Book Review
Looking Back
Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church
by D. Oliver Herbel
Oxford University Press, 2013
(256 pages, $27.95, hardcover)
reviewed by Tim Grass
It was hearing in 1997 about the conversion to Orthodoxy of a couple of thousand Evangelicals from the Campus Crusade stable that first motivated me to extend my interest in Eastern Orthodoxy beyond the patristic era, which I was teaching at college for the first time, and the Communist era, which spoke to us as Evangelicals of both courageous witness to Christ and compromise with hostile governments.
Why were these Evangelicals converting? How did they regard their former Evangelical allegiance? I soon concluded that this threw up a range of issues of wider significance for Evangelicalism on both sides of the Atlantic. Ever since that point, I have been involved in dialogue with the Orthodox. But whilst there has been plenty of material narrating such conversions, and plenty of published reports on dialogue between the two traditions, for me this book broke fresh ground.
Deceptively easy to read (the book is based on the author's doctoral dissertation, and not all such productions are so readable), Turning to Tradition looks at four American converts to Orthodoxy who influenced numbers to follow them. Their stories, taken together, illustrate Herbel's paradigm of American conversion to Orthodoxy as an application of the dominant religious "anti-traditional tradition": "non-Orthodox Christians are using the very American context of religious choosing and religious novelty-creation to make what might seem a very un-American choice in favor of an unbroken tradition, which they find in Orthodox Christianity, in a very American way" (3). I was intrigued, if not yet convinced, by his proposal that there is an intermediate class of conversions between conversion to Christ and conversion from one denomination to another, what Herbel calls conversion to tradition.
Four Main Men
An introduction outlines Orthodox thinking about Tradition and ecclesiology as background for understanding the contemporary American Orthodox landscape with its variety of lower-case traditions.
The heart of the book is devoted to four men: Alexis Toth (1853–1909, since canonized) came from Slovakia and had been an Eastern-rite Catholic priest; Raphael Morgan (c.1869–1916) was from Jamaica and served as a Protestant Episcopal cleric in the United States; Moses Berry (b.1951) journeyed to Orthodoxy via a typically American "new religious movement"; and Peter Gillquist (1938–2012) reached canonical Orthodoxy via the Evangelical Orthodox Church, which he co-founded. After converting to Orthodoxy in the United States, Toth travelled widely in his homeland, making several thousand converts from his former jurisdiction; Morgan sought to win African-Americans; Berry founded the Brotherhood of St. Moses the Black; and Gillquist became director of misssions for the Antiochian Orthodox archdiocese.
Clear continuities are evident between the pre- and post-conversion ministries of all four men. A separate chapter explores the extent to which Gillquist and his followers had to "deconvert" from their anti-traditionalism, an issue that highlights the challenges facing former Evangelicals seeking to develop an Orthodox mindset. The full notes and bibliography (which between them take up no less than a third of the book) will offer many leads for those wishing to investigate further the reasons why Evangelicals "go up the candle," joining liturgical traditions.
Scholarship & Realism
As a Brit, reading this book about the North American scene was like looking through a window into the next room. What I particularly appreciated about the author's careful scholarship was the demonstration that conversion to Orthodoxy did not mean an end to all the troubles of these men—far from it. Such realism contrasts with some of the convert testimonies one finds in print (including, it must be said, some from the Evangelical Orthodox Church stable), and doubtless bears out the biblical principle that "through much tribulation we must enter the kingdom of God" (Acts 14:22).
Tim Grass , FRHistS, is a historian and a Senior Research Fellow at Spurgeon's College, London. He and his wife live on the Isle of Man. He is the author of F. F. Bruce: A Life (Eerdmans, 2011) and The Lord's Watchman: A Life of Edward Irving (Pickwick, 2012).
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