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Books & Culture, Jul/Aug 2000
Correction
Regarding "The Only Honest Man: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Impresario of Modernity," by Alan Jacobs [May/June, 2000]: we regret that due to a production error, the last lines of this article were omitted in the print edition. We apologize for the error. Below is the paragraph as it should have appeared:
It is the tragic culmination of Rousseau's logic: since other people impede my achievement of virtue, in the very name of virtue they must be destroyed. In July 1794 the Jacobins who remained had little choice but to turn on Robespierre and execute him; he would have gotten each of them eventually. And Rousseau had said it all before him: "I publicly and fearlessly declare that anyone, even if he has not read my writings, who will examine my nature, my character, my morals, my likings, my pleasures, and my habits with his own eyes and can still believe me a dishonorable man, is a man who deserves to be stifled." The child of pride is Terror.
"Proselytizers"
While I concur with the spirit of ecumenical understanding and friendship between various Christians that John Wilson's editorial, "'Proselytizers'" [May/June, 2000], seems to advocate, the same is not served by ignoring the historical record and citing his experience of "indigenous" Eastern European evangelical seminarians in Croatia last March.
During the last several centuries Western missionaries, both Latin and Protestant, have deliberately targeted Orthodox Christians in their lands, such as Greece, where Orthodox Christianity has been embraced by nearly the total population since Christian antiquity and deserves to be appreciated as the Christianity of (yes!) an Orthodox native land. During trying historical circumstances, for example, the Islamic rule of several centuries, Orthodox Christians in Greece more often than not welcomed Western missionaries who proclaimed the Gospel, taught the Scriptures and organized schools—until they realized that they were also being asked to leave their Church as something fundamentally corrupt and to join any of several Western divisive denominations. They perceived first hand the meaning of "proselytizers": those who come bearing Christian gifts and end up stealing "sheep" and dividing indigenous Christians by exploiting their political weakness, poverty and lack of education.
Proselytism, whether refined or crude, whether practiced by Protestants, Catholics, or Orthodox, is essentially the same: a deliberate policy and organized program of "sheep-stealing" based on notions of the other as corrupt or heretical. This is by no means a "caricature" but a fact of history which is still operative in various degrees and forms, and which Christians ought to try to overcome in obedience to Him who prayed that all Christians should be one (at least in spirit and heart!).
Fr. Ted Stylianopoulos
Needham, Mass.
I am writing in response to your editorial on "'Proselytizers'" and especially in regard to your criticism of Father Ted Stylianopoulos. Father Ted has affirmed that evangelical Christians are considered to be Christians by the Orthodox. In the passage you quoted, he mentions that evangelicals, on the other hand, do not consider Orthodox to be Christians. When evangelicals conduct missionary work in traditionally Orthodox countries, they often meet with hostility from local Orthodox. He notes that these "unedifying attitudes" in the plural—meaning on both sides—"are an embarrassment to Christ." His text does not require "a fair amount of translation," and I respectfully suggest that you translated it incorrectly.
So far from telling evangelicals to "stay out" of Orthodox countries, he is in fact pleading for Protestants to recognize that Orthodox are Christians! The Orthodox church in many post-Communist lands has suffered and is sick, and needs help from the other churches, not competition. I am afraid that the battle between these churches will simply result in more people being turned off from any kind of church, and cause a "bitter root to grow up" (Heb. 12:15).
Orthodoxy has a wealth of treasures for learning to know our Lord better. As one who has studied Russia and Georgia extensively and speaks their languages well, I became interested in missionary work there in the late 1980s, and began to explore Orthodoxy. I be came convinced that the way to be most helpful to those nations was from within the Orthodox church. I also be gan to love Orthodoxy and be came Orthodox in 1994. I have seen that Russians are much more willing to engage me in discussions about Christ now that they know I am coming at it from their side. This of course is because most Russians do not share Father Ted's openness to other Christians; nevertheless it re mains a fact.
Evangelical Christians should be commended for their willingness to work hard and suffer for the sake of the Gospel. However, Protestant missions will only save individuals: to save these nations, the Orthodox church is the appropriate vehicle. There is much that could be done together.
Orthodox, as well as Protestants, are at times narrow-minded; we often need each other's loving correction. Surely we need to be in dialogue with each other. Father Ted is one of the clearest voices we have in American Orthodoxy in support of contacts with other Christians. As one who sat in his New Testament class this semester, I can affirm that he is very vigorous in his approval of evangelicals' love of the Scriptures, which he often praises, and commends to us as a model. I do believe that in your eagerness to defend, you misunderstood the point he was making.
Elizabeth Scott, CNM
Brookline, Mass.
