Window Quarterly Vol. I, No. 4, 1990 Copyright 1990 [Permission is granted to use, print, reproduce this article provided the following acknowledgment is given: From Window Quarterly 1, 4 (1990); ACRAG c. 1990. *** Toward a Diaspora Theology by Vigen Guroian In his helpful and provocative book All the Fullness of God the Orthodox theologian Fr. Thomas Hopko has argued that diaspora is "a notoriously unchristian term which betrays in its very utterance how far we are in practice from what, by God's grace, we still somehow retain in theory." In so characterizing the use of diaspora by Christians, Hopko is reminding us of Christ's evangelical commission to the Church to "go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Matt. 28:19-20 RSV). For Hopko the only acceptable theological use of the term diaspora is to have it refer to the salvific mission of the Church in its temporal pilgrimage as a sign of the promised Kingdom of God. But as he so rightly points out, this is not how Russian, Greek and Ukrainian Orthodox Christians or Armenians have used it. I agree with Fr. Hopko that diaspora has become a dangerous, even heterodox, term in the hands of Orthodox Christians, who yet carry the memory of forced dispersions from historical national homelands. Often in these contexts the term diaspora has legitimated a wholly unbiblical, even antibiblical, theology of survival. Repeatedly diaspora is employed by Armenians in such a way as to set forth a deceiving contrast between a so-called normal Armenian religious existence in a pre-Armenocide Turkey, or in present day Soviet Armenia or in the Middle East with an entirely abnormal and peripheral religious life of Armenians in America. The deception in such thinking is that there simply is no longer an Armenian religious culture which is normal in the traditional sense; nor is it possible or desirable to rebuild in this pluralistic secular society a religious ethnic community which approximates the Armenian Christian order of the Ottoman millet. And yet how often does one hear the argument that if only Armenians retain the use of the Armenian language in the liturgy, teach Armenian to their youth, perpetuate idealized recitations on St. Vartanantz Day about a once glorious Hayastan, keep eating the right food, dance the right dances, they can preserve or recreate such an order right in the midst of that abnormal odar society in which Armenian-Americans spend virtually all their waking and sleeping hours, of which the vast majority are citizens, in which they work, play, go to school, socialize and upon which they rely for necessary information, goods, and services. So much of the talk of survival heard in Armenian religious and secular circles is, in fact, the reification of this self-delusion for which diaspora serves as a shorthand term. I say this without intending to belittle a rich cultural and religious heritage to which even a third generation Armenian-American such as myself owes so much of his identity and strength, sense of belonging and personal worth. Nevertheless, a heritage such as this is a dead matter unless it projects those whom it claims into a vital human reality. Fr. John Meyendorff in this book Catholicity and the Church, has pointed out that diaspora is a concept belonging to the Old Testament and rooted in Jewish faith. "In the Old Testament," writes Meyendorff, "God acted in history through the mediation of a 'chosen people,' Israel, to whom he had granted the 'promised' land of Canaan, where Solomon built a temple and where the Messiah was to establish His reign. The Chosen People were called to cultivate this land and possess it, and any exile from it was seen as cursed by divine wrath." To this day the notion of a diaspora therefore has a vital theological significance for Jews for whom one particular place is identified with the divine call. For Christians this cannot be so. They have taken their name from the very Messiah who revealed in his life, death and resurrection that the "promised land," the new Jerusalem, is no longer to be identified with any single time or place but is present and coming into existence whenever and wherever two or three gather in His name. This is the tremendous import of Christ's words to the Samaritan woman at the well as reported by St. John in his gospel. "Woman, believe me," said Jesus, "the hour is coming when neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father. But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth (John 4:21-24). The analogy sometimes drawn between the Armenian diaspora and the Jewish diaspora, therefore, is imperfect at best and at worst introduces a theological heresy. Armenia might have been one special place in which Christ established His Church. But that Church's identity ultimately cannot be defined by nor its mission limited to the historic location of the Church's origination or even the historic culture which it Christianized and nurtured. Neither can the new life in Christ which the Armenian Church promises and bestows through baptism and sustains in eucharistic worship be meant solely for that people whose name it took. For no church is the universal catholic apostolic Church if it is so limited and if its energies are restricted to ethnic or national aspirations. In this vein, I am reminded of two bits of dialogue in William Saroyan's play Armenians. Early in the play, the priest Fr. Kasparian says to his Armenian Protestant counterpart "[T]he true church . . .is Armenia itself." Later a character who carries the name of the historic Armenian region of Van exclaims: "The water of Van is water. This [Fresno's water] is also; but it is not the water of Van. It