Validity and Authenticity: The Difference Between Western and Orthodox Views on Orders

[An early Anglican attempt to explain the differences between the Orthodox and Western understanding of "recognizing" clergy outside the Church proper.]

[Rev.] Charles-James N. Bailey

Source: St. Vladimir's Seminary Quarterly, 8 (1964), pp. 86-92.

 

Western theological writings betray a good deal of bewilderment toward the Orthodox teachings on sacramental validity, a subject which Orthodox writers themselves have had little enough success in elucidating to the Western theologian. To him we seem to be lost in hopeless confusion, apparently equating validity and efficacy with canonically right administration, as though legality ensured efficacy in our view, and illegality nullity. Of course, the non-Orthodox theologian cannot avoid doubting the correctness of such an interpretation, in view of the Orthodox insistence on embracing the whole Christian faith in all ecclesiastical acts. But this insistence appears attenuated, for example, by the incongruous endorsement in some Orthodox bodies (however circumscribed or provisional this endorsement may be, and however little put into effect) of the orders of Anglican clergy converting to Orthodoxy. For some Anglican ordinations are performed by bishops on record with public repudiations of the dogma of the Holy Trinity, not to speak of repudiations of the traditional teachings on the sacrament of order and the necessity of a sacramental and sacrificial episcopate in Christ’s Church.

The purpose of this article is to show that much of the misconception concerning sacramental validity in Orthodox theology is due to the fact that “validity” denotes a very different concept in the West from the Orthodox teaching that the same word is often referred to. In order to distinguish the two concepts, the Orthodox theory (denoted in Greek by kyros) will here be acclimated to normal English usage as “authenticity,” and the term “validity” will be reserved for the Western theory. The aptness of “authenticity” for the Orthodox concept will become more apparent as we proceed. After the distinction has been clarified, an attempt will be made to make the Orthodox view intelligible in Western terms.

Before jumping in medias res, it will serve our future purpose first of all to distinguish between sacramental and magical instruments. A sacrament presupposes a divine utilization of visible reality for spiritual goals, while magic presupposes the reverse, namely, the manipulation of spiritual powers by material activity. Western theology expresses this opposition by calling the magical instrument a purely physical instrument automatically linked with spiritual powers, and by calling the sacramental instrument a moral instrument whose physical link with grace depends primarily on the creative Will of God, and secondarily on the compliant will and intention of its human users. The weakest theories in Western theology demand at least two kinds of intention in the Church: (1) an objective, official intention on the part of the Church concerning the sacramental operation or end; and (2) at least the absence of a verifiable repudiation of this intention — unless subsequently retracted, but retracted before the administration of the sacrament — on the part of the minister of the sacrament (for objective validity) and on the part of the subject or recipient of the sacrament (for subjective efficacy). To demand less is clearly magic. Orthodoxy demands a good deal more.

In his magisterial article, “The Validity of Anglican Orders According to the Canon Law of the Orthodox Church,” [1] the Very Rev. Jerome Cotsonis has set forth the Orthodox distinction between an authenticatable potential (validity kat’ oikonomian) and strict authenticity (validity kat’ akribeian). It is the former, rather than the latter, that bears a likeness to the Western concept of validity! But this authenticatable “validity” is not recognized and accepted by the Orthodox as already genuine. Father Cotsonis is at pains to stress the view that potential authenticity becomes actual only within the Orthodox fold, the home of authentic grace. Grace outside the Church among non-Orthodox Christians is not thereby ruled out, although such grace could not be regarded as authentic. The term “potentially authentic” must in no way be understood as implying a firm decision for or against the existence of grace in a non-Orthodox body. Further, “inauthentic” does not mean “invalid” in the Western sense, namely, necessarily unproductive of grace.

