CHANGING PARADIGMS:  THE CLASH OF  THOUGHT WORLDS AND THE UPHEAVAL OF MOVING FROM ONE TO ANOTHER

 © 2000-2001, 2003 by Orchid Land Publications  

    If you read the propaganda, doctrinal unity among Christians and being nice to one another go together (one example of being nice being intercommunion):  If we are nice to one another (and especially nice enough to overlook a lot of what seem to be falsehoods), we will be able to agree on our beliefs.   Overlooking the inherent absurdity and indeed intellectual dishonesty of this, one can point out that it takes more charity to be friendly and tolerant with those of opposed views than it does to be friendly with those who agree with us.  It would be nice if interfaith meetings could skip the background noise or background music and just deal with the differences, not pretending that the goal of intercommunion is the means (it is patently absurd to pretend that a goal can be its own means or conversely).  It would be worth experimenting with a meeting where our clashing thought worlds were laid on the table, where we give others the same right that we claim to differ from them, and then getting on with an honest attempt to see what the causes and results of differences really are and which cannot be overcome.  This attempt should not be seen as what its converse would be--full of willful perversions of truth; it should be seen to stem from deep, deep ideological differences--differences that scholars call paradigms.

iiFrom Protestant radicalism to Orthodoxy's holy Tradition

    The author, a former Quaker, of a recent article in Again tells us that "lifelong Orthodox Christians often have no idea what obstacles a serious Protestant has to overcome on [one's] way to Orthodoxy."  I would portray the shift as including the following:

Since the foregoing rows overlap and are rather artificially distinguished here, a few comments are in order.  First, there is a thread running through it all:  Human concerns, mainly Salvation, as primary vs. Worship of God as primary; a Gnostic anti-creationist, internal-oriented view of religion that disdains any rôle for matter and time (creation and Salvation are instantaneous)  vs. an ontological rôle for the Incarnation and Resurrection and both internal and external (material/Mysteric, temporal/traditional) sides of religion; will-based individualism vs. corporate tradition.  If the Protestant emphasis on sermons is a human-addressed, human-focused activity, Orthodox Worship is doxological--not celebrated to comfort,  teach, or exhort the congregation; in short, Worship is not a means but an end in itself.  With regard to hearing and seeing, it should be noticed that, while ancient and Mediæval Greek education concentrated on rhetoric and verbal expression, hearing never became venerated the way words and the Book are in Reformation theology; on the contrary, the rhetorical embellishments of brief scriptural passages were the middle phase of a chain that eventuated in the pictorial representation of those embellishments in the Byzantine icon.   The word is essential in Protestantism; theologians tell us that ordinances or  "sacraments" are optional in that they simply symbolize, seal, and confirm Grace received through hearing the preached word.  The emphasis on the Crucifixion as a juridical punishment is very different from (the Book of Hebrews and) the ontological view of the Incarnation, Transfiguration, and Resurrection.  The Biblical concepts of energy, energizing, and energetic are absent in Protestantism, as in Western Christianity generally; Grace is not uncreated Energy (God's Life), as in Orthodoxy.  It is replaced by a virtual reality of Grace, Justification, and even partaking of Christ's Body and Blood  in the "ordinance" vaguely corresponding to the traditional Eucharist.  Unity with Christ is "covenantal"--virtual rather than an ontological sharing in God's uncreated Energies--as in Orthodoxy.  
     Those who have not switched thought worlds have to be extraordinarily gifted to have an inkling of the revolutionary upheaval that a person committed to  Gnostic-and-theletist (will-based) assumptions about religious reality faces in moving to an acceptance of a framework in which the materiotemporal creation is assumed to play an essential rôle, and individual Salvation takes second place to Worshiping the all-holy Trinity--not just "Jesus as Lord and Savior," but Father, Christ God, and the all-holy Spirit.  The more a "personal commitment to a personal Jesus" gets emphasized, the more Christ, God the Son, YHWH, the Creator of the materiotemporal world fade from one's religious view--something that explains the waning of Trinitarianism in the more left-wing forms of Protestantism--itself the left wing of Christianity.

