Evangelical Apologetics Didn’t Save the West But It Led Many to Orthodoxy

Love, not Apologetics, is transforming the Western World

Each Sunday, the Divine Liturgy, for me, is a kind of sweet catharsis and release.

As so much of the world about us appears to be coming apart at the seams, to step into the Orthodox church on a Sunday morning is akin to stepping into some quiet and mysterious other place… as though into another country. It is a place where time does not press upon me in quite the same tyrannical way as every other part of my week, and where, above all, one becomes aware of the presence of God.

If you’ve never been to an Orthodox Church, it is not for the faint of heart, we spend hours and hours in prayer, then there is the Eucharist, and then the multi-hour fellowship of our parish seems to consume our entire Sunday.

Our parish itself has changed in recent years. It has not only grown in number, but in love. There is a difference between a crowd and a family, and we have, by God’s mercy, become something nearer to the latter.

Our priest was formed under the guidance of Saint Porphyrius, the Saint who is remembered for what many call his way of love.

For nearly a decade now, our spiritual father has labored, not to construct an institution, but to nurture a household. And a household, if it is to be worthy of the name, must be bound together not merely by agreement, but by affection.

I have not often encountered such a thing. Nor am I alone in this. One of our parishioners came, quite by accident, while on holiday from the North. He was greeted, not with formality, but with a kiss upon the head and an embrace by our priest. Something in that moment persuaded him more deeply than any argument could have done. He returned home, sold his house, and moved to Carolina. I often think that had I too been living across the country and met our saintly spiritual father I would have done the same.

In an age when the very idea of family seems to be fraying, to discover a priest and a people striving, however imperfectly, to live out the command to love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind, and strength, and one’s neighbor as oneself, is to feel rather like the man who found the pearl of great price. One does not hesitate long over the cost.

Yesterday afternoon, a good friend of mine from Charlotte called. He is an Orthodox Christian and a poet. Our conversations often leave me with the bones of an essay before I have even realized it. He speaks with a kind of rhythm that fills me with hope, and, where I am inclined to become entangled in the abstractions of theology, he recalls me to the simplicity and beauty of Christ’s love.

As we spoke, both of us still warmed by the remnants of Sunday, he reflected upon his upbringing in evangelicalism. “Apologetics”, he said,

“was not merely a part of the Christian life, it was the whole of it. Love was spoken of, certainly, but in practice it often seemed that love took the form of argument. Our goal was to master a set of arguments, and then to demonstrate to others why my particular expression of Christianity was the correct one”

For those who grew up in the latter part of the twentieth century, this will sound familiar. Christian bookstores were abundant across North America. Chains such as Family Christian and others devoted entire sections to apologetics.

There were manuals for speaking with Mormons, with Muslims, with Scientologists, with Jehovah’s Witnesses. No belief system was left unaddressed.

Conferences were held

Seminars attended

And the laity were trained to defend the faith with increasing precision.

I remember well how deeply this shaped my own thinking as a young man. Even now, I still hear of young people from the Evangelical world who express their desire to study more deeply apologetics, that they might better contend for the faith. There is a certain earnestness and sincerity in their plan.

And let me say, that apologetics, in itself, is not a thing to be dismissed. One need only look to the writings of Saint Justin Martyr in the second century to see that the defense of the faith has its proper place within the life of the Church.

And yet, there is an observation that I failed to make in those earlier years. For all the effort, for all the books and lectures and carefully constructed arguments;

• Where were the multitudes who entered the Church as a result of all that apologetics?

• Where were the crowds of unbelievers, persuaded at last by the force of reason?

The answer, if we are honest, is that they were not to be found.

Indeed, the opposite seems to have occurred. Throughout the twentieth century, rather than witnessing a great influx into Christianity, the Western world experienced a steady and, at times, dramatic decline.

By the beginning of the twenty first century, many had not merely drifted from the Church, but had abandoned even its most basic claims, embracing instead a vague religious pluralism or a kind of softened unitarianism.

Protestant and evangelical communities, far from expanding, often found themselves diminishing. One need not consult statistics to observe this. It is enough to walk through any modern city, to listen to its conversations, to notice what is absent as much as what is present.

And yet, in the midst of this, something rather unexpected has been taking place. Orthodox Christianity, long regarded as a relic of distant lands and ancient times, has begun to grow in the very places where Christianity seemed to be receding.

When asked to explain this, I heard Fr. Steven Damick answer with disarming simplicity;

We are not doing anything new. We are only doing what the Church has always done. And when this present season of growth passes, we shall continue to do the same.

There are, it must be admitted, a number of those who come to Orthodoxy with a keen interest in theological dispute. They are eager to argue, to define, to distinguish. But they are not the majority. Most of those I encounter are not in search of an argument. They are in search of a refuge.

They come, often quietly, carrying burdens that are not easily set down and dismantled,

Wounds from broken homes, from betrayal, from loneliness, from a life that has seemed, for too long, without meaning.

They are not asking, first of all, to be convinced. They are asking to be healed.

Sometimes a simple kiss on the forehead by a parish priest with the love of Christ will transform such a person far more than a lifetime spent studying apologetics.

And in parish after parish, across North America and Europe, I hear the same refrain; people are weary of the noise. They long for peace. They desire, if only for a few hours, to step out of the ceaseless tumult of modern life and into something steadier, something older, something that does not shift with every passing season.

It would be an overstatement to say that Evangelical apologetics has no role in all this. But it may be nearer the truth to say that its greatest contribution has been unintended; for in attempting to prove the faith, Evangelical Christianity sometimes reduced it to a set of propositions, and in doing so, it left many with the uneasy sense that something essential had been overlooked.

Orthodoxy, for all its theological richness, does not begin there. It begins, rather, with worship. With prayer. With the slow, and often difficult, work of becoming a different kind of person.

I have never been a touchy-feely type of person. My father who loved me deeply, and whose memories of him fill my every waking day; was not really the kind of person who hugged or kissed. He was a bear of man, more than 6 foot 4, and in many ways was an imposing figure. His way of showing us love involved massive doses of encouragement; he always praised us kids for our accomplishments, and he never tired telling us that we could do whatever we set our minds to.

Our spiritual father here in South Carolina has taught me how to physically love others; he has shown me by example how important it is to hug every young man (and old man!) who comes to our parish. To not be distant from those weary souls who stumble into our family, but to embrace them and love them in a way that Christ would.

What I did not understand, for many years, was that such gestures are not mere sentiment, nor are they the indulgences of a certain temperament.

They are, in their own quiet way, a kind of theology made visible. For the love of Christ is not an abstraction to be admired from a distance, but a reality to be embodied, even in something as simple and human as an embrace.

Even Saint Paul, throughout his epistles, exhorts the faithful to greet one another with a holy kiss. And Saint Justin Martyr, writing in the early centuries, confirms that a central moment of Christian worship was the kiss of peace, when the faithful, having prayed together, turned and embraced one another as members of a single body.

And so I have found myself learning, slowly and sometimes awkwardly, to extend what was once foreign to me.

Not because I have become a different sort of man by nature, but because I have begun, however faintly, to see that this is how the Church breathes. It is how she heals those souls who come to her. And perhaps it is also why so many who are weary of arguments and starved for love, find themselves at last at rest within her arms.

~ Kenneth