Nonsense on Stilts

This is a book so inexorably committed to proving its prejudices correct, and so completely immune to any evidence to the contrary, that only that most fatuous of creatures, an American politician-bureaucrat, could have produced it. Normally such a book would be best passed over in silence but because it has already generated considerable publicity, and because it gives so much attention to Eastern Christianity, critical scrutiny must be paid to  

Graham E. Fuller, A World Without Islam (Little, Brown & Co., 2010), 328pp.


The author embodies something the great moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre noted thirty years ago: modernity is the period par excellence when blind "experts" acclaim their own ability to see. Fuller thinks he has seen a great deal of history of the relations between Eastern Christians and Muslims, and of the wider Eastern and Western Christian relationship. But only a tiny portion of this book can be seen as history in any serious sense of the word. This book is, rather, a exercise of fantasy in which the author asks:

if there had never been an Islam, if a Prophet Muhammad had never emerged from the deserts of Arabia, if there had been no saga of the spread of Islam across vast parts of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa, wouldn't the relationship between the West and the Middle East today be entirely different? No, I argue, it might actually be quite similar to what we see today (4).

This book, then, is an exercise of the author's imagination ("this book is an argument, not a narrative" and an "hypothetical argument" at that [15; his emphasis]) in which he claims, moreover, that "there are excellent grounds for imagining that Orthodox Christianity today could have served as a religious and ideological springboard for crystallizing the grievances of the Middle East against the West" (12-13). Thus do we see revealed at the outset Fuller's plaidoyer that he will press relentlessly for the rest of the book: Islam is not and never has been the problem, and he defends it in all the usual ways one finds among today's bien-pensants.

There are two major types of problem with this book: factual and methodological. Both are present in such abundance that I fail to see how this book was subjected to any kind of editorial review, least of all by competent scholars. It would be tedious to list all the problems with this book, so I will confine myself to the first eight (of fourteen) chapters, for here we have the author's treatment of Christian history in general, and of Eastern Christianity in particular.

Let us begin with the methodological problems. The first concerns Fuller's methods of research--or, rather, lack thereof. Fuller, who presents himself--on the front and back covers--as some kind of expert (the "former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, a former senior political scientist at RAND, and a current adjunct professor of history at Simon Fraser University") insouciantly tells us he couldn't be bothered to do any actual research for his book:

this is a book about ideas and alternative ways of thinking about them. I have not attempted to "prove" or to document an alternative history....The arguments in this book are based on my own thinking...over a very long period of time....I have turned to mainstream reference materials primarily for dates, for refining my memory, and for additional details pertinent to this alternative reading of East-West conflict, which diminishes the centrality of religion per se--as opposed to so many other formative factors in history. In this case, the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Encyclopedia of Islam, and the ever-sharpening online resource Wikipedia have been helpful in establishing some general details of events (p.307). 

This would be unobjectionable if indeed Fuller had confined himself simply to a speculative exercise. Then we could have enjoyed his opéra bouffe--a harmless and amusing means to wile away an afternoon before getting back to the real world.  But Fuller, instead of proffering a little light fantasy, leapt furiously into the fray of history, presenting more than half of his text not as a "what if" but as a "what happened," that is, an ostensibly truthful, factual, accurate retelling of early Christian and later Christian-Muslim history as well as Eastern Christianity in its pre-modern and modern forms. Fuller has, as far as I can tell, no scholarly background in Christianity, least of all Eastern Christianity, nor any serious training as an historian. In fact, I find no evidence whatsoever that he holds a doctorate in any discipline, has ever held a serious academic post, or has ever published in serious scholarly journals or by serious scholarly presses.

His lack of credentials are not, however,  the real issue. In fact, too many people have too much faith in them. (Churchill, who never went to university, wrote very important and influential multi-volume histories of both World War I and II.) If Fuller wants to play at being an historian, then let us pay him the respect of evaluating his work on such terms.

Lesser men, trying to tell an enormously complex bi-millennial history when faced with so many glaring gaps in their knowledge, might, at the very least, have bestirred themselves to read even a few standard scholarly works on Eastern Christianity, Eastern Christian history, early Christian history, Orthodoxy, the Byzantine State and Empire, Christian history, Christian doctrinal debates, the ecumenical councils, the formation of the creeds, the events leading to the East-West schism, the rise and many transformations in the long history of the papacy, Eastern Christianity's encounter with Islam and its resulting diminishment and relegation to dhimmi status, the Crusades and their uses and abuses, and dozens and dozens of similar books on related matters relevant to his thesis, but not Fuller. All he needs is merely to "refine his memory." But how can one refine memories of what one neither knew nor understood in the first place?  