As we narrow our focus on the Orthodox concept of authenticity, it is becoming clear that it stands between Western “validity” and Western “licitness” or “regularity.” It denotes something lying within given boundaries, those of the Orthodox Communion, and is more concerned with whether a sacramental act takes place within those boundaries than with how it may exist outside of them. Here we encounter the Orthodox insistence that the home of authentic grace is that body which alone has (by Christ’s grace and not her own merits) obediently and faithfully adhered to Christ’s original and unadulterated institutions of faith and practice in the undivided Church, without unilateral deviations on common essentials. We encounter here also the Orthodox insistence on the necessity of intending the whole of the faith and practice that lie within those boundaries that define authentic Christianity. The Orthodox see no justifiable grounds for the fragmentation that insists only on the intention of a given sacramental act, apart from the intention to maintain the entirety of authentic Christian faith and practice.

If the authentic is that which is acceptable within the sphere of Christ’s original institutions, it is not orders that make a Christian body authentic, but the Church that makes orders authentic. Divided ministries cannot produce authenticity or unity; only the one authentic Church can authenticate the divided ministries, and then only within her own unity and under certain conditions. The Orthodox see no contradiction between their unwillingness to acknowledge sacramental performances outside of Orthodoxy as authentic — that is, as the Church’s own — and their equal unwillingness to deny the possibility of “validity” in the Western sense for some such inauthentic acts.

That the Orthodox doctrine is not reducible to canonical legality alone is obvious from the fact that an authentic bishop who ignores a canon law (for example, that forbidding prayer for the heterodox) that has fallen into desuetude, is not regarded as performing subsequent sacramental acts of doubtful authenticity. Within Orthodoxy there may exist lawfully performed sacramental acts that are invalid in the Western sense, exactly as in other ecclesiastical bodies. When Chr. Androutsos says [2] that the canons are ignorant of the Western distinction between “invalid” and “illicit,” he does not mean either that a lawfully administered sacrament received without a right intention would be efficacious or that a sacrament administered under unlawful circumstances would necessarily be unproductive of grace. The point is that the latter would not be authentic, guaranteed.

Several questions will inevitably present themselves to the Western theologian at this point, among them the following: (1) Is potential authenticity a meaningful concept? (2) Can one admit the possibility of “validity,” when one refuses to concede authenticity, without contradiction? (3) Is not the Orthodox insistence on adherence to the entire faith and practice of the Church a sort of Donatism of correct belief, comparable to the demand for moral rectitude in the older Donatism? (4) How is the participation of Orthodox bishops in Anglican ordinations (especially when ordinands to the episcopate are married, contrary to the canons) or the bestowal of the antidoron on baptized Protestants to be justified, especially in view of the practice of requiring Roman Catholic converts to undergo chrismation anew in some Orthodox bodies, now or formerly?

Let us consider these questions in turn, beginning with the meaningfulness of potential authenticity. This theory is not strange to the West. Saint Augustine’s theory with respect to Donatist converts, ratified by Western synods, was that such schismatics lived in a state of suspended grace — as though they retained only the form or potential of grace, like the withered branches of John 15:1-8 — and that this potential became actual only within the Catholic Church. Today no important Christian body requires rebaptism of those who have formerly lost the grace of a valid baptism when they subsequently repent.

Concerning the question as to whether the possibility of a “valid” inauthenticity can be entertained without contradiction, we may note the early Church’s attitude toward charismatic ministers and toward the clerical status (that of priests, not that of bishops, who were still the ordinary celebrants of the Eucharist) accorded to confessors. If the validity of their special sacramental acts outside the covenants of grace was not questioned, the risks were limited to themselves. The vital needs of the faithful could not be hazarded on objectively unverifiable claims. So the Protestant ecumenist who has been at such pains to warn Catholics against expecting too much certainty from the sacraments ought rather to warn Protestants and others against presuming on any certainty elsewhere. At all events, the Orthodox view represents no innovation in Christianity.

As for Donatism, Orthodoxy repudiates both the necessity for correctness of doctrine and purity of morals as requirements for sacramental authenticity. The ministers and recipients of sacraments must only intend the correct faith and practice of the Church. Where the Orthodox differs from the Western Christian is in insisting on the need for intending the whole of Christian faith and practice, and not merely that fragment which pertains to a given sacramental administration. Such a theory is not foreign to Protestantism, for Presbyterian bodies have officially ruled that ordinations by non-Trinitarians are invalid, [3] and old-fashioned Lutherans could regard Roman Catholic orders as invalid because of what was held to be the wrongness of their faith and intention concerning essential tenets of Christianity.

