Using Therapeutic Sin-Talk in a (Post)Modern Environment: a Theologically Acceptable Choice or a Contemporary Eastern Orthodox Problem?

Abstract

A glimpse at Christian Orthodox writings published over the last twenty years illustrates that numerous Eastern Orthodox scholars acknowledge that, to a large extent, our present era is postmodern. Given that, one would expect that in its contact with broader society, the Orthodox Church would communicate in a contemporary language compatible with the basic tenets of postmodernism that would allow it to effectively carry out its mission in today’s allegedly postmodern age. Yet this is hardly the case. Greatly motivated by the neopatristic movement and its call to return to the Church Fathers and renew Eastern Orthodoxy by grounding it on patristic sources, the Orthodox Church frequently uses pre-modern patristic language in the present day. That is particularly true for the therapeutic language various Orthodox clerics and hierarchs use to describe human sin. For them, just like for many prominent late antique patristic authors, sin is a sickness of the soul, and the Orthodox Church is the only institution capable of adequately curing this sickness. But is such a pre-modern patristic therapeutic sin-talk compatible with postmodernism and, hence, able to effectively communicate with the present era, which many Orthodox scholars consider postmodern? In this paper, I answer this question negatively, arguing that the Eastern Orthodox therapeutic language of human sin has difficulties effectively communicating with postmodernism because it clashes with pluralism, a fundamental characteristic of postmodernism.