Today: a quick offshoot of the boring church conversation we started last month. There are typically two paths offered by most churches to help people figure out if they are doing the spiritual life “right”.

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On the one hand you have: orthodoxy. This is a very good word that can also be quite loaded, depending on what circles you are circling in. Orthodoxy is a term that feels inviolable: if I’m not orthodox then I’m a heretic, right? And there’s truth there, historically, and in the literal definitions of the terms.

For our purposes today, let’s focus on the second part of the word, the doxy. Belief. There is a heavily western elevation of Orthodoxy as the way. Again, I am not referring to the traditions and doctrines of Christian orthodoxy, but more to the idea that what matters most is what we believe. 

To paraphrase Jesus, it’s the idea that, yeah, we love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, but mostly just with our minds. The mind is the most important part. The heart is deceitful, the soul is hard to define, so let’s get our minds right. We think, therefore we are. 

As a result, terms and ideas get labeled as orthodox and then one gets punished for daring to question it. And this is how you end up with: Conformity.

(PS. This is where fundamentalism lands, along with a variety of other camps. To use our quadrant the bottom half tends to be all about Doxy/Belief).

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On the other hand, you have orthopraxy. Praxis=action, or practice. Beliefs are important, but what we actually do is what matters. Impact the world, do stuff, make things happen. Matthew 25 kind of stuff. 

Orthopraxy can become just as judgy and mean as Orthodoxy. It can become a soft form of cancel culture: “Oh, you don’t care about this issue, you didn’t go to the protest, you aren’t serving in this way, you don’t like this kind of worship? You are obviously a sellout/hypocrite/poser/etc.” 

It should be very clear, I hope, that I am not attempting to negate doxy or praxy…we need both! But, they have both contributed to the stifling conformity in the church. 

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And so I would like to help introduce a larger audience to an idea that I came across in Kevin VanHoozer’s fantastic work: The Drama of Doctrine. He coined the term: Orthokrisis. Right judgment or discernment.

We need to be careful about our beliefs and grounded in our actions, but we also need to be willing to name our filters. Beliefs and Actions are not developed in a vacuum. A lot of what we consider to be orthodoxy or othopraxy can be deeply conditioned by our culture, our political climate, our news/social media feeds, etc. 

In a future post I will attempt to define a better filter for our cultural moment, but for now, I want to leave you with the challenge of thinking through your own filters given this introduction to Orthokrisis.

How do you apply your beliefs and actions to your moment, context, neighborhood, family, job, and places of play?

My hope and prayer is that Orthokrisis helps expand our imaginations for what Orthodoxy and Orthopraxy might look like in our local contexts.