Porto Alegre's Redefinition of Ecumenism and the Transformation of Orthodoxy

Antoine Arjakovsky

The following article by Antoine Arjakovsky, originally published in The Ecumenical Review, Vol. 58, Nos. 3–4 (July–October 2006), pp. 265–279, is reproduced for the purpose of examining the theological and ecclesiological implications of the contemporary ecumenical movement. Bold emphasis has been added by the editor to draw attention to passages of particular significance for traditional Orthodox ecclesiology. The author's original text has otherwise been preserved. – Blog Admin.

 

 

Dr Antoine Arjakovsky, an Orthodox layman originally from France, holds a doctorate from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is Director of the Institute of Ecumenical Studies at the Catholic University, Lvov, Ukraine.

 

God, in your grace, transform the world...

Transform us in the offering of ourselves so that we may be your partners in transformation                                                        

to strive for the full, visible unity of the one Church of Jesus Christ,

to become neighbours to all,

as we await with eager longing the full revelation of your rule

in the coming of a new heaven and a new earth.

God, in your grace, transform the world.

In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

 

- The Message of the Ninth Assembly of the WCC

 

There has certainly been real ecumenical progress at Porto Alegre in the form of consensus decision-making, the adoption of the recommendations of the Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the WCC, the adoption of substantial documents, particularly in the area of ecclesiology, overall organization at a highly professional level, the warm welcome by the Christians of the host country, the support shown by President Lula of Brazil, and many church leaders, and much more.

There are, however, some outstanding questions, and it now falls to those elected to the central committee to work on them. And the new central committee meeting in Geneva in September 2006 turned its attention to the seven WCC programme areas: The WCC and the Ecumenical Movement; Unity, Mission and Spirituality; Public Witness: addressing power and affirming peace; Justice and Diakonia; Ecumenical and Faith Formation; Inter-religious Dialogue and Cooperation; and Communications: giving voice and witness in the world.

The foremost question, for me, however, is this: did we really hear at Porto Alegre the call of the Spirit for the conversion of our churches? Will the redefinition of ecumenism sketched out at Porto Alegre encourage the Orthodox to redefine themselves? Are the Orthodox also prepared to be transformed as they are touched by grace, the grace of encountering others?

I have decided to write this report from a personal perspective. First of all, because, although I am a member of a number of Orthodox associations, this article represents only my personal viewpoint. But, most of all, because at Porto Alegre, as I listened to Archbishop Anastasios of Albania, Archbishop Rowan Williams, Dr Norberto Saracco and Cardinal Walter Kasper, I found myself lifted up to a higher plane where academic theology is not separate from ecumenism as it is actually lived. Six months on, it is still difficult to come down from those heights.

Progress made at the Ninth Assembly

There was a fear before the assembly that the WCC, by holding its assembly on the campus of the Pontifical Catholic University, the venue of the World Social Forum in past years, might succumb to the often naive siren voices of antiglobalist ideology. But Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin put a stop to that temptation. Even though anti-globalist thinking can be given a Christian interpretation (as was seen in the testimony by Vera Araujo on the economic experiment of the Focolari movement), as a representative from a former communist country, he said in effect that the Church cannot afford the luxury of indulging in new ideologies. It must work with international institutions such as the WTO and the World Bank and transform them from within. This is already being actively--and successfully--done by APRODEV with the European Commission in Brussels thanks to the efforts of Robert van Drimmelen, a former WCC staff member.

The consensus process has perhaps been a useful safeguard against a drift into utopianism. This way of making decisions that takes the views of everyone into account does not result in a decision based on the lowest common denominator but in the maximum of truth in the Spirit. Its aim is to rediscover, after five centuries of parliamentary methods, the spirit of the Apostles' Council in Jerusalem. Jill Tabart explains in her book Coming to Consensus [1] that the process of parliamentary decision-making in an adversarial way, by means of majority vote, was actually only formalized in 1583 in Thomas Smyth's Lex Republica Anglorum. The time has now come, mainly for reasons of long-term effectiveness, for the churches to present a new decision-making model. The aim is not to gain victory over others by means of argument, but to "engage in a process of discernment in which God's will is sought by mutual attentive listening to the views of each one". In this way diverse views ensure a successful outcome, since all share a common belief. Towards the end of the assembly this decision-making by consensus proved fruitful. But the future success of the ecumenical movement depends first and foremost on the spiritual strength of its members, and that is a double-edged sword.

