In North America, it’s easy to forget that the Orthodox tradition exists. We tend to divvy the Christian pie up into Catholic and Protestant slices, with little notice of anything else. This oversight impoverishes the church. The Orthodox tradition has a unique theological voice that deserves to be heard by the broader church. John D. Zizioulas’ Being as Communion is a deep yet fruitful place to start.

Being as Communion is a collection of essays originally published in a variety of languages (French, Greek, German, and English), brought together in this volume around the theme of personhood.

Most significant for the North American church is Zizioulas’ undermining of individualism. The person, for Zizoulas, is a mixture of two apparently contradictory things: particularity and communion.

Being a person is fundamentally different from being and individual or a “personality,” for a person cannot be imagined in himself but only within his relationships. Taking our categories from our fallen state of existence, we usually identify a person with the “self” (individual) and with all it possesses in its qualities and experiences (the personality). But modern philosophers recall with good reason that this is not what being a person means. (106)

Think about that for a moment. Our identity is not found in who we are (the perennial quest to “find ourselves”), but in our communion with God and with each other in which our unique particularity is not diminished but expressed in love. Zizioulas states the implications of this bluntly: “A human being left to himself cannot be a person” (107).

With the idea of personhood established, Zizioulas explores the implications of this for a variety of theological foci including pneumatology, christology, ecclesiology, apostolic continuation, and ecumenism. Here is where Protestants may feel disconnected from Zizioulas’ logic. The Orthodox tradition (with the Roman Catholic tradition) places an extremely high value on the Eucharist, a theme which is integrated into the core of Zizioulas’ thought.

If you’ve become weary by the emphases of the North American church and are not afraid of a theological challenge, give Being as Communion a try.

Zizioulas, John D. Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood in the Church. Contemporary Greek Theologians 4. Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985.