INTERFAITH DIALOGUE SITES & LISTS:  
THEIR HAZARDS AND THEIR NAÏVETÉ 

© 2001, 2003 by Orchid Land Publications

[updated 20011023, 20030424]

      If you go to an internet search engine like Google Search and search for "Orthodox-Catholic dialogue," you may find something.  If you try "Catholic-Orthodox" dialogue, you will land on more websites.  On these sites, you will doubtless find intimations. e.g.  that Orthodoxy and Papalism are similar in belief but differ in ritual . . . or else similar superficial assertions. assertions based not simply on ignorance, but on ignorance of a particular sort that is the topic of this page.  This limited kind of ignorance is rampant on interfaith lists where views are exchanged.  (You may not seldom find indications that a Catholic-Orthodox site is put online by a Unitate.)  
     All of this should give you pause, if you are Orthodox . . . or indeed if you are anything that goes by the name of "Christian."  

     What should an Orthodox reader know before going to the websites or engaging in communications on the lists?  

      First, be aware that words don't mean the same thing for the various parties; much that is said is cross-talk.  (CLICK HERE FOR HOW TO FORMULATE YOUR THOUGHTS IN DISCUSSIONS.)  As the Latins would say, you must remember the difference between content (e.g. the Bible or a given Greek Father's writing) and the form that moulds the meaning than interprets that content, filtering meanings the way a prism or lens filters light.  If the discussion is about matter or content, it literally has hardly any meaning.  A list of (systematically) unconnected beliefs that can be added to or subtracted from without changing the context and sense of each is a mirage.  If a discussion  is about form, it will reveal the cross-talk about topics of belief that different paradigms impose on the materials.  Grace and Salvation mean absolutely incommensurate things in the Greek-language protoparadigm of Christianity (e.g. the energy words in the New Testament so misunderstood and mistranslated in Western Bibles) and in the two Mediæval paradigms (Papal and Reformation), even though they all agree that it's an undeserved Gift. 
     Those two paradigms invented a dozen centuries after the Resurrection--and after the siz to-seven centuries- long, barbaric centuries of Dark Ages had permanently broken continuity with Eastern thinking-- were both derived from "the Muslim Aristotle" in Cordova.  With 700 mosques Cordova was a large and famous as Great Vyantion (Constantinople) and just a modern--furnished with the plumbing that made available what (after the Turks and conquered Stamboul) came to be called Turkish baths.  The influence of the Muslim Aristotle was that it provided the West with FORMS of thought, outlooks, cognitive frames of reference that filtered what was read the way a lens filters light, letting some wave lengths pass and blocking others.  after they had lost virtually all intellectual contact with original Greek- language Christianity during the Dark Ages.
     Evidence for the foregoing statements abound on this website.  (Saving) Grace is uncreated Energy; an uncreated and inoperative habit of the soul; and divine Benignity in the different paradigms (in the temporal order of their inventing).  Salvation is partaking of Christ's Life (His uncreated Energies) as a member of his resurrected Body; an intentional unity with God's imparticipable Essence; or virtual rightousness imputed by the same God that imputed Adam's sins to every newborn and punishes them for what He has imputed to them.  All of these ideas are imposed on those who embrace them by their paradigms.  (If such differences don't impress you--or don't impress you as irreconcilable--remember that they are but a sample.  Read on.)
    Perhaps you may ask, what is this paradigm thing--ideology, thought world, cognitive outlook, cultural box, and at least six or seven further  terms that have more or less the same reference as the technical term paradigm).  In any discipline, a paradigm  is a small set of axioms or premises or presuppostions about what is thinkable about reality and some  discipline; as such it filters  what you cannot think and what is favored.  A paradigm is prerational and often unconsious, something that makes it the more insidious.  The various Christian paradigms are abundantly discussed on this website.  But a few of many possible concrete examples may bring the point home.   The following are real--not made up.  A number more will appear in a book to appear from Orchid Land Publications in the near future.  If you confuse the essential role of Offering in Sacrifice and the Immolation that precedes the essential Offering in certain kinds of sacrifice (see the Book of Levitikos in the Old Testament0, then you will confuse what cannot be re-offered (as in the Epistle to the Hebrews in the New Testament) with what can be repeated, as in the divine Liturgy which is the center of all Orthodox Worship.

