As soon as I was reasonably sure I wanted to become Orthodox in my Christianity, one of the first feelings or sentiments I experienced was a new distate for religious debate. It felt distinctly impious for me to throw my new-found allegiance toward historic Christian faith into the roiling ring of present-day theological dialogue. I don’t know if that’s because I was aware of my infantile grasp on this faith or if that is the way I would have felt had I gotten a PhD in Orthodox Studies before converting.

Since then, however, everything I’ve seen has confirmed that sentiment. I’ve seen two kinds of internet debate in which Orthodox thinking has been involved.

1) The Orthodox discussion boards; Inter-Orthodox debates.

2) The blog world of protestant seminarians and theologues; Orthodoxy debating with other forms of Christianity.

Each of these types distress me in different ways.

In the first you have Orthodox Christians forgetting themselves and their duties to one another all over the place. I’ve seen sentence after sentence beginning in “Forgive me, but…” and ending in some form of condemnation, criticism, or tongue-lashing in the name of True Orthodoxy. Frequently the bullies win because they won’t back down, while people trying to be good Orthodox Christians choose to put themselves in the wrong rather than keep squabbling. In the process they unfortunately put their beliefs in the wrong, as well. Friendships, at least of the internet sort, break up in public. And the cause of it all is that people were setting their religious beliefs at one another like attack dogs.

I’ve only set my heart on Orthodoxy since last summer, but already I’ve come to associate Orthodox discussion forums with a sort of American Orthodox Fundamentalism. You know, the type that judges the genuineness of your Orthodoxy against a calendar, a head covering, an ethnic custom, a favorite author, lipstick, spanking, a certain political cause, or some other non-essential. (This is a classic hallmark of all kinds of fundamentalism, by the way, as I have very good reason to know, having been raised in a fundamentalist church.) I don’t believe that Orthodoxy is normally a very fundamentalist type of religion. So I don’t care to see the most fundamental thinking among us being the most prominent. 

 The second forum is that of debating with protestants. When I was a protestant I enjoyed getting into a religious brawl as much as anyone out there. Oh, to find someone on my level and have it out in a good clean fight - my intution, learning, grammar, ettiquete, scriptural knowledge, and theological bent against someone else’s. In the process I came to understand the world of protestant theologues rather well. I’m going to share a few hints about their arena:

a) In any given debate, the fight is won by the person with the best debate skills and the steadiest stomach, not the person with the superior theological position.

b) the discussion is almost always purely rational, which means that theology like that of the Orthodox, which cannot survive once divided from its Living context of the Church, has little chance to come out on top compared to theology that was born and bred in a seminary classroom or study.

c) ridicule is the most commonly employed means of making one’s point - in other words, any doctrine you take into the arena you expose to ridicule.

d) over the internet, at least, the beliefs under debate inevitably become an extension of the believer - you attack one, you attack the other - which must inevitably degrade the honor of a belief that in reality is attached to Christ’s whole body, rather than to a single individual.

e) No one ever changes his or her mind.

 So what is the point, my friends? For what good do we hang the historic faith of the apostles, fathers, saints, and martyrs upon the hook of our own debating skills? For what do we engage our tradition in an arena in which it cannot win? Is it right to hand over our holy faith to those who will hold it up to the ridicule of outsiders? Is it right to put it in the position of being our personal defender, and our unworthy selves its personal defender? Is it good that we seek to make it a tool of destruction, humiliation and victory over our fellow believers in Christ Jesus? And when we have done all this, even if we’ve managed to prove our point to some seminarian, making him look like a fool in the process, have we saved a single sinner? Have we even established respectful connections with separated brethren? I fear not.

What’s more, another evil has then been accomplished.

The Protestant mindset is not a coherent tradition anymore. Underneath a broad body of allegiance to the Bible swing a billion tentacles of divided belief. Some tentacles are engorged by the adherence of millions; some maintain a connection to traditional Christian belief that gives them a certain soundness; others are the slender hair of a purely individual interpretation. But the grounds by which they defend their beliefs with such apparent confidence are not entirely the same grounds by which we defend ours. Our confidence flows largely from being part of a Living Body, with an age-long self-memory. Theirs depends largely upon their individual ability to interpret scriptures and church history: the arena of these very debates. Therefore when we enter into debate with such defenders we are making our faith as if it had no more grounds than theirs (I mean, in points at which they differ from us - for we must not forget to thank God for all points of unity which remain to Christian people in our time) thus undermining our own efforts. We are putting the faith beneath us instead of above us and in us and around us, and subjecting it to the criteria of those who do not know anything about it. And the more confidently we defend it, the more arrogant we seem and the less they understand it.

I do understand that there have been great defenders and debaters among the Christians. If there is ever a time again when a blow needs to be struck for Orthodox Christianity, I hope and believe that the saints among us will know how to do it. But when it comes to witnessing for our true Christian faith, I believe it is to such as us that Christ and the apostles speak when they tell us that it is our love, our Christian obedience, our steadfast faith, and our readiness to answer inquirers who have witnessed our hope, that is required of us.