does not give life to the soul, it gives life only to the body." These two characters express a religio-nationalism common among Armenians. This religio-nationalism owes much obviously to Christianity. In the clear light of the gospel story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman, however, Fr. Kasparian's religion errs in the same way that the Samaritan woman erred in believing Jesus a prophet of that cultic religion which identified God and his true worship with a particular place - for Samaritans, Mt. Gerizim, for the Jews, Mt. Sion or Jerusalem, for those like Fr. Kasparian, Mt. Ararat or Etchmiadzin. Van's statement certainly expresses a pathos familiar to anyone brought up Armenian. In that sense it is an accurate portrayal of Armenian consciousness. I cannot help thinking, however, that Saroyan sought to embody in the character Van that quintessential Armenian paganism which he once said sacralizes Armenian family, community and nationhood through the use of Christian symbols. Van invokes these symbols quite sincerely. He does not consciously or cynically manipulate such symbols. Of course, there are Armenians who, smitten with survivalism, will use any strategy to save the Hye Tad. Van, however, is simply devoted to the religio-ethnic cult of Armenianism. He like the Samaritan woman mistakes a local source of refreshment or nourishment with that which truly gives life to the soul. The Samaritan woman would attribute such power to the water drawn from that well called Jacob's well. Van thinks it is the water of Lake Van. But Jesus says that He Himself is the true life-giving water. "Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again, but whoever drinks of the water I shall give him will never thirst; the water that I shall give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life" (John 4:13-14). The religion of the ethnic cult may go on even within the body of the Church, but Christ has and is presently bringing this to an end. Van is the character who at the conclusion of Armenians exclaims, "Long live the Armenian spirit." Yet, significantly, this is an antiphonal to the exclamation, "Long live the human race," offered by the character named Bitlis. Van is not a one dimensional character. Saroyan endows him with a capacity to experience the tension between universalism and particularism in human life. He perhaps has even grasped, if only fleetingly, the truth that a national church is not church at all if it fails to embody also the Universal Church. Near the close of Armenians , Saroyan leads the reader to the brink of this theological truth. Bitlis admits that in his youth he went to the school of the Protestant missionaries in order to get "a little education." Fr. Kasparian responds: "It is desirable to acquire knowledge. The missionaries did not convert anybody to Christianity, they only took some of the Christians away from the national church and put them into their church." Van interjects with the remark: "The international church, perhaps? Isn't it the aspiration of civilized people to become citizens of the world rather than merely citizens of one country? I must say I am strongly tempted, now, to such a citizenship. Now that it does appear our long day is coming to a close." Saroyan is not terribly interested in doing theology, and probably that is just as well. Nevertheless, he is a humanist who articulates the tension between the human good of cultural particularity and that of universalism. Saroyan translated theologically might say: "There is no such thing as an accultural and locationless church and likewise there is not such a thing in history as a Christianity which is universally held by all Christians. There is, however, one Universal Church, variously located, transforming in and through its eucharistic life not some abstract human essence but the many particular historical cultural expressions of that nature into the Body of Christ. Of course, Van might not be right that the Protestant missionaries quite literally represent the "international," or the Universal Church. We may be faced here with Saroyan's impression, having been brought up as a Protestant, that Protestant Christianity has done better at presenting the universal message of the gospel, even if at the significant cost of having abandoned the human good associated with the cultural particularity of the Armenian Church. But Van's comments and the story of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well still recommend some crucial insights for an Armenian theology in the American diaspora. For example, might we not conclude from what I have just reviewed in Scripture and Saroyan that if the Armenian Church communities dispersed here in North America continue to think of themselves as primarily diaspora the Armenian Church will become increasingly incapable of behaving as church and be increasingly irrelevant for people seeking biblical religious meaning for their lives. Fr. John Meyendorff has said that "this does not imply at all, as many would think, that Orthodox immigrants" in other lands other than that of their origin abandon their original cultural identity or forget their ties with the motherland. St. Paul himself "boast[ed] of being the seed of Abraham (II Cor. 2:22), a faithful Jew, willing to die for his people (Rom. 9:3). "And yet," continues Meyendorff, "it is Paul who [also] wrote and preached in Greek to the Greeks, and became the one, of all the apostles, to be the 'apostle to the Gentiles.'" Even if every Armenian Christian cannot be expected to behave as St. Paul, the Church must, lest it lose all identity as the body and mission of Christ in the world. Presently, the