Father Peter Gilquist is chair of the Department of Missions and Evangelism for the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese, a branch of the worldwide Orthodox Church. He also publishes Again magazine, a periodical for Orthodox concern, and has written an interesting book entitled Becoming Orthodox. He also was involved with the production of the Orthodox Study Bible, published by Thomas Nelson publishers.
Back in the 1960s, I was involved in Campus Crusade leadership, along with a group of others who have become lifelong friends. I was the regional director in the Midwest, working out of Chicago, and John Braun was our national field coordinator. Around 1967, during our closing years in Crusade, we began to see that just doing evangelism as divorced from the church was not making a lasting impact. The more we read Scripture, the more we were convinced that we needed to be in a church. And, of course, that begs the question, which one?
In the early 1970s, we began a detailed study of the early church. Our goal was to start at the end of the New Testament and try to see where the church went in history. In the process of that we discovered the ancient understanding of worship and the sacraments, and the sense of consensus in terms of interpreting the Scriptures, and we found the government or the hierarchy of the church in place at the end of the first century. Through peeling off layers, we went century by century; when we got to that split in 1054, we were forced to take sides. We studied those issues that had split the church and said, "Wait a minute. Whoever these people are, the East has kept this faith intact as it was from the beginning."
How do you respond to people who say that this doesn't take into account the Reformation and the Protestant side of things because the Reformation was really an attempt to recover that kind of apostolic purity? The Reformers went back to the Greek and Latin fathers, as well as to Scriptures, to make their arguments against Rome's excesses. The legal character of salvation, original sin as the imputation of Adam's guilt, and the imputation of Christ's righteousness in justification seem to be missing, and in some instances the Eastern Church outright rejected them.
Although there's a huge wing of Protestantism now that has essentially just lapsed into unbelief, my contention all along is that there are modern Protestants who take Scripture seriously and who love God; it will be a great joy for the Orthodox when they discover that wing of Protestantism and vice versa. Among the other things we have in common, one is our disdain for the power moves that Rome has pulled over the centuries. I like to say to my Protestant friends, "We called their bluff five hundred years before you did." That's partly funny and partly true. The East simply refused to put up with those unilateral innovations that Rome introduced back at the end of the first millennium. Then another five hundred years go by, and Martin Luther and Calvin finally yell enough. So in that sense, at least we have the mutual disdain for a common foe, although I hate to put it in those terms.
As far as the doctrinal differences go, what I try to do is encourage my Protestant friends to read, for example, the commentary on the book of Romans by St. John Chrysostom that was written over a thousand years before the Reformation. My heart sings when I read that, and that sense of the juridical view of salvation, of course, is not nearly as strong as the view that came out of the Reformation. In other words, salvation was seen as far more dynamic a process than simply a fiat. And honestly, as a former Protestant, this view has put some things together that I was never able to handle. For example, I ended up pitting faith against works, so fearful that I would lapse into any kind of a good works understanding of salvation that good works almost became an enemy for me. As you look at the writings of the early fathers, those polarities that came out of the Reformation simply weren't there, because the excess of the West wasn't there at that time.
Do you think that it's easier for an evangelical to come to terms with the Eastern Orthodox view because there is less of a juridical influence in evangelicalism today than there was three or four hundred years ago? There's more emphasis on the spirit in the life of the believer, sanctification, growth in holiness, rather than a once-and-for-all declaration in a courtroom. Does that make it easier for evangelicals today than it would have been in earlier days?
That's hard to answer, because there's no way I can astral-project myself back to that time. I will say, speaking for the two thousand of us former Campus Crusade, Billy Graham, Young Life, Youth for Christ types who made that journey in 1987, that what was overwhelming for us was just the issue of truth, that the early church really did keep the faith. I was taught at Dallas Seminary that the minute John the Apostle drew his last breath it all began slowly heading downhill, but we just could not find that in history. And in speaking to the issue of truth, for us it was Christology, the doctrine of Christ, where men and women gave their lives to combat those who would say that there was a time when the Son of God didn't exist, or that his divine nature swallowed up his human nature’those kinds of heresies.
I could imagine how attractive Eastern Orthodoxy could be to many evangelicals who are tired of the constant accommodation to the culture that the Roman Catholic Church and the Protestant churches have been making over the last two hundred years.
It was like a harbor that we sailed into, not that there aren't sometimes choppy waters or sharks. The Scriptures tell us that all who live godly lives in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. It's not a spiritual Shangri La. But there is that settled sense of belief. One of the bishops of the Orthodox Church, a former Southern Baptist, said to me one day, "Father Peter, you just have to understand that regarding the foundations of the faith in Orthodoxy, absolutely nothing is up for renegotiation." I've been looking for that for years. The world will renegotiate, but as you say, when the church starts buying into that, that's our death knell.
Why do you think so many evangelicals these days are attracted to Orthodoxy?
