“The task of theological education is not to enable students to answer questions that arise today, but to be able to respond to those that will be raised in the decades to come,” said the Very Rev. Dr. John Behr, the Father Georges Florovsky Distinguished Professor of Patristics at St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary.

Father Behr’s lecture, “Theological Education in the Twenty-First Century,” delivered Sept. 24 in the McNally Amphitheatre at Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, explored the high calling taken up by teachers of theology and the challenges they face in a complex and changing modern world.

Father Behr, one of the world’s leading scholars of early Christianity, will join the University of Aberdeen next year as a professor of divinity. The Orthodoxy in America lecture is a signature annual event of Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center that has featured some of the Orthodox world’s most influential thinkers since 2004.

“Theological education really is at the heart of the Christian faith,” Father Behr said. “It goes back to the mandate of Christ himself: ‘Go therefore and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’”

The imperative to make disciples, Father Behr continued, “is a matter of teaching—making students of the words.” And the goal of theological education, he said, is “forming theologians—ones who can speak in new and yet unforeseen contexts.”

Training future theologians, Father Behr acknowledged, does, of course, involve the transmission of a great deal of information and skills—encompassing a range of disciplines, including languages, history, liturgy, iconography, pastoral ministry, and public speaking. However, he continued, “Theology is not simply a matter of handing down information, a static set of propositions—as if teachers of theology were simply UPS delivery persons handing over a package without having contributed anything to that package themselves.”

Rather, teachers of theology impart their own wisdom as they pass along the lessons of their forebears. “Tradition is not simply a repetition, but a creative fidelity,” Father Behr said, borrowing a phrase from the Orthodox theologian Kallistos Ware.

Theology as Symphony

To illustrate this formulation, Father Behr likened theology to a symphony comprising the multitude of voices that have shaped Christian thought across centuries and continents. Listening to theology as a symphony, he said, allows us to hear both the orchestra as a whole as well each individual voice. “Each voice must be heard in its full particularity, and in its full particularity contributes to the polyphonous nature of a symphony,” Behr said.

The symphony of theology, in Father Behr’s formulation, is a living composition to be rehearsed and performed anew by each successive generation of theologians. “We rehearse the symphony so that we ourselves can be harmonized into the symphony and so take our part today to sing in that symphony with new voices—with themes and movements that might well be different from what went before, yet part of the same symphony,” he said.

“We must sing in the present—addressing the concerns of the present and using the language of the present—if we’re going to have anything to say and any hope of being heard.”

Transforming Our Vision

To contribute to this ongoing symphony is an essential task, Father Behr stressed. “We must be ready to give a good account of the hope that is in us to all those who ask, as the Apostle Peter demands of us,” he said.

“The task of theology is transformation: transforming our vision so that we might ourselves be transformed,” Father Behr said, adding that this theological vision can allow us “to see everything in the light of Christ.”

Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, praised Father Behr for his reverence and humor in comments following the lecture. “You spoke with experience, you spoke from the heart, and you spoke with loving wisdom about the transmission of the wisdom of love,” Father McShane said.

In his conclusion, His Grace Bishop Irinej of the Serbian Orthodox Diocese of Eastern America thanked Father Behr “for taking tradition out of the formaldehyde in which it is so often placed, and rather bringing it back to life.”

–Michael Garofalo

“To be truly American in the most extreme way is to be a sort of proteus, capable of becoming just about anything,” said David Bentley Hart, Ph.D., research fellow at the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study.

“That may amount to a kind of cultural genius, but it does raise questions regarding what becomes [of]the many eastern Christians Orthodox traditions in this country, when immersed in an element of ceaseless dissolution and transformation.”

According to a 2015 Pew Research Center study, only 53% of Americans who were raised Orthodox still identified as Orthodox Christians. Therefore, the church can benefit from the dynamism, energy, and charisma of converts to the faith, said Hart, in his lecture, “Orthodoxy in America and America’s Orthodoxies.”

Just as importantly, converts can help the faith finally shed the burden of preserving ethnic pride and identity.

But they can also negatively change the faith through shallow understandings of its theology, he said.

“Many are accustomed to think of Christian faith as simply a uniform set of explicit beliefs,” he said.  Some of these attitudes are attributed to the innate character of the United States, which he described as “a nation more constructed than cultivated, built around a political and social project, always somewhat in flux, but also more or less relentlessly oriented toward the future” and “generated out of its own native ideals and values rather than out of any traditions that it might have inherited from the lands its peoples left behind.”

He saw a particular danger posed by converts from Evangelical backgrounds who are drawn to Orthodox Christianity because of their opposition to the Catholic Church.

“There are real differences that divide Christians, [so]it’s absolutely imperative that we not allow ourselves to deepen those divisions by exaggerating, misrepresenting, or to put it bluntly, celebrating them,” he said.

