A blog with a rule, and where the rule comes from
Everything written on this site follows a rule, and the parish thought it more honest to set the rule out in one article than to leave readers to work it out for themselves. The rule is not a house style. It comes from a letter written in a cabin in northern California on 27 November 1980, and from an article published earlier the same year in a small Orthodox magazine with a few hundred subscribers.
Put simply: the Orthodox Church makes a large claim about herself, and these pages will state that claim plainly, because blurring it would be a discourtesy to anyone who has come here to learn what Orthodox Christians actually hold. But the claim will not be turned into a weapon against the person reading it. That is not a modern compromise between conviction and politeness. It is Fr. Seraphim Rose's own position, and he argued for it in print in the last two years of his life.
Four things, held at the same time
He is easy to misrepresent, and he gets misrepresented in both directions. Some quote his sharpest sentences and present him as a man whose chief interest was in telling other Christians where they stood. Others quote his kindest and turn him into something he would have refused to be called. He held four things together, and dropping any one of them produces a different man.
- The Orthodox Church is the Church founded by Christ, and the sacraments are given in her. He stated this without qualification and repeated it.
- It is not for us to say where any particular soul outside that Church stands before God. He refused this question every time it was put to him, and referred it to God.
- Christian life outside Orthodoxy is real. He believed that Protestants are genuinely born again in Christ, that they love Christ, and that in some respects they put Orthodox Christians to shame.
- Harsh convert polemic is a spiritual illness, and it does more damage to the Church than the errors it attacks.
The sentence he put into print
In 1980 Fr. Seraphim published a defence of Fr. Dimitry Dudko, a Moscow priest then under pressure from the Soviet authorities, in The Orthodox Word, the magazine he edited and printed himself. Part of the article turned aside to address his own readers. Among Western converts to Orthodoxy, he wrote, there is a temptation to speak too freely of heresy and heretics, and to use the errors of the non-Orthodox as an excuse for what he called “pharisaic smugness” about our own Orthodoxy. Then came the judgment.
Read that slowly, because it is easy to skim past. He is not saying the harsh convert has his facts wrong. He concedes the theology may be correct, word for word, and condemns the attitude anyway. The sentence continues by naming the consequence: this attitude, he wrote, helps to drive away from the Orthodox Church many who would otherwise have been drawn to it.
The provenance matters. This was not a private remark caught in someone's memoir, nor a line from a letter released after his death. He published it, over his own name, in the journal he had founded and ran. It is the strongest thing he said on the subject and the easiest to verify.
Even when it is worded in a theologically correct manner, this attitude is spiritually wrong
Fr. Seraphim Rose, “In Defense of Fr. Dimitri Dudko”, The Orthodox Word, no. 2 (1980), p. 131; quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
The letter of 27 November 1980
The other central text is a letter, and its occasion is worth knowing. A catechumen had written to him in distress. She had been reading Orthodox authors and had met words like “Papists” and “heretic”, and she told him that as a member of a race which had been subjected to a great deal of name-calling, she despised the habit and did not wish to take it up herself. She wanted to know whether she was allowed to call her Protestant and Roman Catholic relatives Christians. She mentioned St Innocent of Alaska, who had been notably kind to the Franciscan priests he met in California.
His answer begins with pleasure rather than correction. He was happy to receive the letter, he told her, because her attitude showed that within the truth of Orthodoxy to which she was drawn she wanted to find room for a loving and compassionate attitude towards those outside it — and that, he said, is what Orthodoxy teaches. He then set out his position in numbered points. The points are not soft.
What he claimed, and what he refused to claim
He begins where the Orthodox Church begins. Orthodoxy is the Church founded by Christ for the salvation of mankind; in the Orthodox Church alone is grace given through the sacraments; and if salvation is difficult enough inside the Church, it must be harder outside her. That is the traditional Orthodox teaching, stated without a cushion. This site is not going to pretend he said something milder, because a reader who follows the citation will find the passage in ten minutes and will rightly conclude that we were managing him.
Then comes the turn. Everything he wrote about other Christians over the following two years swings on it, and it is stated in a single clause, without argument or apology, as though it were simply the obvious consequence of believing that God is the judge of souls and we are not.
If God wishes to grant salvation to someone who is a Christian in the best way he knows, Fr. Seraphim went on, that is up to God and not to us. Notice what kind of distinction this is. The Church teaches where the sacraments are given; she has not been given the task of issuing findings about particular souls, and he would not issue any. He held the doctrine and declined the verdict, and he did not regard that as inconsistent.
it is not for us to define the state of those who are outside the Orthodox Church
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
What he said about Protestant Christians
In the same letter he wrote that he could himself accept the experience of Protestants being born again in Christ. He had met people, he said, who had changed their lives entirely through meeting Christ, and he would not deny their experience merely because they were not Orthodox. He called such people beginning Christians, and held that they could not have the fullness of Christianity until they were united to the Orthodox Church. He did not take the first half back in order to say the second.