In addition to ignoring enormous bodies of scholarly literature, Fuller insists on seeing everything through an utterly simplistic, reductionistic lens of power. In an age where humanities departments regularly pay obeisance to Nietzsche (however misunderstood) and Foucault (however absurd), this should not surprise us. Thus, for Fuller, "most of what passes for 'religious issues' are not truly about religion at all" (17): "In the end I hope to persuade the reader that the present crisis of East-West relations, or between the West and 'Islam,' has really very little to do with religion and everything to do with political and cultural frictions, interest, rivalries, and clashes" (16). A little later on, he insists that "in the case of the Middle East and its religions, it is not the theology that really represents the source of conflict" (37). Fuller is undoubtedly right to note that there are other factors--political, cultural, geographical, economic--at work in various conflicts, ancient and modern, in the area, but to quarantine theology the way he does, and to refuse to consider theological arguments at all, is grossly irresponsible. He simply refuses to consider  that--as the old saw has it--if you spend an hour discussing politics in the Middle East, you have ipso facto just spent sixty minutes discussing religion. Why should this be so hard to perceive? Why should Fuller work so tirelessly to deny this? Why must he endlessly insist that theological questions--above all Christian theological questions (for Islamic theology, replete with many quotes from the Quran, is always treated respectfully)--are all "arcane" or "unbelievably arcane" (73)? For Fuller, all theological questions are to be seen "strictly as a prerogative of power" (39; his emphasis). This allows him to begin rhyming off a list of jaw-dropping factual errors such as:

• "church and state in Christianity have been far more closely tied over most of Christian history than was ever the case in Islam" (41; his emphasis). 
• nobody who had any grasp of Christian history, East or West, would ever say this, but what is truly astonishing is just how vast and deep Fuller's ignorance of Islam is here. As Bernard Lewis (whom Fuller mentions once, only to dismiss him by means of his favorite sneer: "neoconservative") has shown not only in his most recent book but over his lifetime of scholarship, "church and state" are not merely "closely tied" in Islam: they are fused as one. 
• the very notion of a separation between church and state is an inherently Christian one coming from no less a figure than Jesus Christ Himself. 
• Fuller asserts that with the legalization of Christianity, "doctrine was now to fall directly under state control" (45), allowing the emperors to determine "orthodoxy" or "heresy."
• While this myth of imperial control has certainly been popular, it was long ago debunked by the historian Francis Dvornik in his "Emperors, Popes, and General Councils," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 6 (1951): 1-23; and more generally in his books on the councils and the papacy. Basing himself on the 1931 study of Constantine by N.H. Baynes, Dvornik showed convincingly that Constantine was not a power-mad despot simply using Christianity to advance his own agenda but a sincerely convicted believer concerned about truth (a notion utterly foreign to Fuller). Dvornik--and others since then--further showed that Constantine, and the other emperors, never had the kind of power to dictate doctrine that many have falsely attributed to them. Caesaropapism, in a word, is bunk.
• Repeatedly Fuller claims, without, of course, the slightest hint of evidence, that the Christological controversies of the early Church, especially those arising out of Chalcedon, are still "without consensus and still roil the ranks of Christianity" (47). More strongly still he later insists that "debate over Christ's true nature could never, and has never, been fully laid to rest in any kind of Christian consensus" (56). This is just silly. Chalcedon generated considerable consensus from which there has been very little deviation down to the present day. And even the divide occasioned by Chalcedon was never as wide as many imagined and has largely been overcome in our day, leaving almost all Christians on the same page Christologically.
• Anachronisms abound in this book. E.g., he asserts that the split of 1054 was motivated because "the Orthodox Church also rejected the 'new' Roman concepts of the Immaculate Conception of Mary" (73). That Latin doctrine was not even on the radar, let alone discussed and formally promulgated for another 800 years. 
• his treatment of Orthodoxy in the Ottoman empire (p.74) totally overlooks the millet system even though there is a Wikipedia entry on it....
• his treatment of the papacy links that institution's development to early Christological debates, claiming that "the doctrinal struggle over Jesus's nature...lay at the very foundation of the pope's claim to power. If Jesus was solely Divine [sic] in nature, then how could the pope legitimately claim to be the 'vicar of Christ'?" (83). I've written and especially read acres of papal history--silly and serious--and much else on the office, and not even the silliest and most jejune of commentators has ever come close to making a claim this absurd.
• he claims that "in 2001, Pope John Paul II expressed his sorrow to the Orthodox Church [for the Fourth Crusade] in his first visit to Orthodox territory, in Romania" (106). But the pope went to Romania in 1999. And the papal apology for the harm of the Crusades came in May 2001 in Athens, Greece. This is grade-school stuff. Does Little, Brown no longer employ fact-checkers or copy editors--or anyone capable of calling up the Vatican website to verify a few things?
• his treatment of the Nikonian reforms in Russia (p.123) shows no understanding whatsoever of the issues involved, which he treats, predictably, as nothing more or other than state politics.

I could go on and on, but let me end with my two favorite side-splitting howlers:

• "the West allowed musical instruments in the rites of Western churches, supplanting the strict Gregorian plainsong chants of the Eastern rite. In architecture, the West abandoned the traditional domed Orthodox church design--later absorbed into the design of many Muslim mosques--and adopted what was seen in Orthodox eyes to be the seemingly 'harsher and sharper' lines of Gothic architecture" (157; my emphasis). 
• Is this for real? There are are so many errors here one scarcely knows where to begin....
• But the absolute best line in the book is the author's claim, in discussing the controversy, since 1991, over Eastern Catholics in Ukraine: this Fuller describes as "the bitter so-called Uniate controversy, still ongoing, between Catholicism and Orthodoxy over who should control the Nestorian and Monophysite [sic] churches in Ukraine and Belorussia" (160; my emphasis). 

This, as Jesuit casuists of the old school used to say, is but the most egregious example of "invincible ignorance." And to think that this is the kind of "expert" "intelligence" the CIA was receiving!  I should consider hiring myself out to them.

