For A Culture of Co-Suffering Love: The Theology of Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, by Andrew J. Sopko, Archive Publication, Los Osos California, 2004. 148 pgs.
A review by Dr. Nicholas Frank, Reader.
Archbishop Lazar has enlightened Synaxis Press’ readership for more than a quarter century and enthralled audiences throughout his career as authorr, lecturer and preacher. His mental acuity and scope of interests have seemed at times so mercurial and wide ranging as to require an equally encyclopedic knowledge to grasp them. Always, Vladika Lazar’s point of departure is the gospel of the man-befriending GodMan, articulated in the patristic tradition, passed down through such as the late Metropolitan Antony Khrapovitsky. Andrew Sopko’s objective scholarship is able to convey in a comprehensive yet terse book the breadth of AVladika Lazar’s diverse works and place them succinctly in a thesis of Christian compassion. While followers of Bishop Lazar’s ministry, the Reader included, might have found his interests, from Patristics to astrophysics to physical anthropology to neuropsychiatry to existentialism, challenging if not exhausting, Sopko has little difficulty in keeping up. He is able to appreciate and describe Vladika Lazar’s work as a cohesive whole, consistent on a continuum, elucidating Orthodox Christian theology, and its mystical underpinnings in a manner which is less obtuse than sometime rendered; more welcoming to a wider world.
Sopko sees Vladika Lazar’s work as proceeding across two related fronts. The foremost of these is the preaching of the core Christian doctrine of compassion or co-suffering love; those teachings which inform this doctrine, exposure and refutation of heresies and misapprehensions which do not.
Vladkia Lazar’s second, related, undertaking is understood as the development of a theology of culture. In order for Orthodox Christianity to witness to humanity, what have become her cultural limitations must be addressed. Fr. John Romanides, another subject of Sopkos’, notes Orthodoxy is perceived as a faith of ‘long services ... robes ... beards’. Others, both within and without the Church have fretted and feared her decline into the narrow confines of ethnic ghetto siege mentality and/or museum of religious curios. Resisting, as many have not, an urge to modify the Church in a popular mania for ‘relevance’, Vladika Lazar has very consciously developed a theology of culture aimed at meeting the challenges posed by postmodern secular and religious society. This theology of culture, fully appreciated by Sopko, perhaps more thoroughly so than by any commentator, includes a number of favored and select themes.
This careful selection may have not been self-evident to past audiences, though with Sopko’s help, clarified. That is, Vladika Lazar has presented traditional theology and developed original responses which speak to contemporary social issues and which frequently court reaction.. ‘What is the Church position? ‘ ‘but the Bible says otherwise!’ typify such contentions. The dilemma characteristically faced by Orthodox Christians is whether to retreat into a sheltered spiritual refuge or to incur the risk inherent to our Savior’s request that we convey His Love to all the world.
The book’s chapters review many of Vladika Lazar’s favorite cultural studies.While Vladika’s interests may seem boundless, his work is an ongoing response to critical ecclesiological issues . His ministry has benefited from spontanaety of thought and mental agility,and would have not been so if blueprinted. These areas have been etched out by Sopko as dogmatics, gender issues,existential moral philosophy, empirical science, aesthetics, eschatology and ecclesiology. Sopko notes that, historically, Orthodox Christianity was a powerful presence on the world cultural stage. Arguably, Byzantium’s cultural repositories and academic tradition, uninterrupted through late antiquity infused the Renaissance as Europe emerged from the Dark Ages. It was, in part, the legacy of Byzantium and czarist Russia which imbellished Orthodox culture throughout subsequent historic eras. Ironically, through the later diaspora of the Orthodox people, there has been a tendency for the faithful to grow more protectively insular, seeming less accomodating to potential catechumens. Thus, the Church has been dismissed by contemporary religionists as a preservation society maintained by diminishing numbers of devotees. Apologists for this perception take solace in our heritage as a holy people, a race apart from the World, and there is wisdom in this caution. Bishop Lazar, however, has never ceased to remind us of the scriptural admonition to evangelise, and the theology described by Sopko is a platform for the full engagement of the World to the end of embracing its humanity.
