Dancing Alone: The Quest for
Orthodox Faith in the Age of False Religions.
By Frank Schaeffer.
Holy Cross Orthodox Press. xix
+ 327 pages. Reviewed by Philip Blosser [First published in The New Oxford
Review, December, 1995, pp.
28-29. Reproduced with permission.]
Novelist,
film-maker, and son of noted evangelical writer of L’Abri fame, Schaeffer
offers here an apologetic for his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy.
He undertakes to show that: (1) Western secularization has produced a culture of religious confusion and apostasy, (2) Protestantism is
to blame for cutting off Western Christianity from its historical roots, (3) Roman Catholic abuses and
distortions gave rise to Protestantism and secularism, and (4) the roots of authentic Christianity are found in the
living tradition of Eastern Orthodoxy.
There is much
that is reminiscent of his father in Schaeffer’s sweeping indictment of
contemporary Western culture. But his defection
from Protestantism leads him to identify new causes of American secularism in the religious subjectivism, individualism,
anti-traditionalism, and sacramental
nominalism of the Puritans, Quakers, and revivalists like Finney. He
argues, provocatively, that the pluralistic impulse of denominationalism became
the “principal engine of secularization” through the apotheosis of
“choice” and relativism. He
offers a blistering critique of the political right and left, arguing that American religion has
become so trivialized, if not secularized, that it has little guidance to offer in the public arena.
There is much
that is familiar in (1) Schaeffer’s critique of Protestantism (the
hermeneutical anarchy of
“Sola Scriptura,” private judgment, individualism); (2) his critique of
Catholicism (scandalous popes, politicized
bishops, “Protestantized” liturgies, banal songs, and stripped sanctuaries
that “often look like some United
Nations meditation center rather than a Church”); as well as (3) his argument
in behalf of Tradition (early
patristic evidence of episcopal polity, collegial authority, liturgical worship,
sacramentalism). His discussion
of the rich liturgical tradition of Orthodoxy is warm and winsome.
His account of salvation as a lifelong
journey of often painful growth and self-discipline, rather than a once-for-all
“decision for Christ,” is compelling
and deeply personal.
Still,
Schaeffer often comes across like a loose cannon.
He makes formidable leaps, declaring that
“Protestant theologians are the fathers of deconstruction” (196), and
tracing the pro-abortionist view of the
fetus as a mere “blob of tissue” to Zwingli’s view of the Eucharist as
mere bread and wine (82). His
hyperbole
and sarcasm can seem harsh, as when he compares Protestant Bible study methods
to astrological chart-reading
(197), or calls the Calvinist God “a great unfathomable Zeus-like computer in
the sky who arbitrarily saved some
while damning others ... irrational, perhaps berserk ... no more loving or
predictable than a forest fire” (87). His
logic is often strained, as when he blames the basic errors of Rome on
Augustianianism, which he blames for
everything from a “dictatorial papacy” to “Calvinist-inspired South
African apartheid,” or when he says that
“atheism is a logical, perhaps even desirable, choice if God is presented as
the sort of ‘God’ that the Scholastics,
like Thomas Aquinas ... believed in or as the god-devil of Calvin.” (71f.)
Schaeffer’s
quarrel with Rome centers on Papal authority and Augustinianism.
Against the former, he
advances impressive patristic support for the principle of episcopal
collegiality, but ignores the fact that Rome,
too, affirms this. He notes that
Pope Gregory I rejected the title of “universal” bishop, but without
explaining
that this title implied “sole” bishop, or noting Gregory’s repeated
declarations that Petrine primacy made all
churches, Constantinople included, subject to Rome.
He appeals to the undivided Church of the first seven
Ecumenical Councils, without acknowledging that the East was then in communion
with Popes who
unequivocally maintained their jurisdiction over Eastern churches, or that
Byzantine patriarchs and theologians
(even Maximus the Confessor) readily accepted this.
Schaeffer begs the question by denying that the Church
had ever “seen itself as under a dictator or ‘infallible’ pope” (169),
by failing to accurately convey the Roman
understanding of “infallibility” as a limitation on Papal authority,
preventing infallible definitions of prior Popes
from being arbitrarily “reformed” by the Pope in power at any given moment.
Further, by proposing Orthodoxy
as a happy median between “Protestant chaos” and “papal dictatorship”
(181), he skirts the Orthodox problem
of an autocephalous polyarchy which lacks a central Magisterium.
But, for
Schaeffer, Rome’s Augustinianism is the root of her “profound differences”
from Orthodoxy.
In contrast to Orthodox mysticism, he suggests, Augustinianism represents
a “rationalistic,” if not illicit, Western
proclivity for “cold,” detailed, logical “explanations” of divine
mysteries, producing theological systems “stripped
of awe and mystery,” and the view that persons are bereft of freedom and
unable to influence their predestined
fates. Here Schaeffer overlooks (1)
Rome’s historical defense of free will and cooperation with grace, and
(2) her condemnations of the fatalistic deformations of Augustinianism in
Jansenism and late Medieval
Nominalism. Further, his
repudiation of “Western rationalism” ignores (3) the Western traditions of
mysticism
and via negativa (even in Aquinas!), and (4) Orthodoxy’s historical
defense of the hair-splitting logical
definitions of God’s nature in the early Ecumenical Councils and the Filioque
clause of the Nicene Creed.
Schaeffer’s
journey into Orthodoxy has made him very “catholic,” but not Catholic.
He protests
Rome’s claims. But, like many
Protestants, his substantive objections are practical, not doctrinal.
Accordingly, what he says about forgiveness could be asked of him as
well: “How many times must we
forgive the Church Her torn skirts” before we “fall out of Communion with
Her in the name of purity?
... Seventy times seven” (201).