Elsewhere he went further. Several of his own spiritual children had come out of an evangelical community in Eureka, California, and in a lecture that year he described them to an Orthodox audience with open admiration: warm, loving people who obviously love Christ, who believed in spiritual struggle, who made themselves forgive one another rather than nurse grudges, and who took homeless people in off the street. In this, he said, they are an example of what we ought to be, only more so.
Speaking about simplicity the year before, he made the same point to his own side. The Protestant world, he observed, has many examples of people with soft hearts who are kind to others for the love of Christ; that is basic Christianity, and no Orthodox Christian should imagine that he may be cold and hard and correct and still be a Christian. The warning is pointed inwards, not outwards.
There is one criticism of Protestant teaching in the letter, and he makes it without heat. He thought that the idea that a person who is saved need do nothing further, because Christ has done it all, stands in the way of seeing the Orthodox emphasis on struggling for one's salvation after it has been given, and he cited St Paul: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” (Philippians 2:12, RSV). That is a real difference, and other articles here will take it up at length.
Having named it, though, he moved straight on. Almost all the religious Christmas carols, he remarked in the next breath, are perfectly good, and they are sung by Orthodox Christians in America — some of them, he added with evident amusement, in the strictest monasteries. The difference was stated once, accurately, and then he stopped pressing it.
Potentially Orthodox
The letter ends with a formulation that Fr. Seraphim does not claim as his own. He credits it to Fr. Dimitry Dudko, the Moscow priest he had defended in print that same year, and he offers it as the conclusion of the whole argument. It is the sentence that sets the register for this entire site, and it is worth having in front of you in his own words.
Notice that the sentence does not stop there. It continues into a parenthesis, and the parenthesis is the part that costs the writer something: “(if only we ourselves would give them a better example!)”. The exclamation mark is his. He is not congratulating Orthodox Christians on their position; he is suggesting that the reason others have not seen what the Church is may have a great deal more to do with us than with them.
He had already said as much, more soberly, a few paragraphs earlier. Of Christians outside the Orthodox Church he wrote that they do not yet have the full truth — perhaps because it has not yet been revealed to them, or perhaps because it is our fault, for not living and teaching the Orthodox faith in a way they can understand. On his account, the likeliest point of failure in the whole encounter is the Orthodox side of it.
In a lecture the same year he made the positive version of the point. If the Orthodox Church really holds the fullness of Christianity, he argued, then there ought to be something visible in the common life of her people that a person who sincerely loves the truth would recognise and want. That is a considerably more demanding standard than winning an argument.
We should view the non-Orthodox as people to whom Orthodoxy has not yet been revealed, as people who are potentially Orthodox
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, quoted in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St. Herman Press, 2003)
Correctness disease
He had a name for what he was against. He called it “super-correctness”, and sometimes “correctness disease”: a narrowness he watched spreading among converts and Western-born Orthodox during the 1970s, which offered simple answers to complicated questions and a party line on every possible subject. Many converts, he wrote, grasp at correctness like a baby's bottle, and he thought they could save their souls better by being a little incorrect but humbler.
What made the diagnosis unusual was where he located the danger. Others of his generation were warning that the Church was becoming lax; he thought the deeper trouble ran the other way, that the real loss was the savour of Orthodoxy, and that strictness will not save anyone who no longer has the taste and feeling of the faith. Reading a letter from a priest who argued that destitute Orthodox Christians in Uganda should not be helped because they belonged to the wrong jurisdiction, he asked how such cold-hearted elitism could possibly be fought.
Being correct, he told an audience in 1979, is the external side of Christianity: important, but not of first importance. Of the man who would take your head off over a disagreement he made a remark that is hard to forget — that such a person is displaying weakness, because he is so unsure of himself that he has to convert you in order to be certain he believes it himself. Anyone who has argued about religion on the internet will recognise the portrait.
Especially our own families
One biographical fact anchors all of this. Fr. Seraphim's own family were Protestants. His mother remained a Protestant; his father had been brought up Roman Catholic and became a Protestant when he married. Their son entered a Russian church in San Francisco at twenty-seven and spent the rest of his life writing about the Orthodox faith, and they did not follow him. He was not theorising about other people's relatives.
So when he told the catechumen that there was no reason she could not call her family Christians and be on good terms with them, recognising that they had at least their faith in Christ in common, and that she should “live in peace especially with our own families”, he was describing his own practice. He also drew the one line he thought polemic could properly cross: a harsh tone is called for, he wrote, only when someone is actively trying to take away our flocks or change our teaching. Outside those two cases, no.
That is the register these pages will try to keep. We will tell you what the Orthodox Church has held, including at the points where it differs from what you may have been taught, and we will not file the differences down until nothing is left of them; that would waste your time and insult your intelligence. What we will not do is treat you as an opponent. Fr. Seraphim thought the argument was never the thing that persuaded anybody anyway — that what persuades is seeing something, in the life of the Church, worth wanting. The door is on the latch, and it opens outwards.