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by Aristotle Papanikolaou
The primary goal of the Orthodox Christian is to struggle toward theosis—deification. The word theosis
often conjures up images of a super hero like Thor or a Greek god like
Zeus.
When St. Athanasius proclaimed that “God became human so that
humans can become gods,” he was not envisioning super-human strength,
nor was he envisioning a life of moral perfection. To become like God is
to love as God loves, which means, as Jesus proclaimed, even the enemy
and the stranger. The struggle for theosis is one that entails a learning how
to love. It is often so very difficult to love even our parents,
siblings, friends—imagine now learning how to love the enemy and the
stranger.
This learning how to love ultimately entails seeing all human beings
as created in the image of God. This is not as easy as it seems. It’s
one thing to declare that all humans are created in the image of God;
it’s another thing to form oneself in such a way that such a belief is
evident in our thoughts, feelings, actions—our very being toward the
other person, especially the one who is different from us.
On the surface, then, it would seem that, of course, Christians are
against racism—we should never think someone is inferior because of
race. But theosis calls us to a deeper level. The struggle to
learn how to love is one that includes rooting out racism in our own
hearts and in the very structures that constitute the political,
cultural, and economic matrix within which we locate ourselves. The
first requires incessant self-reflection; the second requires action.
Racism today looks different that it did prior to the 1960s, when
there were actual visible signs that proclaimed that Black persons were
inferior to White persons, especially through segregation of bus seats,
drinking fountains, restaurants, sidewalks, hotels, etc. Those signs
are, for the most part, gone, but there are other, less visible signs
such as the disproportionate incarceration rate of Black and Latino
Americans—even when charged with the same crimes as White Americans—the
continued segregation of schools, the continued and widening gap between
White household incomes and the incomes of people of color, the decision of persons to opt for prison as a way of avoiding gang culture because there are no other options, or the need for high school kids in Chicago to train themselves to walk in the middle of the street in case of a drive-by shooting—one
could go on and on. These disparities, as well as others, such as
access to loans or the best public schools, evince clear signs of
privileging of White persons, notwithstanding the fact that lower- to
middle-class White persons have suffered economically over the past two
decades. It also points to the reality that although the visible signs
of racial segregation are not as evident, or that overtly racist actions
are not as socially acceptable, racism is still operative in the
complex social matrix in which we are embedded, and which undoubtedly
forms and even deforms our judgments and beliefs in ways that we are not
aware of. If that is true, then it requires incessant self-reflection
in our struggle to learn how to love or to identify how we may be
contributing to this structural inequality, even when we consciously
condemn racism. This type of self-reflection may give us courage to
act–to create structures that would facilitate for all people the lived
experience of irreducible uniqueness—of being created “in the image and
likeness of God.”
There has been much resistance to the slogan, “Black Lives Matter,”
even (sometimes especially) by Orthodox Christians. The rhetoric of
sweeping demonization—often against police offers—that issues from a few
persons identified with BLM does not help. In our struggle to learn
how to love—theosis—it is absolutely the case that “all lives
matter”; those associated with BLM do not deny that “all lives matter.”
However, BLM is attempting to bring attention to the fact that within
the current political and economic structures in the United States– all
lives, in fact, do not matter equally.
What our struggle for theosis most demands is a politics of
empathy. What can this look like? We can, for example, attempt to
imagine what it is like to live as a Black person in the United States
of America. For some Orthodox Christians in this country, this imagining
shouldn’t be difficult: Greek and Arab Christians living in the South
once found Klan crosses burning in their own yards because of their dark
skin. But black history, unlike Orthodox immigrant history, is in part
founded on the back of slaves. There is no erasing that tragedy from our
history, whose traumatic effects still endure. In imagining what it is
like to be in the body of a Black person in the USA, perhaps we can see
more clearly the structures in place that facilitate the inequality
among persons. Those Orthodox Christians who say that Blacks should just
“improve their culture” (yes—I’ve heard this), do not have a
sufficiently theological understanding of sin and its insidious and
lingering social effects. Is it really that easy, as an example, to will
a better life for those who find themselves judged unemployable for a
job or unworthy of a promotion because of their skin color–much as some
Orthodox Christians in a not so distant past?
Racism has gone underground in this country in the sense that it has
moved to the realm of the unconscious—with both personal impacts and
structural effects. As Orthodox Christians, the challenge of our
spiritual life is to incessantly self-reflect on what blocks our own
growth in love of our family, friends, stranger and enemy. If that
self-reflection is successful, then it will get us to see that there is,
in fact, a privileging of White persons in this country; it will get us
to see how we may—even unintentionally—be contributing to this
privileging; and it will empower us ultimately to non-demonizing action
that attempts to transform the structural matrix that facilitates
treating all persons as being made in God’s image. That action may take
many forms—prophetically calling attention to injustice, educating
parishioners, mobilizing a parish, political involvement, participating
in and facilitating racism training, to name simply a few. We must act
to excise structural injustice in order to make America—in the immortal
words of Martin Luther King Jr.—“to be true to what it said on paper,”
to realize the ideals symbolized by the American Flag, in every crevice
of American society, including our individual hearts and minds. King’s
pursuit of justice for all, in the end, is grounded in the call to
holiness, to become godlike, to love as God loves, which means to
facilitate the lived experience of irreducible uniqueness—of being
created in God’s image.
Aristotle Papanikolaou is the Archbishop Demetrios Chair in
Orthodox Theology and Culture and the Co-Director of the Orthodox
Christian Studies Center of Fordham University.
Public Orthodoxy seeks to promote conversation by providing a
forum for diverse perspectives on contemporary issues related to
Orthodox Christianity. The positions expressed in this essay are solely
the author’s and do not necessarily represent the views of the editors
or the Orthodox Christian Studies Center.