Jesus Christ at Oxford

The noted Eastern Christian theologian Khaled Anatolios, arguably the leading Athanasius scholar in the world today,  has a chapter ("The Christ of the Creeds") in a forthcoming book in the long-running Blackwell series of "Companions To":



The Blackwell Companion to Jesus (Blackwell Companions to Religion) (Blackwell, 2010, 576pp).

Edited by Delbert Burkett, and featuring more than thirty authors in thirty-one chapters, this volume, due out next week, includes chapter on Jesus in film, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, American culture, history, art, and literature.

Look for this to be reviewed in 2011 in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.

Old Testament Apocrypha in Slavonic

The liturgical and theological use and study of Scripture in the Orthodox world has slowly but steadily been gaining greater attention in the last twenty years. We have had a number of recent conferences and books on, e.g., the Septuagint; the uses of the Old Testament, including in Byzantium; and the uses and hermeneutics of the Russian Orthodox Church.  

Now we have a new book out exploring Old Testament apocrypha in the Slavonic world:

Lorenzo DiTommaso and Christfried Bottrich, eds.,The Old Testament Apocrypha in the Slavonic Tradition: Continuity and Diversity (Mohr Siebeck, 2010, 500pp).

This is an international collection of over a dozen articles, some in German but most in English, exploring a variety of questions in East- and South-Slavic, Romanian, and related contexts.

Christian History

This massive new history



Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (Viking, 2010), 1184pp.

by Diarmaid MacCulloch has already generated considerable comment and occasioned a number of reviews in the secular press. Fr. Michael Plekon will be reviewing it for us in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2011.

Pope John Paul II

Now that more than half a decade has passed since Pope John Paul II died, we may be able slowly to get a more clear-headed assessment of his papacy. Certainly we know things today (e.g. the Marcial Maciel madness that went unchecked) that, at the very least, ought to give the "santo subito" mob pause for a penitential silence.

The pontificate attracted a considerable number of biographers, almost all of whom wrote utter bollocks. The only biography that was largely reliable (though occasionally prone to editorializing and a touch of hagiography) was George Weigel's Witness to Hope : The Biography of Pope John Paul II, which first appeared in 1999. Now Weigel, having had access to new materials, has published a successor volume:

The End and the Beginning: Pope John Paul II -- The Victory of Freedom, the Last Years, the Legacy 


Certainly Eastern Christians have many reasons to be grateful for the late pope's many efforts, not least in Ut Unum Sint, to advance East-West unity. Not everything he did, however, was welcomed by Eastern Christians; in some areas serious mistakes were made, giving Eastern Christians occasion once more to explain that "It's not the pope we fear but the pope's helpers!" Andriy Chirovsky, the editor-in-chief of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, in his editorial in 2005 shortly after the pope's death, wrote a very perceptive and balanced assessment, summing up the strengths and weaknesses of the pontificate from an Eastern Christian perspective. We shall see whether that assessment needs to be revisited in light of what Weigel has unearthed and written. I look forward to reading this and seeing it reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. 

The Book You've All Been Waiting For

Unsure what to get your friends and family for Christmas? Know someone who is interested in the pope of Rome and the Orthodox Churches? Wait no longer. Now you can pre-order copies of a book they will all want to read:

Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity (University of Notre Dame Press, 2011), 280pp.

Pre-order your copies here for all our friends, and so so today!

Congar on True and False Reform

At one crucial point in my dissertation, I drew on Yves Congar's Vraie et fausse réforme dans l'Église, an enormous, and at the time enormously important, work that pre-dated Vatican II, being published in 1950. There he made the case for what would be known as ressourcement theology, showing how any genuine reform in the Church must begin by a return to first principles, so that reforms proceed not ex nihilo but ex traditione.

I long puzzled over the fact that this book, along with much else in Congar's oeuvre, seemed to have been largely forgotten as evidenced, inter alia, by the fact that nobody ever bothered to translate this book into English. Now, at long last, Liturgical Press is doing just that, and both Eastern and Western Christians have reason to be grateful for Paul Philibert's forthcoming translation of

True and False Reform in the Church

Philip Jenkins and Jesus

Philip Jenkins is a prolific fellow whose recent historical work has done much to "popularize" Christian history in general, and to bring attention to parts of the Church that both historically and currently have not always figured prominently in the Western imagination of Christianity and of Christian history. Thus his

The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia--and How It Died


did much to make better known how far Eastern Christianity penetrated into Asia along the Silk Road as well as into Africa before it gradually began, for a variety of reasons, to contract and in many cases to be almost entirely extinguished.


Jenkins has also done important and impressive earlier work, including a book on the future of Christianity in the "global south."


Additionally, his book Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis is one of the sanest treatments of the topic I have seen, especially considering it was written by a non-Catholic. Even more impressive on that score was his excoriation of anti-Catholicism in the media and American culture at large.

Now we have another book from him with the provocative title

Jesus Wars: How Four Patriarchs, Three Queens, and Two Emperors Decided What Christians Would Believe for the Next 1,500 years

I look forward to seeing this reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies next year.