The ecclesiology text Called to Be the One Church is more a convergence text than a consensus text. It does, however, have the merit of directing the movement for Christian unity towards new horizons at a time when many are talking of a crisis in the ecumenical movement. In effect, it asks each church to state "the quality and degree of their fellowship and communion, and ... the issues which still divide them". The Church is a 'who' and not a 'what', as also appears in the Faith and Order text The Nature and the Mission of the Church [2]. It is thus normal for it to have different levels of awareness and embodiment, all of them necessary, all of them worthy of respect, and with ways of doing things appropriate to each level.

The ecumenical movement can thus be understood as a vertical spiral, able to be loose at the base (like the Global Christian Forum, provided that it shares the spirit of the WCC) and much tighter at the top (with--and why not?--the blessing of local inter-communion, when the bishops are satisfied that there is spiritual communion). The ecumenical movement is here in perfect harmony with the current search aiming to promote local ecumenism [3]. That will also be one of the major concerns of the European Ecumenical Assembly at Sibiu in September 2007. Dr Peter Bouteneff, of St Vladimir's Institute, opened up the way for this on the Orthodox side, when he stated at the Rhodes Consultation in 2005, retracing a whole tradition of Orthodox thinking from St Basil the Great to Father Sergei Bulgakov, that the Orthodox churches should change their attitude towards their ecumenical partners [4].

WCC theologians thus desire to allow the churches individually to take steps forward on important issues such as: common observance of the date of Easter, holding a joint ecumenical council with the Roman Catholic Church, and mutual recognition of baptism, eucharist and ministry. It is, of course, unrealistic at the present stage to hope for rapid progress towards eucharistic unity between the Russian Orthodox Church and the Neo-Pentecostal communities of Brazil! None the less, locally, Christian churches can work very actively together. In Moscow there is a Catholic-Orthodox cultural centre, which functions very harmoniously. In Ukraine, there is a Christian academic association, where university personnel from the Catholic, Greek-Catholic and Orthodox churches (from the three jurisdictions) meet together in peace.

For the first time in the history of WCC assemblies, the Orthodox have declared their full support for the decisions of the assembly. This more relaxed attitude in the Orthodox world comes as the result of the work of the Special Commission on Orthodox Participation in the WCC, which cleared the ground in 1999-2002, particularly by its insistence on the issue of ecclesiology, by initiating the process introducing decision-making by consensus, and by making a clear distinction between confessional and interconfessional common prayer. Tribute should here be paid to the notable work of the Special Commission and to its co-moderators, Metropolitan Gennadios of Sassima (who replaced Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Ephesus) and Bishop Rolf Koppe [5].

Outstanding issues

There remain, of course, outstanding issues after Porto Alegre. How will the WCC now put into practice its new vision of the Church? What are the issues that theologians must now work on to encourage the expansion of the ecumenical movement? How will the WCC be able to continue to develop with a budget more than 40% of which depends on the Evangelical Church in Germany, whose financial contribution is being reduced? What are the challenges facing the Orthodox churches who take seriously their involvement in the WCC?

Putting the new vision into practice

Regarding the first question, it would seem to me to be logical in the first place for the central committee to work on ways of encouraging those churches that genuinely seek to be more closely involved with the WCC as a fellowship of sister churches. The WCC must be logical in its aims. Now, a neutral stance, or one that treats everybody equally, would lead to stagnation. By contrast, if churches succeed in demonstrating that in the course of the past years they have entered into a certain number of agreements of mutual recognition (from the most basic level of recognizing that dialogue with such or such an ecclesial community is a possibility, to the most advanced level of mutual recognition of ministries), then the WCC should gradually devote more time and means to the projects of churches proportionately to the results achieved [6].

