Vox Oriente: An Introduction to the Orthodox Christian East

Vox Oriente is a Latin phrase meaning "Voice of the East." It might strike some as ironic to use such a title in Latin, which never enjoyed much popularity in the East but has only ever dominated the culture of the West. Yet because these weblog offerings are in the West, from a son of the West, but (attempting, at least) speaking with the theology of the Christian East, it makes some sense, I think, to use Western language to speak about the East. And if theology really is what it must necessarily claim to be—universal truth—then of course what is true in the East is true in the West, as well.

The purpose of this weblog, which the editors at Emmaus Patch have so kindly invited me to write, is generally to introduce readers to the world of the Orthodox Christian East, which is nearly unknown in the West, despite having persisted in the world for almost 2000 years since its beginnings in the Middle East and for more than 250 years on the North American continent since the 1734 secret conversion of a former Anglican from Colonial Virginia while visiting the Russian embassy in London.

In the minds of most Americans, Christianity is a known quantity. I imagine this must be true of most folks in Emmaus, as well. Emmaus is home to a few more than a dozen churches, and it was conceived as an explicitly Christian community at its foundation in 1759. Most of the churches in Emmaus are (at least in their official documents) both Trinitarian (believing that there is one God in three Persons—Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and Incarnational (that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is both God and man) in theology.  Most of them come from a Western theological background, in which the primary question of man's connection to God is put in legal kinds of language—we have committed crimes against the divine law, and so either we must pay (Hell!) or we must get someone to pay for us (Heaven, because Jesus died in our place).

But what if there were a Christian theology that does not see our problem as primarily a legal one? What if trying to get God to simmer down and not be mad at us any more so that He'll let us into Heaven were not the basic dynamic of Christian theology?

I know I'm painting with broad brush strokes and oversimplifying a bit here, but my experience has been that these kinds of issues do indeed characterize the portrait of Christianity in America. Some believers are of course fine with a theology founded essentially on questions of crime, punishment and pardon. And some ex-believers are fine with such a Christian theology, too, because it's clear to them why they're rejecting it.

What I'd like folks to know is that there's a whole Christian theological world out there which is not preoccupied with these kinds of questions but is focused on something else entirely and that that world has steadily taught and practiced the exact same thing unwaveringly for twenty centuries. What is that world? It's Orthodox Christianity, the faith of the Orthodox Church, sometimes known as Eastern Orthodoxy or Greek Orthodoxy.

You may also be familiar with the Church through its ethnic associations, e.g., Russian, Syrian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Serbian, etc., but those associations are cultural accretions of history and not critical to the faith itself. I'm actually reminded of the sheer irrelevance of these cultural designations by a curious accident in the Emmaus borough's records for my own church (which is from the Antiochian Orthodox tradition, generally associated in the Old World with Syria and Lebanon):  We are listed on the zoning map of Emmaus as a "Ukranian Orthodox" (sic) church.  I have some theories about why we've been mistaken for Ukrainians by the borough cartographer (despite our never being part of the Ukrainian church), but the misappellation just goes to show that such things really don't matter that much. What matters about Orthodox Christianity is Orthodox Christianity, not the particular flavor of food or music or ethnicity one's forebears happen to have borne.

In any event, one could write volumes about the differences between the Orthodox Christianity of the East and the Roman Catholic and Protestant Christianity of the West (and I must confess to having written one of those volumes; please forgive me and feel no obligation to read it). But my aim in this first post is not to lay out any such library, but rather just to introduce what my purpose in writing this weblog is. 

Vox Oriente hopes to draw the reader's attention to the unknown (yet, in some ways, known) treasuries of Christian theology and spirituality which have made their home in the East and are making their way here in the West.  I hope some of the jewels and pearls we may discover together will be of interest to you.

The Rev. Fr. Andrew Stephen Damick is pastor of in Emmaus, Pennsylvania and is the author of Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy: Exploring Belief Systems Through the Lens of the Ancient Christian Faith. He also lectures widely on Orthodox Christian evangelism, history, ecology, comparative theology and localism. He is a founding member and one of the associate directors of the Society for Orthodox Christian History in the Americas. Fr. Andrew hosts the Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy and Roads from Emmaus podcasts, as well as writing the Roads from Emmaus weblog. He lives in Emmaus with his wife Kh. Nicole and their children.