The Eastern Christian world, due to the historical cataclysms it has endured under Islam and Communism, has fallen behind in scholarship. Nevertheless, it remains true that the Western Christian outlook, while claiming inclusivity and ecumenical breadth, is in fact habitually confined to the Western Christian experience, and tends to take the western part of Christianity for the whole. This can be seen in the course offerings of divinity schools and seminaries, both Protestant and Roman Catholic. In a review of Christian thought on forgiveness, the author begins with the biblical roots and with the gospel, and then discusses the theology of Augustine, the medieval Western developments, and concludes with a consideration of the Reformation thinkers, specifically Luther and Calvin. Now this pattern of limited and selective Christian memory by no means begins and ends in the scholarly realm of intellectual and theological history.
Ideas have consequences.
A political and historical world view logically follows, and is applied to very contemporary issues. In an excellent series of articles in The New York Times several years ago, we were given perceptive descriptions of the complex reality of the Balkan ethnic conflicts. The narrative clearly showed that nationalist extremism in former Yugoslavia is easily found in Serbian Orthodox, Croatian Catholic, and Muslim settings. There was a most peculiar quotation attributed to a former professor of Philosophy at Belgrade University, stating that the totalitarian intolerance of the Yugoslav Communist regime was borrowed by the Communists from Serbian Orthodoxy. If a Greek or Russian journalist were to present a similar analysis of Western diseases and pathologies, claiming that they flow from the very nature of Western Christianity, we would be led to believe that such an analysis illustrates extremism, anti- Westernism, intolerance, and fanaticism.