That would certainly have the effect of further encouraging those churches that had made most progress in dialogue, while at the same time respecting the caution of those churches who are now setting out on the journey of discovering one another's unity in the faith. It could be imagined that, where doctrinal agreements have already been reached (as in the case of the Chalcedonian and Pre-Chalcedonian Orthodox churches), that policy would encourage church leaders to take further steps towards even closer relationships.

It would also be logical to expect that after Porto Alegre the WCC would make a particular effort at education. In fact, the consensus method could run the risk of seeming to be a device used by rich countries in those countries that do not know even the most elementary democratic procedures. It is, however, a technique that can be adapted to any context, provided that it is taught and learned there. The Ecumenical Institute at Bossey could play a major role with the theological formation desk of the WCC in this task of communicating knowledge.

I have not seen any proposal for ecumenical distance learning in the WCC programmes. At the Institute for Ecumenical Studies at Lvov, we are currently setting up a programme of distance learning for our master's degree in ecumenics, which is internationally recognized. Would it be possible for us also to contribute, with WCC help, to the formation of leaders skilled in consensus methods in the countries of the former Soviet Union?

Regarding the reception of the Porto Alegre documents, as a basic condition for effective implementation of the decisions taken there, it seems to me that the WCC needs to rethink the way in which some of its commissions work. They could become places where ecumenical spaces are created and opened up, rather than simply driving forces devoted to spreading the idea of ecumenism. The role of Faith and Order could be reassessed, if its Commission were reorganized as a body that gathers, collates, analyses, synthesizes and distributes much more regularly to the member churches the present state of 'levels of awareness' within the Una Sancta.

In this regard, one cannot but rejoice at the recent decision of the Faith and Order Standing Commission to nominate Bishop Vasilios (Karayiannis) of Trimithus as its moderator. He hopes to take forward, together with Dr Tom Best, important issues such as the date of Easter, the celebration in 2007 of the 25th anniversary of the document Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, and the one hundredth anniversary of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity in 2008. This will make the work of Faith and Order more widely accessible to a greater number of people. Moreover, the new programmes set up by the WCC central committee, such as 'Faith, Science and Technology', are fine examples of ecumenical thinking turning its attention to all spheres of life.

This new vision will give theologians the opportunity to be much closer to day-to-day ecumenical issues, to appreciate ecumenical activities regarded as somewhat irregular that cannot easily be fitted into WCC categories (such as mixed marriages, professional associations, lay ecumenical communities, etc.) and to communicate to the media much more consistently and convincingly the many examples of fruitful cooperation between Christians, instead of the all too often simplistic presentation of existing divisions. This will also give the WCC the opportunity to have access to a greater number of theologians, now that networking of ideas and initiatives can take place via the Internet. Such a fresh approach will finally help theologians to shed the somewhat negative image of being obstructionist and getting nowhere that they have gained in people's minds in many churches!

This follow-up of agreements reached and their incorporation into programmes, this more widely accessible and better recognized education programme and this popularization of theological research would enable everyone to understand better where the causes are to be found for the unjustifiable lack of love between our churches.

New themes and new approaches

The above proposals enable us to reply more easily to the second question on future issues to be considered. As I see it, priority ought to be given to everything that makes it possible for us to go beyond a way of thinking that thinks only at world level. Our churches could cease clinging to their confessional identities, if traditional ontological theology were to be replaced by a theology of love. This theology, aspired to by Benedict XVI (Deus caritas est), Geoffrey Wainwright (Doxology) and Christos Yannaras (Essai sur le Cantique des Cantiques), is contextual but not relativist. Its starting point is persons and their experience, and it concludes, against all canon law arguments that, when two or three are gathered in his name, Christ is in their midst.

That is why I hope and pray for an ecumenical theology of marriage, an ecumenical theology of economics, an ecumenical theology of the liturgical calendar, etc. I also believe that our recent ethical problems could benefit from being exposed to such theologies. That does not, of course, mean that the Church should give equal recognition to everybody, nor that it should downgrade its vision of the kingdom. We all have our particular enthusiasms. But such a theology would remind the world of the power of God's mercy. The gospel indeed declares that the Father causes the sun to rise on the farthermost corners of the earth.