--If you premise that matter and time can play no beneficial rôle in Salvation, then Incarnation and Resurrection will simply be incidental to some other central thing or event.  The Immolation of Christ on the Cross will be all that matters.  Mysteries (sacraments) will be out of the question, as will holy places and holy times/days.
--If you further presuppose that will is superior to reason (something unsustainable in most frameworks but does prevail in one established Christian framework), then your view of Salvation will depend on divine will and the virtual realities it wills--e.g. the virtual righteousness  that God wills when He treats believers who are essentially unrighteous AS THOUGH VIRTUALLY righteous.  (Of course, the Apostolic Age was unfamiliar with virtual reality; no evidence exists for such a belief at that time.)
--If you assume that Grace is a habit or form of the human soul infused into it by the Holy Spirit, it will not be uncreated Grace:  It will be defined as both created and non-operative (non-energetic)--yet somehow able to unite you "conceptually" or "ideationally" (in effect virtually) with God's Essence [sic]!
--If you premise that Grace is uncreated Energy (as do the Orthodox), then you will reject the JURIDICAL (satisfaction, atonement, justification, etc.) and of course non-ontological soteriology of Western Christians:  You will accept that a worshiper benefits from what Christ God did because s/he shares God's uncreated Life or uncreated Energies--so that what Christ has done is theirs (yours), and what they (you) do under the Energization of the all-holy Spirit (Philp. 2:13 in GREEK)  is Christ's--and hence soterial!  
--If you view the Fall and Salvation as ontological (though caused by moral facts), you will reject the silly notion that a moral trait like guilt (or, for that matter, merits) can be physically inherited the way the Latins and Protestants assert!

But even agreement on the foregoing premise can--as is obvious--lead to different ways out.  You can be united with God's uncreated Life, or with the divine ideas in God's "brain," covenantally (a will-based idea) and virtually with His Being--or really with that energy spoken of 27 times in the New Testament Epistles.  It wasn't E =MC². of course, but it was thought of by all thinkers in Hellenistic times as what makes a potential (dynamis) real and actual.   (See Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics.)   It will do no good to talk about energy if you do not understand what writers in the Hellenistic Age meant.  If a Roman Catholic ordination is a valid dynamis, that does not make it an authentic energized reality--at least not till it is brought into the Orthodox Church.  The Western FILIOQUE cacodoxically added to the Standard of Belief (Symvolon Pisteos) takes its being from a whole constellation of beliefs wholly at odds with the ethos of presuppositions of the protoparadigm of holy Orthodoxy, ideas of where Trinitarian unity is centered, ideas of the analogy between uncreated and created being, ideas of the which causes which-- relations or the beings they relate--etc., etc.  They'll never get the Orthodox to buy all of those fictions.  (This leaves aside Charlemagne's political motives for promoting it.)  Thomas Aquinas of course knew of the potentia : "actus/operatio" relationship, but he misled himself by confusing energies with essence and in that way lost the idea of Unity with the uncreated Energies and had to settle for a conceptual-intention unity with the divine Essence--which is not participable by a finite being.

      The foregoing examples show how useless agreement over a list of words or beliefs is.  It is no agreement at all, let alone one worthy of intelligent people; such an agreement cannot long endure.  So BEWARE of a wolf that covers himself/herself with a sheepskin "seeking someone that he may kill"!  Do not let yourself fall into the UN-PARADIGM TRAP OF THE LIST MENTALITY so opposed to the systematic mind.  When exhorters of the similarity of Christians on the Internet skip over paradigms and pull the wool over both their own eyes and readers' eyes--even the Pope says things that fail to take paradigmatic assumptions into account--don't be lured by such siren songs:  Insist on beginning where one should begin.  There, you will find similarity in content but no similarity with regard to interpretative form between the East and West or between the two juridical paradigms of the West.  :

