On Human Nature: Thoughts Between the East and West

By Bishop Joseph (Ancient Church of the West)

I was recently accused by a young Eastern Orthodox novice here in China of trying to spread "Western doctrines" amongst cultural Easterners. This is an interesting accusation, especially since everything I truly learned theologically was in the East. I do not consider myself a sterotypical "Western theologian."

Contrary to what one would come to believe reading Eastern Orthodox apologetic material online, the East has no fully formed vision of human nature, just a very beautiful vision of what transformation can occur when the human person comes into contact with the unbounded energy and the uncreated light of the Holy Spirit. The East is concerned with what humanity can become, but the West has always been grounded in a realistic sense of what humanity is. They are both necessary, and the East misses out when it tries to pretend as if Western saints or the Western Church, have "always been slightly off." (Apologists such as Romanides and the "Three Ossky's" try to argue this in a "Neo-Patristic Synethesis.") I found that the Cappadocians all disagree within themselves and the other Eastern Fathers as to the construction and relationship of the spirit, soul and body. The problem with these Byzantine theologians today is that they artificially cut themselves off from the West, as if they were always seperate. The truth is that the East was also "semi-Augustinian" (biblical in its understanding of human brokenness) until after the Great Schism. Now, Western Orthodoxy is actually far more consistent and biblical than the East when it comes to understanding the realities of how Church politics can filter and distort the Truth.

Human nature is broken, unelightened and untrustworthy, even after baptism. Because of this imperfect nature and the long, incomplete struggle for sanctification in this life, humans can never be infallible, and the Church is always in the process of obedience and purification, never arrived or "perfect" in its militant state, and even can be wrong in a local council. There is no place for over-veneration of holy men and saints as oracles of God up and against Scripture and the Early Church, and there is no way to magnify the Church structure as if it is the Kingdom to Come. The Church doesn't save you, Christ does, and Christ forms the Church from those who repent, confess and submit to the stream of fellowship, accountability and fullness that He established with His Apostles. 

The West now is not in any position to be preachy. I think that the English-speaking world, up until the last 40 years, was generally realistic about man's evil nature, and the fact that "absolute power corrupts absolutely." That is what held everything in check for a few hundred years. Now that this more Augustinian understanding of human nature has been replaced with the "essential goodness" humanist model, we see a lot more authoritarianism and dependence upon centrally managed systems to keep law and order. This is the tyrannical vision of authority that is shared by many Asian countries and has been the unfortunate legacy of Eastern Orthodox nations as well. In my estimation, the West's unique freedom and well-developed individualism, the inheritance of the Western Greco-Roman civilization, is teetering on a precipice and could be destroyed from within in just a few short years by Social Justice politics. The solution is not found in submission to the Postmodern "wokeness" or conversion to Eastern Churches, jettisonning personal guilt and responsibility, and quickening the loss of our Western inheritance through capitulation to political visions of all-embracing governance. Only by returning to the Apostolic Faith as it developed in both the East and West, learning the Hebraic-Greco-Roman classical culture anew, and reappropriating our Traditions, will freedom and an uncoerced religious expression ever be maintained for another generation.