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Source: Orthodox Christian Fellowship
Press release of the talk yesterday evening (February 17, 2011) and archived below.
CHAPEL HILL, NC – FEBRUARY 4, 2011 — The New York Times best-selling author Bart Ehrman and Eastern Orthodox priest James Berends will give a free public presentation at 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 17, at the FedEx Global Education Center on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill campus. Ehrman and Berends, both of whom graduated from Wheaton College as Evangelical Christians in 1978 and 1979 respectively, will share their subsequent three-decade spiritual journeys for the forum: “What to Believe? An Internal Struggle.”
Graduating Wheaton College in 1978, Ehrman received a master’s degree in divinity and his Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary, pursuing a scholarly career in New Testament textual criticism. During that time, Berends did stints in ministry and industry between his two divinity degrees at Dallas Theological Seminary and Holy Cross Greek Orthodox School of Theology. Excerpts from Ehrman’s 2006 New York Times bestseller, Misquoting Jesus, provide a preview into the story of his personal journey.
“I kept reverting to my basic question. How does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired?” said Ehrman in the introduction to his book. “These doubts both plagued me and drove me to dig deeper and deeper, to understand what the Bible really was.” Coming to the conclusion that the New Testament was not an inerrant document, because it was influenced and edited by the early “proto-orthodox” community, Ehrman eventually became agnostic. Berends also followed the historical record to the proto-orthodox community that participated in the formation of the New Testament; he, however, concluded that that community continues today in the Eastern Orthodox Church and that it promulgates an accurate rendering of the Christian message. Also like Ehrman, Berends’s journey loosened his grip on fundamentalist certainty.
“Bart is agnostic; I am apophatic,” said Berends. “In Eastern Orthodoxy, I found support for my uncertainty through apophatic theology, which emphasizes what we do not and cannot ever know about God, except through spiritual experience. Some say “when you’re uncertain, pound the podium harder.” My voice gets softer, and I will throw in an opposing opinion because I have to be intellectually honest.”
The event is sponsored by UNC’s Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies (CSEEES) and the UNC Orthodox Christian Fellowship (OCF).
Scroll to 36:36 for the start of the talk.
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Fr. Thomas Hopko, an advisor to AOI, delivered an address in late September for the 40th Anniversary of the Consecration of the Chapel at the Orthodox Monastery of the Transfiguration, a monastery for women in Ellwood City, Pa.
Fr. Tom observes that while a “sprinkling” of Orthodox Christians in academic circles have been known to the wider American public, “hardly any other practicing Orthodox Christian has been publicly recognizable in American society in the past forty years.” Among the clergy, the late Archbishop Iakovos is singled out for social witness in the civil rights movement. “Things are not much different today,” Fr. Tom says. “But there are some notable exceptions.”
He opens with a sobering assessment and then explores the accomplishments of the Church in recent decades:
A Spiritual Springtime for American Orthodoxy — Reflections on the last 40 Years
Membership in the Orthodox churches in North America in the past forty years has radically decreased. There are probably about half as many people in the churches today as there were four decades ago. It also seems that most adults who attend services in Orthodox churches today are “holding the form” of Orthodox Christianity while “denying the power of it” (2 Tim 3.5) as they ‘pursue happiness” according to “the American dream” as devotees of “the American way of life.”
Concerning the churches’ clergy during the past forty years, I believe that the task of finding, educating, appointing and supporting suitable candidates for the clergy, especially the episcopate, remains the greatest challenge in all Orthodox churches in North America today just as it was four decades ago when (as my friend, the late Fr. John Psinka would say), “few were called and all were chosen.”
Having stated the “negatives” — greatly reduced membership, inept leadership, nominal participation and widespread use of the church for secular purposes – the spiritual achievements in North American Orthodoxy during the past forty years are amazingly many and spectacularly significant. They were accomplished by a relatively small number of people, mostly converts to the Faith, people born abroad and clergy children. They are so remarkable that I am persuaded to call the past forty years a “spiritual springtime” for Orthodoxy in the United States and Canada.
I will comment on the accomplishments as I see them. They are not yet a bountiful “blossoming.” But they are a promising “planting” capable of producing, in due time, a rich harvest of spiritual fruits, including, we may hope, a company of committed and competent bishops, priests, deacons, monastics, church workers and lay leaders for the coming generations.
Read the full address on the Web site of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary.
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Source: Orthodox Christian Fellowship