The Big Three: Rome, Geneva, and Constantinople

http://www.christiantruth.com/orthodoxyapophaticism.html

A new inter-faith dialogue is springing up, one not dominated by the World Council of Churches. As Rod Dreher perceptively analyzes in "Crunchy Cons" (see his book and his website) and as the anonymous Spengler of Asia Times Online has pointed out, Christians of traditional bent have discovered more in common by going outside their own communions than by continuing to try to talk to the liberalizing elements within their own branches.

The Johannine community of hope (Orthodoxy), the Roman community of love (Petrine Catholicism), and the Pauline community of faith (Evangelicalism) are beginning to understand each other. The above link illustrates a scholarly and improved attempt to promote the growing consensus. This consensus is not a Descartian, liberal, or scientific effort, but one based on maintaining Truth in the midst of, not a converging outlook, but a convergent "sight" of what we all agree is paramount : the living truth of God Himself, alive and well in a modern world.

Franz Rosenszweig, a Jew who very nearly converted to Christianity (in my opinion, he was a latent Christian), has outlined all of this in his seminal "Star of Redemption". Sometimes an outsider can see things more clearly in the forest of experience, and in this case, what he saw was the commonality of spirituality in the Judeo-Christian faith traditions (as opposed to the Islamic tradition, which represents an inversion of Judeo-Christian categories into a paganized, polytheistic monotheism that depends upon a capricious Allah recreating by fiat the world at His whim through the miracle of Koranic speech: as Rosenszweig puts it - sorcery by God the Revealer aimed at God the Creator, along with a materialistic redemption provided by worldy power and a legalistic and sensual afterlife).

There are several issues at stake here:
1) Orthodoxy has a tension between a very visible Church (outside of which there is no Church) and apophatic theology of negation that attempts to approach the energies (not the essence) of God.
2) Evangelicalism has a tension between upholding living truth and reconciling a divergency of individualistic outlooks where every prophet/priest/king interprets the Bible.
3) Catholicism has a tension between its rich Christian Kultur and the need for separation from the world.
These are simplistic starting points, but they give some idea of what the "traditionalists" are up against. There is no question that a community of faith and tradition aids the individual. All three traditions, however, are struggling with modernity and globalism. A synergy of the three will probably be necessary to confront postmodernism, and, indeed, that is what is happening.

I would like to suggest that the Orthodox begin by looking at the Evangelical doctrine of New Birth (Regeneration) in order to balance their critique of the "juridical/legalistic" categories of Western theology (as opposed to the ontological/energetic categories of Eastern theology). The Catholics are going to have to follow Ratzinger's thinking on the issues of the day and go back to Ur von Balthazar's theology of "Only Love is Credible". And the Evangelicals are finally going to have to confront their Gnostic-paradigms that deny the role of time and matter and hierarchy in aiding the individual's quest for God.

Those are the starting points.