memory has turned into a forgettory, and so I’ll have to look it up… preemptive? No, that was something else. Preterist? No, not that. But it did begin with a “p”, of that I am certain. Anyway, I must stop here, and I’ll look up the p-word and blog about atonement next time.

In calling for a missional synchroblog Rick Meigs says:

I have a continuing concern that the term missional has become over used and wrongly used….I think it is time to make a bigger effort to reclaim the term, a term which describe what happens when you and I replace the “come to us” invitations with a “go to them” life. A life where “the way of Jesus” informs and radically transforms our existence to one wholly focused on sacrificially living for him and others and where we adopt a missionary stance in relation to our culture. It speaks of the very nature of the Jesus follower.

Rick also says quite a bit about the word “missional” on his Web page Friend of Missional.

The first missiologist using the term “missional” in its modern understanding was Francis DuBose in his book, “God Who Sends” (Broadman Press, 1983). By the 1990’s the term began to appear more and more in such books as “Missional Church: A Vision for the Sending of the Church in North America” (Edited by Darrell L. Guder) and the works of Lesslie Newbigin

My question is: does “missional” mean anything that “missionary” does not?

The problem with “missionary” is that it is both an adjective and a noun, and as an adjective it has acquired connotations from the noun that “missional” has not. “Missional” has the advantage of being an adjective only and not a noun. But both words are derived from “mission”, and what does “mission” mean? That was a question I had to ask at the beginning of my doctoral thesis on Orthodox mission methods:

Before one can even begin to discuss Orthodox mission methods, however, one has to acknowledge that there is a methodological problem. One should perhaps begin by defining one’s terms, but to do so is, in a sense, foreign to the spirit of Orthodox mission. The term “mission” is a recent one, even in Western theology. The concept of mission as a “phenomenon”, something that can be observed, discussed, studied, analysed, and dissected is itself a product of Western thinking, conditioned by the Enlightenment. Even in Western missiology, definition has been a problem. It is only since the sixteenth century that the term “mission” has been used (beginning with the Jesuits) for the spread of the Christian faith among people who had not previously known it. Since the 1950s the word “mission” has been used more frequently among Christians, and it has been used in an increasingly broader sense (Bosch 1991:1). Bosch, in his magisterial work Transforming mission (1991) describes the origin and the expanding use of the term “mission” among Western Christians, and goes on to observe that there is a crisis in Western mission. Having noted the difficulty (and ultimately the impossibility) of defining mission, Bosch (1991:9) sets out an interim definition, which is necessary in order to delineate the scope of his work. Is it then possible to apply a term that arose in Western Christianity in the sixteenth century to the Orthodox Church? Many of the assumptions of Western theology, and the conditions in which they have been applied since that time, have been different from those of Orthodox Christians. Any application of the term to a time before the sixteenth century must be in some sense anachronistic. If one can speak of Orthodox mission at all, it will necessarily be different from the Western understanding of the term.

“Mission” is a term derived from Latin, and means “sending”. It is perhaps significant that the Afrikaans terms for “mission” and “missiology” are “sending” and “sendingwetenskap” respectively. For the Orthodox Church, whose theology is based on Greek rather than Latin, the cognate term for “missionary” (used as an adjective) would be “apostolic”. One of the marks of the Church in the Symbol of Faith is that it is “apostolic”, and, based purely on the etymology of the terms, one could perhaps translate “apostolic” as “missionary”, and deduce from that that mission is one of the essential marks of the Church.

“Missionary”, however, has a narrower connotation than “apostolic”, and when one says that the Church is “apostolic” it means more than simply saying that the Church is “missionary”; it proclaims that the Church as a body continues “in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Ac 2:42). The apostles were sent into the world as the Father sent the Son into the world (Jn 17:18; 20:21). The Father sent the Son into the world “to bring the good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s
favour” (Lk 4:18).

The Son likewise sent his disciples to “Go out to the whole world; proclaim the Good News to all creation” (Mk 16:16), and as they go they are to “make disciples of all nations (ethne), baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”, teaching them to observe all Christ’s commands (Mt 28:19). As an interim definition, therefore, one could say that Christian mission is the sending of the Church into the world, and what the Church is sent into the world to do.

In this sense, “missional” as an adjective could replace “missionary” with no loss of meaning, but with no gain in meaning either. One could say “I believe in One Holy Catholic and Missional Church”, but “missional” still does not carry the full meaning of “apostolic”. It expresses the “sending” part, but still does not express the continuity of a body that “continued in the apostles’ teaching and communion, the breaking if bread and the prayers.”

The apostles whose teaching and communion we continue in were not just any people who were sent to do anything. In the Christian understanding they are a particular group of people, sent for a particular purpose. Nowadays it has become fashionable for all kinds of commercial enterprises to have a “mission statement”, and the boards of directors in that sense become apostles, men with a mission, sent to carry out the objects set out in the mission statement. But that is not the same thing as Christian mission, and being an employee or customer of the firm does not mean that one is thereby participating in “the apostles’ teaching and communion, the breaking of bread and the prayers”.

