Matthew Baker: Scholar, Pastor, Friend

Treasures from His Text Messages

Fr Matthew teaching theology to undergraduates at Hellenic College, Spring 2014.

Prefatory note: March 1, 2025 marks the ten years’ mind of the Rev’d Dr. Matthew Baker (1977–2015), one of my closest friends and mentors, killed in a snowstorm car accident on his way home from church on the Sunday of Orthodoxy. I composed the following piece about six years ago, and revised it in 2021 to celebrate the posthumous release of Fr. Matthew’s collection of essays Faith Seeking Understanding. It draws on his and my long text chat to highlight some important themes in Matthew’s thought: the good and the bad in theological academia; the bifurcation he was seeing within Orthodoxy between progressive academics and anti-intellectual zealots; the relationship between intellectual pursuits and pastoral work, especially in the areas of preaching and catechesis; the need for serious Orthodox ecumenical engagement with the West; what he saw as the fundamental difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy; and the important place of mentorship throughout his life.

“SO, I AM KIND OF REELING from Presanctified tonight, which was so beautiful. I just love it.” It was Wednesday night in the first week of Lent; Fr. Matthew was messaging me. “Last year I found the rubrics mind-boggling, but this time it seemed really easy.” The year was 2015: Fr. Matthew’s second Lent as a priest, and what was to be his first and only Clean Week in his first and only parish. My phone lit up again:

I preached a longer, much adapted, more spelled out and less dense version of the sermon I just published on OCN.¹ By the way, this ‘part-time’ priest thing is really not part-time. I’m not unhappy about that at all. At the same time I do need to be careful to carve out guarded time to write my dissertation. Which is what I am doing right now, and tomorrow all day.²

For his many friends and colleagues, messages and emails from Fr. Matthew came in thick, plentiful clusters. He and I kept up a continuous online conversation from the Summer of 2013 until his death in 2015, after which I downloaded and archived the whole thing — nearly 500 pages. I had been teaching at St. Vladimir’s Seminary where he and his family had an apartment on campus while he completed his Ph.D. coursework at nearby Fordham University. A decade previous, we were students together at St. Tikhon’s Seminary; but at St. Vladimir’s I was privileged to witness Matthew’s growth as a friend and mentor to many. About a year after he moved away from St. Vlad’s, he told me how much he missed being there on campus. “I really loved the students.”³

Matthew, it is fair to say, was the pre-eminent scholar of Fr. Georges Florovsky: the guardian of his papers and the interpreter of his thought. But it’s no exaggeration to say that his relationship with academia was — much like Florovsky’s — unconventional. He never completed high school or college, yet he had spent many years as a student or resident at four Orthodox seminaries and was progressing towards his Ph.D. at Fordham.

He could at times be sharply critical of the culture of academia: its fashionable intellectual fetishes and its impersonal officialdom. But to the students themselves, his heart was wide open. Especially warm was his love for the undergraduates he taught at Hellenic College in Spring 2014. As much as these friendships were characterized by intellectual rigor and bookishness, there was also plenty of banter mixed with affection and solicitude. To have Fr. Matthew as a teacher was to have a brother, a father, and a friend. “Real spiritual fathers and teachers,” he wrote to me once, “love their children in a way that is palpable, so that their students/children want to obey and follow.”⁴

But he was aware of possible pitfalls. “People who demand respect and obedience,” he said, “have problems.”⁵ Thus a teacher must watch out for self-love: “Narcissism is a helpful category against which to examine oneself. Including in teaching. Namely, am I loving or mentoring a student just as a projection of myself? I can see how I’ve been guilty of this.”⁶ As a mentor, Fr. Matthew was lavishly generous. He gave freely because he himself had freely received: the care and kindness throughout his life of several fatherly mentors were foundational for him.⁷ “I depend greatly on mentors, in a certain way. Not for the details — there I am extremely independent — but in terms of general direction, and emotionally, in terms of support.”⁸

He sought out and thrived on such encouragement throughout his career, and especially when he set his hand to writing his doctoral dissertation. Despite his capacious and lively mind, he found academic writing to be onerous and draining work. Absent the company of his trusted mentors and colleagues, the task could seem to verge on meaninglessness.

