Paths & Polemics
The Truth: What Every Roman Catholic Should Know About the Orthodox Church
by Clark Carlton
Salisbury, Massachusetts: Regina Orthodox Press, 1999
(270 pages; $22.95, paper)
Two Paths: Papal Monarchy—Collegial Tradition. Rome’s Claims
of Papal Supremacy in the Light of the Orthodox Church
by Michael Whelton
Salisbury, Massachusetts: Regina Orthodox Press, 1998
(215 pages; $22.95, paper)
Upon This Rock: St. Peter and the Primacy of Rome in Scripture and the
Early Church
by Stephen K. Ray
San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1999
(331 pages; $16.95, paper)
by William J. Tighe
Ours is an age when many Protestant Christians are rediscovering the ancient Church, especially as it is expressed by Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Often, the rediscovery leads to conversion. At times, too, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians have, so to speak, traded places. The reasons for conversion are many: purity of liturgical expression; the recovery of a genuinely sacramental sense; historically reliable theological teachings; depth of spirituality; and historical authenticity are some of the chief reasons given. This review essay presents the work of three such converts and their attempts to deal with the conflicting jurisdictional and doctrinal claims between Rome and the East.
These three books are works of polemic; all three authors are zealous converts from one robust form of Christianity to another. Clark Carlton, originally a Southern Baptist seminary student, became a member of the Orthodox Church in 1988. The present volume is third in a projected series of four books on Orthodoxy from Regina Orthodox Press, Frank Schaeffer’s publishing company: The Faith: Understanding Orthodox Christianity: An Orthodox Catechism (1997); The Way: What Every Protestant Should Know About the Orthodox Church (1997); and The Life: The Orthodox Doctrine of Salvation (forthcoming).
Michael Whelton, an English-born Canadian Roman Catholic, joined the Orthodox Church in 1995. Two Paths is mostly an attempted debunking of what have usually been termed the “papal claims.” Whelton surveys church history in this light between St. Peter’s Confession at Caesarea Philippi and the aftermath of the First Vatican Council. The first and last chapters of the book reveal how the “liturgical revolution” in the Latin rite of the Roman Catholic Church both acted as the catalyst initiating his journey to Orthodoxy (but not the reason for his conversion, as he states) and remains to his thinking symptomatic of that church’s abandonment of its tradition for “relevance.”
Stephen K. Ray, an evangelical Christian of Baptist background and principles, became a Catholic in 1994. He described his upbringing and conversion in an earlier book from Ignatius Press, Crossing the Tiber: Evangelical Protestants Discover the Historical Church (1997).
A Different Church
Perhaps the best summary statement of Clark Carlton’s stance as an Orthodox Christian vis-à-vis Roman Catholicism occurs as a short paragraph toward the end of this book’s Epilogue (“A Note for Evangelicals Considering Rome”). “Evangelicals searching for the catholic tradition,” he writes, “must understand that Orthodoxy is not simply an alternative ecclesiastical structure to the Roman Catholic Church. The Orthodox Church presents a fundamentally different approach to theology, because She possesses a fundamentally different experience of Christ and life in Him. To put it bluntly, she knows a different Christ from that of the Roman Catholic Church.” This is the note sounded throughout the book—that in every respect the differences in doctrine and practice between the two churches are to be seen as mutually exclusive and incompatible. He would therefore have little sympathy for the efforts of those who attempt to view some of these divergences as complementary differences of emphasis (such as those briefly adumbrated by Leon Podles in “All That Separates Must Converge” in the Summer 1995 issue of Touchstone).
The introduction, “Is Reunion Imminent?”, begins by contrasting the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomeos’s blunt speech at Georgetown University on October 21, 1997, with its allusion to “the continually increasing divergence” and “ontological difference” between the two churches, with Fr. Richard John Neuhaus’s description of that speech as “virulently polemical.” Carlton further contrasts what he sees as the changelessness of Orthodox ecclesiology with the malleability of contemporary Roman Catholic theology. For the Orthodox, there can be no “development of doctrine” and hence no compromises or “mutual concessions” on the papacy or anything else. Carlton characterizes the Orthodox participants in ecumenical dialogues as not having been, for the most part, representatives, either “juridically” or “morally,” of Orthodox church consciousness.
William J. Tighe was Professor of History at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pennsylvania, until his retirement in 2024. He is a member of St. Josaphat Ukrainian Catholic Church in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.He is a senior editor for Touchstone.
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