Even in the Christian context, the word “missionary” has acquired bad connotations, however. There is a story often told, which has many variants, but it is often used by black South Africans, and goes like this:

When the missionaries came to Africa, they had the Bible and we had the land. The missionaries said “Let us pray”, and we closed our eyes to pray, and when we opened our eyes again, we had the Bible and they had the land.”

Much the same sentiment is expressed in the song:

Mayibuye! Mayibuye! Mayibuy’ iAfrika
Eyathathwa ngamaNgisi sisasebumnyameni.

(Let Africa return, which was taken by the English while we were still in darkness)

The song and the story express the entanglement of Christian mission and colonialism in Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries. The story does not bear too much analysis, but it makes a telling point nonetheless, and provides one good reason for substituting the term “missional” for “missionary”, to avoid the negative connotations of “missionary”.

It is also important to realise that “the missionaries” is an unfair stereotype. The events in the story never happened as the story relates them. The story is not a historical narrative, but a parable, and it speaks many things. In some versions, the term “missionaries” is replaced by “whites” (and is thus closer to the song and also truer to history). Whites who were ostensibly Christian came to Africa from Europe to make money. The gave black people things they had discarded, like old clothes and the Christian faith. The wrong thing about the story is that most of the Christian missionaries in Africa have been black and poor.

As I understand the term, therefore, I think there is no question that the Church is missional, and should be seen to be missional. Whatever else “apostolic” means in the phrase “I believe in one holy, catholic and apostolic church”, it means at least that. As Papathanasiou (2005:13-14) puts it

The Church is “apostolic” insofar as (and provided that) she is sent and sending; sent by Christ and sending her apostles “to all creation”. Her being sent (that is, her mission) is not something additional to or beyond herself, but a constituent of herself, of her own nature. The point at issue, in other words, is not simply “what the Church does”, but chiefly “what she is”.

That is what I primarily understand by “missional”.

In the Orthodox Church the great missionary saints are often given the epithet isapostolos (equal-to-the-apostles). Such, for example, are St Nicholas of Japan, St Nina of Georgia, and SS Cyril and Methodius, Enlighteners of the Slavs. In their lives and ministry they made the missional nature of the Church visible.

But Rick Meigs says, ‘I think it is time to make a bigger effort to reclaim the term, a term which describe what happens when you and I replace the “come to us” invitations with a “go to them” life.’ Others have contrasted “missional” with “attractional”, implying that the former is the “go to them” life (good), while the latter is the “come to us” invitations (bad). I have my doubts about the adequacy of that. When Philip said to Nathaniel, “Come and see” (John 1:41-53), was he setting a bad example by being “attractional” rather than “missional”? Because that is what Rick’s statement seems to imply.

So I look forward to reading the other contributions to this synchroblog to see what others think “missional” means, and what they think it ought to mean.

Here are the other contributors to this synchroblog:

Alan Hirsch
Alan Knox
Andrew Jones
Barb Peters
Bill Kinnon
Brad Brisco
Brad Grinnen
Brad Sargent
Brother Maynard
Bryan Riley
Chad Brooks
Chris Wignall
Cobus Van Wyngaard
Dave DeVries
David Best
David Fitch
David Wierzbicki
DoSi
Doug Jones
Duncan McFadzean
Erika Haub
Grace
Jamie Arpin-Ricci
Jeff McQuilkin
John Smulo
Jonathan Brink
JR Rozko
Kathy Escobar
Len Hjalmarson
Makeesha Fisher
Malcolm Lanham
Mark Berry
Mark Petersen
Mark Priddy
Michael Crane
Michael Stewart
Nick Loyd
Patrick Oden
Peggy Brown
Phil Wyman
Richard Pool
Rick Meigs
Rob Robinson
Ron Cole
Scott Marshall
Sonja Andrews
Stephen Shields
Steve Hayes
Tim Thompson
Thom Turner

Bibliography

• Bosch, D.J. 1991. Transforming mission. Maryknoll: Orbis.
• Papathanasiou, Athanasios N. 2005. Future, the background of history: essays on Church mission in an age of globalization. Montréal: Alexander. ISBN: 1-896800-48-3.

In a piece tagged “doom and gloom” The Shrieking Man writes about what one can only call the moral degeneration in South African society, which he attributes to a lack of shared values. And if this continues, he says, the future is bleak

what is coming is an atomised capitalist anti-community where divisions grow rather than shrinking. The love of emigration among the rich is paralleled by the violence against foreigners among the poor; both are signs of a general refusal to accept that we live in a society where such behaviour is not helpful. Corporate and bureaucratic corruption among the rich and powerful matches the crime wave among the poor and downtrodden. It is a low-intensity war of all against all. Kurt Vonnegut oversimplified when he said “The winners are at war with the losers”, for he forgot that the winners are also at war with the winners, and the losers with the losers. We cannot actually afford to live in a society like this, and yet this is what we are having built around us.