It is my dream also that the churches that enthusiastically received the speeches of Archbishop Anastasios of Tirana and Archbishop Rowan Williams pleading for a humble Christian self-identity, will explore the theme of the Wisdom of God as a possible key to inter-religious dialogue. Serious consideration of the biblical figure of the Wisdom of God as a personal reality and not simply as a divine attribute (sophiology) makes possible a rapprochement with Islamic mysticism, Jewish spirituality, and even Asian traditions. In the Koran it is written that Jesus was taught Wisdom by Allah. For Jews, the Torah is nothing less than the Wisdom of God. Finally, following Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians, where he describes Wisdom as polypoikilos, i.e. manifold, dialogue is a possibility with Hinduism and Buddhism. [7]

It would also be good to see the WCC (as Bishop Vasilios Karayiannis advocates) more consistently following up certain documents, such as Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry, of course, but also the 1997 Aleppo document "Towards a common date for Easter". It so happens that on 8 April 2007 we shall be granted once again, by God's universal mercy, the opportunity to celebrate Easter together. Does that not give us an opportunity to fix once and for all the observance of Easter by all Christians on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the northern spring equinox, moving it by one week if the date coincides with the Jewish Passover, following the other recommendation of the Council Fathers in 325? [8]

Was not the decision by the Council of Nicea to fix a common date for Easter for all Christians according to the lunar calendar determined primarily by a desire to indicate that Christ's resurrection reached to the farthest ends of the created world? The 318 Fathers solved the long-standing conflict with Pope Anicetus, not by astronomical proof, but by taking a joint decision in openness to the Holy Spirit's leading.

Church leaders would gain much credibility in the eyes of the faithful if they managed to persuade their synods to observe Easter in that way. Of course, some groups will continue to observe Easter according to their own calendar. That has always happened and, to an extent, that can be accepted by the majority of the faithful, for the resurrection of Christ is unique and is celebrated as such every Sunday. But the bishops who have accepted the WCC agenda, the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity and the synaxis of the Orthodox churches will not be able to be criticized by the faithful. On the contrary, the responsibility for a possible schism would rest on the shoulders of those Christians unwilling to manifest the visible unity of the body of Christ for the life of the world.

Challenges for the Orthodox churches

Whatever may have been the reasons given to justify the absence of a common eucharist at Porto Alegre, one fact stands: the Orthodox churches, despite the pressing requests of Christophe d'Aloisio, the President of Syndesmos (the World Fellowship of Orthodox Youth), were not able to concelebrate. At a time when the whole world is witnessing growing rivalry in the leadership race between Moscow and Constantinople, that only reinforces the impression that the Orthodox world is passing through a serious crisis. There is no end to the disputes between the two churches: the non-recognition of the Orthodox Church in America, the struggle to take over parishes in Western Europe, the setting up of parishes of the Ecumenical Patriarchate (Constantinople) in Estonia, and even in Ukraine, etc.

Moreover, the process of reconciliation between the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Church in diaspora, one of the church bodies originating in Orthodoxy which is most opposed to the ecumenical movement, is giving rise to a number of problems. Is it possible for the same church both to be associated with a body opposed to any common prayer with non-Orthodox, and also to have voted four months previously for all the decisions taken by the WCC assembly?

Finally, how is it possible for certain Orthodox theologians--although there is no unanimity here, as is shown by the example of the mixed French Catholic-Orthodox Commission--to condemn the Eastern Catholic churches when they express the wish to be recognized by Rome as local churches in communion with other Orthodox churches? [9] How can they on this point be divided among themselves--as has been shown by Professor John Erickson [10]--on the issue of autonomy and autocephalicity, which is recognized in the Tradition of the Church?

