Hierarchy.

Not a four-letter word 

Reading recent issues of Commonweal has made me wonder about the pervasiveness of the problems facing all believers. In the July 17 issue a survey of the attitudes of young Catholics revealed their loose attachment to the institutional church; and the editorial in the August 14 issue asked, "Is it fair to say that this papacy is in the hands of fear-filled men? Of course, not all their fears are groundless." No, indeed. But some of the explanations offered for the loose attachment so many people feel to the church, or for the Roman reaction to perceived or real threats to the faith, seem too narrowly focused on Roman Catholic issues: Vatican II is at fault, or the rejection by Rome of the spirit of Vatican II is at fault, or the assimilation of Catholics into the larger society....

None of these really begin to get at it, I think. Among young Orthodox there is a similar drift, and we never went through Vatican II. Most young Greeks are not churchgoers, and the relatively low number of young people who attend the church in countries formerly dominated by the Communists has been blamed too easily on communism. As corrupting as communism was, the same low church-attendance numbers can be found among young people in every church in Holland, England, Italy, and France, where the Communists weren't in charge. Among many of the young Orthodox I know who do go to church, there is the same "pick and choose" attitude toward Orthodox teaching that you can find among "cafeteria Catholics." And there have been fearful reactions among Orthodox hierarchs, including a book burning in Russia, in which the works of important modern Orthodox theologians were torched, apparently with the approval of at least one bishop.

Let me suggest that one problem has been the loss of a living sense of hierarchy. The word (like "patriarchy" and like "orthodoxy") has fallen on hard times. I am not speaking here primarily of "the hierarchy," but of the idea that some things (ideas, works of art) are more important, more profound, more compelling, than others; some teachings and teachers are more authoritative than others. This includes the understanding that not all interpretations or interpreters are equally privileged.

This is a profoundly undemocratic (though not antidemocratic) notion, but it is essential to understanding Christian orthodoxy. And it is simply not a part of the lives of many people today. Why has it been lost? No doubt in part because it has been abused or invoked too easily, in too authoritarian a fashion; no doubt because it has too often been used to end discussion, rather than to deepen reflection. But a rejection of hierarchy is in the air, and it does in fact have to do with a dumbed-down democracy which affects the way we look at almost everything.

With the loss of established religion - a good thing - came a sense of religion as a purely personal choice, something private and subjective, and in recent years (as Robert Bellah et al. showed in Habits of the Heart, University of California Press), it serves a more or less consumer-oriented, therapeutic role. It is good if it pleases us and makes us feel good; otherwise, what good is it? There is no social stigma involved in not being associated with any church or temple, and this is probably a good thing. But there doesn't seem to be any other compelling reason to be a believer. The idea that some truths are matters of life and death is simply not a part of the way we see the world.

We say of a great work of art or music that there is something "compelling" about it. So it is with what faith reveals. Not to see that what God has done for us, that what has been revealed in Christ, is both heartbreaking and wonderful is to miss the point. To share the life God calls us to share, God's own divine life, and to be able to forgive as we are forgiven, require a self-emptying.

I have met a few people who seemed to me to incarnate Christian truth. They struck me as authoritative in a rare way: I would listen to what they had to say about Christ and take it (I can think of no other word) obediently. The word's roots imply not submission to an external authority, but deep listening.

Christian obedience may not be blind - we are not allowed that sort of mindlessness - but it must be obedience. To be truly obedient is to listen to God's word with our whole selves, to listen with everything that is in us. This has to do not with submission to an authority in some external sense, but rather with the understanding that in order to be transformed by God's word we must be still, and allow it to form us.

This has to do not only with hierarchy as a principle, but at times with the hierarchy itself. A bishop may not be charismatic, a good administrator, or even very bright, but if he is doing his job he may find it necessary to say of some theological teachings, of some interpretations of Scripture, or of some forms of behavior that they do not correspond with what we have been given in our tradition. He doesn't need to do this in an authoritarian way, but he may very well need to do it. While it is true that a deep listening is required of the hierarchy as it is of all of us, it is in fact traditionally, and for good reason, the job of the bishop and not the theologian.

But, as is often said in Orthodox circles, the true theologian is the one who prays, and the one who prays truly is the theologian. Prayer is the beginning of the deep listening which is involved in the only kind of obedience that should matter to Christians.