That’s a bleak picture, and The Shrieking Man says, “Because the “rainbow nation”/”ubuntu” propaganda construct which the media engendered has been shown to be a lie, the media declares that this proves that every positive aspect of South African life is a lie.” And that is where I beg to differ.

Ubuntu and the “rainbow nation” were not engendered by the media, though they may, at times, have been hyped and propagated by the media. If I remember correctly, the “rainbow nation” idea was first propounded by the former Anglican Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, to show a different way of looking at things after apartheid. Different colours do not have to be segregated in “homelands” and forcibly separated from each other. They can live side-by-side and create something beautiful, like a rainbow, which is greater than the sum of its parts.

Ubuntu is shorthand for a set of people-centred values and behaviour that is a kind of aspiration that is seen more in rhetoric than in reality. It is a contrast to the selfish individualism that seems to have taken hold of many of the leaders of our society, like “moral regeneration”, which is something that many talk about but few actually want if it is to apply to them. Ubuntu is not quite dead yet; in fact we do see examples of it from time to time. We see it in the actions of those who moved to shelter and care for the victims of recent xenophobic violence, for example, and there have been quite a lot of them. So ubuntu is not quite dead. It’s just that those who practise it don’t talk about it much, and those who talk about it don’t practise it much.

The Shrieking Man advocates socialism and socialist values. But those are two different things. Socialism, in the broadest sense, is an economic system based on the principle that cooperation is better than competition. But you can’t make such an economic system in a vacuum, without the underlying values that support it. And for the last 25 years or more people have been indoctrinated with neoliberal capitalist values, which are in direct conflict with socialist values and ubuntu. If you’re a doctrinaire Marxist, of course, you won’t believe that — first create the economic infrastucture and the superstructure of values and ideals will follow. But I don’t think it works like that. The values and the infrastructure go together.

Over the last 25 years South Africa, like other countries, has been afflicted with privatisation mania. But privatisation didn’t just happen; it was carried out by people with a neoliberal value system who put it into practice. Why was the demutualisation of building societies and insurance groups carried out with so little fuss or opposition? The only suprising thing is that the Old Mutual still calls itself that when it is nothing of the kind — a better name would be the New Commercial. Why don’t we see protests against toll roads and privatised prisons? Because most people have bought into the neoliberal capitalist value system.

In a pluralistic society like South Africa, if there is to be moral regeneration, it cannot be a top-down process. Ubuntu cannot be imposed by government decree, as Sukarno tried to impose Pancasila in Indonesia, though it would be nice if our leading citizens at all levels of government did live by the principles of ubuntu. Moral regeneration needs to be bottom-up as well, and that means that it needs to be taking place in civil society, in churches and other religious groups. Of course there are many differences between religious and other civil society groups, but that is precisely the reason that a “one size fits all” system like pancasila cannot be imposed from the top.

So I narrow my horizons, and say what is needed to bring about moral regeneration in my neck of the woods? And my neck of the woods is the Orthodox Church. Moral regeneration needs to begin with the clergy, or, more specifically, with the priests who hear confession, because that is where, in the Orthodox Church, the most immediate moral guidance takes place. And to achieve that the clergy who hear confessions need to be able to themselves confess to a wise and Spirit-filled spiritual elder, of the kind usually to be found in monasteries on the Holy Mountain (Mount Athos). So the most important step we can take to contribute to moral regeneration in the country is to have some well-established monasteries. What we need is not more good men, but more holy men.

I realise that this will not be of much help to Muslims or Methodists or Agnostics or Atheists. But South Africa is a pluralistic society, and the “one size fits all” mentality won’t work. But if the Orthodox managed to achieve this, it would help Orthodox Christians in South Africa to acquire the Christian virtues of modesty, humility, patience and love, and people who acquire those virtues will practise ubuntu even if they don’t know they are doing so.

Preamble

A couple of years ago, when our Constitutional Court was considering the question of homosexual marriage, I was asked by my bishop, His Eminence Metropolitan Seraphim, Archbishop of Johannesburg and Pretoria, to prepare a short paper on Christian marriage. In view of the confusion and conflicting opinions and controversies among other Christian groups on the topic, I thought it might be useful to post something on the Orthodox understanding of marriage.

This doesn’t deal directly with the question considered by the Constitutional Court, but rather focuses on the theology of Christian mariage from an Orthodox point of view. I did blog about the Constitutional Court question and homosexual marriage here: Notes from underground: The State should get out of the marriage business.

_____

Marriage: an Orthodox view

The Orthodox Church understands marriage as a holy mystery (sacrament); the union of two human persons, one male and the other female, as a sign of the love of Christ for the Church, fulfilled in the Kingdom of God. There can be no such thing as a homosexual marriage.[1]

1 Introduction

Christian theologians do not seem to have paid very much attention to marriage in the past. There have not been such clearly worked out dogmatic definitions for marriages as there have been, for example, in Christology.
In Christology, however, until the First Ecumenical Council (Nicaea, 325) there were also not such clearly articulated dogmas concerning the nature of Christ. It was only when the divinity of Christ was questioned by Arius that the need was felt for a clearer statement, and it was one of our own African bishops, St Athanasius the Great, who helped to formulate the Nicene Creed that was produced by the council. And it took several more councils before we had the doctrinal statement, the Symbol of Faith we have today.