Eastern Christianity and the Encounter with Islam

As I've noted before, Anthony O'Mahony is a prolific fellow, frequently teaming up with Emma Loosley as fellow editor. One of their most recent and outstanding volumes is

Anthony O’Mahony and Emma Loosley, eds., Christian Responses to Islam: Muslim-Christian Relations in the Modern World (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), x+246pp.

This is an excellent and highly welcome book that belongs in every course and on every bibliography about contemporary Christian-Muslim relations. General (especially undergraduate) readers will benefit from a text that is both scholarly and eminently accessible—not an easy balance to strike in this area. The authors are balanced, moreover, in their tone, avoiding polemics, but certainly (and thankfully) not shying away from noting again and again how often Christians have suffered, and continue to suffer, at the hands of Muslims. Almost no politician or academic today has the courage to acknowledge this.

Almost all the contributors are British academics, but this book’s focus is truly global: there are only two articles on contemporary Britain, and a third on Western Europe. The others deal with Malaysia, the Philippines, Australia, South Africa, West Africa, and the Sudan. One article, Andrew Unsworth’s “The Vatican, Islam, and Muslim-Christian Relations,” is a very interesting (if too brief) treatment that seems to have been written before Pope Benedict XVI’s Regensburg address, which it does not treat.

Eastern Christians will be especially interested in the four articles focusing on Russia, Egypt, Syria, and Iran. Basil Cousins’ “The Orthodox Church, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations in Russia” is a decent general overview that gives brief historical detail before focusing on events in the last two decades. It is, however, very thinly sourced, and one is a little disconcerted to see an over-reliance upon a handful of dubious websites including Wikipedia! Cousins inexplicably overlooks a burgeoning scholarly literature in two key areas: the Russian Church in the post-Soviet period and several recent books by major publishers on Islam in Russia.

Fiona McCallum’s “Muslim-Christian Relations in Egypt: Challenges for the Twenty-First Century,” is excellent but limited in scope. Her focus is on events since 1970, which saw Sadat take power politically, followed very shortly (1971) by Patriarch Shenouda III assuming the Coptic papacy. These two would clash repeatedly, leading the former to exile the latter to a desert monastery over his opposition to the proposed introduction of shari’ah law and his frequent demands that the government do something about Muslim violence and Muslim interference with the construction or repair of Coptic churches.

After Sadat’s assassination, relations between the patriarch and the new president, Hosni Mubarak, improved somewhat. Mubarak has attempted a balancing act by offering, on the one hand, “a gradual process of Islamisation” (71) in the hopes this would placate the hyper-hostile Muslim Brotherhood and, on the other, by offering some benefits to the Copts (e.g., declaring Christmas a national holiday for all Egyptians). Further complicating matters are efforts from well-meaning Copts, especially in North America, to draw attention to ongoing Muslim violence in Egypt. The patriarch, whose delicate internal balancing act is apparently upset by such external critics, has said in public that these expatriates unhelpfully distort the true nature of the problems in Egypt. McCallum does not say if this is a genuinely held position of the pope, or if he has been forced—by events, the government, or other forces—to take such a position much as Orthodox hierarchs in Eastern Europe did during the Cold War when, pressured by the KGB, they used to attend ecumenical events in the West to argue with a straight face that there was religious freedom in the USSR.

The eleventh chapter, by Loosley, treats “Christianity and Islam in Syria: Island of Religious Tolerance?” She begins by rightly recognizing that “Syria remains remarkably mysterious” (162) to many in the West, and Christianity in Syria especially so. Since her article was published, however, we have other recent treatments that attempt something of a demystification: two articles in Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East (Routledge, 2010); and four articles in Christianity in the Middle East (Melisende, 2008); the latter volume will be noted on here in due course and reviewed in Logos next year. Additionally, we have the frequently delayed book by Norirko Sato on Syrian Christianity that, if it ever appears, may shed light here.

In the present article, Loosley notes that Muslim-Christians relations in Syria enjoy a level of tolerance perhaps higher than anywhere else in the Middle East. Nonetheless, the Christians (figures for which range from 8-15% of the total population) continue to decline because the bad economy causes them to have fewer children, and many of those children end up leaving for better opportunities elsewhere.

The final article of note is O’Mahony’s “Christianity, Shi’a Islam, and Muslim-Christian Encounters in Iran.” He focuses on three communities in particular: the Assyrians, the Chaldean Catholics, and the Armenians, each of whom continues to maintain significant numbers in Iran under highly restricted circumstances. (A tiny handful of Arab and Russian Orthodox parishes also eke out an existence.) He also notes that both Anglicans and Roman Catholics had a well-established presence in Iran but after the 1979 revolution both lost everything and some of their faithful were martyred.

In sum, this volume gives a good overview of some of the relations between Eastern Christians and Muslims, and once more we are in Loosley and O'Mahony's debt for pulling together an important and useful collection such as this. 

