Orthodoxical

Hello Internet!

My name is Elias Dummer and I’m a worship leader, musician and songwriter who talks too much – and so I’ve been encouraged to write. While it’s possibly because I think I have a lot of ideas, it seems more likely that I am surrounded by introverts and as writing more requires me to talk out loud less, it is better for everyone. So here I am, taking one for the team.

While I have a list of upcoming article ideas as long as my arm, and a journal full of inspiration, for the time being I’ll simply attempt to explain why I chose this as a moniker.

But first, here’s some relevant backstory: I grew up in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada – and have always had a passion for seeing the Church in light of the “big picture”. For most of my childhood I attended two different Baptist (CBOQ) Churches, which merged together in my teens and which had , for lack of a better way of putting it, a youth group loosely connected to the “charismatic renewal movement” of the 90’s. I worked as an intern with my Youth Pastor and with IVCF , helping to run Christian lunch-time groups at public high schools around the city. After marrying my wife, and in a different (and slightly more traditional) Evangelical denomination, I served as an Elder (at too young an age, frankly) then joined the staff leadership team at another church. In the years that followed our family was involved in a CBOQ church plant and then found ourselves as part of a very rapidly growing Anabaptist church in our town. Over all those years I worked very closely with a Christian camp, as well as a Christian college that (at the very least) finds its roots in Reformed circles and helped to start an interdenominational missional student event called CrossCulture at which 3/4 of The City Harmonic led worship and which fell under the umbrella of a citywide missional movement in Hamilton known as TrueCity. Since 2009 I’ve been traveling the world with my band The City Harmonic and have worshipped alongside churches, pastors and denominations of just about every stripe.

This isn’t meant to be boastful in any way. The point is that I have personally seen that God can do incredible things in ALL of those places, and amazing things happen when churches that disagree on some things (even important secondary things) know to keep their common ground in view. And I’m not encouraging some kind of do-good pragmatism either! Far more importantly, I think that we might need to take a good look at how we understand what makes a “Christian” and “not a Christian” in classically Christian terms and filter ALL theological discussion (including those on Youtube and blogs) by a genuinely Christian (in the broad, historical sense) lens. Before I dive into that a bit more, let’s quickly look at the words themselves…

or·tho·dox·i·cal

This blog

Orthodoxy + Paradoxical

 A word which is probably more clever sounding than it is actually clever.

or·tho·dox·y

From Greek orthos (“right”, “true”, “straight”) + doxa (“opinion” or “belief”, related to dokein, “to think”),

adherence to accepted norms, more specifically to creeds, especially in religion.

in the Christian sense, “conforming to Christian faith as represented in the creeds of the early Church”

par·a·dox·i·cal

(parəˈdäksikəl)

seemingly absurd or self-contradictory.

“Paradox is truth standing on her head to attract attention.” —G. K. Chesterton

As a word, orthodoxy is considered weighty, rigid or judgmental, and rightly so – if only because of the abuses carried out while throwing it around. While originally directed at artists of course, in this context I find a particular C.S. Lewis Quote to be especially poignant for teachers and pastors:

“Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from the love of the thing he tells, to the love of the telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him”

– C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

It seems as though orthodoxy is often used as a way of exerting power, at least in the public square, rather than as a common and comforting boundary in our common pursuit of God. This seems particularly true in the Evangelical Church (which I call home) where with our many schisms it seems more necessary than ever to agree on a universal guideline — and face the issues of the day with our common ground in mind — before we become so embroiled in infighting that the soapbox we once could stand in the square on has been lost in the melee and given us all splinters. In fact, this is why my band wrote a song called “Manifesto”, a song based on the Nicene and Apostle’s creeds, and of course, the Lord’s prayer — so that as we sing together we might focus on our common ground in Christ, rather than secondary distinctions.

There’s some irony in “orthodoxy” being used in a disrespectful manner too, which brings me to my point. Orthodoxy is, in the Christian sense, a logical paradox in and of itself. Besides the fact that the creeds are chock full of paradox (one being both in nature fully man and fully God, 3-in-1, virgin birth, etc), logically speaking, Christian orthodoxy is the claim of a finite being to have infinite knowledge – and this is what makes it such a beautiful thing. In looking over the creeds, we also quickly see that classical Christian orthodoxy is, unfortunately for nerdy recovering-rationalist types like myself, a shorter and less complete “system of thought” than we might like. It’s as if God knew what we were capable of and made it so that we couldn’t be bullies even if we wanted to – the truth is often simpler, more beautiful, and more perplexing than our best reasonings ever could be. It’s just an issue of perspective.

I believe that since Christians supposedly aim to know, be known by, and live ever-increasingly in “the Way” of the Man-God whose image we bear, if sincere, this journey towards understanding God will only lead us to greater humility and an increased awareness of our own limitations. Because of the built-in paradoxes at the core of the Christian faith orthodoxy is a daily exercise in humility — a constant reminder that if we call ourselves Christians there are truths that we believe, claims that we stake, which we cannot (and will not in this lifetime) fully understand. More like the walls of a shared sandbox than the cages of a jail cell.

So in light of this, my hope for this website is that it serves as both an encouragement and a challenge: to give our best efforts at knowing God, while being willing to question our assumptions about the world and our faith in light of what it means to be Christian, and putting this before the many other categories we may choose to interject along the way.

This grand pursuit of God, this chasing as those looking through a glass darkly, is exactly why we are. The finite pursuing the infinite because he loved us so much that he defied the rules so that we may just know Him after all. In this “orthodoxical” reality we are constantly reminded of our limited scope. In the right light orthodoxy requires of us grace and humility, love and an open mind to understand and accept mystery, holding in one hand the few things that we know to be true, with the other hand open in grace and love.

If we can somehow maintain a posture like this, they may just know us by our love instead of our shabby soap-box after all.

Grace and Peace.
Elias