The fourth question concerned the justifiability of Orthodox participation in Anglican ordinations, which has now been discontinued. Obviously such a practice was predicated on the Orthodox belief and hope that the other party shared the chief items of Christianity with Orthodoxy, at least in intention, and that this participation would lay a basis or potential for the realization of the hope of unity in the future. The participation did not actualize authenticity or entail intercommunion, as Father Cotsonis stresses, for these exist only within Orthodoxy for the Orthodox. But it is difficult, if not impossible, to square the non-ordination of what are regarded as potentially authentic ministries with the reconfirmation of lay converts from the same bodies.

The Orthodox position would be intelligible if a terminology had been worked out to meet the exigencies of the contemporary situation. Our relationship with other Christian bodies are threefold:

(1) Sacramental acts by those denying the Trinity and other essential dogmas are totally invalid in the Western sense.

(2) Claims having no actualizable counterparts as such in Orthodoxy are unrefuted. Here belong the non-sacrificial and non-sacerdotal claims made by Protestants for their breaking of bread and ministry. As Protestants do not claim a sacerdotal ministry or a sacrificial Eucharist, there could be no question of equating these institutions with the Orthodox Eucharist or priesthood. But their economical adequation with the Orthodox antidoron and diaconate, their linguistic and functional counterparts, would have at least as much in its favor as the adequation of the quasi-catholic priests mentioned below with the Orthodox priesthood.

(3) Roman Catholic clergy and Old Catholic clergy (other than married bishops) are authenticatable (valid kat’ oikonomian).

(4) The contemporary juncture requires a further category in which the authenticatability of orders is unresolvable. They could be received into Orthodoxy by conditional ordination. In this case, the Orthodox would not deny the validity claimed, but simply assert, “We cannot tell.” Here belong the quasi-catholic ministries, episcopi vagantes, and married bishops of otherwise authenticatable lineage.

The term “quasi-catholic” refers to Western claimants of a place in the “historic” succession of bishops whose own ordinations are claimed to derive only from predecessors committed to the faith and practice of the undivided Church in intention at least, but whose position is maintained in ecclesiastical bodies—which are neither Catholic nor Protestant—in which the sacramental and sacrificial view of the episcopate is not required at the official level and in which bishops are tolerated despite their repudiation not only of this intention, but also of such dogmas as that of the Trinity. How the recognition of the sacramental acts of the latter group by the former differs from magic is opaque to the Orthodox theologian as any Orthodox theory on orders can be to a Westerner. The quasi-catholic ministries are those of the Churches of Sweden and of England, together with the rapidly proliferating derivatives of the latter in the English-speaking countries, the Orient, the Philippines, “Lusitania,” and South India.

No protestations of Catholicity on the part of such quasi-catholics can conceal the fact that they have not taken the canonical (and other) means at their disposal for repudiating and dissociating themselves from bishops in communion with them who have publicly discarded the faith and practice of the undivided Church. (Publications of Anglo-Catholic societies can still act as though Swedish bishops are valid, and no distinction is made between those who ordain priestesses and those who do not.) No protestations of Catholicity can conceal the general voting in many quasi-catholic bodies to recognize the validity of episcopal ordinations in bodies (for example, the Church of South India) whose very constitutions rule out the first type of necessary intention mentioned above, bodies that refuse to commit themselves to the belief that bishops are a separate order of the ministry, let alone a sacramental, sacrificial, and necessary one.

The Orthodox theologian is nonplussed to understand how the South Indian position can be squared with the Protestant doctrine of faith, not to speak of the ancient doctrine of intention. As for Anglicans, the Orthodox would prefer to see less time spent on defending the validity of their Ordinal to the Papalists and more time concentrated on the second type of intention. It is the latter, the intention of the ordainer and the ordained, that becomes questionable, when either has publicly repudiated the faith of the undivided Church, or when sermons or other official statements at ordinations have the same effect for the service as a whole.