Hart said he was apprehensive but hopeful that a new form of “self-aware” orthodoxy is taking shape in the United States.

“[It] has at long last severed its mission to speak the gospel from its institutional and cultural subordination to nations, governments and discreet peoples,” he said.[It] will remind the convert that there is neither Jew nor Greek nor South Carolinian. All are one.”

In his benediction, His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, primate of the Greek Orthodox Church in America, contrasted his own upbringing in the city of Thessaloniki, Greece, to his current residence on East 79th Street in Manhattan.

“How do you feel if you go from a history and a country with 95 percent orthodox people, and you come to this kind of situation where there are 198 different nations, countries, religions, languages, and everything is different?” he said. “You’re a special species. You create the contemporary orthodoxy rooted very strongly in the past, but looking to the future.”

Hart’s lecture was presented by Fordham’s Orthodox Christian Studies Center.

]]> 78271 https://now.fordham.edu/living-the-mission/orthodoxy-lecture-chronicles-the-philokalia/ Mon, 03 Dec 2012 16:20:06 +0000 http://news.fordham.sitecare.pro/?p=6896

American writer J.D. Salinger, author of The Catcher in the Rye and student of the Hindu tradition Advaita Vedanta, would seem an unlikely proponent of Eastern Christian Orthodoxy.

But it was Salinger’s 1961 book Franny and Zooey that helped usher into American thought an ancient Orthodox tradition known as the Philokalia, said the Very Reverend John Anthony McGuckin, Ph.D.

Father McGuckin, the Ane Marie and Bent Emil Nelson Professor in Late Antique and Byzantine Christian History at Union Theological Seminary and professor of Byzantine Studies at Columbia University, was the keynote speaker at the ninth annual installment of the Orthodoxy in America Lecture Series, held Nov. 14.

In his lecture, Father McGuckin traced the roots of the Philokalia, a compilation of spiritual texts, and how this tradition arrived in America.
One of the most important books in the Orthodox tradition, the Philokalia contains the writings of spiritual masters who strived to illuminate the path to religious awakening.

“The collection of texts follows a broad but generic master-theme: the correlation of the search for inner stability with the quest for the transcendental vision of God…whereby the human soul, at its highest level of cognition, might awake in its upper levels of sensibility into the unmediated presence of God,” Father McGuckin said.

Father McGuckin highlighted three Orthodox saints—St. Paisy Velichkovsky, a Romanian Orthodox saint, and St. Nikodemos the Hagiorite and St. Makarios of Corinth—who made important contributions to the Philokalia and helped disseminate it throughout the Eastern world.

Among the Philokalic spiritual practices that these writers and translators emphasized was the Jesus Prayer, a meditation that repeatedly recites the phrase “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner,” until it becomes ingrained in the mind and heart of the person saying it.

Following the death of St. Paisy, who labored to bring the Philokalia to the Slavic countries, the text was brought further east to Russia and the Ukraine. Here, the Jesus Prayer made its way out of monastic communities and gained popularity among the laity.

In the mid-19th century, two Russian mystics published the Way of the Pilgrim, the story of a poor peasant who masters the Jesus Prayer as he journeys through Russia. The story’s translation into English helped give the Philokalia its final push from the monastery into the “global village,” Father McGuckin said.

“And nowhere [was]that global village more epitomized than New York…in the hip 1960s of the 20th century,” he said.

During this time, the American public was becoming increasingly interested in mystical traditions such as Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta. It was at this time that Salinger penned Franny and Zooey.

The book chronicles the existential crisis of Franny Glass, a Manhattan college student in her 20s who plunges into despair over the selfishness and superficiality she perceives around her. In her anguish, she becomes preoccupied by the Way of the Pilgrim and recites the Jesus Prayer incessantly.

With the help of her elder brothers Zooey and Buddy, Franny looks deeper into the Jesus Prayer and learns that we must have mercy on ourselves and on others—just as the prayer implores God’s mercy. This mercy ultimately translates to love, the “true fabric of existence,” Father McGuckin said.

“Franny’s story revealed to a very large reading public the existence of the Way of the Pilgrim, which became for American Protestants and Catholics a major highway into Orthodox spiritual practice,” Father McGuckin said.

The story also offers a caution, Father McGuckin said.

“We need to take to heart the American icon of Franny Glass, and be wary of using the endless cycles of the repetitive ‘Lord have mercy’ to make us even more neurotic than we presently are,” he said.

“It is wise to remember… that this process needs an experienced guide—even while admiring the courage of many great devotees of the prayer, who still insist that it ought to have wide and public dissemination.”

The annual Orthodoxy in America Lecture series, the largest annual lecture of its kind, is sponsored by the Orthodox Christian Studies Center.