First, that unchanging truth. Second, there is a great hunger for worship. Back in the 1950s, Tozer gave that landmark sermon at Moody called, "The Missing Jewel of Evangelicalism," which was so good they made a booklet out of it that's still in print. The missing jewel is worship. We find both evangelicals and charismatics come and experience that historic liturgy and they say, "Where have we been all our lives?"
Is part of it transcendence that we don't experience in evangelicalism these days?
I think that's a part of it, which is what attracted me years ago to the charismatic movement. I don't build a theology on warm fuzzies, but they don't hurt now and then. I learned to worship, maybe as primitive or, in some cases, excessive as it might have been, in the charismatic movement. We would lift our hands and sing, and that was more than I'd ever done as a dispensationalist. That was an attraction for me, although there were things in the worship that I didn't understand at first.
So the history, that the church existed before Billy Graham, and the worship, that there was a sense of transcendence, that this wasn't just a lecture, that this wasn't all cerebral, that there was an emotional sort of attachment’all of this is attractive. One thing I've wondered with our history in America of restorationism, especially as it was revived by the Jesus Movement of the 1960s and '70s’the idea of getting back to the apostles and a church in continuity with the ancient apostolic church. Do you think that there's any validity to that?
Speaking for the group of people we were associated with and still are, it's as if we were never satisfied. Accepting Christ and starting out with him, you're on a cloud for about two years, and I look back at those years with a great sense of gratitude. But when it comes to really digging into the meat and potatoes of the thing, it always seemed that the church and worship eluded us. In the West, where there was a Reformation, the children of that Reformation are still looking at what they left behind that was valid but that somewhere along the line they rejected. I think specifically of worship and the early creeds and the consensus of those councils, that sense of being connected to history I certainly never had in dispensationalism.
The mind-set for us was restorationism’let's get back. You say that to an Orthodox, and it's Earth calling Mars. Because for the Orthodox, he says, "We never had a reformation." There was nothing to reform, because we have kept the faith intact as it was from the start. So I say to my friends who are into the restoration movement (I went through a phase of that, which I think was one step that ultimately brought us back to Orthodoxy): How about the church that never changed? I spoke at Westminster College in Pennsylvania last May, and the reason they invited me was that the students had seen a video on Orthodoxy, and they asked the faculty why they had never told them about this. They told them that Rome was wrong and that Calvin was right, but here was twenty-five percent of Christendom that they've never been introduced to. They were blown away that a church exists that confesses that Jesus is the eternal son of God who assumed our humanity; that believes in the death, the burial, the resurrection, the ascension, and the second and glorious coming; that believes the Scriptures and all of those things that we are taught to hold dear, and that never did go through this tumultuous thing called the Reformation.
Do you think that contemporary evangelicalism really stands in line with the Reformation, or do you think that contemporary evangelicalism’the evangelicalism you left’really has become its own American thing?
I very much believe that it has become its own thing. There are days I wonder if all of evangelicalism isn't parachurch. Not just Campus Crusade and YFC, but there is so much that we've sidestepped. If you and I get mad at each other, we just go out and form two new churches.
That's one place where I think in spite of the different views of the church we might have, we still confess with Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic folks the creedal affirmation: we believe in one holy catholic and apostolic church, and we really mean that along with you, even though we might differ on the definition of that. Our sense is that really in evangelicalism, it doesn't matter whether you're even a member of a particular church.
It's an invisible one holy catholic and apostolic church.
There's a visible church that people actually belonged to in the New Testament.
Even the church in heaven is visible, if you've got the eyes to see, as John did. We've just made it this thing that everybody who loves Christ is in the church. But there's way more flesh and blood to it as you read the Bible. It's like saying that Israel was an invisible community. You'd be a rock pile if you said that in 1500 b.c.
Do you think part of that, too, is the outbreak of Gnosticism we have in the church today?
For me, it was because I rejected Rome; there was really nothing else to do, and it seems in evangelicalism that the more you go on from the Reformation, the less and less churchy it is. I'm here at my son's house, and just down the street is a "church" called Family Christian Center. They don't even confess the word "church." You stack that up against the New Testament and see that we've come light years from even the Reformers. You have your dental center, your sports center, and your Christian center’but don't say church.
We are watching Eastern Orthodoxy because many people are moving over to it, and we think for a lot of the same reasons that people are interested in delving into the Reformation’anything to get out of contemporary evangelical shallowness.
I just want to say that I'll always be thankful to the evangelicals for bringing me to Christ. Frankly, that was the crowd out there for me. Rome never showed up, the East didn't show up, and my own Lutheran background never showed. So I owe a great debt of gratitude to those who cared enough and loved me enough to bring me the gospel. But it was like the first introduction, and from then on you see that there's more than just that initial step of commitment to Christ, that there's a whole kingdom out there that becomes a reality through the church.