As in the time of Arius and Athanasius, the nature of marriage is being questioned today, and so there needs to be a more carefully-worded and clearly worked out statement of the theology of marriage. This paper is not such a statement. This paper is merely an attempt to draw together some strands of what the Orthodox Church has taught about marriage up till now.

2 The theology of marriage

The Orthodox Church’s understanding of marriage is primarily ontological and sacramental, not juridical.

The Orthodox sacrament of holy matrimony does not carry the meaning of a legal contract. By considering the institution of marriage as a legal contract, one begins the process of transforming the whole sacrament into a juridical issue, and transforming the Church into a mundane legislator.

Consequently, it eliminates the principles of love and grace which make love grow immeasurably. It also emphasizes the concept of ownership, which is encompassed in the concept of contract.

Though marriage often has a legal and juridical aspect, that is not the starting point for a discussion of what marriage is.

2.1 The anthropology of marriage

The starting point for understanding marriage can be seen in Mark 10:27, when the Pharisees came to our Lord Jesus Christ and asked him about the lawfulness of divorce. In other words, it was a juridical and legal question. But Jesus does not answer the question in a juridical and legal manner, but rather in an ontological one: “But from the beginning God made them male and female. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife.”

Our Lord Jesus Christ was referring to two passages from the beginning of Genesis. “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them” (Gen 1:27) and “And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh” (Gen 2:23-24).

According to the Scriptures, therefore, God did not start by making an individual, but a community, a marriage. “It is not good for man to be alone” so God made man male and female. There is a Zulu proverb that illustrates this: Umuntu ungumuntu ngabantu — a person is a person because of people).[2]

In making man male and female, God deliberately creates sexuality. The author of Genesis knew the difference between a cow and a bull, but did not see fit to mention this sexual difference when describing the creation of cattle. This is because man can debase sexuality in a way that cattle cannot. Man can treat sexuality as something alien and hostile, as an invention of demons, as many gnostics did. It is also noteworthy that having made the sexual distinction in man at creation, God makes no other distinction. There is no distinction between Greek man and Jewish man, black man and white man. There is only man, male and female.

Male and female are not interchangeable. There is a unity and a difference; male man is incomplete without female man; female man is incomplete without male man. Western culture tends to deride and devalue this complementarity and the need for community. There was a saying that was common a few years back that illustrates this: “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”. This rejects the idea of “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh”. Denying the complementarity, however, is like saying that having two left feet is the same as having a left foot and a right foot.

In all this we are considering marriage from an ontological and anthropological point of view. This is what human beings are. This is what God made man to be; not alone, but longing for the other, different yet the same.

In human history, marriage has taken many forms. In some societies there have been polygamous marriages, and polygamy has been seen as normal. This has very often been caused by the mode of production. When economic circumstances change, the pattern of marriage changes. But in discussing creation the authors of Genesis, even though they themselves lived in polygamous societies, described the ideal of marriage, the God-intended form of marriage, as the marriage of one male person with one female person.

2.2 Marriage as a sacrament

The anthropological and ontological view of marriage looks at what marriage is, as a human institution. There have been various laws and customs in different societies that have applied to marriage. But the legal and social dimensions of marriage do not determine what marriage is.

What of Christian marriage? Or a specifically Christian understanding of marriage?

We do not even remember today that marriage is, as everything else in “this world,” a fallen and distorted marriage, and that it needs not to be blessed and “solemnized” – after a rehearsal and with the help of the photographer – but restored. This restoration, furthermore, is in Christ and this means His life, death resurrection and ascension to heaven, in the pentecostal inauguration of the “new eon,” in the Church as the sacrament of all this. Needless to say, this restoration infinitely transcends the idea of the “Christian family,” and gives marriage cosmic and universal dimensions (Schmemann 1982:82).

The Christian understanding of marriage, therefore, is primarily in relation to the Eucharist, which is the sacrament of all these things. In the early Church there was no separate marriage ceremony. Married couples brought their life together into the Church by participating together in the Eucharist. The development of a separate marriage service is basically an extension of this.

2.2.1 The marriage service

The Orthodox marriage service is in two parts: the Betrothal and the Crowning.

The Betrothal, in which the main feature is the exchange of rings, normally takes place in the narthex of the temple. It represents the natural marriage, marriage as a human institution, Even in Western Christian marriage rites, in the past the custom was for marriage to take place at the church door or porch.

The prayers mention the betrothal of Isaac and Rebecca, and the priest, after blessing the rings, makes the sign of the cross over each of the parties three times, saying that “The servant of God N is betrothed to the servant of God M, in the name of the Father, and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.”

The priest then puts the bride’s ring on the bridegroom’s right hand, and the bridegroom’s ring on the bride’s right hand.