God, Sex, and Gender

If you live anywhere in the West today, you could be forgiven for thinking that the only topic that arouses Christians to passionate debate is sex. In particular, most Christian traditions, for thirty years or more, have been asking about the permissibility of ordaining women and approving of homosexual relationships. Lurking right behind these questions is the more interesting and important question of what it means to be created male and female--the theological significance of sexual differentiation and gender. In debates about same-sex marriage, that question is often overlooked by some Christians who prefer instead to indulge in sociological prognostications and apocalypticism on the cheap, usually rolled into one: "gay marriage will bring about the end of civilization as we know it!" Instead of sloganeering like that, Christians should be doing what they alone can do, and that is: ask, and attempt to answer, the question of why God made us male and female, and what the significance and implications of that are. Most Western Christians have only recently begun to contemplate such questions. To date, the best such book raising those very questions is  
 
Creation & Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage

by Christopher Roberts. But that book has little to say from the East apart from a couple of inadequate sections on Clement of Alexandria and Gregory of Nyssa. But we cannot fault Roberts, and for two reasons: first, no early Christians asked the question in any serious or systematic way of what, in theological terms, human sexual differentiation means; and, second, most of us in the Christian East have ourselves only begun to ask the questions of what, theologically, the meaning of both sex and gender are. For too long, the question either did not occur or, as when recently it did, we have often replied very inadequately. If Orthodox Christians hope to be taken seriously--as I do--in discussions about why marriage is between a man and a woman, and why the tradition of priestly ordination is reserved for men, then we must come up with deeper, more satisfying arguments that ultimately answer the question: what purpose did God have in mind in creating us male and female? I am myself trying to ask such questions in a book (under contract with T&T Clark) tentatively entitled "Sexual Differentiation and the Christian East: Sources Ancient and Modern."

Now a new book comes along to continue asking those questions:

Patricia Beattie Jung and Aana Marie Vigen, eds., God, Science, Sex, Gender: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Christian Ethics (University of Illinois Press, 2010)vii+287pp.

This is an interesting and important book that very clearly saw its goal as asking questions rather than providing definitive answers. As the great moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre put it in his book on Edith Stein, we live in a culture impatient with questions and always desirous of immediate answers. But philosophers such as Stein, and theologians worthy of the name, must know that some things can never be answered definitively, and that the value of asking the right questions can be enormous. Those seeking simple solutions will have to look elsewhere than in this book. But that is not a fault. It is, in fact, very commendable of the editors to have assembled such a unique gathering to attempt to bring together diverse disciplinary perspectives on questions of theological anthropology and human sexuality and gender. What makes such a gathering, and resulting book, so important is that, for too long, most contemporary Christian reflection on sex and gender--especially among Catholics, and to a lesser extent among Orthodox--largely consists in repeating rather essentialist, romanticized, and frankly shop-worn slogans about "complementarity" and "image of God." Too little theological reflection has taken account of what the biological and social sciences have to say, but this book attempts to do just that, and it is about time. We owe the editors and authors thanks for breaking important ground here.

The editors, one a Lutheran and the other a Roman Catholic, gathered together over a dozen academics, almost all of them at Roman Catholics at Loyola University in Chicago--though there is an Episcopalian, Lutheran, and Mennonite among their number as well. This was designed as an interdisciplinary symposium, and so we have professors of biology, literature, sociology, anthropology, and philosophy alongside a half-dozen or so professors of theology. The one glaring absence here is, of course, that of the Christian East. One looks in vain in this collection for any reference, however passing, to any Eastern Christian figure--e.g., the Fathers, Bulgakov and the Slavophiles generally; and, more recently Elisabeth Behr Sigel, Verna Harrison, or John Behr--who, alongside such scholars as Eve Levin,  Anna Lisa Crone, and others have done so much to advance our understanding of sex and gender among the East-Slavs and the Eastern Orthodox. It is tiresome to treat the label "Christian" (as in this book's subtitle) as a synonym for "Western." What is even more problematic here is that most contributors are Catholic, but act as though Catholic=Roman; they seem oblivious to the fact that the Catholic Church includes 23 non-Roman Eastern Catholic Churches and thus the world of the Christian East is not extraneous exotica they could ignore but a very part of the communion to which they already belong. The editors did, as I just noted, a very commendable job in seeking out non-theologians to help shed very welcome and useful light on what biology and other disciplines say about sex and gender. But why could they not have looked a little bit farther to ensure that even one Eastern Christian voice was included? This is not just special pleading. The question is all the more acute because some of the contributors here write as though their questions were new and nobody had ever shed any light on them when, in fact, as I will presently show, we have had the better part of century's worth of reflection from some enormously influential and important Orthodox figures on precisely some of the issues raised here. In addition, one essay treats Ethiopian Christianity--a country with deep Eastern Christian roots, and the largest Oriental Orthodox Church in the world--but totally ignores the tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which is not even mentioned.

The book is divided into three sections; the table of contents may be viewed here. The first section sets the scene with broadly "methodological" essays focusing largely on how religion and science may talk to one another. These are all short essays. Jon Nilson's, on Roman Catholic authority and moral theology, has a few things to say that may be of interest to those having no background whatsoever in the issues he addresses, but the ecclesiologist, ecumenist, or other specialist reader will find nothing new here.   

The six essays in the second section are designed as reflections "on human sexual diversity." Of these, the most interesting and substantial is John McCarthy's "Interpreting the Theology of Creation: Binary Gender in Catholic Thought." Though marked by several typos, this is nonetheless a very thoughtful, respectful probing of reflection on creation theologically understood 'first and foremost [as] a 'relationship'" and "not a moment" (134). The author seeks to show that "statements of the Roman Catholic Church on sexuality and gender" are perhaps not "informed deeply enough by a Catholic theological reflection on creation" (133). Creation names a relationship of difference, and there is what he calls a "betweenness" in the relationship of creation-Creator. The author spends the rest of his chapter reflecting on this "betweenness" and trying to find language and categories to describe it. The obvious lacuna here is, of course, any reference to the profound and groundbreaking (if somewhat controversial) Sophiology of Bulgakov, which was precisely such an attempt to reflect on the "betweenness" in the Creator-creation relationship. That entire trajectory of theological speculation is unacknowledged in this otherwise commendable essay, which could have been strengthened by engaging Bulgakov and the argumentative tradition he inspired down to the present day.