iii

From Papalism to holy Orthodoxy

It is immediately evident that from a purely numerical vantage, the move from Papalism to Orthodoxy is not as great as the move from Protestantism to Orthodoxy.  Both forms of traditional Christianity are "sacramental" and therefore not iconomachist.  But the great gulf between East and the various Western forms of Christianity is evident in the absence of "energy" in the West--and all that that entails--as well as in the Anselmian idea that the Crucifixion is an inherited punishment.  But Latin Grace is a created quality of the human soul; and union with Christ is realized through an intellectual vision and is non quantum ad modum essendi--i.e. virtual--given that God's Essence (there is no God's "Energy" in Western Christianity) is ontologically imparticipable.  Note that Grace and works conflict in Protestantism and are problematic in Augustinian-influenced Papalism; this contrasts with the energy of Philp. 2:13 in Greek--in Orthodoxy.
     If the jump from sincere Latin to sincere Orthodox requires somewhat less shifting of gears than from sincere Protestant to sincere Orthodox, the shift is nevertheless  just as radical.  All paradigms are discrete and unrelated.  In a few respects, the Protestants may have an advantage, since Grace is not "uncreated" for Protestants the way it is for Latins.  But in the end, both have a kind of virtual, non-energetic or ontological Unity with Christ, whether an intellectual or covenantal Unity with the Savior one worships.

iv

From a Correspondent (shortened)

       Your website is a godsend for me.  It is remarkable.  I am a former [mainline Protestant] minister. . . .  But . . . via computer, God's "amazing grace" led me to discover Orthodoxy.       

     One question that comes to mind is:  Near you, on the Island of Molokai, [the Latin] Fr. Damien did well in serving God, did he not?  One could reasonably  ask, where was Orthodoxy?)

  Orthodoxy was busy missionizing the northerly areas of half of the world's time zones.  It missionized Alaska when it was still part of Russia and after it became part of the USA.  Then Orthodoxy was devastated--several million martyrs under the Turks in the twentieth century and 60 million martyrs in the Soviet Union alone under the Communists (or Nazis)--in all of the countries where it predominated.  After Orthodoxy reached the shores of Alaska and the rest of North America, Australia, New Zealand--all far from Hawai'i--almost none of its leaders spoke English at first.   To answer your question about where Orthodoxy was--it in the ghettos and mines where the great majority of the immigrants from Orthodox lands at first lived and worked, though there were of course a few intellectuals teaching at the best universities as well as a few specialists in certain industries.  

      Why should God lead [the priest who switched from being an anti-Catholic to a Catholic at Assisi, and who converted me to Catholicism] in the wrong direction?  He did not ask for it. 

How does one know?  A well-known Latin apologist once asked me why Latins convert to Orthodoxy but the Orthodox do not convert to papalism.  There must be a reason.  I won't state what I think it was--but it has elements of both spiritual life and secular history.

You see, my doubts and questions could come under the basic and simple idea of "phenomenology" in philosophy, viz., I take seriously and respect others' experiences.  

Certainly one should respect all sincere experiences; but Buddhism has got, I imagine, as many such experiences, proportionately, as does Christianity or Islam.   It seems that that approach could lead to relativism.  

I realize that I need to concentrate on my own belief and
circumstances, though, not on someone else's.  But questions arise,
nevertheless. I was wondering if I may ask you some of these?

What your site shows me, among other things, is that Orthodoxy has such a limitless and internally consistent intellectual dimension--but it's not just that, is it? 

Well we do believe that the LOGOS & SOPHIA (Reason and Wisdom) of God--YHWH, Jesus Christ--created all that has been created.  As the LOGOS is Reason, so the cosmos He created is logikos--amenable to rational investigation.  But we are not "intellectualist" or "rationalist" like Scholastics.  We believe that finite reason has limits that block it from understanding infinite mysteries, except apophatically (i.e. revealing finite things that God is not).  We certainly don't have all of that complex juridical views of Salvation one finds in Western Christianity--insofar as any beliefs are found in either today.  Any peasant can grasp the basic import of Divinization (theosis).       (If you read the Barna research reports at barna.com, you will see that most Evangelicals--including a lot of the teachers--do not believe in very much of a specific nature--at least, according to Barna's statistics.  There are even Catholics who do not treat the consecrated bread and wine as the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, and after Communion dispose of it as though it were the bread and wine that Protestants take it to be; but they are not the norm--any more than faithless Orthodox are the norm for holy Orthodoxy.   There are even some Reformed Protestants that claim to be, in effect, still in Calvin's paradigm.) 

I mean the simplist grandmother or, even a simple-minded person like me who makes no claim to being any sort of intellect . . . can believe.  What drives me more than the apologetics and the history, is the fact that I need to get right with God in right Worship and belief, because I am an awful sinner; my "nous" is scattered, and I need healing.  The Church is a hospital for wounded souls like mine.  (I've read Orthodox Psychotherapy several times!). 