Sopko organizes the text so as to identify the more salient areas of Bishop Lazar’s evangelism and describe how each correlates to concerns of post-Christian thought. Dr. Sopko, professor of theology in a Roman Catholic seminary,,intends the book as instruction for a students conversant in Biblical narrative, scriptural teachings, early Church history and patristics. Beyond these requisite expectations, he provides a fine summation of those more recent Orthodox theological writings which provide context for Vladika Lazar’s. With the exception of Romanides and Khrapovitsky, Bishop Lazar’s work is not seen as heavily indebted to contemporaries, but as highly innovative. Though Bishop Lazar uses, for example, existential philosophical writings as points of departure, it is by way of relating them to patristic thought. Other contemporary writings, conversely might be polemically lambasted by the archbishop as heretical. Sopko’s many engaging cross-referents place Vladika Lazar in good company among contemporary Orthodox scholars evangelising in an academic mode.
Dr. Sopko discussion concentrates on the most popular of Vladika Lazar’s teachings, those most familiar to the episcopal flock.. He begins with the ‘Gender as Prophecy’lecture, illustrating how, though derived from scriptural sources it speaks to contemporary concerns surrounding the issue of gender equality. Bishop Lazar’s argument in these writings, in sum, entails a premise that observance of traditional roles and behaviors in the liturgical and sacramental life of the Church carries no general value assumption as to the worth of men or women as such. Neither can any such valuations be generalized by Orthodox Christians or others to regarding gender roles in civic or political life. The text turns to writings most central to an ethos of cosuffering: transvaluation of conventional mores as key to spiritual transfiguration. His Eminence is not alone in this observation, as it is central to all existential Christian thought. He is select among Orthodox hierarchs in stressing such ethical insight as central to the doctrine of theosis. The ‘existential’ ethos, that overreaches preoccupation with calculation of right and wrong toward a Good premised on Love is not altogether an invention of 19th century philosophy. Sopko mentions current discussion by Orthodox theologians regarding the existential flavor St. Gregory Palamas writings.. Kierkegaard, after all, in his desire to ‘Christianize’ Christendom, and Nietzsche, in his desire to see it collapse, each recognized in the Gospel narratives an ethos of co-suffering as love lived and, thereafter, oddly absent in the institutions ostensibly founded upon these very narratives. Vladika Lazar’s ministry seeks to engage the postmodern sensibility also through a voiced enthusiasm for the physical sciences. While theoretical and applied physics and astronomy, are favorite interests, his work also suggests an understanding of medicine and physical anthropology. These interests not only underscore Vladika’s curiosity, but an effort toward becoming conversant in the most topical areas of scientific research Though one can be legitimately critical of false faith in scientific salvation or an idolatry of scientism, it will not do for those hoping to penetrate the Western consciousness to ignore science. As indeed all postmoderns are so reliant upon scienctific technology as to be transparent to it, we are likely to be suspect of zealots who insist upon its prima facie demonic evil. Science, after all, is our friend. Vladika Lazar refers to this adversarial religious reaction as responsible for contrived ‘models of reality’ set forth in order to shore up theological shortcomings and render unnecessary reassessments by complacent theologians. Examples of ‘models of reality’ employed by defensive religionists range from the geocentric cosmology force-fed to Galileo to the ‘creationism’ baked up in humble pie for us today by the religious right. Such abuses readily explain the Archbishop’s urgent interest in astrophysics and evolutionary anthropology as ingredients of a cultural theology.
Sopko’s text at its midpoint turns to Bishop Lazar’s more purely spiritual themes: iconography, eschatology, and evangelism. Orthodox Christian iconographics can give rise to a sensitive impasse to interfaith dialogue with post-Reformation Christendom, defended gingerly by Orthodox apologists undertaking any such colloquy. Bishop Lazar’s most popular lecture may well be ‘Iconography as Scripture’ and its delineation of the Christian aesthetic. Iconography is presented therein as not simply permissible but a necessary component of Gospel interpretation and catechism. From the Orthodox perspective, the greater risk of unintentional idolatry more likely lies in the exegetical approach of isolating Biblical ‘proof text’,at the expense of their broader context. Iconography is presented through Bishop Lazar’s lecture as a subtextual aid provided the initiate; perhaps a more incisive a teaching device than any other comparable medium.