The other essay that clearly suffers by ignoring the Christian East is the last one in the book by Patricia Beattie Jung and Joan Roughgarden: "Gender in Heaven: the Story of the Ethiopian Eunuch in Light of Evolutionary Biology." This is certainly an interesting and worthwhile essay, engagingly written, but it is unnecessarily weakened in three ways. First, and very surprisingly, it breezily conflates "sex" with "gender" and then baldly asserts that according to Roman Catholic teaching, "Gender is eternal" (225). But the Church has never said that. We simply do not know--beyond a rather general and vague sense that, in the age to come, we will remain embodied creatures, but in new, resurrected bodies where marriage (as with all the sacraments) will pass away, along with the need to procreate. Second, the authors assert that the story of the Ethiopian eunuch "has been much neglected and continues to this day to evoke little commentary." We are to take this assertion on faith, but should not do so. The story did not escape comment by Eusebius, St. Irenaeus of Lyons, St. John Chrysostom, Origen, Augustine, and others. It may not have been commented upon as much as other texts, but it was not entirely ignored. The authors go on to assert that this text "was rarely represented in Christian iconography." But there are Ethiopian (and other) icons of precisely this scene, and numerous recent studies on Ethiopian iconography, none of which are referenced here. Nor is the tradition of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church  herself acknowledged, which is a glaring omission given that it is the largest Oriental Orthodox Church in the world, claiming well over 30 million members. That Church sees the story of the eunuch as foundational to her history and a key part of the introduction of Christianity into the country. Third and finally, the authors again assert--again without any evidence--that "we believe there was considerable division within Christianity over questions about gender in heaven for centuries before the onset of the Middle Ages" ( 237), a claim repeated almost verbatim twice on the next page. That may have been the case, but piously asserting it, without actual evidence, does not make it so. There are clear echos here of the ploy Robert Taft has described many times of inventing a past to meet present felt needs.

Still, in sum, this book, limited though it is to a Western perspective, is nonetheless useful in attempting to build bridges between theology and the sciences. Eastern Christian theology can perhaps benefit, mutatis mutandis, from some of the work here, and can certainly benefit from imitating the symposiasts' attempt to build bridges between science and theology--which has not often been recently done in the East. This book very commendably brought together important, thoughtful, generally respectful perspectives to deepen an  important dialogue--one which I very much hope continues--and for that the editors and contributors, together with the University of Illinois Press, deserve our thanks.

The Coptic Papacy

Earlier I noted a forthcoming book on the Coptic papacy. I have at last received it from the publisher, the American University of Cairo Press. It is:

Mark N. Swanson, The Coptic Papacy in Islamic Egypt 641-1517 (2010), xxii+226pp.

This is the second of a projected three volumes in the series. When the earlier volume came out by Stephen Davis, The Early Coptic Papacy: The Egyptian Church and Its Leadership in Late Antiquity (Popes of Egypt) I reviewed it at the time in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. The author was clearly writing as an historian rather than a theologian, but his book was no less fascinating or important.

The Coptic Church is especially dear to me not only because of close friends who are Copts, and not only because they are among the most heavily persecuted of Eastern Christians today: the Copts are also a great inspiration in the vigor of their ecclesial life, their ascetial discipline (with a fasting regimen stricter than any other Eastern Christian tradition), and in their ecclesial structures. The Coptic papacy is a fascinating model to examine, as I did in detail in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, for those of us seeking to respond to Pope John Paul's request for new models of how the Roman papacy could be exercised anew in service to Christian unity. There is much to be learned from these Coptic models.

The author of this second volume, Mark Swanson, is a professor of Muslim-Christian relations at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. He covers a wider swath of terrain than Davis did in hhis book. Swanson's book includes an appendix of martyrs from the late 13th and early 14th centuries. It also has a wonderful twenty-page bibliography, which is most useful.

This will be reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies in 2011.

The Pope of Rome and the Christian East

Peter Seewald's new book-length interview with the pope,

Light of the World: The Pope, The Church and The Signs Of The Times 


on which I briefly commented earlier, has of course already generated enormous discussion on--predictably and tiresomely--sex. Some have said that the pope allowed himself to be played by the media and should have known how these comments would be received. I would say, based on the entire book, that the pope did know the likely reception his comments would receive, and proceeded anyway. His previous interviews--especially the 1985 Ratzinger Report--as well as his 1997 volume of memoirs, Milestones set off firestorms so I'm sure he was not unaware that something similar would happen again--all the more so in an Internet age. In any event, I've just finished reading the entire thing and have seen that the "condom comments" are so tiny that only the tendentious would be interested in repeating them.