survivalist mentality of both the Diocese and the Prelacy has subordinated the catholic memory and evangelical mission of the Church to other cultural or nationalistic purposes as well as intra-and-extra ecclesiastical power machinations. In so doing they have encouraged especially those who, finding it difficult to consciously adopt the ways of others in order to be of service to them, circle the wagons of the ethnic train to protect themselves from the aliens in whose midst they have come. Nor have the Diocese or the Prelacy found a way to reach the increasing others who slip the wagon circle at night and, never looking back, endeavor to become full members of American society at the cost of all Armenian and Apostolic Orthodox identity. As long as the Armenian Church in America conforms itself to the image of a church in diaspora, there can be no hope of mediating these two extreme yet regular behaviors. As Meyendorff has said of churches, such as the Armenian Church, which identify so totally with ethnic diasporas, "the problem is not that [the church] helps immigrants to preserve their human and religious identity, but rather that the church expects to be limited by the immigrants' particular interests and goals, which in turn are defined and supported by foreign ecclesiastical or political interests." Are Etchmiadzin and Antelias foreign? In some real sense they are, unless we believe the extraordinary myth that there is a singular Armenian nation dispersed throughout the world, and that we here in America belong in a more concrete way to that mystical nation than to the society in which we live out our daily lives and in which most of us expect our children and grandchildren and great grandchildren to live out their lives. Likewise, it is no more helpful to say that the Armenian Church in America is a national church than it is to say that it is a church in diaspora. Bishop Aram Keshishian of Lebanon has argued in his book The Witness of the Armenian Church in a Diaspora that a theology of the diaspora is necessarily a theology of survival. He then goes on to define this survival as "a continuous attempt to rediscover and reinterpret the ethos of the Nation." Perhaps such a statement makes sense in certain Middle Eastern contexts with which Bishop Keshishian is far more familiar than I. To be fair, he does go on to say that such "survival is not religious ethnocentrism, a monological existence. It is basically an inter-dependent dialogical co-existence." But the overall significance of such a theology of survival, however carefully nuanced, is that it substitutes a projective myth of national restoration for the hope in the in-breaking of God's eschatological Kingdom, founded in the person of Jesus Christ, expressed and experienced through the Church's liturgical life and in charitable deeds toward the neighbor. In such a theology the former myth not the latter hope is the subject and goal of the witness of the Church. Even in America, the Armenian Church has been making this myth its goal. It has devoted the larger portion of its energies to uniting the Nation. But what would it take for the Church to accomplish this end. Armenian-Americans are not living in the Ottoman millet, and the last remnants of an integrated Armenian Christendom have long since vanished. The Armenian communities of the diaspora have gone the secular ways of the societies in which they are located. The nation will not be united on Christian premises. The Church inevitably discovers that in order to keep the mystical nation alive it must subordinate its Christian witness to cultural activities and political agendas far removed from the praxis of prayer and worship by which it is defined as church. Who is transforming whom? This matter of the secularization of the Church's own self- interpretation can be illustrated through a brief consideration of how St. Vartanantz day functions presently. Professor Kachig Toloyan of Wesleyan University has argued persuasively in several articles on Armenian terrorism how utterly secularized the Vartanantz story has become and that the Church is fundamentally to blame for this, thus even unintentionally having provided Armenian terrorists with a narrative justification for what they do. Over the past several years we have witnessed hierarchs of the Church liken the conflict over Karabagh with the Vartanantz War. Yet that which has been happening in Soviet Armenia recently has to do almost exclusively with nationalism. Even the innocent lives lost to Azerbaijani atrocities cannot easily be counted as Christian martyrdoms as the deaths of Vartan and his followers are depicted in the hagiographic accounts. In contemporary Armenian religious life this hagiography has gradually been stripped of its christological bearings and removed from its location within the larger biblical narrative of salvation. It is interpreted as an exemplary narrative of virtuous action in defense of national identity. This has happened across diocesan and jurisdictional lines. The story of Vartan has been transformed into a model for a post-Armenocide national struggle for survival in the diaspora. In that struggle the ethnic goals of preservation of culture and language or nationhood have replaced the Christian eschatology. The national life which a particular geographical location might provide Armenians has been valued above the life that Armenians can bring to others as bearers of the catholic apostolic faith. Vartan transformed into a hero of survival and nationhood, whether understood culturally or politically, has even eclipsed St. Gregory the Illuminator in the consciousness of Armenians. This I venture to say has primarily