“Fathers and Sons”
February 26, 2008
Os Guinness lays the smackdown on Frank Schaeffer’s “Crazy for God.”
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Scaeffer’s sometimes angry and snide tome “Dancing Alone” had a profound influence on me in younger days when I was hearing the siren call of American apologists to Orthodoxy during the days of disaffection with RC upbrining and my uncertainty about wheather joining my Grandma at her Greek Catholic church was “enough”.
It was a long and winding road with a detour into “whogivesadamnville” of a few years where I indulged in indifference and self-worhsip… I digress.
While many presented Schaeffer as having a prescient perspective on Orthodoxy as the “Ancient wave of the Future” his book left me non-plussed. I could not figure out why.
15 years on it is easier to put my finger on – Orthodxy’s boomlet (with Schaeffer being their version of our Scott Hahn) seems to have fizzled. The Evangelical Orthodox movement splintered early on with priests being de-frocked and then re-ordained in short order in the melee of autocephalous polyarchy by a rival jurisidiction.
15 years on, the imminent conversion of thousands – or per chance millions – of Americans to Orthodoxy and the unity of a singular Orthodox jurisidiction in America which was being sold to me as a seeker, just has not materialized. Where there is no immigration, there is no growth. Orthodox seminaries ARE full. Full of guys who will be working part time as priests when not at their dayjobs – the congregations outside of the GOA can’t support the wife, and the kids. The wife better work too.
Angry and incessent Roman Contra-distinction does not an indentity build. Schaeffer seems to have tried to “do dubs” as he angrily turned his back on (parts of) the Evangelical upbringing – and what an upbrining! – while hold holding constant to (and re-tooling, Greek style) his Evangelical distaste for Rome.
One is left to wonder if the years have not found Schaeffer disappointed – Orthodox growth has been sluggish, secularism and sex scandals have been problematic in Greek Church, collusion with the State and infiltration for the Russian Church, OCA financial scandals, Antiochian difficulties with schism and the failure to launch in many Eastern Orthodox national Churches now freed from the Communist Yoke might have left him disappointed and cynical.
Today he stands at the cusp of a lot of rhetoric about culuture wars and the like. Describing himself as “belonging to the Greek Orthodox tradition” Orthodoxy does not loom large on his website… A comparison of Schaeffer and Rod Dreher would be an interesting one.
I wish him well and thank him for his voice. During some formative seeking years, his anger and contradistinction helped me to find my own path. I wish him well ultimately finding his.