The time is at hand for Orthodoxy to disabuse quasi-catholics of the notion that their position is compatible with Orthodoxy. The ecumenical hope is imperiled less by the clear positions of Protestants or Roman Catholics who differ from us, than by the rapidly proliferating twilight world of questionable episcopates. Further, the Orthodox can scarcely make a distinction between authenticatable bishops and inauthenticatable ones which is not recognized by the quasi-catholics themselves. Past experience makes it extremely doubtful that the latter will disavow the sacramental acts of any of the thirty-two prominent signatories of the famous Open Letter [4] to the archbishops of the Church of England, in the not unlikely event that any of the latter should be elevated to the episcopate. And yet this letter energetically maintains that non-episcopally ordained ministers exercise quite as priestly a ministry as the signers themselves (even though no Protestant minister claims the sacrificial functions of traditional Catholic theology) and that the “historic episcopate” is no more than an important expression of, and the best means to effect, ecclesiastical unity.

Our loyalty to the ancient faith and practice of Christianity demand that we take a stand. The impression of latitudinarianism on essentials should be avoided and our witness not compromised. But it is not just in matters of sacramental authenticity, that we can set an example to others. Indeed, Orthodoxy turns men’s attention away from technicalities to their higher meaning—and this is one advantage of “authenticity” over “validity”—to the unity and continuity of the earthly Church with the heavenly, and beyond that to the wholeness of sanctity flowing out of Our Lord’s Resurrection and the power of the Divine Spirit. If the Church’s sacramental nature as the continuation of the Incarnation is acknowledged, the comparatively lesser beliefs will follow. For how could such a continuity be real except as existing in both of the orders of reality wedded in the Incarnation? In the spiritual order the Church’s continuity is realized in the holy tradition, headed by, and flowing out of, the Scriptures. In the temporal realm her continuity is realized in the sacramental succession of the episcopal priesthood.

To those who would confuse the juridical or hierarchical function of bishops with their sacramental and sacerdotal essence (and perhaps most Protestant writers commend or reject episcopacy purely as a good or bad form of polity), Orthodoxy displays a system in which each order has its proper function. The laity take charge of the temporalities of parishes, and even the decisions of ecumenical councils are held by the Orthodox to require their acceptance by the whole body of the faithful, including the laity, in order to be infallible. A lay theologian is as acceptable to an Orthodox seminary as a clerical one. And indeed the priestly function toward God is not confused with the teaching function towards men. But the confusion of preacher or teacher with “priest” in Protestant theology is only slightly less bewildering than the confusion between word and sacraments exemplified in the custom of placing Bibles on “altars.”

We may now summarize the Orthodox position on orders. To advocate or acknowledge authenticity apart from unity would make no sense. If the reality or validity of grace among those who are apart from us need not be denied, it is also not to be authenticated. (This statement also displays the utility of the concept of “authenticity,” in contrast with that of validity.”) The Orthodox demand for sacramental acts to take place within the bounds of the original Church and with full, rather than partial, fidelity to her faith and practice represents the ideal of unity and excludes Donatism and magic alike.

 

NOTES

1. The Greek Orthodox Theological Review, III (1957), 182-96 and IV (1958), 44-65.

2. Chrestos Androutsos, Dogmatikè tês orthodoxou anatolikês ekklesias (2d ed.; Athens: Aster, 1956), p. 305.

3. Cf. A. A. Hodge, Outlines of Theology (rev. ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1957), p. 598.

4. Reprinted in The Modern Churchman, V, N.S. (1962), 126-28. The signers maintain that “many” Anglicans agree with them and that such views are consonant with the official formularies of their Church. Some of these signers are also contributors to A. R. Vidler (ed.), Soundings: Essays Concerning Christian Understanding (Cambridge: The University Press, 1962), a book of no small importance for understanding the position of these scholars.