The Ecclesiology of Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople

Protopresbyter Michael Azkoul

 

His All-Holiness, Bartholomew, Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, was interviewed on national television during his visit to Atlanta, Georgia, on April 17, 2010, by the veteran newsman Charlie Rose. Mr. Rose asked him: “Do all people have the same heavenly Father?” The Patriarch replied: “Of course, we are all created by the same God, and as such we are all brothers and sisters, and all have the same heavenly Father, whatever we call Him. ‘God’ is but one independent name given to Him, Allah or Yahweh....” In these remarks, His All-Holiness reveals a great deal about his vision of God. While God is the Creator of all mankind, and while we are all children and creatures of God for that reason, as Orthodox Christians, we claim to worship the One God in Trinity. We confess that there is one “true God and Jesus Christ Whom He hath sent” (St. John 17:3). Not only do we call God by a correct and specific Name, but we also understand Him, in accord with our confession of Faith—i.e., in an “orthodox and Orthodox” manner—as Trinitarian, Father, Son (Jesus Christ), and Holy Spirit, and not in some general and undefined way, such that any definition of God by any name is acceptable to us.

The Patriarch’s erroneous theology is the starting-point of his ecumenical distortion of the nature of the Christian Church. His false theology leads him to a false ecclesiology. Not only do we Orthodox confess the One God in Trinity, but we confess and believe that Christ, God Incarnate, established one true religion, the Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, and that we are, as Orthodox Christians, a “chosen generation” (γένος έκλεκτόν), a “holy nation” (έθνος άγιον) (I St. Peter 2:9), and the New Israel: a chosen people. Through Baptism into the Church, blessed and taught by the Holy Spirit (cf. Romans 8:12-18), moreover, we are guided by an Episcopal hierarchy and nourished by the Holy Mystery of the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ, our Lord and God. The confession of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, the Church of Holy Tradition, and a life rooted in all of the Mysteries (“Sacraments”) defines the Church for us.

Patriarch Bartholomew would have us base our theology on the god of ecumenism, undefined and unspecified, and the Church on an ecumenical vision of a divided Christianity that has no unifying focal point. He adheres to an ecclesiology which allows him to speak of a church that is divided and yet is one. He thinks that differences in faith between Christians do not divide them, since they call on Christ. Yet Christ says that it is not enough simply to call Him “Lord” (St. Matthew 7:21). One must know Who God is and what the Lordship of Christ is. In addition, St. Basil the Great, in his First Canon, tells us that where there is an incorrect understanding of the Holy Trinity, the Mysteries themselves are non-existent. Salvation, or union with God by Grace (θέωσις), therefore, is dependent on our correct understanding of God and of the Church.

Patriarch Bartholomew rests his case for theological inclusiveness and ecclesiological relativism on two precepts: “unity” and “love.” As I have pointed out, theological inclusiveness falls flat when we speak rightly of the Trinitarian Christian God. To speak outside that definition of God is to speak of something other than the Christian God. Likewise, from an Orthodox point of view, it is not possible to think that the Church is both divided and united, as the Patriarch asserts. If the Church is divided, how, then, is she “One, Holy, and Catholic”? As for love (άγάπη), while it can, and should, produce tolerance and a deep inward desire for unity, it cannot generate that unity a fortiori and without a common Faith. To put it in another way, if there is no unity in Faith, love is ultimately futile. Love cannot bring about salvation without true Faith.

The Patriarch offers a clever solution to what I portray as an impossibility. The Church, he opines, is bifurcated between its spiritual (or invisible) dimension and its historical, physical (or visible) dimension. The former dimension of the Church, he asserts, is united, while the latter is disunited. However, the Patriarch would be hard-pressed to defend his proposition that one can be saved solely by the visible Church, “within time.” Nor can we be saved by the invisible Church, “outside of time,” without her visible component. If we posit that salvation is possible without both dimensions of the Church together, we violate the orthodoxy of our confession. After all, traditionally the Orthodox Church has claimed that she is the Church in which both dimensions are united “without separation or confusion” (Synod [Council] of Chalcedon), and that she alone fits the traditional ecclesial paradigm.

If Orthodoxy is the Church “within time,” she must be in communion with the Church “outside of time”; hence, she is the Una Sancta. The Patriarch seems somehow indifferent to this traditional model of the Church. To be sure, altering “the faith once delivered to the saints” (St. Jude 1:3), as he therefore does, is no small matter. By his clever bifurcation of the Church, the Ecumenical Patriarch implicitly maintains that God must restore the unity of the Church, which His children have corrupted. This is a Protestant view of history. If one accepts it, then the Faith of the Fathers and the Holy Synods (“Councils”) of the Church were in error. The Gates of the Church have been shattered, despite Christ’s promise to the contrary (cf. St. Matthew 16:18). It will take, the Patriarch seems to believe, the World Council of Churches, the supreme organ of the ecumenical movement, to reunite the Church and restore her integrity.