I’m basically not in regular contact with anyone for whom this sort of thing matters. So it’s hard to believe it matters. At SVS, people were always busy with writing. And I would see people in my department engaged in the same. Now I see no one.… It’s not to say it doesn’t matter to me. It does. It just frankly doesn’t matter to many around me. And we are all social creatures.⁹

The previous day he had written, “I’ve been loving serving as a priest. And loving my kids and wife. Not much else. Diss[ertation] does not seem so important now.”¹⁰ At other times, though, it would be plain how much he loved his dissertation work and saw its significance. One evening I asked him to remind me what he was writing about. A rapid stream of messages came back:

Orthodox engagement with modern historicism and continental philosophical hermeneutics, in particular Florovsky’s engagement with such figures as Dilthey, Royce, and Collingwood, and the relevance of this for understanding his conception of neopatristic synthesis.

But I also have a chapter on Zizioulas and Heidegger, and my concluding chapter touches on more recent discussions (Behr, etc.).

The question of realism and idealism is threaded through here too. Why?

“ ’Cause B[—] was trying to remember,” I said.

“Right,” he continued. “So questions like temporal distance and interpretation, truth as historical event, eschatology and interpretation. The nature of doctrinal formulae.”

“So, what is this dissertation not about?” He ignored my sarcasm and plowed ahead:

…Relating the past to the present … Basically all problems raised by the attempt to relate tradition and a stable conception of truth to modern historical consciousness. Implied in that too would be a stable conception of human nature, though that’s not a focus here.¹¹

There you have it! He had set himself a tall order. At times he found it impossibly tall, especially given so many other demands on his attention. But there was one goal that often proved an effective motivator. “I feel like once I have that stupid degree in hand I can do great things.”¹²

That statement, however, contains an unintended irony, since for years he already had been doing great things; that this is so, all the contents of this present volume¹³ bear testimony.

And as for his future dreams, they were not narrowly academic. “If I had my own parish,” he once mused, “I might dispense with Friday night Salutations services during Lent,¹⁴ and instead have Liturgy every Saturday morning and just have a continual series of sermons on Hebrews.” “Nice idea,” I responded. “Yeah,” he said. “Why doesn’t anyone do it? The only sermons I have ever heard on Hebrews during Lent are my own.”¹⁵

What went into the make-up of a good parish? For Fr. Matthew, solid teaching, though key, was not the only ingredient.

Where Orthodoxy in America is at its strongest, I think it is characterized by a focus on the Gospel and evangelism, a fairly well-educated clergy and laity, communities centered on the Eucharist, and a model of church life which is much more congregationally focused than in most Orthodox countries, affording people a strong sense of community that they do not find in the surrounding American culture.¹⁶

Fr. Matthew saw warm networks of Christian community as the necessary context for vibrant preaching and teaching. Robust learning at every level, from family Bible-reading at home to regular Sunday and weekday preaching, to seminary training and advanced theological research and dialogue: none of this could thrive outside the context of families and communities fundamentally oriented towards the Apostolic Faith, to the glory of God the Father.

Parish, seminary, academy: these worlds were interlaced in Fr. Matthew’s life, and sometimes vied for his attention. “I love the pastoral work. Really love it. But I do feel my vocation includes academic teaching as well, and that’s the only reason I’m doing this degree. Otherwise, forget it.”¹⁷ Later, with more nuance, he remarked: “I love these students. The academic thing I love less. In terms of the scene, I mean — not research, which I do love.”¹⁸

The research, though, was not its own end, but was ordered towards the broadening of theological culture throughout the Church, and, in particular, among the clergy.

We do need to revive the model of the educated clergyman. It’s a different model of education than the academic specialist. It’s intentionally generalist. Breadth of learning and culture. Not research-oriented. Instead, enjoyment-oriented, and edification-oriented. Russians [have this]. Hence their love of art, novels, etc. It’s not something you get by adding a [seminary] class on “theology and the novel” either! It’s a culture.¹⁹

Orthodox academia, particularly in North America, was missing the mark, both theologically and culturally. “I agree with our liberal academics that the anti-Western thing is not good. I just wish they would learn something about the best in Western Christianity, rather than Western secularism.”²⁰ Elsewhere, he was more direct: “Our Orthodox [academics] know about the Fathers and Derrida, but [they] don’t care about the Christian humanists of the West in the last couple centuries.”²¹ And this, despite the fact that “we are Westerners. Anglophone. It is our tradition. And this tradition is a tributary of the Greek tradition.”²²

That which he found wanting among Orthodox scholars, he would delight in discovering among non-Orthodox. Once he mentioned a Baylor professor, Ralph Wood: “He is a Baptist with very Orthodox sympathies. Writes on literature, loves Solzhenitsyn, Schmemann, Dostoyevsky, etc. Flannery O’Connor. If I were at the seminary, I’d be pushing for this sort of broad Christian humanism.”²³

But the cultural narrowness he perceived among many Orthodox was a symptom of a larger problem, a theological problem, a crisis in Orthodox identity that, in his words, runs “deeper than leftist academics or ‘zealot anti-ecumenist monks’ peddling their stuff.”²⁴

I have a feeling [he wrote] that no one really cares about theology anymore. Not in the real sense.

