Introduction to the Orthodox Church an address given in Belfast to an Inter-Church Service for the Week of Christian Unity
In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Glory to God who has brought us together! As we come together this evening in the name and presence of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, confessing together the work He is accomplishing amongst us through the Holy Spirit, and praying for an ever deeper experience of His love and peace, I am reminded of the words of the Apostle Peter on Mount Tabor at the Transfiguration: 'Lord, it is good for us to be here.'
Truly, it is good for us to be here. And so I thank you all for having me here. I am honoured to be invited to speak this evening, honoured to be able to partake, if only briefly, in the loving relationship between your two communities, honoured to be invited to share with you some aspects of the theology and spiritual life of the Orthodox Church which may be of relevance during this week dedicated to Christian unity.
Truth be told, we Orthodox Christians are simply pleased whenever people remember we even exist it is all too easy, particularly in a society like ours in which the tensions between the two poles of western Christianity are thrown into such relief, to forget that a whole other Christian world exists. This evening's service, partly drawn from Syrian Orthodox sources, is a small but tangible reminder of this other world, as I hope my brief words to you can be as well.
The Orthodox Church is another world indeed, one which certainly presents the western world with some paradoxes. The oldest branch of Christendom, continuously present for two thousand years, in spite of much persecution and suffering, in the Holy Land, Middle East, Asia Minor, the Balkans and those other places where the Apostles carried the message of the Gospel and yet only recently known again in the west through immigration and renewed contact. A worldwide communion of churches with some 300 million members today, yet small and insignificant in numbers in many places throughout the west including here in Northern Ireland. A Church which has never ceased to be threatened and persecuted from the early pagan Roman Empire, though the various heretical movements, through rise of Islam and the Arab conquests, through Mongols and Tartars and Latin Crusaders and Ottoman Turks, through to the Atheistic Communism of the 20th century a Church which has brought forth countless martyrs for the faith, but which is often viewed (if viewed at all) as moribund, as an archaic museum piece.
The Orthodox Church, if western Christians have even heard of it, is written out of the standard church history books after the split between Rome and the Eastern Churches in the 11th century over the issue of the authority of the Pope. Christianity from that point on becomes perceived as a 'western religion', driven forward by the dynamisms of Renaissance, Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the challenges of the modern era. Eastern Christianity is forgotten: it may have been the womb of Christianity, the Church of the Seven Ecumenical Councils, the Church of great Fathers of the Early Church the Church of St Ignatius, St Athanasius, St Basil the Great, St Gregory the Theologian, St John Chrysostom, St Maximus the Confessor, and so on , the Orthodox Church may have been all these things, but it is now perceived as a spent force with nothing to offer.
Of course, it is true that Orthodox Christianity has changed little, save in some of its outward forms, in twenty centuries. And it may well be that, particularly as local Orthodox churches emerge from behind the old Iron Curtain or (hopefully) out of the turmoil in the Middle East, there is much that we Orthodox can learn from western Christians about effective Christian witness in the modern world. Here I think particularly of the prophetic voice which the current Roman Catholic Pope represents on such issues as social justice and the sanctity of life, and lament the apparent inability of many Orthodox bishops to speak out on contemporary concerns from behind the ikons and incense which shroud the core of our Orthodox Christian Faith.
Nevertheless, whilst the modern world offers specific challenges to us and it is certainly important that the Gospel be presented in a renewed fashion to every generation, Orthodox Christians believe that the Gospel itself cannot change. Indeed, it is part of the Orthodox Church's self-understanding that the Apostolic deposit of faith be preserved and passed down in its entirety, without addition or subtraction. Yet far from making Orthodox Christianity moribund or archaic, it is precisely the unchanging nature of its faith in and experience of God which the Orthodox Church can offer as a gift to those interested in the question of Church unity today. Let me explain what I mean.
In the Gospel passage from John we read this evening, a selection from the high priestly prayer of the Lord Jesus on the eve of His crucifixion, we read that the Lord tells his disciples that the Father will send in His name the Comforter, the Holy Spirit, who will teach them 'all things.' Later He tells them that the Spirit, when He comes, will 'lead them into all truth.' This theme of the advent of the Holy Spirit and what He will bring forms a central part of the Lord's instruction to the Apostles before His death and resurrection.
