Answering J.B. Watson
[Rod Dreher  03/24 08:44 AM]

I posted something yesterday by J.B. Watson, who argued that he chooses to be Catholic, not Orthodox, in part because he is a man of the West, and wishes to be fully part of the Western Christian tradition. I don’t endorse his view, but I thought it was an interesting one. Now, Daniel Larison, a convert to Orthodoxy, has answered him, an excerpt of which I post here to contribute to the conversation about choosing one’s Tradition:

Then there is the claim that "they are Eastern churches, and I am a Western man." If we are speaking in terms of a civilisation as a basis for determining which "valid" church Westerners will choose, we are speaking of a Christian civilisation. That civilisation encompasses the heirs of Byzantium as well as the heirs of Latin Christendom. If that is the case, the distinction between what is Eastern and Western collapses rather quickly. What is an authentic measure of the mind of that civilisation, if not the common mind it possessed prior to the schism? If it is that mind that created the fundamental, defining doctrines of the Faith, and that mind was possessed equally throughout the oikoumene before the schism and was expressed in ecumenical councils that were, because of particular historical reasons, all located in the East, we cannot dismiss the "Eastern" churches for being Eastern if we grant, as Mr. Watson does, that they have a valid apostolic succession, valid sacraments and the correct definition of faith. Once we accept the latter, their "Easternness" ought to be immaterial to Western peoples. Indeed, if we see the continuities in the Orthodox Church from the early centuries until today we will be more hard-pressed to mark them off anachronistically as simply Eastern and thus unfit for "Western men."