I have no doubt that Patriarch Bartholomew acts with the greatest hope and sincerity for Christian unity, as every Christian should; but in point of fact, he promotes an ecclesiology which finds no place in Orthodox tradition. The Patriarch holds to a different conception of the Church than that which has been passed down by the Fathers and promoted by most of his predecessors. Thus, with the greatest naivete, he can declare that he has “a profound willingness to learn from others who live beyond the boundaries of Orthodoxy.” [1] He thinks of himself as a “bridge-builder,” aiming at union or harmony between Orthodoxy and the other Christian confessions. The Orthodox Church, again, seeks Christian unity, and it prays for it; however, it seeks unity in the Orthodox Faith, to which Faith it calls all confessions.

The Ecumenical Patriarch, it seems to me, comes to his view of the Church, in part, by way of believing himself competent to play this unitive role. No doubt reinforced by his education in the West—largely in Rome, in fact—he learned to place inordinate value on the human personality, embracing the principles of the philosophy of Personalism. Personalists have called for the reconstruction of the social order, so that the sanctity of human life and the dignity of each person might be foremost in our personal lives and in our social and, more specifically, religious outlook. Strongly attracted to the precepts of Personalism, the Patriarch made it part of his new ecclesiological vision. Its ideas enable him, in the religious domain, to compare the human person to “the Supreme Person (Being)” and, thereby, to transcend the differences between men and between religions. Personalism promotes universal brotherhood, with all that this implies, and not individualism, which it equates with self-centeredness and solipsism. He links this brotherhood with the Church, since the Church aims at the restoration of the divine image in humanity, which Adam shattered by his disobedience, as St. Athanasius said.

It may be that, given his penchant for the Personalist worldview, the Patriarch follows Nicholas Berdyaev. “Personality,” the latter said, “is the moral principle, and our relation to all other values is determined by reference to it. Hence the idea of Personality lies at the basis of ethics.... Personality is a higher state than the value of the state, the nation, mankind or nature, and indeed is not part of that series.” [2] While studying in Geneva, His All-Holiness met the famous Greek ecumenist, Nikos Nissiotis, who also instructed him in Personalism and its “new horizons.” It becomes clearer why the Patriarch no longer feels compelled to consider as final and unchangeable the Orthodox form of the Christian Faith. Personalism, since it rejects individualism, tears down Orthodox exclusivism, downplaying differences of every kind and honoring human agency in what are actually matters of divine prerogative. I have no way of knowing the depth to which this philosophy has penetrated the Patriarch’s soul, but it is not a jump in logic to think that Personalism directly influenced his diminution of Orthodox exclusivism and his loyalty to ecumenism and his own personal ecclesiological views—a loyalty which, not so incidentally, is inevitably and tragically leading to a schism in the Orthodox Church.

St. Hilary of Poitiers portrays much of what Orthodoxy faces today, to a great extent because of the rejection of the exclusivism (indeed, the ecclesial primacy) of Orthodoxy by the Ecumenical Patriarch, in his portrait of the situation of the Church in the fourth century, a century which was not unlike our own. Speaking of Arianism, the Saint could easily be commenting, were he writing these same words today, on ecumenism and its divisive effects on the Orthodox world:

Multitudes of churches, in almost every province of the Roman Empire, have already caught the plague of this deadly doctrine; error, persistently inculcated and falsely claiming to be the truth, has become ingrained in minds which vainly imagine that they are loyal to the Faith. I know how infrequently the will is moved to recant thoroughly, when zeal for a mistaken cause is encouraged by the sense of numbers and confirmed by the sanction of general approval. A multitude under delusion can only be approached with difficulty and danger. When the crowd has gone astray, even though it knows that it is wrong, it is ashamed to return. It claims consideration for its numbers and has the assurance to command that its folly shall be accounted wisdom. It assumes that its size is evidence of the correctness of its opinions; and thus a falsehood which has found general credence is boldly asserted to have established its truth (De Trinitate, VI, 1).

To what extent do these words apply to the ecclesiological errors held by the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople today? I will let the reader decide this for himself.

 

Notes

1. Patriarch Bartholomew, Encountering the Mystery: Understanding Orthodox Christianity Today (New York: Doubleday, 2008).

2. Nicolas Berdyaev, The Destiny of Man, trans. N. Duddington (London: Centenary Press, 1954), p. 55. See “Conversations,” pp. 123-124.

 

Source: Orthodox Tradition, Vol. 32 (2015), No. 3, pp. 5-9.