And so, when on the fiftieth day after the Lord's resurrection, ten days after His ascension, the Holy Spirit descended in tongues of fire upon the Apostles at Jerusalem, the Orthodox Church Fathers teach us that the words of the Lord were fulfilled by this experience of Pentecost, the Apostles were indeed led into all truth. By this experience, the Holy Spirit brought them into union with God, made them, in the words of the Apostle Peter, 'partakers of the divine nature', in other words, made them to share in the uncreated life and glory of God Himself. And of course the Apostles themselves then spread throughout the known world to bring the Gospel, the good news that God had reconciled the world to Himself in Christ Jesus by destroying sin and death, by healing the human person from within, and enabling us once again to take up our original vocation to share in the divine life of God.
The Apostolic experience of glorification, of union with God is itself the whole of the spiritual life. The Orthodox Church Fathers, from the end of the first century to the present day, tell us as with one voice that there is nothing that we can add to the experience of the Apostles on the day of Pentecost. It is the task of Christians, of those who heed the Apostolic teaching, to follow them into this same experience of glorification.
When an explorer visits a previously uncharted land, he will come back and draw a map of where he has been. He may even write articles or books describing his experience. And people will then pick up these maps and writings to learn about the place he has described. Yet no one looking at maps or reading articles could sensibly on this basis claim to have been to the place depicted, in other words, to have had the experience the explorer did. The point of maps and articles is precisely to allow others to find their way to the same place, and only once they arrive can they say that they have the experience of the place. Indeed, once they arrive the maps and articles themselves become superfluous pale reflections of the place itself.
The Fathers teach us that the same thing is true in the spiritual life. The Apostles wrote down their memoirs, their experiences, in documents which circulated in the early Church and which later were compiled by the Church Fathers into what we have as the New Testament. But these written accounts of their experience are meant for us as maps to lead us to the same experience of glorification, of union with God, which they had.
It was precisely the Apostolic experience of healing, transfiguration and glorification in Christ, the Apostolic experience of union with the uncreated grace of the Triune God, which formed the Apostolic deposit of faith, the Apostolic 'tradition' the Greek word for tradition, paradosis, meaning simply 'that which is handed down'.
In other words, the Apostolic deposit of faith is genuine, authentic spiritual experience, not doctrine, not written confessions, not theological speculation none of which can substitute for the spiritual experience itself. Only when the experience itself came under attack did the Church Fathers begin to formulate dogmas or doctrines, and these were only to protect the experience, to draw lines around it in order to exclude false experience.
An example of this is in the early 4th century when Arius, a presbyter from Alexandria, began to teach that Christ, although divine, was less than fully God. Arius was a powerful preacher and, believing strongly that his views were entirely Biblical, used many proof texts to illustrate his teaching that the Son was inferior to the Father and had catchy hymns composed to propagate his beliefs. In a short period of time, Arianism became very popular and swept across the Christian world.
The problem was that Arius's teaching contradicted the experience of the Church of Christ as fully God and fully man. So in response to Arius the Church gathered in the first of the seven great Ecumenical Councils at Nicaea. One of the products of that council and the next one at Constantinople-New Rome is the creed which we shall be proclaiming this evening. This creed, called in Orthodoxy the Symbol of Faith, is like the Apostolic memoirs it is another map. The Church Fathers gave us this map to exclude the possibility that we would be waylaid by Arianism or other false teaching about the Trinity or Jesus Christ. They did not invent anything new, but gave expression to part of the Apostolic experience so that Christians in each successive generation could continue to embark on the spiritual journey to glorification in union with God. Likewise, when he was asked by heretics to justify his belief in the Holy Trinity, one of the greatest of the early Church Fathers, St Basil the Great, did not appeal to Scripture or philosophical argumentation, but replied simply by pointing to the constant references to 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit' in the liturgical worship of the Church, in other words, to the Church's experience.
Why am I belabouring this point? Precisely because, when we consider the question of Christian unity, we cannot but be struck by disunity. And this disunity, when viewed from the perspective of the Orthodox Church Fathers, owes an awful lot to speculation and disagreements over maps.
Disunity among Christians, from this perspective, is a result of taking our focus off the spiritual life and the struggle towards union with God. It is the result of replacing authentic spiritual experience with academic study, endless theological speculation, absolutist doctrinal formulation, contesting confessions of faith, and so on.
