Stranger in a Strange Land

• INTELLECTUM VERO VALDE AMA • Greatly love the intellect

—Augustine

“Proselytizers”

Who are They, anyway, those loathsome spiritual predators? How do you recognize Them? In an essay in the Journal of Ecumenical Studies (Vol. 36, Nos. 1-2 [Winter-Spring 1999], pp. 43-65), “New Myths for Old: Proselytism and Transition in Post-Communist Europe,” Jonathan Luxmoore and Jolanta Babiuch-Luxmoore cite the following definitions:

As for proselytism, the Geneva-based World Council of Churches, grouping inter alia the largest Orthodox, Lutheran, and Anglican communities, defined it in 1961 as “a corruption of Christian witness,” which used “cajolery, bribery, undue pressure, or intimidation, subtly or openly, to bring about seeming conversion.” Similarly, the Roman Catholic Church defined proselytism after Vatican II as “a manner of behaving contrary to the spirit of the Gospel, which makes use of dishonest methods to attract [persons] to a community—for example, by exploiting their ignorance and poverty.”

“In short,” the authors conclude, “all mainstream Christian churches appear to agree on the negative implications of the concept.” More recently, in 1991, the WCC and the Vatican issued a joint statement on proselytism largely echoing the sentiments of these earlier statements.

Alas, these definitions of proselytism are worthless, since in practice the term is applied indiscriminately to all sorts of evangelism. Consider, for example, a recent column by Father Ted Stylianopoulos, an Orthodox priest, on Beliefnet (www.Beliefnet.com—check out this site if you haven’t yet visited it). The column begins irenically, responding to a question from an evangelical Protestant as to whether evangelicals are considered to be Christians by Orthodox believers. Father Ted says yes, and reports with approval on ecumenical contacts between the two groups. But then he shifts gears:

It hasn’t always been this way in the past. Evangelical Protestants have sent, and are still supporting, missionaries in traditionally Orthodox lands in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. These evangelicals seek to proselytize Orthodox Christians, viewing them as “idolaters” because of their icons and elaborate ceremonies. Orthodox Christians in such lands have reacted with understandable hostility, terming the missionaries “heretics” who lack the sacraments and have no part in the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. These unedifying attitudes bring embarrassment to Christianity and do not serve the cause of Christ.

This requires a fair amount of translation, but what it boils down to is clear: the recipe for ecumenical harmony is for evangelical Protestants to stay out of “traditionally Orthodox lands.” And—setting aside the question of the legitimacy of such restrictions—what about the evangelical Protestants who are already there, indigenous, who can’t by any stretch of the imagination be cast as interlopers from the intrusive West?

In March, I had the privilege of meeting a number of indigenous Eastern European evangelicals—many of whom are Pentecostal—at the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Croatia. The students at the seminary are drawn not only from Croatia, a predominantly Roman Catholic country, but also from many other nations in post-Communist Europe, most of which are among the “traditionally Orthodox lands.”

There is, for example, a sizable contingent of students from Romania. More than a decade after the overthrow of Ceau¸sescu, their country is struggling. If they wanted to, they could make easier lives for themselves somewhere else. What drives them to study and prepare for their return home is not animus against Orthodoxy but a passion for “the cure of souls.”

This doesn’t mean that there is no truth in Father Ted’s caricature of evangelical Protestants. Just as evangelicalism in the United States has suffered from the narrowness of vision identified so clearly by Mark Noll in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, so also with our brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe. But many of the students at ETS are aware of this tendency and seek to overcome it.

In this they are encouraged by the perspective of Peter Kuzmic, the president of the seminary, whose faith is ecumenically orthodox. During my week in Croatia, Peter and I participated in a ceremony honoring the publication of a new Croatian edition of Thomas a Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, held in the library of the Catholic university in Osijek. Peter sketched Thomas’s life and read some selections with commentary. I talked about the profound influence of The Imitation of Christ on John Wesley, and hence the debt that we as evangelicals owe to Thomas and the church that nurtured his spirituality.

The publisher of this edition, whose list is wonderfully eclectic, was the minister of culture in the last Communist government of Yugoslavia. So it goes in the strange new Europe.

—John Wilson