This concludes the betrothal. Unlike Western marriage services, there is no exchange of vows, no legal contact that is ended by death “till death us do part”.

The priest then leads the couple into the nave of the church, to the singing of a psalm, and the crowning service takes place in front of the royal doors, with more prayers. The crowns are placed on the heads of the bridegroom and bride, and, in some traditions, exchanged between them either by the priest or by the best man.

The crowning expresses the distinctively Christian and sacramental aspect of marriage. The priest says “Crown them with glory and honour”, which recalls Psalm 8, and also Hebrews 2, in which the Psalm is quoted. This refers to fallen man restored to fellowship with God in Christ, and restored to rightful dominion over the earth. The couple are to be king and queen to each other, and their life together is to be a witness (martyria) to the kingdom of God, a little kingdom, and a little church, a cell of the Body of Christ. And so the crowns are also martyrs crowns, and this is referred to in the song that is sung as they circle the analogion three times anticlockwise:

Rejoice O Isaiah, a virgin is with child
And shall bear a Son Emmanuel
He is both God and man
And Orient is his name.
Magnifying him, we call the virgin blessed.

O holy martyrs
Who fought the good fight
and have received your crowns
entreat the Lord God
that he will have mercy upon our souls.

Glory to Thee, O Christ God
The apostles’ boast, the martyrs’ joy
Whose preaching was the consubstantial Trinity.

Christian marriage, therefore, is to be a sign and a witness of the restoration of marriage, and of mankind and all creation from their fallen state, and to be restored to fellowship and communion with God. The love of the married couple for each other must overflow as a witness of the love of God. So Christian marriage, as expressed in the crowning, is to transform the fallen human institution of marriage itself, and also to participate in the transformation of the fallen world.

The marriage is not simply between the couple themselves, but there is a third person present, Christ Himself. If their life together is to be a “little church”, then it cannot be without Christ who said “without me you can do nothing”. So everything in the service is done in threes: the rings and crowns are blessed three times, and the Dance of Isaiah is a triple circling of the analogion. And their marriage is a preaching without words, a preaching whose content, like that of the apostles and martyrs, is the consubstantial Trinity.

One of the primary features of their witness (martyria) will be that if God blesses them with children, they will bring up their children in the knowledge and fear of the Lord.

Holy Matrimony is a sacrament indeed, because through marriage the Kingdom of God becomes a living experience, in the midst of the Eucharistic community. In the Body of Christ the husband and wife can become the flesh of each other in a way unique to the measure of the unity of Christ and His Church. Sacramental marriage is like other marriages, but it does not belong to this world in its content and experience. Holy matrimony is a testimony to God and a way toward theosis, a way toward eternity (Fr. Michel Najim).

Fr Alexander Schmemann (1982:8 also points out what marriage is not:

We can now understand that its true meaning is not that it merely gives a religious “sanction” to marriage and family life, reinforces with supernatural grace the natural family virtues. Its meaning is that by taking the “natural” marriage into “the great mystery of Christ and the Church,” the sacrament of matrimony gives marriage a new meaning; it transforms, in fact, not only marriage as such, but all human love…

For the Christian, natural does not mean either self-sufficient – a “nice little family” – or merely insufficient, and to be, therefore, strengthened and completed by the addition of the “supernatural.” The natural man thirsts and hungers for fulfillment and redemption. This thirst and hunger is the vestibule of the Kingdom: both beginning and exile.

2.3 Marriage, virginity and celibacy

We have seen that the sexual distinction in man is one made by God in creation. God made man male and female, and sexuality is therefore not something intrinsically evil. But, like many other things, it has been debased, abused, and distorted since the Fall.

One of the ways in which sexuality has been abused is by idolising it, by turning it into a little god, and then claiming that anything and everything that impedes or hinders the acting on any sexual urge is bad. For Christians, such a belief is an error, as is the opposite error (propounded by many Gnostics) that sexuality and sexual urges are bad in themselves.

For this reason Orthodox Christians practise fasting on certain days and seasons, restraining not just sexual urges, but restraining other bodily appetites as well. Fasting is, of course, primarily the abstention from food, or certain kinds of food. According to Genesis 3, it was failure to abstain from certain kinds of food that led to the Fall in the first place.

In addition to saying that a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to his wife, our Lord Jesus Christ also said that “in the resurrection they neither marry nor are given in marriage, but are like the angels in heaven” (Matt 22:30). And so there are those whom God calls to forgo the blessings of marriage, and to live the angelic life on earth. And this too is a witness; a witness that we do not need to be slaves to our bodily desires, that sex or food are not the last word in human fulfilment.

Thus for Orthodox Christians marriage and monasticism go together. Marriage and monasticism are two different ways of manifesting the mystery of our communion with Christ.

As one monk put it, the monasteries are the lungs of the church. The world is enemy-occupied territory, enveloped in a mantle of pollution. But Christ did not come into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through him might be saved. But in order to participate in that work of salvation the Church needs to be able to breathe the pure air of heaven, and so we need monasteries as the lungs. But we also need to descend into the muck and pollution in order to be able to participate in Christ’s saving work.