East: Energy VS. West:  Static intellect or will
East: Ontology VS. West:  juridicality (punish in order to forgive) and government
East: Vision of uncreated Light VS.  Reformation:  Hearing words

      One should insist on beginning interfaith discussions at the true beginning, which is for the West to understand Orthodoxy in its own terms and conversely for the Orthodox to understand the Western kinds of Christianity in their terms.  Both will be extremely difficult and require an at least momentary paradigm-shift.   What makes Orthodoxy very difficult for the West is the fact that the early Orthodox theologians in Britain and America were not native-speakers of English and just accept terms from Latin and Protestant theology laden with baggage, connotations and context, and whole thought worlds wholly at variance with the protoparadigm.  If you judge that our highest human faculties (reason, which also enables will to be free, since the will cannot be meaningfully free if it doesn't know what the choices or the consequences of each choice really are), you will approach interfaith dialogue in this manner--the above-board, honest manner--one in which Papalism appears as dissimilar to Orthodoxy as one can imagine.

     Much of what has been said above applies to Reformation lists, since it is a Western paradigm with juridical soteriology like the Latin's, except for it's conceiving Justification as virtual righteousness imputed by God.  The Reformation paradigm, however, combines the two modernism of Luther's time the will-first  via moderna and the Gnostically-inclined devotio moderna--both of which foster individualism.   It teaches that God is full of wrath at newborns for their sins--the very sins (of Adam) that He Himself has imputed to them.   CLICK HERE for more on paradigms.  There is a good JW site online with scholarly participants; one should visit it only if one has the scholarly background.  One will find on interfaith lists that only cross-talk results from using words that mean different things in different paradigms . . . and that most participants cannot escape their paradigm even for a moment to see what the context is of given words in others' paradigms.  This is of course true of official participants in the ecumenical movement.  

      I hope that the following reply to a Latin friend will help explain more:

     Theologically, the Orthodox have been at a huge disadvantage in North America because the early theologians were not native-speakers of English and just picked up terms from Latins and Denominationists as they found 'em (see on Immaculate Conception below); some even named parishes "Assumption." These terms came with an enormous lot of un-Orthodox baggage that still misleads outsiders and often confuses insiders.
     Until we know what each other is saying, all discussions are a waste of time . . . or worse, since they result in avoidable quarrels.  For example, the Orthodox don't believe that newborns are guilty of Adam's sins, so--while we have no problem with the Theotokos's "immaculate" conception, which is like that of everyone else, except for her special Graces--the Orthodox nevertheless rightly balk at the dogma of the IC because it implies that we believe (like the Latins) that everyone but her is born maculate.  Similarly, while we believe that the Virgin's body was "assumed" to Heaven, we don't believe (nor did the early Church believe) that she didn't die.  (We call the day the Falling Asleep of the all-pure Theotokos)  The early documents say that this happened three days after her dying.  But once the West accepted Augustine's view that death is a juridical penalty for sin, how could it accept her dying?  We have no problem with the Theotokos mediatress and other roles, but we utterly reject calling her a redemptress.  We take an ontological (not juridical) view of Adam's Fall, Salvation, and Death--and have no problem with her dying. But the ignorant say, "Y'all think she was assumed--so what's the problem?"  And then sand gets thrown into the mechanism.  Note that since ontology is not part of Protestant soteriology, the Theotokos plays no significant role.  Both Western groups (and one could quote from both) ignore ontology  in soteriology.  As  the Jesuit J. Pohle’s God, the Author of nature and the supernatural (1945, p. 151), puts it, “the Resurrection of Christ was not, strictly speaking, a chief or even contributing cause of our Redemption,” being  “an “integral, though not an essential, element of the Atonement.”  (Since many Western Christians accept the pre-Christian pagan view that the human soul is immortal BY NATURE and do not emphasize bodily resurrection the way the Orthodox do, it is not to be expected that they can be in synch with the early Christians about the significance of Pascha Lordsday or the resurrection of the flesh of Christ's reposed worshipers.)
     The Orthodox want none of the Western baggage in what they say about the Panayia, and they know that Easter isn't glorious Pascha, at least not in Western soteriology (the main concern of Western Christians).

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