I know a priest who is also a psychiatrist who stresses the therapeutic aspect of the Orthodox religion.  I think that your description is anything but atypical.  But different personalities are converted in different ways.  I find the "we are more  mystical than other forms of Christianity, etc., etc." approach off-putting (see on "mystical" below).

I've come to see that the Protestant tenet of sola scriptura is not so much wrong as impossible.  I understand also that the Church is not a communal consequence of the Gospel, but an integral part of it.  I believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. . . .  concisely put, I believe IN the Church, as the Standard of Belief states).  

We have now come to the nitty-gritty:  Each of us starts out with a set of axioms and assumptions that dispose what we can and cannot entertain in our thinking.  Basic terms like "energy" in the Greek- language OT & NT and basic ideas like theosis in Greek thinking are unknown in the West--not being part of the Western sets of presuppositions--paradigms.  Why?  The 750 years of Dark Ages separated the West from Orthodoxy; that ended when the West adopted two new paradigms from Islamic philosophy (in Cordova, Spain, the biggest city of its day--as big as Constantinople).  One set of assumptions was Dominican and intellect-based (Thomas Aquinas); one was Franciscan and will-based (Luther's philosophy):  Both involved different and common elements of the Islamic Aristotle.  The point is that, since the paradigms that moulded Western Christians' understanding of Scripture and the Fathers were invented a dozen centuries after the resurrection and lacked the emphasis on BEING with its division into dynamis (potential) and energy (actualization):  MOST CRUCIAL PASSAGES CITED FROM SCRIPTURE OR THE FATHERS WILL MEAN DIFFERENT THINGS IN EACH PARADIGM.  That's the nitty-gritty!!  
     By the way, Luther had two modernisms:  (a) the via moderna or will-based Ockhamist philosophy; (b) the devotio moderna, with heavy overtones of Gnostic rejection of matter (Mysteries) and time (tradition as well as developmental creation and developmental Salvation).   Now some of the latter sixteenth-century modernism (devotio moderna) was "mystical" in a vastly different, anti-materialist, anti-temporal sense from Orthodox mystericism.  The Hesychast theologians were mystical in a non-Western sense that emphasized the body in Worship, etc.   
     What blocks some potential converts who write is their inability or unwillingness to see that they have got to enter a NEW WORLD of thinking and behaving in order to grasp the Orthodox phronema or outlook.  (It's hard, since you need to understand that thought world to read the Fathers; and you need to read the Fathers to acquire the Orthodox phronema.)  But one can do so with the assurance that what we say about, say, energy (and all of the problems it solves) is in the Greek Bible--however much obscured in translations of the NT that are available.  Those unwilling to make the paradigm leap (shift) won't IMHO get anywhere.   :((  'Tis not easy.  
      I think many introductions to Orthodoxy are a waste of time.  They speak in words that mean something else to readers; they speak of church government rather than of belief; of our history and differences with other religions; etc.  Of course, comparison is useful--but when it is apples and oranges, one has got to begin with the difference between apples and oranges before one contrasts an apple seed with an orange seed.  The introductions that I've come across start at the wrong end.  You might well be wary of doing that.  What good is a discussion of the Synods if you understand them in an alien phronema?

But there is a Roman Catholic Church, of course.  The Catholic Church is truly everywhere.  Why can't that be the case for the Orthodox Church in Hawai'i?  

The majority religions here are the various kinds of Buddhists and the Mormons, but the Latins have at least a small temple everywhere nearly--usually served by a priest who serves several others.  I have already answered your other question.  A new parish was recently started on a near-by island.  A further, partial answer to your question involves two factors: (i) The Latins have unmarried priests that they can move around easily and pay small salaries to; they are more mobile than married Greek/Russian/Antiochian clergy, though the latter are likely to be better counselors (on the whole) for family problems. (ii) A Protestant layman can start a Church and preach and do what one wishes till the congregation is big enough to hire a pastor.  We cannot do that.  I cannot go out and organize a Church.  I am not authorized to read even the non-eucharistic services to a group of people.  

May I write again, with a view to being more concise and asking some specific questions? 

