The Theological Work and Witness of Matthew Baker

I only met Matthew Baker once. He also happened not long after to contribute an essay to the journal I edit, Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. And then suddenly he was gone, killed in a car accident, leaving a lovely family and many other lives and loves behind. It was clear to everybody that had he lived, he would have been a very prominent and influential academic theologian. 

In September of this year, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press gathered together and published a Festschrift for him: Faith Seeking Understanding (2021), 368pp. About this book the publisher tells us this: 

This book offers a collection of the essays, letters, interviews, and correspondence of Fr Matthew Baker, exploring the works of Fr Georges Florovsky and the writings of the Church Fathers.

‘The Fathers are ahead of us, with Jesus—it is we who should be running to catch up to them.’ Thus Fr Matthew Baker, in one of the interviews included in this volume, summarizes and defends the understanding of Orthodox theological method espoused by his hero, Fr Georges Florovsky, known as neopatristic synthesis. We tend to be programmed in Western societies into thinking that simply by virtue of living in the twenty-first century, we are somehow ‘ahead,’ that we are intellectually, morally, and theologically superior to our forebears just because we happen to live later than they did, and in an age of technological marvels. But the measure of what puts us ‘ahead’ as human beings is neither time nor technology, but our proximity to Jesus Christ. This is what allows the category of the Fathers to remain a steadfast one in Orthodox theology: not simply because in the distant past they forged lasting and faithful expressions of the Gospel, but because in doing so they assimilated the very life of the One they sought to defend and glorify, the Coming One, thereby becoming living witnesses before us (not just behind us) to the only truth that can save human beings….