In both of these ways, however, we cannot expect unbroken success in this world. Some marriages fail, and end in divorce. Some that do not end in divorce are nonetheless marred by the adultery of one or both partners, or by violence or cruelty. As Schmemann (1982:89) puts it,

This is what the marriage crowns express: that here is the beginning of a small kingdom which can be something like the true Kingdom. The chance will be lost, perhaps even in one night; but at this moment it is still an open possibility. Yet even when it has been lost, and lost again a thousand times, still if two people stay together, they are in a real sense king and queen to each other. And after forty odd years, Adam can still turn and see Eve standing beside him, in a unity with himself that in some small way at least proclaims the love of God’s Kingdom.

And so too with monasteries. One monk said that monastic life was not for the faint-hearted, because more people went to hell from monasteries than from anywhere else. It was so easy for a monk to lose his nipsis (watchfulness) and to fall into sin.

3 Legal and social dimensions of marriage

It should be clear by now that in the Orthodox view marriage is not primarily a legal contract, and the ontological and sacramental meaning is far more significant. Nevertheless, marriage does have legal and social dimensions, and these may or may not be compatible with the Church’s understanding of marriage.

3.1 The social dimension of marriage

The sacramental dimension of marriage is not something that the Orthodox Church would wish those who are not members of the Church to follow, though there have at times been problems with this. In the past, for example, the Greek government would not recognise the marriage of Greek citizens unless it was performed by an Orthodox priest, even if both were atheists.

But natural marriage is something given by God to the whole human race. It may be fallen, but even in its damaged form it can, through human love, reflect something of God’s love.

In South Africa, however, this natural marriage suffered almost irreparable damage from the ideology of apartheid and its implementation. Migratory labour and influx control meant that in many areas 90 percent of first babies were born to unmarried mothers. And the effects are felt even today, years after the end of apartheid. A large proportion of those coming to baptism from non-Orthodox families do not know who their fathers were. Even from the point of view of African traditional religion, they cannot venerate their ancestors, because they have no idea who those ancestors were. Thus the very concept of marriage is alien to many people in our country.

3.2 The legal dimension of marriage

The Constitutional Court of South Africa found in Minister of Home Affairs vs Fourie & Bonthuys (CCT 60/04) that by restricting marriage to couples of different sexes, the Marriage Act and the common law definition of marriage infringed the constitutional rights of those who wished to marry someone of the same sex.

In its judgement the Court referred to Discussion Paper 104 of the South African Law Reform Commission (SALRC), which had suggested three possible alternatives:

1. Amending the Common Law definition of marriage and the Marriage Act to include same-sex couples.
2. Separating the civil and religious elements of marriage so that the Marriage Act will only regulate the civil aspects of marriage.
3. Providing a “marriage-like” alternative of civil unions with the same legal consequences of marriage.

Before being heard in the Constitutional Court the matter was heard in the Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA), where Farlam JA pointed out, in a minority judgement, that in the Roman Empire marriage was not a concern of the State at all and even after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire this did not change.

One way of avoiding the difficulties arising from conflicting understandings of marriage might be to combine proposals 2 and 3 of the South African Law Reform commission in the light of the observations of Farlam JA and repeal the Marriage Act altogether, and for marriage to cease to be a concern of the State.

As the State registers commercial partnerships, it could replace the Marriage Act with legislation for the registration of social and domestic partnerships, which could include, but not be limited to marriage, regardless of what form such partnerships might take. Such partnerships could have similar legal consequences to those of marriage today, and clarify the legal rights and responsibilities of partners (I have said more about this here: Notes from underground: The State should get out of the marriage business).

4 Conclusion

The Orthodox Church believes that marriage is intrinsically and ontologically based on the union of two human beings, one male and the other female. Though this has become distorted in human society as a result of the fall, the aim of Christian sacramental marriage is to express and make present the promise of its restoration. Natural marriage has the potential of being restored in this way, as shown in the dual rite of Betrothal and Crowning.

There is, however, no way that a “marriage” between two persons of the same sex can be seen in this way. In the view of the Church such a union is not a marriage at all.

5 Bibliography

Schmemann, Alexander. 1982. For the life of the world: sacraments and Orthodoxy. Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Deacon Stephen Hayes
8 June 2006

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Notes

[1] In this paper I refer to “homosexual marriage”, and not “gay marriage”. While “homosexual” can refer to sexual orientation, in the phrase “homosexual marriage” it refers to the sex of the parties, whereas “gay” in this context refers to sexual orientation. While in Orthodox theology there can be no such thing as homosexual marriage, there is no legal or theological obstacle to gay marriage, and I know of no country where there has been. A gay person can marry someone of the opposite sex, who may or may not themselves be gay, and that has often happened.

