World Religions, Orthodoxy and

TIMOTHY J. BECKER

The Orthodox Church understands itself as the full completion of the covenant with

Israel. From the outset, Orthodoxy has claimed continuity with a Jewish past, and so has assumed its monotheism, Scriptures, and critique of idolatry. Yet it has also stood in significant discontinuity with that past heritage, orienting the Jewish dispensa­tion according to Jesus Christ, whom it proclaims as the true goal of the Law and the Prophets, and who exceeds them all (cf. Mt. 12.6; 12.41–2).

However, most who became Orthodox Christians came from the nations sur­rounding Israel and, while accepting the Jewish critique of their cults, progressively resisted Jewish culture. This differentiation between cult and ethnic culture saw the emergence of the new and distinctive category of “religion,” in which cult took precedence but no longer necessarily corresponded to a particular culture. Thus, Orthodoxy has encountered the world with a restricted cult but an unrestricted attach­ment to culture; in this sense every culture can house Orthodoxy, while Orthodoxy can house only one cult, which it offers to all nations as the fulfilment of their own cultures.

Nearly all the fathers of the church saw Judaism in a closely relational mode to Christianity. Even those hostile to it were hostile likely because of local tensions rather than systematic theological reasons. The religions of other nations around them, however, were not seen positively. St. Athanasius (296–373) taught that the pagan cults were failures (at a basic logical and moral level) at assessing the innate Image of God properly, which was a live possibility. In a very influential early 4th-century treatise on the pagan cults, he said that rather than worshipping their uncreated Master, humans were swayed by evil to establish cre­ated things as God. Evil, which lacks exis­tence, is thus the cause of false gods, which also lack existence (Contra Gentes 1.8). For Athanasius, the religions are not just errors in religious style, they are metaphysically the undoing of the world, the deification of ontologically diminishing forms of exis­tence. Athanasius is also clear that this prac­tice is widespread, implicating, among others, the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Per­sians, Syrians, Indians, Arabs, Ethiopians, and Armenians (Contra Gentes 1.23).

Two centuries later, Pseudo-Dionysius (early 6th century) wrote that the religions of the nations derived from their rejection of angels. God had assigned an angel to each nation for oversight and divine illumination (The Celestial Hierarchy 9.2–4; cf. Dan. 10.13–21), which for Pseudo-Dionysius, explains the priesthood of Melchizedek (see Gen. 14.18–20; Ps. 110.4; Heb. 5.6), in the sense that he was faithful to angelic revelation. However, the vast majority of the nations had wandered from their angelic overseers and turned to false gods. Only Israel remained faithful to their angel, Michael, and so received illumination. Thus, for both Athanasius and Pseudo- Dionysius, the religious state of the world was a result of free will. All the nations could have been endowed with the true worship which Israel accepted, but have chosen otherwise because of moral and intellectual failures.

What this false worship would entail for the pagans at the Judgment was a matter of some reflection among the early fathers. A general sentiment, witnessed in the Egyptian desert literature, is that all fol­lowers of the cults were eternally lost. John of Damascus (655–750) summed up this view, teaching that repentance was not pos­sible after death (On the Orthodox Faith 2.4). Gregory of Nyssa (331–95), following Origen (186–255), held that all things would make eternal progress towards God; though this has always been a minority position within Orthodoxy and was formally condemned as a dogmatic propo­sition in the 6th century. Nevertheless, Isaac of Nineveh (7th century) wrote in his recently discovered treatises (The Second Part) that God’s mercy was greater than could be imagined; and one is also reminded of the celebrated saying of Silouan the Athonite (1866–1938): “Lord stand me at the gates of Hell and I shall see no one ever enters»

While uniformly rejecting “false gods,” “demons,” and “idols,” the Orthodox theo­logians, always within an active missionary and evangelistic awareness given to them by a vastly pluralistic ancient world, have generally sought to claim for themselves ele­ments within other religions that they have regarded as culturally valuable, as partially “compatible” with Christian truth. Chief among these characteristics have always been a prevalence towards monotheistic worship, an attachment to a rational mode of life, and the elevation of moral standards that were akin to those of the church. So, Justin Martyr (d. 165) argued that all who lived reasonably throughout history were in a real sense partakers of the Word, Jesus Christ (First Apology 46) and, as such, par­tial knowers of Christ (Second Apology 10). Justin retrospectively claimed for Christ the achievements of figures as prominent as Socrates and Heraclitus. In some Greek churches it is not unknown to see, occasion­ally, the great philosophical figures, Socrates and Plato, depicted in the frescoes of the Narthex, as some form of Hellenic prepara­tion (propaideusis) for the gospel.

Orthodoxy after the 3rd century was active in deliberately reconfiguring the theo­logical and metaphysical systems of the Greek philosophers, in order to harmonize elements of them with the scriptural teach­ings about God and the world. For instance, Platonism regarded God as an impersonal ultimate principle, with which the soul had a necessary kinship. While Orthodoxy drew on Platonic conceptual patterns, it thoroughly reworked them. For the patristic tradition, God was a Person, to whom the soul related as a creature with no natural bonding, only a connection by God’s grace­ful mercy that bridged an otherwise impass­able chasm between Creator and creature. Thus, the fundamental cultural distinction between the immaterial soul and material body had become one between the Uncre­ated Maker and everything else, which had been created out of nothing and which (without God’s vivifying grace) would lapse back into nothing. Athanasius epitomized this insight when he argued in the Contra Gentes that idolatry involved the worship of anything other than the Uncreated Creator.

