An Interview with His Eminence Metropolitan Savas of Pittsburgh
PRAXIS: Your Eminence, you’ve acquired something of a reputation for your openness to popular culture. How do you reconcile your role as a bishop of the Greek Orthodox Church, a Church that prides itself on its fidelity to tradition, with your willingness to engage the rapidly changing and generally irreverent world of pop culture?
METROPOLITAN SAVAS: You say “change” as if it’s a bad thing! I wouldn’t agree. Certainly the Truth doesn’t change-“Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever” (Hebrews 13:8)-but our perception of the Truth, our manner of expressing it does. And so long as we are creatures in history, that will be the case. You might say the truth of the Church hasn’t changed for two thousand years, but what was given in fullness through the gift of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost has been made known sequentially, over time. Christ spoke of Himself as the Vine and His followers as the branches: a perfect image of a living relationship between the Truth and the teachers of the Truth. By abiding in Christ, His disciples necessarily grow and bear fruit, and bring new life into the world.
Remember how St. Peter described the Church: as made up of “living stones”! Through that paradoxical, practically oxymoronic expression, he calls attention to the solidity, the continuity, the eternity of the Faith and also its dynamism, its vitality. I believe the Church changes in order to remain true to itself. Its identity as the Body of Christ is in no way compromised by change; nothing essential is lost. As the Apostles moved out of their original Jewish culture into a Greco-Roman one, they learned a new language, new artistic forms, new melodies. Had they not done so, how could they have been true to the divine commission of the Lord of the Church to preach the Gospel to all nations?
The Apostles set an example of interaction, adaptation and accommodation that has continued through to this day. The Apostolic Church is always finding new ways to communicate its saving truths: through the composing of new hymns and music, the use of icons, architecture, or the printed page, or recordings, or radio broadcasts or television programs or podcasting or blogging or live streaming or social networking on the Internet. I think it’s curious that some within the Church don’t appreciate this basic truth about being in time and space.
The late, great Church historian Jaroslav Pelikan, in the volume of his monumental The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine dedicated to The Spirit of Eastern Christendom, begins by emphasizing the Byzantine ideal of stasis, permanence, immutability. He claims that the Byzantines were so philosophically committed above all to the notion of the changeless God that they believed the Church must reflect above all that particular divine attribute.
I am forever indebted to Professor Pelikan for his fascinating book, Jesus through the Centuries, in which he demonstrated how different aspects of Jesus’s character came to the fore at different times and in different places over the past two millennia. In the second century, for instance, the emphasis was on Jesus as “Teacher of Eternal Truth”; in the fourth and fifth centuries, it was “Jesus the Model Monk” or “Jesus the Emperor.” In more recent times, it’s been, at least in some cultures, “Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild” or “Jesus the Liberator” in others. Stephen Prothero came out with a similar book a few years back called American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, calling attention to the ways we Americans have consciously or otherwise shaped Jesus to meet our patriotic or even chauvinistic needs: “Jesus the’ Protector of the Family Values” (of the Eisenhower era), or “Jesus the Rugged Individual” (or the Proto-Libertarian).
Now, not all these changes of perception are equally acceptable to the Church. We discern between the Jesus whom the Church has always known and proclaimed and any new Jesus whose message deviates from the Gospels. Did Jesus really come to empower us to enjoy greater health and wealth? Does he really want us to address social inequalities by collective means? Is the Gospel for our time summed up in advocating for laws that protect the personhood of the unborn and the sanctity of traditional marriage? These are the kinds of questions the Church should not be afraid of addressing.
PRAXIS, Spring 2011, Vol. 10 “Truth and the Times: The Culture Conundrum. An Interview with His Eminence Metropolitan Savas of Pittsburgh.”
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