[2] English-speaking Orthodox Christians are also uneasy about the current trend to use the word “man” to refer exclusively to male persons. There is no other word in English that expresses the notion of the human person in community. Most other languages have two words where English has only one. Greek has anthropos and aner, Zulu has umuntu and indoda, Russian has chelovek and muzhchina; but English has to make do with man and man for both meanings. The worldview of Western individualism means that Western people feel no loss in this, but it goes against Orthodox anthropology, which makes a distinction between the individual and the person. The individual is isolated, a person is in community and relationship with others and with God. Some recent translations have fallen into this error. One translation of the Symbol of Faith has changed “for us men and our salvation” to “for us and for our salvation”. The omission of tous anthropous is at least as great an error as the addition of the Filioque and opens the way to interpreting it as “for us Greeks and our salvation” (or Serbs, or Russians, or any other ethnic group one happens to belong to).

Amatomu’s move to new servers seems to be taking longer than expected, and now that it’s been gone for a couple of days, I realise how much I miss it.

There are other African blog aggregators like Afrigator, South African Blog Top Sites and Muti, but none of them seem to keep one in touch with the South African blogosphere as well as Amatomu does. Amatomu is like scanning the headlines of the newspaper — even if you don’t read all the articles, you can get an general impression of what’s going on. And all of a sudden I feel out of touch.

Liberals tend to get a bad press nowadays. Those who dislike liberalism often no longer even bother to try to justify their dislike — it is enough to simply use the word “liberal” as an epithet to condemn the person in their eyes. The enemies of liberalism, on both the left and the right, have so thoroughly caricatured liberalism and liberals that many people no longer know what the words mean.[1]

Perhaps the best way to counter the caricature is to look at some real liberals, and in this post I will look at just one, Peter Brown, the former National Chairman of the Liberal Party of South Africa. In An audit of liberalism from Brown to Leon, Patrick Lawrence writes:

Brown, who was detained for 98 days in the wake of the Sharpeville massacre of 21 March 1960, was the antithesis of the effete drawing room liberal caricatured by the political enemies of liberalism on the left and right. He was decidedly not the kind of liberal who leaves the room when the fight begins. Though firmly committed to non-violence, he refused to submit to the NP government and its bullyboys in the security police. He even invoked fear in them by his persistent solidarity with black landowners in Natal who were targeted for forced removal and by his success in recruiting black people into the ranks of the LP.

I think Lawrence got that exactly right. though I would not say that of the rest of his article. Regressing from Peter Brown to Tony Leon is really a classic example of bathos. If anything, Tony Leon epitomised the caricature of the “white liberal”. Peter Brown was the real thing. In particular, Tony Leon’s shameless attempts to gain the support of the white right in the 1999 South African general election, and the sordid machinations to unite with the rump of the National Party that followed, which introduced the abomination of floor crossing into our political system, must exclude him from the category of “liberal”.

Randolph Vigne, in his obituary of Peter Brown in The Independent (6 July 2004), writes

As National Chairman from 1958, with Paton as President, he was an inspiring leader of the Liberal Party, most of whose members never knew how much the party depended on his full-time and unpaid service, his leadership and generous financial support. The government of Hendrik Verwoerd unwittingly awarded him the true badge of honour among the oppressed by sending him to prison, with hundreds of others, in its panic after the Sharpeville shootings in 1960. In Pietermaritzburg jail for three months, he, typically, refused, after intercession in high places, to give undertakings that would have set him free while blacks and whites throughout the country stayed in prison.He led the party for four more stormy years. The Congresses were outlawed and their leaders jailed, silenced or in exile and the party fought alone though worn down by banning orders served on 50 leading members, Brown, in July 1964, among the first to be thus made a “non-person”. Within four years, new legislation outlawed racially mixed political activity, removing the Liberal Party’s non-negotiable raison d’être.

In South Africa, the noun “liberal” is so often preceded by the epithet “white” that one might get the impression that the Liberal Party was an all-white affair, and forget the contribution of black liberals like Selby Msimang, Elliot Mngadi, Chris Shabalala, Hyacinth “Bill” Bhengu and many others. The Liberal Party, both in policy and in fact, was non-racial rather than multiracial. It’s aim was to bring about nonracial democracy in South Africa.

If you want to know what a liberal is, check the obituaries of Peter Brown. He was not the only liberal, but he was a real liberal, not the phony liberal of the caricatures of both the left and the right.

1. Independent obituary
2. Mail & Guardian obituary

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[1] Gavin Evans’s article is a pretty good summary of the later stages of the South African liberation struggle, and he gives a few reasons for the criticism of “white liberals” from the left. But it is questionable how liberal  some of the people termed “liberals” actually were.  Some could at best be described as “semi-liberal” — they held some liberal values, but not others. The Progressive Party was not liberal, though it had some liberal people in it. It was always elitist: its policy was to drop racial discrimination and replace it with discrimination in favour of the rich and educated. At a student conference in the 1960s I said as much to a (black) supporter of the Progressive Party, and he accused me of preaching “Congoism”, and said that the Liberal “one man one vote” would never work.

