Being Ruled Without Rules

Tonight, in the Orthodox Church, is the eve of the feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos - the same date, August 15, as what Roman Catholics call the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. Our sister church in this city is a Greek church, Assumption, and this is their patronal feast, so we joined them tonight for the pre-feast Lamentations service. Lamentations is a beautiful service, a sort of compression of the final service on Holy Friday (Good Friday), just as the past two weeks, a period of fasting, have been a sort of compressed Lent.

Among the several priests who visited and helped serve was Fr. Ted Trifon, pastor of Sts Constantine & Helen Greek Orthodox Church in Wauwatosa. Fr. Ted delivered a homily after the service that enlightened even lifelong Orthodox in the congregation, and gave us food for thought concerning obedience and the best way to achieve it.

For readers who are not Orthodox, we probably should explain the Orthodox belief about the end of the life of the Virgin Mary, Jesus' mother, whom we call the Theotokos (Greek for God-bearer, with "bearer" in the sense of bearing a child). From the beginning, the church has taught that Mary died in the house where she had long lived with the Apostle John; that she was buried quickly according to Jewish custom, with most of the apostles present; that the apostle Thomas arrived three days after the burial and asked to see her body so he might venerate it; that when the tomb was opened, the Theotokos' body was gone, showing that her son Jesus had taken her bodily to heaven in much the same way that his body had been resurrected after the crucifixion and ascended to heaven 40 days later.

Roman Catholic belief is fairly similar; there are only two differences that matter for the sake of this entry. One is that Romans tend to believe Mary was taken to heaven alive, without dying first (so they have no celebration of "Dormition," which means falling asleep in the Lord). The other difference is that in their church, the Assumption of Mary is a dogma - while the Orthodox church has never adopted it as dogma, but regards it as a "theological opinion." (We're going to use the term "opinion" rather than the formal Greek term "theologoumenon," partly because the latter is hard to spell or even say quickly, and partly because theologoumenon often means subjects about which Christians can have valid disagreements - and as you'll see, Fr. Ted's remarks about Assumption as an opinion took the complete opposite approach.)

According to Fr. Ted, the Orthodox church creates "dogmas" only when it has to, in order to rebut heresies. When the entire church has always broadly accepted a belief, the church sees no need for a formal dogma but allows the belief to remain a "theological opinion." So in a sense, rather than being "lower" than dogmas, Orthodox theological opinions of this kind would be "higher" than dogmas - because they have never been questioned, but are just a matter of "common sense," as Fr. Ted put it. ("God took Elijah to Heaven in a fiery chariot, and he was only a great prophet," Fr. Ted said. "Wouldn't He do at least as much for His mother, the person from whom he received a human body?")

This got us thinking about an important difference between East and West - and maybe a connection with our thoughts about spirituality and living with dogs. (No, we're not going to make any puns about "dog" and "dogma," much as ordinarily we might like to.) In the Eastern church, while there are certainly rules and hierarchies, there is nothing like the Western insistence on defining, classifying, organizing, and over-analyzing everything, commonly parodied by the question, "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?"

The Roman Catholic dogma of the Assumption is a good example. According to the research we've done, the Roman church accepted Mary's bodily Assumption fully as long ago as the Orthodox have - since at least the fourth century. In the 18th century, Pope Benedict XIV declared it a "probable opinion, which to deny were impious and blasphemous," (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02006b.htm). Yet in 1950, Pope Pius XII made the Assumption of the Virgin a dogma in a Bull issued under his power of infallibility (also a relatively recent dogma of the Roman church, but that's another story). Apparently it wasn't enough that the belief had been accepted for almost 2,000 years, and that denying the Assumption was impious and blasphemous - the Western church still felt the Assumption needed the validation of being stated as a "dogma."

Perhaps this example helps explain why Orthodoxy, while producing some of history's greatest theologians, has always been a little cautious about theology. Understanding the ways of God, or thinking we do (how much can we really understand?), takes second place to living the ways of God. "When you pray, don't theologize," an Orthodox bishop told a BBC reporter during an interview on Orthodoxy shortly before the collapse of Communism. The more rules people are expected to follow, the more incapable people are of acting without rules, and the more the rules may become God.

The connection with dog training? (Here it comes, at the end of a very long entry.) The really well-trained and socialized dog needs the fewest commands. One of the first rules we learned in our dog-training class was, "Never repeat a command." Say the command, then create a situation where the dog knows what you want through body position, movement, habit, to which the words are just a reminder. Ultimately, work toward situations where what you want the dog to do is what the dog wants to do. If dog and man are to live in harmony, both have to do it without continually consulting a rule book - but instead, knowing what right behavior is, and doing it through mutual agreement. Where our relationship with Bounder is working the best, he knows what he's supposed to do, or not do, and behaves accordingly without needing to be told.

Is it a stretch to say that the church, for 2,000 years, has worked the same way? She has avoided multiplying dogmas because God is happiest when believers just accept God's truths as "common sense." If challenges arise, if believers seriously differ, then the church clarifies the command (yanks on the leash?). But it is far preferable for believers to share the Church's beliefs through general acceptance, custom, usage, shared practice - in harmony with God, as we seek to be in harmony with our animals.