Changeless and Eternal...Not!

Evangelical and Charismatic Protestants have been converting to Eastern Orthodoxy at a steadily increasing rate over the last decade or so. I won’t comment here on the reasons for this, since they are often as varied as the people themselves. But there is one peculiar phenomenon that is accompanying this trend and is witnessed in nearly every single instance. The converts, who in many cases have been members of their previous church groups for many, many years and enjoyed what they assumed to be close friendships with their brothers and sisters in Christ in those churches, are finding that these same friends are now treating them as heretics or worse over their decision to become Orthodox. I have heard stories of church women calling up all their friends and warning them to avoid Mr. and Mrs. So-and-so because, “they have joined a church that uses icons and has an altar and (gasp!) prays to Mary!”

To a certain extent, this is a human thing; people naturally dislike anything markedly different from their own grasp of how things ought to be. It is also a Protestant thing. Contemporary Christians have virtually no knowledge of how the early Christians worshipped or how they understood the communion of the saints—including Mary—and thus accept without question the teaching they continually hear from their pastors and bible-study groups that these things are wrong. It is ironic that old friends condemn converts to Orthodoxy as if they were ignorant, when the converts have likely spent years studying church history to arrive at their decision, a study that their former friends have never made and know nothing about. Who is ignorant here?

But what is also interesting to me is how quickly attitudes change in the world of Protestantism. Way back in the beginning of the Reformation, the earliest Reformers were entirely sacramental in their beliefs. In what was just a matter of a moment, a man named Zwingli arose who decided from his reading of the Bible that Holy Communion was not an actual sharing in the Body and Blood of Christ, but a spiritual memorial only. To him, the bread and wine were simply symbols of the Body and Blood and could not possibly contain any “actual presence” of the Lord. Luther and Zwingli engaged in a heated debate over this matter, during which Luther essentially accused Zwingli of being demonic. Today Zwingli’s view holds sway over much of the Evangelical/Charismatic world, in defiance of traditional (and truly Biblical) Christian belief dating back to the apostles.

When the modern Pentecostal movement got started on Azusa Street in Southern California, it was nearly universally rejected by mainstream Protestant churches. Anyone in, say, a Presbyterian or Baptist church in the 1930’s who confessed to speaking in tongues or to believing in the gifts of the Spirit such as healing would likely be “disfellowshipped” and asked to go somewhere else. Today, the vast majority of new “Praise Centers” are Charismatic and have been influenced to one degree or another by the pioneers of American Pentecostalism. It has gone from being anathema to becoming thoroughly mainstream.

The same is true with Christian Zionism. When the radical dispensationalists began teaching that the Christian Church was not the “New Israel” as had been nearly universally believed from ancient times, but in fact represented little more than a “speed bump” on God’s highway to return the Jews to their promised land, most Protestants cast them out of their churches and condemned Zionism as heresy. This was around the beginning of the 20th century. When a new state was formed in the Middle East in 1948 and was named “Israel”, many Christians began to wonder if perhaps the dispensationalists were right in their wild assertions. Given the fact that most Protestants at that time (and today) possessed a threadbare ecclesiology and saw the Church as nothing more than an “invisible body” on the earth, whereas here was now a visible, locatable Jewish state, it became easier to think that God had satisfied prophesy and that “the time of the Gentiles was fulfilled” and all attention should now be focused on the nation of Israel. Today, it is nearly impossible to find an Evangelical or Charismatic church that has not embraced Zionism. I recently heard a pastor from one such church claim that if you subscribe to “Replacement Theology” (in other words, that the Church is Israel), then you are anti-Semitic and opposed to the will of God. My, how things have changed in such a short time!

Perhaps this should give converts to Orthodoxy some hope. Seeing that there are essentially no boundaries to Protestant thought or dogma, that things condemned in one generation are wholeheartedly embraced in the next, perhaps in a hundred years or less they will have icons in their churches, put the altars back in, and even (gasp!) start praying to Mary. It could happen. After all, anything goes when you have no continuity of faith and all you have to go by is the latest fad in biblical interpretation. It’s like my friend in Seattle, Washington says about the weather; if you don’t like it now, wait a minute and it will change.