The main criticism of the Liberal Party from the left was from the Communist Party, which claimed that the Liberal Party was a party of the bourgeoisie. Though most of the black members in Natal were black peasants, they were often landowning peasants like the Russian kulaks. The Nationalist government was ethnically cleansing them to remove “blackspots”, but if they had been subjected to a Stalinist solution, would they have been any better off? The difference is that the National Party actually applied its ethnic cleansing policy. The Communist Party, even though part of the government, has not actually attempted to apply a Stalinist solution, but has adopted a more liberal policy. Thus the left, though they have sometimes adopted liberal policies, still continue to badmouth liberals in their rhetoric.

Sex and skin — that’s what the US Democratic Party’s primary race was all about, if one read South African newspapers last weekend. Her sex and his skin, but with the emphasis on the skin.

Nearly 15 years after the end of apartheid, it seems, the South African media still have not recovered from their obsession with race. And nor have most of the rest of us. And nor has the government, for that matter. In the last census I still had to enter my “race” in the census form, and we are supposed to be a non-racial democracy. Isn’t this obsession with Barack Obama’s skin colour racist? What about his policies? Don’t they count?

As I noted in my other blog, quite a lot of Americans seemed to be more concerned about other differences between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton than sex and skin. Quite a lot noticed, and blogged about the difference in language and style. Hillary used the first person singular. Barack Obama used the first person plural. She was elitist, he was populist, in rhetoric anyway. She voted for cluster bombs, he didn’t. She voted for war with Iraq, he didn’t. His more recent capitulation to the Israel lobby doesn’t bode too well for the future, but that’s not the point here. The point here is the rhetoric and discourse of “race”.

The South African media pundits were asking “Is America ready for its first black president?” But if Hillary Clinton had won the nomination, or if John McCain wins the election, should we be asking “Is America ready for its 44th white president?” The very question is racist, right to its core.

Of course the Americans are having their own discourse about “race”, and that can perhaps illuminate some of our South African discourse too. On the alt.usage.english newsgroup there has been some discussion about it. Someone pointed out that Barack Obama is not black. His father was black and his mother is white; that makes him a mulatto. Is mulatto a “race”? What do we mean by “race”? And how does it relate to skin colour?

In South Africa we have our own terminology. We don’t use “mulatto”, but we have a lot of terms that were used in the apartheid era, and seem slow to die. The catch-all term for that was “Coloured” (with a capital C, as Black, White and Asian were also written in capital letters). But there wasn’t much logic applied (logic was not apartheid’s strong point). People whose ancestors came from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh were “Asian”, and those from Japan were “White” (they were on the right side in the Second World War which the Nats, then in opposition, opposed joining on the side of the Allies, preferring the Axis). Those whose ancestors came from Indonesia and Malaysia were not “Asian” but “Coloured”. And so were those, like Barack Obama, who had one parent with a dark skin and one with a light skin.

In our church in Johannesburg we once had a kid who would have been called “Coloured” in the apartheid era. She was born in South Africa, but of a Nigerian father and a Ukrainian mother. In the apartheid time, she would have been forced to attend a “Coloured” school, because that was her “own” people and culture. And so, for that matter, would Barack Obama, if he had been born in South Africa and grown up here.  But how much of their “own” would that have been?

In the debate on alt.usage.english, some said that the term “mulatto” was pejorative. Some said it would be better to say “mixed race”, but that still doesn’t answer the question “What do we mean by race?” Is it just skin colour and physical appearance? Or does culture count? When “Bantu” became politically incorrect in South Africa some time after 1970, some people began to speak of “Black” languages — as if a language had a colour.

Sometimes in South Africa we use these terms as a kind of cultural shorthand. People speak of the “black community” or the “white community”, meaning, very loosely, a kind of cultural group. To some white people, black people do not just have colour in common, but they are also people who are likely to slaughter and sacrifice animals in suburban gardens to honour the ancestors. So “black culture” is the culture that slaughters animals in the suburbs, and “white culture” is the culture that abhors that practice and thinks that the animals should be slaughtered far away and covered in polystyrene and plastic shrinkwrap before being brought into a suburban garden to be burnt. And the people who follow the former practice usually have dark skins, and those who follow the latter practice often have light skins, but there is no necessary connection between skin colour and where you get your meat.

But take the child with a black Nigerian father and a white Ukrainian mother, and one with a black Kenyan father and a white American mother? According to the apartheid theory (which still seems to hold sway in the minds of many South Africans) both children have a “Coloured” identity, which is their “own”. According to apartheid theory they could and should, nay, must have their “own affairs”. But what is it that they have in common? A similar colour of skin, perhaps, but culturally, Kenya and Nigeria, Ukraine and America, are poles apart. I have met Nigerians in Kenya who despised the alien food that Kenyans ate (samp and beans) as unfit for human consumption. Read A short history of tractors in Ukrainian to get the idea.

After a long discussion of these things on alt.usage.english someone told a story about Tiger Woods, the golfer. Apparently he was on some TV talk show, perhaps Oprah Winfrey, and he was asked what his race was, and he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer. So the talk show host turned to his father, who was sitting behind him, and asked what race his son belonged to. And his father replied, “The human race.”