Scot McKnight: Evangelicals Turning to Eastern Orthodoxy

It can shock the socks off some ordinary evangelicals when they hear that one of their children or someone they know well decides to jump ship to become Eastern Orthodox. (The same goes for evangelicals who turn to Roman Catholicism, and I have written about this in Finding Faith, Losing Faith, along with Hauna Ondrey.) But it happens — sometimes good Biola kids go Eastern and good Wheaton kids go Catholic. The bigger fact, of course, is that far more Easterns and Catholics become evangelicals than the reverse (but that’s another story, and that’s in Finding Faith, Losing Faith too).

What happens when someone turns Eastern Orthodox? In Turning to Tradition: Converts and the Making of an American Orthodox Church, D. Oliver Herbel proposes what I think is both a convincing theory but one that could be sharpened. In his book, Herbel examines four paradigmatic converts to Eastern Orthodoxy, only one name will be known to many readers of this blog. The four are St. Alexis Toth, Fr. Raphael Morgan — both of whose stories take us back a century or more — and then Fr. Moses Berry, in Missouri, and the recently deceased Peter Gillquist. Keep reading