Orthodoxy: Evolving Tradition (review)

In recent years a number of introductions to the Eastern Churches, or to the Orthodox Church in particular, have appeared. Still unsurpassed among them is the updated and revised edition of Timothy (Kallistos) Ware’s The Orthodox Church (London, 1993). Many of the recent surveys add new perspectives and material about recent developments.

This newest introduction has been provided by David N. Bell of the Department of Religious Studies at Memorial University in Newfoundland. He has taught courses there on virtually all of the major world religions and reads an astonishing array of twenty-one languages, including Arabic, Japanese, Tibetan, and Welsh. Even though Eastern Christianity has not been the main focus of his work, his new book furnishes a generally accurate overview of his subject. In sixteen rather brief chapters, Bell touches upon the different “families” of Orthodox churches; organizational and administrative questions; and a number of major theological themes, including pneumatology, Christology, the veneration of icons, the eastern notion of tradition, deification/theosis, and the Eucharist. He offers practical suggestions on how to behave in an Orthodox church and also reflects on the Orthodox understanding of sex, marriage, and celibacy, as well as monasticism and Orthodox participation in the modern ecumenical movement. Bell adopts a highly conversational, even colloquial style of writing.

In the introduction, Bell informs his readers that he will be dealing exclusively with the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox churches that he says are the two main groupings within “Orthodoxy.” He observes that the designation of these groups as Eastern and Oriental can be misleading and states his preference for using other expressions, most often “Chalcedonian” and “non-Chalcedonian.” This is regrettable because one of the fundamental principles in interchurch discussions is that churches have the right to be called by the names that they choose for themselves. The fact of the matter is that these non-Chalcedonian churches call themselves “Oriental Orthodox,” and the Chalcedonians call themselves “The Orthodox Church,” or less frequently “Eastern Orthodox.” These decisions of theirs must be respected as an aspect of their own identity.

In addition, Bell’s tendency to treat both groups together as “Orthodox” perhaps leads him several times mistakenly to identify the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America as part of the Syrian (Oriental) Orthodox Church, when in fact it is an extension of the Eastern Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch, of the Byzantine tradition. He also has a troubling tendency, in his chapter on Orthodoxy in the West, to categorize certain churches of highly questionable legitimacy as “Orthodox.”

Bell does not mention the Eastern Catholic churches in this book except in the section dealing with ecumenical relations between the Orthodox and Catholic churches. He insists on calling them “Uniat,” even referring at one point to a fictional “Ukrainian Uniat Church.” The term uniat (or, more commonly, uniate) is not used in the Catholic Church today, and the Eastern Catholics themselves—Ukrainian Greek Catholics in particular—find it highly offensive. Its use here is entirely unacceptable and will require correction in any future editions of the book.

Some Orthodox and Catholics as well will be surprised to learn here that some of the apostles were women, that the Orthodox do not accept the Catholic doctrine of purgatory (they may reject the word but the doctrines of the two churches are very similar), that Catholics do not share communion with anyone else (it is possible under some circumstances, especially with the Orthodox), that the 2000 Vatican document Dominus Iesus was an encyclical signed by Pope John Paul II (it was a declaration of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith signed by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the prefect), and that the only infallible statement made by a pope since 1870 was the definition of the Immaculate Conception in 1954 (it was the Assumption in 1950).

Overall, this is a rather idiosyncratic description of the Christian East, and Bell calls the shots very much as he...