by DYLAN PAHMAN
Last night I attended an engaging lecture at Calvin Collegeby Dr. William Abraham of the Southern Methodist University Perkins School of Theology. Abraham, whose religious background is Irish Methodist and who is now a minister in the United Methodist Church and the Albert Cook Outler Professor of Wesley Studies at Perkins, gave a presentation titled, “The Treasures and Trials of Eastern Orthodoxy.” As someone who was once an outsider to the Orthodox Church and is now an insider (as much as a former outsider can be, I suppose), I can say that Dr. Abraham’s lecture highlighted many things that I see in the Orthodox Church myself as well as bringing others into focus, in particular five treasures the Orthodox bring and four trials that they face in our current, global context.
Dr. Abraham began with his own background: how had he come to discover Eastern Orthodoxy? Years ago, when he first came to the United States, he experienced something of a scandal: his impression of the Methodism of America was that it significantly differed from that which he had grown accustomed to in Ireland. It was as if they had forgotten Charles Wesley’s rich, doctrine-laden hymns. He met people who did not believe in (or at least did not care about) the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation. The scholarly focus was entirely on discussions of method: epistemology and metaphysical questions, which though important failed to say anything positive about the God we worship, the Savior who gave himself for us, and the faith that we have inherited. In his assessment, the liberal Methodism he encountered, however, did not really lack piety — the people he met were quite sincerely religious — but rather they had burdened themselves with an impossible commitment to revisionism. As a result, they were “not only intellectually thin but spiritually hopeless,” said Abaraham.
It was in the midst of a personal, spiritual crisis at this time that he first encountered the Russian Orthodox Slavophile Alexei Khomiakov, in particular his work “On the Western Confessions of Faith.” Reading this had a profound effect on him. At this point his experience of Orthodoxy was that it was “a spiritual treasure trove.” He attended Vespers, and the services of Great Lent and Holy Week and was especially moved by the Lamentations service of Great and Holy Saturday (observed the previous night on Good Friday), which he described as like an Irish funeral for Jesus. Furthermore, he found that the iconographic tradition of the Orthodox helped him pull away from a purely intellectualized conception of his faith. In particular he mentioned his fondness for an icon of St. Seraphim of Sarov, who is known to have said, “Acquire the Spirit of Peace, and thousands around you shall be saved.”
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