These questions, which must not be evaded, lead me to go back to the probing comment made to the Orthodox by Dr Mary Tanner at the conclusion of the work of the Special Commission. She said, "Is there a place in your ecclesiology for other churches?" [11] Is Orthodox ecclesiology compatible with participation in the ecumenical movement? As many eminent Orthodox theologians present at Porto Alegre think--I am thinking of Bishop Hilarion (Alfeyev) of Vienna, Fr Heikki Huttunen, Fr Viorel Ionita, Fr Emmanuel Clapsis, and others--has the time not come for us to admit that a great number of heresies, hiding beneath a cloak of apophatism, have accumulated in the course of the years of persecution suffered by the Orthodox?

The need to redefine Orthodoxy

To arrive at an answer to those questions, we need to make a short excursus into contemporary Orthodox theological thinking. But, first of all, academic honesty and spiritual humility demand that we admit clearly that the Orthodox world is passing through a deep crisis, both as regards unity and more generally as regards its spiritual strength. The representatives of the Orthodox churches at their meeting at Rhodes in January 2005 admitted as much in the prayer that they produced: "In your Son, our Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, You have renewed us. Yet we continue to deny this gift. We fall away, and need to be called back in repentance. We have distanced ourselves from you: do not remember our sinfulness!" [12]

The authors of that prayer were not writing abstract elegant language but were acknowledging publicly the sins of historic Orthodoxy. Peter Bouteneff, professor at St Vladimir's Orthodox Theological Seminary, expressed the wish that, once rationalism had been condemned, Orthodox theology might become more 'kataphatic'. Anne Glynn-Mackoul, an Orthodox American lawyer, suggested that Orthodox should shed their constant stance of being the victims of one Babylonian captivity or another. If that repentance is sincere, an in-depth investigation, illumined by the Spirit, into the foundations of Orthodox identity will again become possible.

Orthodox historiography regards the history of the Church as only possible if we admit that the Church itself is a personal reality embracing the whole of history. The divine/human nature of time gives an understanding of how historical narrative is itself in evolution. Our attitude to the past is coloured by our experience of the present and of the future.

To see this, we only have to compare Istoria Religii (The History of Religions) by Father Alexander Eltchaninoff, written in collaboration with Pavel Florensky and Vladimir Ern [13] at the beginning of the 20th century, with The Orthodox Church [14] written by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware in 1963. In the course of the 20th century Orthodox historiography became less ethnic and more open about its plural identity--Russian, Greek and Arab.

However, despite all their efforts, historians of Orthodoxy in the 1960s did not fully succeed in making universal their narrative of the 'historic journey of Orthodoxy'. Fr Alexander Schmemann has failed to explain how it was that after the 1054 schism Western Christianity became heterodox overnight. Olivier Clement in his admirable Byzance et christianisme (Byzantium and Christianity) does do justice to the orthodoxy of Western Christianity up to the Council of Florence and thus extricates Orthodoxy from its tradition of being culturally restricted to the Russian and Byzantine empires. But, in his 1961 essay on L'Eglise Orthodoxe [15] (The Orthodox Church), he fails to be convincing when he states that the crisis of modernity affecting the Orthodox Church in the West has not changed the apostolicity of the Orthodox Church in the East. While there is a clear physical continuity from the church of the apostles to the church in the East, the historic continuity is not always obvious between the Acts of the Apostles and the Pidalion, the manual of canon law of the Greek Church.

Today the idea of orthodoxy has become synonymous in the eyes of the public and the media with a rigid and even fundamentalist attitude. It has thus been devalued and has lost the proper significance that it has acquired in the history of Christianity.

However, this significance proper to Orthodox Christianity has itself been exaggerated in the modern and contemporary age, most often by Christians themselves, to the point of its taking on a new and exclusive meaning. A recent work contains the following definition: "The concept of 'Orthodoxy' describes that group of Eastern churches originating in the Byzantine tradition and in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople." So, those who are not fortunate enough to belong to a church in the Byzantine tradition, or those belonging to that tradition who do not live exclusively in communion with that second Rome, are obliged to choose between assured salvation and a false definition!