John Wilson replies:
I appreciate the thoughtful responses from Father Ted Stylianopoulos and Elizabeth Scott. They raise important issues that can't be addressed adequately in a brief response. Readers who are interested in more substantive dialogue on this subject should go to our online Letters section at www.BooksAndCulture.com, where they will find a conversation on proselytism that includes Father Ted, myself, indigenous Protestants from Eastern Europe, and representatives of other faith communities as well.
Here I want to emphasize that the intent of my column was not to single out the Orthodox for criticism, but rather to draw attention to the way the terms proselytizers and proselytize
are used and—so it seems to me—abused. In recent months, apart from countless instances in print, I have heard, for example, a secular East Coast academic (referring to Christian campus groups such as InterVarsity), an Orthodox professor in America (referring to Protestants in the former Soviet Bloc), and a radio commentator in Chicago (referring to Southern Baptists) use proselytizer
as a handy term of abuse. In such instances and many others, the term is a substitute for thought.
Because It Works
There is an old joke that mathematicians resent physicists not because they use faulty reasoning and get wrong answers but because they use faulty reasoning and get right answers. I want to offer a physicist's perspective on William Dembski's review of Yair Guttmann's book, The Concept of Probability in Statistical Physics [Because it Works, That's Why!, March/April], with perhaps some tempering of the view of "pragmatism" offered by these two philosopher-mathematicians.
Like many of my colleagues in physics currently engaged in research in complex systems, pattern formation, or nonlinear dynamics, I came to the field through thermodynamics and statistical physics. Contrary to the view offered by Guttman when he states (and Dembski concurs) that physicists "are not likely to pursue this question," it has been my experience that many physicists are often indeed concerned as to why we can apply statistical reasoning to our experiments, if only for (shudder) pragmatic reasons.
In thermodynamics, we typically characterize the state of a system at equilibrium (say a collection of gas molecules in an insulated, rigid container) by a few measurable parameters—such as the temperature, the volume or the mass of the substance in the container. Statistical mechanics is the attempt to explain, and extend, the results of thermodynamics from the viewpoint of the interactions of the individual molecules that compose the substance being studied.
One of the most fundamental ingredients in this endeavor is the assumption that, for a system at equilibrium (or, in a very restricted sense, near equilibrium), the individual molecules are equally likely to be found in any configuration that still satisfies the constraints put on the system by the macroscopically observed parameters. For example, each molecule may have a different velocity, but the total energy of the system must always add to the same amount for any allowed con figuration. This astoundingly simple assumption, from which the Second Law of Thermodynamics and other results in statistical physics can be de rived, is called the fundamental postulate.
This, of course, clues one in on the pragmatic approach being taken. We postulate this for our equilibrium systems and then move on. But the reality is not so simple. Especially as research extends away from equilibrium systems, physicists regularly concern themselves with why the fundamental postulate seems to work. The difficulty that motivates such pondering is straightforward. I can give you certain specific conditions under which I am fairly certain the fundamental postulate will work. I can also give you examples of systems for which I know it will not work and the proper alternative picture to replace it. There is, however, an incredibly large wasteland including systems far from equilibrium, systems with hysteresis (memory) or systems with highly nonlinear interactions, for which it is not clear if the fundamental postulate should apply or how it should be modified if it does not.
The image I wish to impart is one of a dynamic interplay in the mind of the practicing scientist. I am not sure why a certain set of assumptions works, but they seem to, at least under a limited set of conditions, so I march ahead and use them. At the same time, seeking more fundamental understanding, I also re turn and question the very assumptions made, in order perhaps to develop a more comprehensive framework that will be useful for a larger set of problems.
Returning to the specific problem of fundamental postulate in statistical mechanics, the questioning is actively going on. Ask a researcher in statistical mechanics why the fundamental postulate seems to work and the favored answer tends toward the ergodic theory. That is, the particles in the system change from configuration to configuration as they collide with one another and with the container in a way that effectively samples all various possible states. The difficulty, as Dembski points out, is that if these particles are modeled with deterministic dynamics, all sorts of pathological cases could be realized and the sampling of all possible configurations cannot be guaranteed without the addition of assumptions that do not at this time have a physical basis.
The physicist's short answer to this problem is "Deal with it!" If ergodicity really is the foundation for the fundamental postulate, then it must be the case that the problems envisioned by the mathematicians are not such large problems after all. If it is not, then the research, the physical research, will bear it out. The mathematicians are not left to fend for themselves; this is not just "a fertile area of mathematical research." Advances in experimental technique are allowing us to probe the interactions of a small number of particles that make up larger systems and test some of our assumptions directly.
This is the core of the confidence that fuels the scientific endeavor. If it's there, it's got an explanation, and the mathematics will have to catch up.
Steve Rauseo
Wheaton College
Wheaton, Ill.
Copyright © 2000 by the author or Christianity Today International/Books & Culture Magazine. Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.
July/August 2000, Vol. 6, No. 4, Page 3
Books & Culture
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