had listened quietly for over two hours. John had been a close friend of mine
in seminary, and I did not want to treat him rudely, whatever I did. So I just
listened. His journey to the brink of the Orthodox church had been a torturous
one, and I didn't want to add to his difficulties unnecessarily.
". . . so you see that I am not trying to leave behind what we had. I am very grateful. If I hadn't had that New Testament class, I would still be a very superficial Christian. Dr. White made me hungry for the communion of a church which really worshipped in the beauty of holiness. And, it had to be in the same church that the apostles founded -- the true Apostolic Church. The Orthodox church . . . well, I feel as though I am finally coming home."
He stopped, and looked at me. "You are being awfully quiet. You weren't that way in seminary."
I shook my head and grinned. "No, I wasn't."
"Well, tell me what you think. That's why I came to see you, really."
"I have no desire to be rude. . . "
"Please." John said. "If this is wrong, I want to know."
I leaned forward in my seat. "Your desire to be a part of the one apostolic church is certainly correct. And I hope we can agree that liturgy is inescapable. The question is not whether a church has a liturgy -- all do -- but rather what that liturgy is, and whether or not it can be shown to be scriptural."
John nodded. "I'm glad to hear you say that. I went to a fundamentalist church once in Bangkok, and I thought I was in Macon, Georgia. And they thought they had no set forms of worship!"
I laughed. "But this question about liturgy and worship shows why the Orthodox church is not the apostolic church. For example, icons . . ."
John interrupted. "I hope you are not going to bring up the Second Commandment. I've studied all that out."
"The Second Commandment does apply to icons, but that is not my point. My point is a historical and contextual one -- the cultural context of the earliest Christian churches."
John looked at me, baffled. "What do you mean?"
"In the first century, the apostolic church was heavily Jewish. The first great controversy in the church was whether or not a person could even become a Christian without becoming a Jew first. When the apostle James welcomed the apostle Paul to Jerusalem, he pointed out that many thousands of Jews had believed in Christ, and that they were all zealous for the Law. In his letter, James mentions that these believers gathered in Christian synagogues , and he calls them churches . The Bible also says that a great many Jewish priests became obedient to the faith."
John was puzzled. "Okay. What's your point?"
"We know that in the Jerusalem of the first century, pious Jews were extremely sensitive about the Second Commandment -- when it came to issues of worship, they were much more strict about it than the most iconoclastic Protestant. The Romans and the Jews were in a constant state of tension over the issue of images. We know that the Jewish Temple had no images for use in prayer and worship. It was in this cultural context that the first apostolic synagogues were formed. Now can we really believe that Christian synagogues introduced the veneration of icons, and that the innovation resulted in no recorded discussion, debate, or controversy? Is it reasonable to believe that when this happened, there was not a peep within the church from the thousands of zealous Jewish believers, and that the Jewish enemies of the Christian church, who hated images of all sorts, as well as the Christians, were kind enough not to mention it either?"
John sat back in his chair. His brow was furrowed. He said nothing, but I could tell that all this was new to him.
I continued. "The Orthodox church is part of the modern movement to detach the church from its apostolic, Hebraic, covenantal, Abrahamic roots. It has the same problem that contemporary evangelical Christianity has -- detachment from the ancient covenant with Abraham. The Orthodox like to point out that the New Testament grew out of the church, and not the other way around. But this does not go back far enough -- the New Testament church grew out of the Old Testament church."
John responded. "Perhaps the problem is that you are looking for a fully-developed worship pattern in the first century church. The veneration of icons could have existed in seed form in the apostolic church . . . and even in the synagogue. After all, the Temple had images of pomegranates, trees, and cherubim. That would account for the lack of controversy."
"But what happens then to the Orthodox claim that its worship has been changeless , since the time of the apostles? Paul did worship in the Temple where there were images of pomegranates, but the icons of the Orthodox are not images of pomegranates. If we know anything about history, we know that no pious member of any first-century synagogue, whether Christian or not, would feel at home in a modern Orthodox service. So if Orthodox worship arrived "full-blown," then why no controversy in the pages of the New Testament? And if it did not, the 'seed form' argument is just begging the question."
"What do you mean by that?" John asked.
"The approach begs the question because it is incredibly versatile and can be used to defend any practice -- the fundamentalist can easily argue that altar calls, invitation hymns, and Vacation Bible School existed in seed form at Corinth. But of course, an argument for everything is an argument for nothing."
John slumped back in his chair. "I can see I need to do some more thinking about this. May I come and see you again soon?"
"You may be my guest," I said.