Let me, instead, focus on those aspects of direct interest to Eastern Christians, of which there are about twenty or so passages in the book that are noteworthy. I would divide the comments into (i) the encouraging but not really surprising comments (not surprising, that is, to anyone who has read Ratzinger over the last 40 years); (ii) the truly surprising; and (iii) the disappointing. Of these, (i) is the largest category; (ii) the next largest; and (iii) has only one disappointment. Let me take them in order. Not all treat Orthodoxy directly, but all of them, I believe, have clear and obvious bearing on issues about which Orthodoxy is concerned.

i) Encouraging Comments: 

• The pope is not omnipotent: right at the outset (p.6), he underscores that notwithstanding the fact the Catholic Church is the largest such organization in the world, "the Pope does not have power because of these numbers." Indeed, he goes on to say that while the pope bears "a great responsibility," he "is, on the one hand, a completely powerless man" (6). He cannot control or correct or confront everything, and it is not his job to keep the entire Church in being: "only the Lord himself has the power to keep people in the faith" (7).

• The pope is not exclusively the "vicar of Christ": this title, rather, belongs to "every priest" when he "speaks on behalf of Jesus Christ" (7). This is important, not only because history clearly bears him out in refusing to see the title as exclusively papal, but also because, in the furor in 2006 over papal titles (about which more presently), Orthodox commentators like Met. Hilarion (Alfeyev) noted that other titles, including "vicar of Christ" needed critical examination.

• Infallibility cannot be invoked arbitrarily: Vatican I has, of course, been seen (often incorrectly, in my judgment) as a huge impediment to Orthodox-Catholic unity. Much of that is based on misunderstanding, which the pope is at pains here briefly to correct, insisting that the pope can never act "arbitrarily" but only in concert with other bishops and only "when tradition has been clarified" so as to proclaim "the faith of the Church" (8).

• A papacy of martyrdom: Seewald quotes back to the pope a paper the latter gave in 1977, with which he still agrees today, saying the papacy must first and foremost be understood to have and to exercise "a primacy of martyrdom" (9). In other words, "standing there as a glorious ruler is not part of being pope" (10).

• Papal bibliophilia: not a major point, but on a blog about books, I was heartened and amused to read that after he moved into the papal apartments in 2005, he gave pride of place to his bookshelves: "in them all are my advisors, the books" (14). Only after they were installed did he give any thought to furniture, decorations, etc.

• Curial criticism: In several places he very briefly (and in one place obliquely) criticizes the curial bureaucracy, calling it "spent and tired" (59); noting that "certainly John Paul II sometimes put off making decisions"; and agreeing that, while his predecessor "did undertake reform of the Curia," he "subsequently left many decisions to his collaborators" (79), not always, he seems to suggest, to good effect.  

• Synodality: saying he sees no need for a "Vatican III," he expresses his view that "I believe that at the moment the bishops' synods are the right instrument, in which the entire episcopate is represented and is, so to speak, 'searching,' keeping the whole Church together and at the same time leading her forward" (65-66). This is not really surprising, though a little disappointing because the limits of the Roman "synods of bishops," as I have noted elsewhere, are considerable and perhaps most memorably summed up in the words of the late Ukrainian Catholic Metropolitan Maxim Hermaniuk, who dismissed them as synods, archly calling them no more than "international study days of the Catholic bishops." No Orthodox recognizes these synods as real synods in the sense in which that word is used in the East: i.e., as a legislative body, having real power exercised in conjunction with its (usually patriarchal) head. Roman synods are purely consultative bodies. That being said, the popes have so far not ignored the recommendations of all the synods held since Paul VI instituted them in 1965, but they are certainly free to do so, and that remains a point of concern to Eastern Christians. 

• On not being a busybody: Referring to a document written in the 12th century by Bernard of Clairvaux for Pope Eugene III, Benedict agrees with him that no pope can allow himself to be consumed with files, meetings, decisions at the expense of "deeper examination, contemplation, time for interior pondering, vision...remaining with God and meditating about God" (71). Remember, he says, the pope is "not the successor of Emperor Constantine but...of a fisherman" (71). This is important because, as David Bentley Hart has memorably observed, many Orthodox fear the papacy as "the advance embassy of an omnivorous ecclesial empire." It is good to have (as he notes below, and had done so previously) a "pared down" papacy, and thus good to have a pope who is not forever trying to insert himself into the business of his brother bishops around the world--unless, of course, a truly genuine emergency, that admits of no other solution, requires his intervention.