We live in an age of massive biblical and creedal illiteracy. And our academics are doing little to help that. N.T. Wright is a great exception. I do not see anyone quite as good on the Orthodox side. Not in America anyway.

The Orthodox strike me as afflicted with a corporate obsession about their own identity — both the liberals and the traditionalist types. We focus on being Greek, Russian, “Eastern,” the exoticism and supposed uniqueness of everything Orthodox from all other Christians, etc. Not good.

Our academics are focused on showing other academics that they are not typical convert zealots and that Putin and Hilarion [Alfeyev] do not represent all of Orthodoxy. That’s what I see. It’s depressing.²⁵

“Yes,” I agreed, “it is.” “N.T. Wright is a good Christian,” Matthew added, “—despite his support of women’s ordination.”²⁶

In these last few quotations, we can discern two interwoven themes that are prominent throughout this book: one theme is the struggle to maintain “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3) — that is, the Orthodox Tradition in all it gives to us and all it demands from us. On this, Fr. Matthew would quote Florovsky’s warning against “the dangerous path of doctrinal minimalism.”²⁷ But the other theme is the need for charitable engagement with non-Orthodox Christianity, with its work and culture, and even with its institutions.

While some may find these two themes at cross purposes, for Fr. Matthew, as for Fr. Georges, they were integrally connected. “The notion of Christian East and West as two monolithic, opposed civilizations is, as Florovsky said, ‘a dangerous fiction.’”²⁸ Fr. Matthew saw Orthodoxy confronting many of the same dogmatic and moral errors that for decades have been plaguing and decimating Western Christian communions. Included among the errors he saw were philosophical matters of first principles. He discussed this less than a month before his death:

There is a basic confusion or conflation of the Holy Ghost with the Zeitgeist. Behind that basic confusion is a metaphysic of immanentism or pantheism. As I said to [Professor N.]: “‘My ways are not your ways, nor my thoughts your thoughts,’ saith the Lord” [Cf. Is. 55:8. —HM.] And that I work from the starting point assumption that I am not God and I don’t know God — I need to rely on his Word to know him. This is where I get on better with my Barthian Protestant friends rather than Orth[odox] or R[oman] C[atholic] liberals.²⁹

In many ways, then, faithful Orthodox and faithful non-Orthodox find themselves sharing a common fight and a common enemy. “Solovyov was right about one thing,” Fr. Matthew asserted, “Secularism and persecution and catastrophe are going to separate the sincere (even if heterodox) Christians from those who cloak other agendas in vaguely Christian dress.”³⁰

And yet, as open as Fr. Matthew was to that which is good and beautiful in non-Orthodox Christianity, he did not trivialize the real and fundamental differences. “Reading discussions online between RCs and Orth, I do feel we are very far apart.” “Regarding primacy, divorce … ?” I asked.

No, more fundamental things. Like how we conceive of truth. I think that, functionally speaking, for them the prime medium of truth is propositions, the certitude of which is guaranteed by the mechanism of the magisterium. This is not a teaching — it’s deeper than that. It’s a founding presupposition.…

So, here’s what I think. I think that propositions aren’t so primary for us. I think that for us, Liturgy really is the prime medium of truth. More important than councils, dogmatic statements, etc.… I see online that Roman Catholics have an obsession with certitude. Infallibility and validity are twin concepts. I think validity has a psychological force in the Roman Catholic Church it does not have in Orthodoxy. I think in place of “valid” and “infallible” Orthodoxy has “axios” and “theoprepis” — worthy (for worship), and appropriate to God (for doctrine).³¹

These were topics not only for online debate or ecumenical dialogue: Fr. Matthew saw their relevance for his parishioners too. “I served Liturgy yesterday for St Photios. I tried to preach for the first time as celebrant. Off the cuff … could not come up with such good stuff.” “It’s difficult in the morning,” I said, “much easier to preach off the cuff in the evening.” He continued:

I just told the people about who Photios was, his learning, the controversies of his day. Then I spoke of the good shepherd in the Gospel reading and said that Photios is emblematic as “a pillar of Orthodoxy;” that a good shepherd not only knows his sheep by name but is also zealous for the truth and the integrity of the faith (i.e., Filioque controversy).