Yes, but (i) personal questions and spiritual advice would best be directed to your priest or spiritual advisor; I am not qualified to do more than funnel information and comments on the same.  (ii) Having made at least one paradigm-shift (Liberal Protestant. to RC), you know what a new thought world is.  Unless one begins with that, just discussing details will do nothing but confuse us.  At least, I was confused till I took that route; and there are probably others like me.  I was misled by the various introductions to Orthodoxy that I came across; most were strange lists of beliefs and practices--with much discussion of the seven Synods that I already knew about in my non-Orthodox phronema--and much praise for the beauty of Orthodoxy.  (The Orlapubs webpage on the beauty of Orthodoxy points out that beauty is necessary but it is not enough for a religion to be right and true.)  Most of whatever I know is already available on the website.  As I have received answers to my own questions, I have posted what people have written or someone's distillation of those intimations.  I also refer to many good sites, including the official sites of the larger groups.    This web site makes no claim to completeness, good organization (it just grew up in the manner just stated), or any sort of magisterial status.  There are no doubt more than typing errors on it--which I like to be informed of--so that I can (after investigation) correct them.

May the All Holy Trinity continue to bless you in your wonderful work for Him.

Thank you very much.  I appreciate your good wishes and reciprocate them.  
     Two points:  It's fine with me but one doesn't say "Bless you" to a priest, since it's the priest who blesses the layperson.  

Yours in Christ God, 

and in a subsequent communication

With Catholicism, you know, the world knows . . .  where the best and most traditional and conservative Catholics stand, what the true Catholic teaching is.  It's written in the Cathechism, spoken and written down by Cardinal Ratzinger, and articulated by the Pope and his Magisterium.

As is said elsewhere on this website,  Orthodoxy could do a lot better in offering systematic treatises on belief and practice than the West has done.  But there is a problem of overdoing it among the Latins.  I guess the Orthodox temperament  (phronema) is content with a less straitjacketed or mechanistic approach to everything than the West (especially the Scholastic West)  is--unless it's something basic and essential (non-negotiable)  like homoousios.  In the latter case, the Orthodox can be nobly nitpicking.   Superclarity is impossible with regard to Mysteries and may or may not be desirable in some other things.  Take juridicalized Western Christianity (with which American Orthodoxy is greatly infected, as not a few websites and online lists reveal):  The more exact one gets with respect to some things (especially laws), the harder it is to deal with the real world, since no room is left for interpretation or special circumstances not foreseen by the lawmaker.    Get too exact in some things and you lose touch with reality; get too exact in some things, the harder it is to say something that cannot be taken exception to.  Rigidity is not good in matters where a degree of flexibility is called for.  The job is to know which matters call for non-negotiability and which "live" better with some sensible flexibility.

Yours in Christ,

v

Summary

     The shifting of mental gears required for moving from one sincerely held religious paradigm to another is obscured when one thinks of the move as simply giving up some beliefs in one's list of beliefs and of adopting new ones.  The list-mentality ignores the systematic coherence and interlinking of beliefs favored or disfavored by the underlying premises of one's (often unconscious) paradigm.  Those who have made the shift from a sincere Latin or Protestant paradigm to the Orthodox thought world and phronema can tell you that a lot more is involved than changing this and that belief--what most Orthodox apologetic and missionary manuals concentrate on.  This latter approach may work for atheists, but it won't do so well with Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, etc.  It is not enough just to "start where they are" if "where they are" is envisioned as being simply a list of beliefs.  Changing religious thought worlds is a revolutionary exchange of some premises and assumptions about reality and religion for very different, often opposite, premises and assumptions--not in principle unlike switching from Ptolemy to Copernicus or from Newtonian physics to today's physics.
     Many writers do not realize that they are saying things in THEIR thought world that mean OTHER things in other thought worlds.  If you call Dormition "Assumption," you mess up.  Let's see how much theology is packed into a single, by no means recherché, term.  (I lean on George Gabriel's Mary the untrodden portal of God.)  Dormition says that the Theotokos reposed (died); Assumption conveys that she did not die.  (Both say she was carried off to heaven--three days after dying in Orthodoxy.)  Why could the Virgin not die in Latin theology?  It is because death is a punishment in Western thinking; and it would not be appropriate to allow a sinless person (both East and the Latin West agree on her "all-pure" or sinlessness life) to be punished.  Why is she freed from sin at her (immaculate) conception?  It is because in Western theology, newborns carry (by natural generation among the Latins, by divine imputation for the Reformers). and are guilty. of Adam's sins.   Look how much is tied up  in one simple term!!  None of the theological reasons of the West that would prohibit the Theotokos from living the way humans live apply in Orthodoxy, though we of course believe that she was endowed, as St. Luke's Gospel says in its first chapter, with special Graces for her momentous task:  She was born sinless like other newborns and died a non-penal death like others humans.  Note that in Luke 1:43, St. Elizabeth called her "Mother of YHWH" (Jews were required to replace the ineffable divine name with [in most contexts] "my Lord"; today, they often say Ha Shem "the Name").