Pew Research Center’s report published on November 8, “Orthodox Christianity in the 21st Century,” contains very valuable data concerning the state of Orthodox Churches and the countries in which they prevail. However, questions concerning a number of the researchers’ choices cannot but emerge.
(1) The report’s definition of what constitutes “Orthodox Christianity” is deeply problematic. The report bundles together the Eastern Orthodox Church with the Oriental Orthodox Churches (also called Old Oriental, Anti-Chalcedonian, Non-Chalcedonian, Pre-Chalcedonian, Miaphysite, or Monophysite Christianity). These have hardly anything in common (compared, for example, to the common theological elements between the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church): we are referring here to Churches that are not in communion with each other, haven’t been in communion since the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, and have developed different theologies ever since.
To illustrate the point, the Eastern Orthodox Church (today a communion of 14 local/national Churches, plus the Orthodox Church in America [OCA]) has ceased to be in communion with the Roman Catholic Church since, conventionally, AD 1054—half a millennium later than the clash with what are today the Oriental Orthodox Churches. The use of the word “Orthodox” in the title of Churches is purely coincidental (a claim made by both Churches, essentially), and problematic as terminology. One struggles to understand what would exactly be the rationale for this bundling of Churches that are not in communion and haven’t been so in more than 1500 years, in spite of current and laudable ecumenical attempts. What would be the definition of “”Orthodox Christianity” in “Orthodox Christianity in the 21st Century” so that it encompasses both the Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches, but not other Churches? The reader shouldn’t get me wrong: I am inquiring on methodology, not making pronouncements about the Oriental Orthodox Churches.
By excluding certain impossible options (such as an academically reputable terminology, theological grounds, the question of communion, etc.), one is led to identify an orientalist sentiment as the sole possible basis for this definition: i.e., that these Churches “look Eastern,” they look liturgically similar and “exotic,” so naturally they can be bundled together in a report on their current state. There is a way this could work by employing the equally problematic term—although not downright wrong, as would be the case with “Orthodox Church”—of “Eastern Christianity,” which would geographicalize the question and leave other terminological considerations aside. But even in that case, how is it that other Churches, like the Nestorian “Church of the East” or even the Byzantine Rite Catholics, do not fit the description and are not included in the report?
The Orthodox priest-scholar and my friend Father William Mills passed on to me an e-mail from the Jesuit, Father John Baldovin, who was in to see Father Robert Taft last weekend and reported that he is no longer eating and is very weak and frail. Taft, now in his 86th year, will soon appear, it seems, before the “awesome tribunal of Christ,” as the Byzantine liturgy, which Taft has done so much to help us understand, plaintively puts it.
One day, Damien asks me a question: How can he find out whether his religion is true? He comes to me and not, say, to his own Muslim Chaplain, because I will respect his freedom to search without coercing him (however gently) to my own answer. At the same time, my own faith commitment compels me to respond to Damien in a way that maintains the integrity of Orthodox Christianity, including its claims to exclusive fulness of truth. How do I prepare? I go to that quintessential scriptural interfaith engagement: the Apostle Paul’s speech to the philosophers of Athens (Acts 17:22-31).
ORTHODOXY IN DIALOGUE 