There has been a great deal of interest, in the last decade, by many Christians, in returning to the Classic phase of the Christian Tradition. The Patristic heritage (of the Latin West and Greek East) is held high and warmly honoured and respected. This turn comes as both a critique of a faltering and failing liberal ecumenism and the fragmentary nature of much modern and postmodern thought. There has been a quest, in short, for an era and ethos in the Great Tradition when there was some sort of depth and unity.
Thomas Oden has done much to urge the North American Evangelical world to go deeper and further in their historic faith journey. The publication of Evangelicals and Catholics Together: Toward a Common Mission (1995), Reclaiming the Great Tradition: Evangelicals, Catholics and Orthodox in Dialogue (1997), Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants (1999) and Ancient-Future Faith: Rethinking Evangelicalism for a Postmodern World (1999) have done much to build on the work of Oden and further enrich this process of returning to the sources (ad fontes). The problem with much of this turn to Tradition, by Evangelicals, Roman Catholics and Orthodox, is that it is, for the most part, an American phenomena, and, more to the point, a turn by those within the USA of republican sympathies to the Great Tradition.
It might be more honest to state that the return, interpretation and read of the Fathers and the Great Tradition is more a right of centre republican approach to the past. It is within such a context that we, as Canadians, welcome a book on the Orthodox theology of Archbishop Lazar Puhalo. It is somewhat sad and tragic when Canadian theology becomes co-opted by American theology. This colonization of the Canadian mind is all too common, and Archbishop Lazar has done much to resist and oppose such colonization. Unfortunately, Andrew Sopko’s fine primer on Archbishop Lazar tends to miss this basic and essential point.
The Orthodox Tradition in North America has done much in the last few decades to make its presence felt and known. The ethnic Orthodox and the Orthodox Church of America (OCA) have waged their wars to make the Orthodox way relevant to the North American context. The OCA has established itself as a leading and articulate voice in this debate.
Many have been the fine volume and seminary that has walked the extra mile to articulate a view of Orthodoxy that comes as a needful and necessary critique of western theology and denominational schism. Many have been the Orthodox mystical theologian that has made the Orthodox way appealing and attractive. Most of us have either heard of or read Kallistos Ware, Vladimir Lossky, John Meyendorff, Alexander Schmemann, Thomas Hopko, John Zizioulas and clan. But, there is a form of Orthodoxy in North America that is not as well known, not as much in the mainstream nor part of the Orthodox establishment and Sanhedrin. It is this tradition and motherlode that Andrew Sopko has attempted to unpack and unravel in his book, For a Culture of Co-Suffering Love: The Theology of Archbishop Lazar Puhalo (2004).
Archbishop Lazar has dipped his bucket deep in the wells of Metropolitan Anthony Khrapovitsky, John Romanides, Michael Azkoul and George Florovsky. In fact, Andrew Sopko (the author of For a Culture of Co-Suffering Love) did an earlier book on John Romanides (Prophet of Roman Orthodoxy: The Theology of John Romanides, 1998). Sopko is now working on a biography of the life and theology of Anthony Khrapovitsky.
There is, therefore, this alternate form of Orthodoxy in North America that has a lively pedigree and family tree. It is, though, this line and lineage that has often been ignored by many within the Orthodox club in North America and those within the Evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions that are meeting and coming together in their interest in The Great Tradition . Andrew Sopko, to his heroic credit, is doing yeoman’s labour to tell the fascinating tale of this often ignored form of Orthodoxy in North America, and For a Culture of Co-Suffering Love: The Theology of Archbishop Lazar Puhalo is a fine primer in this revisionist vein.
Archbishop Lazar Puhalo is, without doubt, the most prolific Orthodox theologian in Canada, and he is certainly one of the most prolific Orthodox theologians in North America. It is about time that Archbishop Lazar was given his due, and For a Culture of Co-Suffering Love does such a deed well. The book is divided into eight sections: 1) Introduction: Orthodox Christianity and Culture 2) Christian Existentialism, 3)Gender as Prophecy, 4) Beyond Morality and Ethics, 5) Science and Theology as Empirical Quest, 6) The Aesthetics of Reality, 7) Last Things and 8) Epilogue: Church and/or World. In each of these probing chapters, Sopko carefully examines and explores how Lazar has engaged the world he lives in on a variety of key cultural issues.
The strength of For a Culture of Co-Suffering Love... is the way Andrew Sopko has highlighted for the interested reader how and why Archbishop Lazar, as an Orthodox theologian, has engaged the culture he has lived in rather than retreating into an idealized past, an ethnic subculture or a reactionary and right of centre political theology.
There is a way of studying culture (much indebted to Matthew Arnold) that tends to do an end run on material questions such as economics and politics. The Arnoldian approach to culture has been soundly challenged by those like Raymond Williams, Edward Said, Terry Eagleton and, in Canada, Robin Mathews. It is one thing to argue that culture deals with literature, literary criticism, philosophy, theology, the arts, science and religion, gender questions, identity politics and various levels of theory. It is quite another thing to argue culture and cultural studies include the tough and challenging questions of war and peace, wealth and poverty, crime and punishment. It is this fuller view of culture that Sopko has ignored in For a Culture of Co-Suffering Love.
A weakness of the book is the way that Sopko has tended to exclude economic and political questions from culture: Archbishop Lazar has never done this. Again and again, Archbishop Lazar has faced and confronted many of the tough and troubling economic and political questions. He has dared to address, much to the annoyance and chagrin of many of his fellow Orthodox theologians, many of the large issues of injustice rather than either slip into an insulated pietism or genuflect to American republican politics and new forms of Caesar worship. It would have helped if Andrew Sopko had highlighted how and why Archbishop Lazar has articulated a political theology that cannot be taken captive by the right, sensible centre of political left, and done so from the unique Canadian Red Tory tradition. It is from this Canadian perspective that Archbishop Lazar writes, and, as such, offers a way of thinking through a political theology that has not been co-opted by an American republican turn to the Great Tradition.
We must and should make the turn to the Great Tradition, but we must be wary about how this is done. There are many ways of reading the Fathers, and we must be careful, in our turn to such a perspective, that we do not reduce them to either inward looking pietists or American republicans. The Canadian approach to such an issue by those like Archbishop Lazar, George Grant, Stephen Leacock or Robert Crouse is a needful and necessary corrective to a rather reductionistic view that tends to dominate the intellectual scene at the present time.
For a Culture of Co-Suffering Love is a fine primer on the work of one of the pre-eminent Orthodox theologians of North America. It would be wonderful if others would take the time and exert the energy to probe the integrated theology of Arcbishop Lazar in much more depth and detail. Such a probe could take Canadians in the direction of a post-colonial theology.
Ron Dart teaches in the department of political science/philosophy, and religious studies at University College of the Fraser Valley, Abbotsford, British Columbia, Canada.
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