to do with the fact that St. Gregory's story of conversion and mission is not terribly useful to a religion of ethnic survival. Ironically, St. Gregory's story and those narratives of our other mission and ecumenically minded saints are far more instructive in how Armenians might behave as church in this North American location than the Vartan narrative. These hagiographic narratives have the power to instruct and inspire Armenian Christians toward a renewed understanding of themselves as apostolic witnesses in a society whose suffocating secularism leaves so many people, Armenians and non-Armenians alike, gasping for a faith greater than the measure of man or nation. How shall I put it? As a church we are suffering from such distortions of our tradition that our first act of theological renewal may well require that we seek from other Christians to whom we tell our story a critique of it, so that we can once again tell it correctly. And that critique most often need not and probably will not come as a univocal address to our circumstances but will be something that we ourselves must conscientiously listen for in the midst of an ongoing dialogue the concerns of which cross church or denominational boundaries. For this reason, I am persuaded that the Armenian Church's involvement in the World Council of Churches and the National Council of Churches, in spite of all the theological and ecclesiological booby-traps along the way, has been a good which Armenian Christians have not the critical distance from their own concerns to yet measure. In a somewhat different though related way, the positive side of the so-called mixed marriages increasingly populating our parishes is that those strangers whom we accept into our midst will by their involvement, indeed by their very presence in the Church, require us to think hard about how the Church can be instructing persons who are not Armenian in the Christian life. This may well be where the rebirth of our sense of the Church as mission will begin. In concluding, is there then any sense in which we might want to retain the use of the word diaspora when reflecting upon the future of the Armenian Church in America? I would recommend a sociological meaning which can be put to critical and constructive use toward the renewal of Armenian theology and church life. Thus understood, diaspora describes an historical dispersion of a people and its institutional forms from an indigenous homeland. Armenians came to America not only as a church, but as an immigrant community. And over several generations and waves of immigration they have continued to think of themselves and behave as a displaced or even exiled religious ethnic community. The term diaspora correctly accounts for this experience and invites thoughtful reflection upon the particular and universal dimensions of it. This diaspora is both permanent and transitional. It is permanent because never will all Armenians return from whence their ancestors fled or were expelled. It is transitional because it is a phase in an inexorable process of acculturation and ecclesiastical adjustment by which the Armenian Church increasingly becomes a mission to America and is no longer identified even primarily with an historic culture to which it once gave a Christian character. As a permanent state the diaspora challenges the Armenian Church to incorporate into its divine remembrance and doxo-logical prayer some accurate valuation of a past to which there is no return but from which those who worship and pray as that church might seek wisdom and guidance in living a Christian life. As a transitional phase the diaspora challenges the Armenian Church to turn its energies away from a concern for preservation of old religious forms and practices which have gotten hopelessly confused with secular national aspirations and ethnic folk customs toward the nurture of new forms of ecclesiastical life which are demonstrably vivified by biblical faith and the greater Orthodox Christian tradition from which the Armenian Church long ago derived the marrow of its spiritual life. At the end of an oral history conversation I had some years ago with a survivor of the Genocide, a woman whom as a child saw some seventy of her relations die on the march from Marash to the Syrian desert, I asked: "How in view of all you have suffered could you still believe in God?" At first she demurred saying that she was not a priest or a theologian. But I pressed her. Surely she had thought about this matter. "Yes," she said finally. Some of the men and women of her generation who settled in Richmond had succumb to bitterness and resentment, even anger at God. They would accuse God: "Why did God do this to us?" or "Why did he permit it to happen?" She, however, had not grown bitter. There were, of course, moments of doubt and questioning even so many years after. But she would remember Jesus on the cross. "This," she said, "is what gives me hope and sustains me. And I believe in the resurrection and that we will live even after this death on earth.... Maybe God means for us, I mean the Armenians, to be an example to the world." Here is the beginning of a diaspora theology, a theology not of survival but of renewed witness to the crucified and risen Lord. For we can be like "the grain of mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in the shade." (Mark 10:31-32). *** =================================================== _ _ _ _ _ |_| ___ _| | ___ _ _ _ | | | | | | _ / _ \ / _ | / _ \ | | | | | | | |_| |_| || |_ | | | || |_| || |_| || |_| |_| | \_________/\___||_| |_| \___/ \___/ \_________/ View Of The Armenian Church ===================================================