But I had wanted to say more about the ecumenical dialogue. That we have made some in-roads on the issue, etc. I think it’s important for priests to talk to their people about this in a balanced way. People … either think that we are all the same, or they have bad caricatures of Roman Catholic heresies, etc. Neither good.³²

Here he returns again to the theme of inadequate education in the parish. What could be done to improve it? What were the root causes of its defects? Such questions were never far from Fr. Matthew’s thoughts. “We have academics who are either entirely on the wrong side … or really wishy-washy … And then we have clergy who are mostly sensible, well-intending, and in the right — but lacking in subtlety.”³³ He was intent on finding ways to improve the scene, and it became clear to him that first-rate seminary education was key. Hence his ambivalence towards academic work outside that context.

Given the choice between teaching in the non-seminary context vs. parish work, I will go with parish work. What I have hoped for with academic teaching really is somewhat seminary-specific. [Some] don’t understand this. … It’s about the mentoring of a specific type of student. Namely young men who want to be priests, and more broadly, men or women who want to serve the church in a very specific capacity.³⁴

He knew this was his vocation; his colleagues knew it too and would remind him of this when he needed encouragement. Matthew shared with me part of an email that Dr. George Hunsinger at Princeton Seminary sent to him during a particularly dark period: “You need to think about your future as a mentor to the next generation. If you drop away, they will have few they can turn to. They will need you to give them hope. It will be for your son and his generation. Don’t discount that!”³⁵

Those of us who knew Matthew Baker as a mentor — and who introduced him to others and saw him begin to mentor them as well — bear the weight of a deep and abiding sorrow that new generations of young Orthodox intellectuals will not have the same privilege we have had. It does seem, at times, that they “will have few they can turn to.”

But something occurs to me that gives me hope. Fr. Georges Florovsky died before he had the chance—in this life—to meet his greatest and most dedicated disciple, Matthew Baker. And yet Florovsky’s voice was not silenced by the grave. Neither, I am certain, was Baker’s.

*** *** ***

Thursday in the First Week of Lent: my phone lights up again.

“Tell me, why do you think first week Salutations has a Gospel reading?”

“Well, actually,” I replied, “in Greek usage Compline every night of Clean Week has a Gospel reading.”

“That I recall. OK. I did not put that together.” He replied.

I went on: “So the Gospel for Salutations is probably part of a series unrelated to the Akathist. It’s a Passion Gospel, isn’t it?”

“No,” he said, “it is ‘I am the True Vine.’”

“Oh, interesting,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “trying to think of something intelligent to say tomorrow.”

“Somehow,” I texted back, “I suspect you will succeed.”³⁶

1. See Faith Seeking Understanding: the Theological Witness of Fr Matthew Baker (Yonkers, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2021), p. 223.

2. Private messages sent online to Fr. Herman Majkrzak on February 25, 2015. All subsequent citations refer to the same series of messages.

3. October 31, 2014.

4. February 7, 2014.

5. Ibid.

6. November 2, 2014.

7. Cf. Faith Seeking Understanding, pp. 266–267.

8. December 5, 2014.

9. August 30, 2014.

10. August 29, 2014.

11. June 24, 2014.

12. August 29, 2014.

13. That is, Faith Seeking Understanding.

14. I.e., Small Compline with the Akathist to the Mother of God. Though not itself a Lenten service, it features prominently in the observance of Lent especially in the Greek tradition.

15. April 25, 2014.

16. August 3, 2014.

17. October 24, 2014.

18. November 17, 2014

19. Ibid.

20. April 25, 2014.

21. December 12, 2014.

22. April 25, 2014.

23. December 12, 2014.

24. February 22, 2015.

25. April 25, 2014.

26. Ibid.

27. June 2, 2014.

28. June 7, 2014.

29. February 3, 2015. Cf. Fr. Matthew’s emails to the same professor in Faith Seeking Understanding, pp. 353–356.

30. December 1, 2014. Fr. Matthew cited Vladimir Solovyov’s Three Conversations and A Short Tale of the Antichrist.

31. October 12, 2014.

32. February 7, 2014.

33. November 8, 2014.

34. November 17, 2014.

35. December 1, 2014, quoting an email sent the same day; quoted with permission of its author.

36. February 26, 2015.