• On not being a star: Some time ago, as those who follow him know, Cardinal Ratzinger expressed considerable unease with the fact that John Paul II was considered a "superstar." (He appeared on the cover of Time more than a dozen times.). He reiterates that here, but more gently and circumspectly, asking "is it really right for someone to present himself again and again to the crowd in that way and allow oneself to be regarded as a star? On the other hand, people have an intense longing to see the pope" and not him personally so much as "this office...the representative of the Holy One" (73).
• On dialogue with Orthodoxy: Noting that as a "professor in Bonn and Regensburg, I always had Orthodox among my students, and this gave me the opportunity to form many friendships in the Orthodox world," he goes on to note that it is with Orthodoxy "where there is...the most hope of reunion" in part because "Catholics and Orthodox both have the same basic structure inherited from the ancient Church" (86). I confess I was slightly taken aback by this because Orthodox and Catholic structures--assuming the pope means ecclesial structures--do vary considerably: the Roman is bipartite (the universal and local), while the East is usually tripartite (the local, the regional, and the "universal" in some sense, pace the denials of some ignorant Orthodox polemicists who like to sneer at "universal" structures as purely Western and having no place in Orthodoxy, a risible claim to anyone who really knows what he is talking about). But this is a very brief comment he does not develop so we should not read too much into it. His larger point is valid.
• Cordial relations between Old and New Rome: he expresses delight in the "real friendship and sense of brotherhood between" him and Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew.
• Russian relations: he notes his gratitude for "the friendship and the great cordiality that Patriarch Kirill has shown me," noting the latter has "such a joy about him, such a simple faith....So we understood each other well" (87).  The interviewer presses him a little later as to whether there will be a meeting between the two "in the not too distant future", and the pope responds: "I would say that, yes" (91). 
• The nature of the unity we seek: he notes that unity between Orthodoxy and Catholicism needs to happen in order to spread the gospel and help the world believe, but that we must "truly relearn to see and understand our inner spiritual kinship with each other." He is not, he says, concerned firstly with "tactical, political progress, but rapprochement on the level of our interior affinity" (87). He expands on this later, rightly noting that 'beyond the doctrinal issues, there are still many steps to be taken at the level of the heart. God still needs to do some work on us here. For the same reason, I would also be shy about making any predictions about when reunion will happen. The important thing is that we truly love each other, that we have an interior unity, that we draw as close together and collaborate as much as we can--while trying to work through the remaining areas of open questions" (89-90).This, of course, clearly echos John Paul II's oft-stated call for the "healing of memories," on which I've commented previously with reference to Orthodoxy (“The Healing of Memories: a Suggestion for Liturgical Enactment,” Ecumenical Trends 34 [2005]: 9-12), including here.
• No new Uniates: Discussing the prospect of Anglicans entering the Catholic Church, the pope notes that structures being set up for them will be flexible. "We don't want to create new uniate churches, but we do want to offer ways for local church traditions, traditions that have evolved outside of the Roman Church, to be brought into communion with the pope and thus into Catholic communion" (97).

ii) Surprising Comments:

• No hand kissing? The interviewer enumerates things that changed in 2005 when Benedict took office, saying "you abolished the custom of kissing the Pope's hand--though no one followed the new protocol" (82). Is this true? I never heard or saw this anywhere. Orthodoxy has objected to an over-exaltation of papal authority and some of its concrete expressions, but this would not be an objectionable practice given that Orthodox regularly kiss not only patriarchal and episcopal but also priestly hands.  The pope does not respond to this comment, instead insisting that his removing the tiara from the papal coat of arms was not so original because already Paul VI had given it away (and none of his successors have worn one). Frankly no Orthodox could object to the tiara (except, perhaps, the one Paul VI wore because it looked like some nasty cheap nursery-school project) unless we were prepared to renounce the use of imperial headgear on our bishops.
• Backtracking from Dominus Iesus?  Discussing the conciliar language of particular churches, the pope notes that "the Eastern Churches are genuine particular churches, although they are not in communion with the pope. In this sense, unity with the pope is not constitutive for the particular church" (89; my emphasis)! When I have time I'll have to check this (especially the word "constitutive") against Dominus Iesus and also the 1992 declaration on the Church as communio because it sounds like the pope is introducing an important clarification or nuance here....  
• No nationalism or nationalist "autocephaly" in the Church: Noting that "there has always been a tendency toward national churches, and in fact some have actually been founded," he nonetheless notes that in today's world the need is "precisely" for "an interior unity": "the Church needs unity, that she needs something like a primacy. It was interesting for me that the Russian Orthodox theologian John Meyendorff, who lives [sic] in America, said that their autocephalies are their biggest problem; they could use like a first authority, a primate" (138-39).
• this is certainly true, as I have demonstrated at length in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy, forthcoming from the University of Notre Dame Press early next year. But I was a little taken aback here by two things: others have said this more recently--e.g., Nicholas Lossky--so this suggested to me the pope has not followed the recent literature. (I'm sure he's kept sleepless at nights waiting for my book on this score!) And surely he knows that Meyendorff is...dead? Meyendorff died in 1992--perhaps this is a translation issue--or even a typo--and the present tense ("lives") should, of course, have been in the past: lived.

iii) Disappointing Comments: 

• Papal reform: the interviewer presses him to say more about why the title "Patriarch of the West" was abandoned and about how the papacy might be reformed to take account of Orthodox concerns, but the pope will not say, arguing that "these are contentious issues, which I would have to say more about than I can right now..." (89). I examined this question in  my “On the Patriarchate of the West," Ecumenical Trends 35 (June 2006): 1-7. There I said we very much needed to hear from the pope because the decision created such turmoil in the Orthodox world and the statement put out by Cardinal Kasper at the time was unhelpfully ambiguous--a concern I expressed in greater detail here. I very much stand by those comments. The 2006 deletion of the title was, and is, a puzzling decision. Many of us have tried to remain hopeful about its intended import, but further developments and clarifications here would be most useful.

This book covers much else besides. The overall impression, right from the beginning, is confirmed for those of us who know and have read and met Ratzinger (as I did very briefly in 1998), but may be new to others, including the media: he is a wonderfully gracious, humble, open man with a deeply affecting, inspiring simplicity of faith and trust in Providence.