In its eschatological commentary Bishop Lazar’s work shifts toward Orthodox audiences most exclusively. The afterlife and apocalyptic prediction are topics virtually guaranteed to arouse religious interest, yet neither Orthodox clergy nor laity are as fully agreed upon such beliefs as might be supposed. While popular folklore and supermarket tabloids abound with authorative accounts of the afterlife and expert endtime forecasts, it may seem startling that Orthodox Christians are not of one mind in such matters. Andrew Sopko details Bishop Lazar’s eschatological commentaries, which significantly heralded his entrance onto the theological stage. Popular Christianity was long influenced by superstition, folklore, Manichean and neoPlatonic beliefs, among others, which paralleled Christian dogma at points but were never legitimate Christian teachings. By the mid nineteenth century, if not before, some of this lore had become such commonplace, even to the Orthodox, as to be treated as canonical. Had these tales been merely favored by the unlettered with a tenuous grasp of doctrine , it would have been a simple matter for more erudite Christians, including the clergy, to correct. The problem, as Archbishop Lazar has pointed out, is that such heresy is inevitably promulgated by the clergy; from the top down. As Vladika Lazar attacks the Gnostic foundations of these heresies, it is worth keeping in mind that what is under discussion is not the supposed ecclesiastic cover-up touted by contemporary ‘Gnostics’ in works such as ‘DaVinci Code’ or Pagel’s exegesis of apocrypha. Such arguments are, incidentally, implausible in that such apocrypha would have become hopelessly obscured were it not for the Church’s own painstaking preservation of her own artifacts. What Vladika questions are those heresies of the present which are actively and openly taught in revered Church circles! …The Reader will not slake the reader’s curiosity further, but invite those piqued to peruse Sopko’s chapter on Vladika’s eschatological doctrine as well as the many related publications offered by Synaxis Press.
Dr. Sopko concludes with an epilogue which takes into account the strengths of the Archbishop’s ‘Theology of Co-Suffering..’ as well as its oversights. Sopko’s candor, needless to say, will tantalize former students of the Archbishop, yet accustomed to soliciting his approval. Sopko’s criticism, however is impersonal and directed as much to Orthodoxy’s ambiguous attitude to external dialogue as to the Archbishop. Orthodox traditionalists, for instance are perpetually at odds with ecumenists: The latter ardently defending every vestige of high tradition, the former protesting the faith will wither if growth is inhibited. A recent wave of conversion in North America, followed by an influx of Old World Orthodox refugees, while increasing membership and revitalizing parish life, renewed the Church’s role as an ‘immigrant’ resource. This consideration may diffuse some of Sopko’s observation that Bishop Lazar, as most of our episcopacy, remains perpetually bound by Old World identity; i.e., compassion for the newcomer will take precedence over, say, a move for vernacular liturgy. Sopko also observes that Orthodoxy’s harsh criticism of Western Christianity, indeed, of Western secular culture, deflates the Church’s postmodern dialectic currency. His own work exemplifies a genuine and benevolent interest in Eastern Orthodoxy on the part of a Western Christian which ,alas, will be infrequently reciprocated. There is again the traditional/ecumenist tension to reconsider, but also the body of much of Sopko’s own study. Vladika Lazar’s perpetual reinvention of himself as, physicist, anthropologist, existentialist, gender spokesperson, metaphysician, etc. exhibits nothing if not a heartfelt effort on the part of a traditionalist hierarch to embrace a world not of his own predilection. A more pointed critique may be of Vladika’s ecclesiology; that it would remain unclear to the unchurched reader of the Bishop’s as to how expression of compassion was necessarily linked to Orthodox baptism and the ensuing theotic struggle. (‘Can’t I just do this at home?!’). Nonetheless, Sopko’s conclusion leaves an impression of immense respect for Bishop Lazar’s work, culminating with a moving and lyrical passage on the nature of the gospel of co-suffering by Metropolitan Antony, key inspiration of the lifework of Lazar Puhalo.
Andrew Sopko’s text is, to the Reader’s discerning eye, well-researched, highly articulate and impressively referenced . Several advance copies were distributed in an effort to gauge reader response. Reaction was favorable overall with reserved criticism. Some sampled found the text overly academic in tone; so demanding at points that earlier passages had to be reread in order to stay abreast.. The Reader, as already noted, is grateful to Dr. Sopko for having consolidated Bishop Lazar’s writings so singularly and artfully illustrating their central theology. His thoughts on encouraging universal Christian dialogue teem with fresh insight. While the text is material for seminarian seminar, Sopko is generous enough by way of explanation, notes and cross-reference that the Reader maintains that any who could follow this taxing review should be able to follow Sopko’s generou8s text. The only genuinely upsetting response to it was from a parishioner who assumed the work was published as a retrospective upon His eminance’s retirement from active life. May he never retire from active life, and may God continue to give him the stamina and presence to continue to enlighten and teach us. God grant him many years!
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