Thanks for the links. I think I have already visited some of the sites at one time or another. But I will take a further look.
It seems the two biggest reasons many evangelicals are embracing orthodoxy (or Catholicism, which is the church I was raised in) are the endless divisions (I have seen five) and the lack of discipline and respect for history in biblical hermeneutics, or rather a lack of any sense of hermeneutics. I understand the diagnosis. I am apalled at some of the excesses in American evangelicalism. But after a couple of years of lay study, I am not convinced that the cure is necessarily Orthodoxy, at least not exclusively.
Thomas Oden's "paleo-Orthodoxy" seems to hold more promise to me. It recognizes the need to consult the rest of church history across all time and cultures, being based in the rule of St. Vincent. Yet it does not find a need to consider all of Western church history worthless, instead finding that perhaps the core of what the early fathers taught has somehow been reaffirmed by the Holy Spirit in a number of traditions in spite of the "accidents of history" that have divided the church through the ages. I just don't believe God has left Western civilization without a valid Christian witness since 1054 or since the Reformation. In spite of all the bad apples, there seems to be genuine fruit. And I don't believe the Eastern church has been free of its own cultural and political influences or is necessarily the perfect representation of Christ on earth. (The tendency of many Orthodox converts to trash Augustine seems to be at odds with the collegial approach Orthodoxy claims. Does not Paul use reason and argue for a "forensic" view of justification? Can there not be truth in both the Eastern and Western ways of explaining salvation?)
Can we not say that those who affirm with a genuine faith the ecumenical creeds (Apostles, Nicene, Athanasian at least) are truly Christian and begin from there? In that sense, we would have a long way to go to re-establish unity, but at least we would have a starting point.
