Orthodox Christianity is made up of two main branches: Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy. The two branches split in the year 451, when at the Council of Chalcedon, there was a disagreement over the nature of Christ.

The Eastern Orthodox Church includes groups such as the Greek Orthodox Church, the Russian Orthodox Church, and about a dozen other self-governing churches throughout the world.

Oriental Orthodoxy is comprised of six groups, the main one being Egypt’s Coptic Orthodox Church of Alexandria. The other five churches are based in India, Armenia, Syria, Eritrea, and Ethiopia.

Father Andrew Louth

In recent years, leaders from Eastern Orthodoxy and Oriental Orthodoxy have sought to find commonality between their beliefs. Some of the churches, such as the Coptic Orthodox Church and the Greek Orthodox Church of Alexandria, have even agreed to recognize baptisms and marriages that were performed by the other group.

Some Evangelicals believe that Orthodoxy keeps its focus on icons and rituals rather than on having faith in God. I grew up with a clear delineation between “our church” and “their church.” However as an adult, I wanted to see what Orthodox spirituality represented beyond the icons and rituals. I wanted to truly understand how the Orthodox people viewed God.

In order to learn more about the Eastern Orthodox perspective, I contacted Father Andrew Louth, a Russian Orthodox Priest in Durham, England. Until retiring recently, he was also the Professor of Patristic and Byzantine Studies at Durham University. And before that, he taught early Christian theology at Oxford University. Father Andrew graciously agreed to answer my questions for the following interview.

Rachel Mock: I read on the Durham University website that you teach a course on the understanding of what it is to be human in early Christian theology. Could you tell me about some of the key concepts that you teach in that course?

Father Andrew: I used to teach such a course (I am retired now).  It was an MA course, with texts, the texts being Gregory of Nyssa’s On the Making of Human kind and Nemesios of Emesa’s On the Nature of Human kind.  Central concepts were: the human in the image of God, as bond of creation, as microcosm of the cosmos; quite a lot about psychology, a good deal about providence.

A review essay of John P. Burgess, “In-Churching Russia: Journeying Through the Efforts of Orthodoxy to Return Russia to Faith” First Things (May 2014), by Rachel Mock.

The article “In-Churching Russia” by John P. Burgess not only helped me to reexamine my childhood as a Charismatic missionary kid in Moscow, but it also gave me a newfound understanding of the Russian Orthodox Church and its effects on post-communist Russia.

As I read this article, I kept asking myself the question, Should Evangelicals see the Russian Orthodox Church as competition or as a Christian ally? When I was a child growing up in Moscow, where my parents started the first American Charismatic church in 1991, I assumed that we were in competition with the Orthodox Church. I was told that we needed to evangelize to the Orthodox, because they were people who followed religious rituals instead of pursuing a personal relationship with Christ. Now, as a 32-year-old non-denominational Christian, I can see several benefits of Evangelical churches partnering with the Russian Orthodox churches.

In order to fully appreciate this article, I decided to research the author online. Burgess is an ordained Presbyterian minister and a professor of theology who has been working at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary since 1998. He spent time in Russia as a Fulbright Scholar in 2011 and a Luce Fellow in Theology 2012, and according to his faculty page on the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary website, the focus of his research was “the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in shaping a new national identity for post-communist Russia.”

Burgess went to Russia primarily as a researcher, not an evangelist. He is also a Presbyterian, not a Charismatic or a Pentecostal. Perhaps these factors helped him to take a more positive view of the Russian Orthodox Church. In the article, he describes the spiritual moments that he shared with Russian Orthodox people he met. He wasn’t on a mission to guide them toward the Sinner’s Prayer or the baptism of the Holy Spirit, so he was probably more able to notice the benefits, rather than the risks, of the Orthodox Church gaining influence over the Russian people.

The article “In-Churching Russia” describes how the Orthodox Church’s sphere of religious, social, and political influence has been expanding greatly in post-communist Russia. The Church’s motto over the past five years has been the word votserkovlenie, translated into English as “in-churching.” According to Burgess, Russian Orthodoxy “aspires to achieve nothing less than the re-Christianization of the Russian nation.”

The Orthodox methods of re-Christianizing are, of course, different from the Charismatic and Pentecostal methods of evangelizing. Instead of encouraging people to hand out tracts and share testimonies, Orthodox leaders, such as the patriarch Kirill, are urging the Russian people to find their spiritual and social identity within the Church. According to Burgess, “Orthodox moral and aesthetic values, [Kirill] argues, lie at the heart of the nation’s historic identity.”