Of Ancient Apples and Orthodoxy
A Path to Renewal in a Post-Christian West
One of many fond memories growing up in Michigan is the Winesap apples my Mom would buy each fall at the local farmers market. She would keep a big bag of them on the back staircase in our drafty victorian home on Olivia Avenue where they would stay cold and crisp — available for a snack at any time. Now considered a novel “heirloom” variety, you probably won’t find Winesap apples in your local grocery store, but they sometimes appear in my local farmers markets here in Washington, D.C. Despite the many varieties of apples out there, apparently all apple varieties typically available in the West derive from a limited genetic pool originating in wild apple forests in central Asia which spread along the ancient spice road.
I remember being so excited when I first learned of these ancient apple forests that included varieties with skin so dark as to seem almost black! But these ancient apple stocks are more than a novelty — they are the key to maintaining apples as a plentiful domesticated fruit around the world. Because all modern apple varieties stem from a small number of ancient trees they are highly vulnerable to pests and disease. So vulnerable, that efforts have been undertaken in recent years to preserve seeds and rootstocks from central Asia to refresh and strengthen the genetic pool. These efforts have urgency, not just because of the vulnerability of modern domestic varieties, but because we have lost many of these ancient forests.
I found myself musing about ancient apples after listening to an illuminating talk that an Orthodox priest, Father Panayiotis, gave at a 2017 conference in Lutherstadt-Wittenburg, Germany, on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of Protestantism.1 Entitled “The Protestant Reformation and the Orthodox Christian East”, Fr. Panayiotis offers a brief history of the Byzantine or Eastern Orthodox Church and the schism with the West — suggesting wryly that the Orthodox are the original “protestants” to structural and theological changes introduced into the Western Church beginning with Charlemagne in the 8th century.2 During the Protestant Reformation, Lutheran leaders in the 15th and 16th centuries attempted to enlist Eastern Church leaders in their conflicts with Rome. Fr. Panayiotis carefully reviews letters between early Lutherans and Orthodox patriarchs that were exchanged at several points. Fr. Panayiotis’ examination of these letters shows how linguistic and cultural gulfs that had developed by that time between East and West — gulfs which neither side seemed to fully grasp or appreciate — doomed the possibility of meaningful theological dialogue at that time. For these and other reasons, the Orthodox Church never joined with the Lutherans in their cause.
Early Magisterial Protestants had sought to correct certain practices and teachings of the Catholic Church without fundamentally altering liturgical practices. Yet those early Protestants knew little of the Eastern Church and its fidelity to early church practices and teachings. For example, Fr. Panayiotis observes the Protestant doctrine of Sola Scriptura seems not to recognize that the Church existed for almost 400 years before specific texts were assembled into what today we recognize as the Bible. The Magisterial Reformation was followed by the Radical Reformation which began to reject historical liturgical practices and church hierarchy in favor of individualistic, often emotional experiences of the Holy Spirit (see pietism). Indeed, since the 15th century, western Christendom has had continuing schisms.3 Arguably, with rare exceptions, Protestantism’s legacy has not been to reground Christian practice in pre-Papal roots, but to unmoor it further from those roots.
In contrast, Fr. Panayiotis notes, all Orthodox churches today practice a liturgy which would be easily recognizable to church fathers from 1200 years ago, while Luther himself would not recognize the modern Lutheran liturgy, much less the practices of many other Protestant denominations. This is an observation, not a criticism — the story or Protestantism is too complex and too rich for that. But Protestantism has arguably led to the atomization of modern Christian faith, providing the theological foundation for each individual to, in effect, claim a divine right to be pope in their own personal church of one.4
Fr. Panayiotis closes with suggestions for how meaningful dialogue between Eastern and Western churches might proceed — starting with collectively revisiting the period before schism, establishing common linguistic and theological terms and definitions, and proceeding carefully from there. Although I was baptized Orthodox as an infant, I was not raised in any church, and had little religious education or participation as a child or a young man. I know some Orthodox history and less Orthodox theology. Thus I came to this lecture as a westerner with a protestant mindset that is unconsciously prevalent in the U.S. From this perspective, Fr. Panayiotis’s lecture highlighted not just how little Westerners know about the Orthodox Church and Orthodoxy, but how little they have ever cared about it.
And why should we in the West care? By the 11th century, the Orthodox Byzantine Empire had begun its final decline, while Western Christian nations and empires had begun their inexorable rise. This rise accelerated when Byzantine scholars and elites fled west before the final fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453.5 Despite being initially plagued by religious wars, Western Catholic and Protestant nations grew to dominate the entire world militarily, technologically, and culturally. Orthodox nations, subjugated by Islam, Western Christianity, and Communism, waned as a cultural force.
Yet, at the dawn of the 21st Century, we are entering what some recognize as a post-Christian West. Many churches are struggling with declining congregations, and Western Christians are glimpsing what cultural minority status in a post-Christian West may involve. It is in this context that the richness and perseverance of Eastern Orthodox Churches, despite centuries of subjugation and oppression, takes on a new light. And in this light, a new dialogue between East and West looks not only fruitful, but perhaps necessary to the vitality of Christianity everywhere. To be clear, I am not proposing Catholics and Protestants acknowledge error. But, Western Christians, in a spirit of humility, would gain from revisiting common history and reconnecting with theological roots that were once lost and yet live among us today.
All the of musings that follow are my own, although where indicated, I have attempted to summarize the ideas of Fr. Panayiotis.
Separation between the East and West began taking root in the 4th and 5th centuries.
A pastor friend quips that God created denominations to keep Christians from killing each other.
Combine pietist subjective individualism with post-Christian understandings of identity, and you end up in a world with unlimited gender-identities, all of which are subjectively “true.”
The last part of this excellent four-part 1997 documentary, the Lost Empire, explores this.