By contrast, the Orthodox Christianity of the Fathers is at heart an intensely practical faith, directed entirely at the Apostolic experience of glorification. Given that doctrinal disputes and confessional arguments are at the heart of so many of the divisions of western Christianity, it is perhaps surprising to learn how little doctrine the Orthodox Church has and how simple its teaching is. Indeed, there would be no 'doctrine' as such if the experience of the Church had not come under attack from heresies.
For those familiar in any way with Orthodox Christianity, simplicity may not have been the first word to come to mind. The Orthodox Church is of course known for an elaborated and majestic worship, rich vestments, beautiful ikons, heavenly-sounding ancient chants. It has an immensely deep and sophisticated spiritual tradition recorded in such profound spiritual works as the The Ladder of Divine Ascent and the Philokalia, including instruction on the prayer of the heart or Jesus prayer which has recently become familiar to western Christians. And owing to the Orthodox belief in the equality of all bishops and the subsistence of the entire, catholic Church in every local church, it also has a somewhat complicated earthly structure.
Yet despite this apparent complexity, at its core, Orthodox Christianity is very simply the Apostolic path to glorification, and all these elaborate and complicated outward aspects of the Church are merely the external signs which point us along the way. The worship, the ikons, the writings of the Fathers, the creed these are all just the pointers and guides which direct us to our goal, and once we attain the goal, they are relativised and ultimately discarded. Even the Scriptures, the written record of the Word of God, are discarded in our own experience of direct union with the Word of God Himself.
Orthodox Christians have involved themselves from the outset of the modern ecumenical movement. Indeed, the formation of the World Council of Churches and its forerunners owes much to the invitations of successive Patriarchs of Constantinople in the early 20th century to work towards the unity of all Christians.
Nevertheless, to the profound disappointment of Orthodox participants, much of what has gone on in the name of 'ecumenical dialogue' has been yet more theological speculation and discussion. This has surely be useful in terms of breaking down historic obstacles and enabling separated Christians to encounter one another. Yet unless we are to reduce the Church to being merely a human society or organisation, no amount of negotiation or doctrinal discussion or even positive thinking and esprit de corps could possibly lead to real unity. From an Orthodox Christian perspective, unity among separated Christians can only come as the fruit of a shared spiritual experience of union with God. Authentic spiritual struggle and growth, the path of purification, illumination and glorification proclaimed by the Apostles, defended by the Fathers, and lived by Saints, is the key to unity.
Some of you may be aware that the majority of Orthodox Christians follow the older Julian calendar which runs 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar, which makes today the 6th of January, the Feast of Theophany or Epiphany. Theophany is actually a much older feast than Christmas, and originally all the events which we celebrate during Nativity and Theophany were celebrated together, as one great feast of the Incarnation.
And still to this day in the Orthodox Church, Theophany, the celebration of the Baptism of Christ, is a feast celebrated with as much, if not more, solemnity than Christmas. The hymns of Theopany extol the tremendous mystery that the Creator of all the universe should not remain detached from His creation but enter into the very midst of it, taking flesh from a human mother, joining the created world to Himself. On this feast, every Orthodox church celebrates the Great Blessing of Waters blessing vessels of water, rivers, lakes and oceans basically as much water as we can get our hands on! recalling that by His descent into the Jordan, the One through whom all things were made is now actively transfiguring all creation and making all things new.
I mention this because many of the Fathers describe the Church as the pan-mystery of God's communion with His creation, the union of the uncreated and the created. As we gather to pray for peace and unity amongst Christians, and indeed among all people and with all creation, let us never lose sight of the fact that the Church is no mere human institution, but the very life of God shared with His creation. It is the Kingdom of God, inaugurated but not yet fulfilled, and we await the day when God will be all in all.
Our choice therefore is not whether or not to work to bring about the unity of the Church for, as the Body of Christ, the Church itself could never be divided but rather whether or not we actively participate in the unity of divine life which God has invited us to share. Christ's prayer 'that they may be one' as He and His Father are one is a not a wishful statement about the reunion of separated institutions, it is a prayer for the unity of all in the life and loving communion of the Holy Trinity.
It is a prayer that I too offer this evening: that divided and broken as we are, we may resolve to follow the path of the Prophets, Apostles, Fathers and Saints, to seek healing and glorification through union with Jesus Christ, the living Son of God, so that we may become partakers of divine life and attain to true unity and peace in the the eternal communion of selfless love of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, One God, unto the ages of ages. Amen.