In the early centuries of the church, reflection on the “other religions” was heavily conditioned by the pluralistic cultic scene of the late Roman Empire. There were regular persecutions of the church by the imperial authorities in this period, attacks which the Christians attributed to the hos­tility of demons roused by the church’s refusal to pay homage to them, and which local pagan communities also articulated in similar ways, from a slightly different angle, accusing the Christians of being worthy of death because of their “atheistic” rejection of the ancient cults. Such a context was not likely to lead towards much positive regard for alternative religious systems, and the positive reflections of the “philosophical fathers” probably did not carry much beyond the intellectual class.

Within a few centuries, the church had spread across the Mediterranean world and into Ethiopia, Arabia, Armenia, Persia, and India. By the 7th century the East Syrian Church had even reached China, where it survived active until the close of the 10th century. By the 9th century, Ortho­doxy began its movement among the Eastern European tribes of the Slavs, Moravians, Bulgars, Serbs, and Rus. Thus, at the end of its first millennium, Ortho­doxy, and Eastern Christianity more

generally, had encountered tribal religions from Africa to Arabia to Europe as well as Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Platonism, Hin­duism, Buddhism, and Islam. Each new religion it discovered was assessed with ref­erence to its own classical past and long experience of evangelization in pluralistic environments.

Among all the religions, Orthodoxy’s rela­tionship to Islam is distinctive. Islam is the only religion to have politically superseded Orthodoxy in homelands where once it was a majority. Between the 7th and 15th centu­ries, Orthodoxy moved from a position of power to that of an oppressed minority in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Persia, Armenia, and finally the Levant. In the times of the Byzantine ascendancy, Islam was generally regarded in a hostile way (Muhammad as a false prophet). In times when the church was subject to Islamic control, there were more attempts to have a sympathetic understanding, and some degree of accommo­dation could be witnessed (along the lines that Muhammad had brought monotheism to his people, together with a sense of reverence for Scripture, and a moral code – all of which spoke of elements of divine inspiration).

When Muslim Turks finally overcame the Byzantine Empire in the 15th century, the remaining Orthodox stronghold became Russia. Through the extending of the Russian Empire, the Orthodox eventually came into contact with the religiously plural Mongol Empire (before it became Muslim), as well as with Buddhism, Shintoism, and Shamanism in Alaska. And throughout the 20th century the Orthodox in Russia and much of Eastern Europe had to struggle with communism, an atheistic system with religious roots and characteristics.

The 20th century also saw the large-scale movement of Orthodox into an increas­ingly religiously plural West. This, together with its involvement in the Christian ecu­menical world, is leading Orthodoxy to become aware of its minority status within the global religious climate. The Orthodox today are faced, even in traditionally Ortho­dox countries, with making the transition, once again, from a context of power to one of weakness. In the West they are also faced with large-scale problems of the loss of religious identities, and a vastly greater plu­ralism than they had hitherto imagined. There are many challenges for the Orthodox Church in terms of what its future response will be. One thing is clear: the old attitudes that relied on cliches about other religions will have to be replaced by a deeper and closer study of what these religions actually do and teach. Many resources exist for such an extension of caritas. Patristic theology set up terms of rapprochement based upon the common heritage of humanity (all men and women of all religions) as made in the Image and Likeness of the Divine Logos who is the center of the worship of the Orthodox Church: the selfsame Lord, with a desire to save all humanity. The church, however, is governed by its divine commission to evangelize (Mt. 28.18–20), and pluralism in the form of accepting other religions as “equal or valid” alongside Orthodoxy is not seen as a viable path for­ward, or as compatible with its fundamental mission in the world to bring all to Christ and to witness to all the authentic traditions of the gospel in its own lifestyle and Chris­tian culture. The exact resolution of many of these issues of Orthodoxy’s relations to other religions remains to be clarified in the future. What is unarguable, however, is that Orthodoxy has a vast experience of living in a religiously plural world from its earliest origins, and that its relations with Judaism will remain on a different basis from all others. However, Islam also constitutes a special, though lesser, case because of its own origins with so many Jewish and Chris­tian influences in its foundational Scriptures.

SEE ALSO: Ecumenism, Orthodoxy and; Evangelism; Islam, Orthodoxy and; Judaism, Orthodoxy and

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Boyarin, D. (2003) “Semantic Differences; or ‘Judaism7‘Christianity,’” in A. H. Becker and A. Y. Reed (eds.) The Ways That Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages. Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Griffith, S. H. (2008) The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the

World of Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Louth, A. (2007) The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

McGuckin, J. A. (2008) The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Its History, Doctrine, and Spiritual Culture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Moffett, S. H. (2003) A History of Christianity in Asia, Vol. 1: Beginnings to 1500. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis.

Pospielovsky, D. (1998) The Orthodox Church in the History of Russia. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press.

Sunquist, S. W. (ed.) (2001) A Dictionary of Asian Christianity. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.