This view of orthodoxy as exclusive is, in most cases, not deliberate. It is mainly, as I see it, the result of muddled thinking. The monopolization of orthodoxy and its exclusive identification by one single Christian church creates many problems, for it is unacceptable from an Orthodox perspective to turn the Orthodox faith into a concept or an institution. It is not justifiable to dissociate the idea of Christian orthodoxy (with a small 'o')--however radical it might be--from the living tradition of the Orthodox Church. In both cases, that means that we need to present the history of the Orthodox Church as being orthodox and to describe orthodox Christianity as tending towards Christian Orthodoxy.

Fr Andre Borrely, a French theologian of Orthodox confession, gave an open definition of Orthodoxy in a lecture at the Institute for Ecumenical Studies at Lvov in November 2004:

“There is an historical fact that should give Orthodox cause for thought and that is that the Ancient Church did not rebaptize Arians. In fact the seventh canon of the Second Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 381 decided that, after renouncing their heresy in writing, Arians were to be marked or anointed with holy chrism in the form of a cross on their forehead, their eyes, their nose, their mouth and their ears.

“Not to rebaptize someone who has already received baptism is a recognition that there is orthodoxy beyond the visible perceivable boundaries of the Orthodox Church. It is an admission that, while nothing heterodox exists in the lex credendi or the lex orandi, the teaching or the worship, of the Orthodox Church, the whole of Orthodoxy is not contained within the visible perceivable boundaries of the Orthodox Church.

“Truths are firmly believed, realities are intensely experienced, and acts--often heroic acts--are sometimes performed that are truly Orthodox, although situated outside the visible boundaries of the Orthodox Church. The belief and the worship of the Orthodox Church comprise all that is contained in the definition of Orthodoxy, but more than one of the constituent parts of Orthodoxy can and must be discerned in the faith and worship of Christians outside the empirical boundaries of the Orthodox Church.

“Philosophically speaking, I would say that the concept of Orthodoxy is more comprehensive than that of the Orthodox Church.” [16]

It is thus preferable to define Orthodoxy as a symbolic idea representing two realities. On the one hand, the term 'orthodoxy' designates a way of acting that is a manifestation of the life of the Church, a way of thinking specific to the Christian revelation, and a way of organizing a community in conformity with the Beatitudes. On the other hand, the word 'orthodoxy' also signifies a self-awareness, a specific identity marked by the striving of a community towards the Orthodox Kingdom as it is represented.

Orthodoxy is thus not something that one possesses or does not possess. That is why the history of Orthodoxy is not static. It is the story of the mystic life of the Bride and the Lamb and the consequent striving of Christian communities to attain it. The history of Orthodoxy extends beyond the orthodox self-awareness of a particular church at a given time. It is the narrative which brings together the life of the mystery of the Church and the activities, sometimes faithful, sometimes faithless, of the churches, all of which are striving towards orthodoxy in their belief.

There is thus a spiritual, European history of Orthodoxy, which does not present the Body of Christ as a railway track with forks and sidings. That sort of approach is often governed by pseudo-legal or pseudo-theological a priori thinking. I think of the concept of canonical territorial jurisdictions, which is insufficiently linked with the pastoral care that we see in early church tradition. Such thinking is often merely the result of a simple misunderstanding of other people, resentment, or indeed nothing more than sheer human arbitrariness.

To take the example of the tradition of hesychasm, which to the Orthodox seems so typically Orthodox, Father Andre Louf has demonstrated at a seminar at the Bose Community in Italy that the West too has experience of the quest for solitude and silence, the practice of continuous prayer and openness to the divine energies. According to him, Nil de la Sora and Guillaume de Saint Thierry are very close to each other. It is also known that St Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain owes much to St Ignatius Loyola, just as Bossuet read Nicolas Cabasilas widely. The spirituality of inner monasticism of someone such as Paul Evdokimov was also prepared over a long period by the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul.

That is why an attempt can be made to reinterpret the ages of Orthodox identity as follows. Orthodoxy has been understood and lived historically in four ways:

The first age, from the time of the early Christian communities to the conversion of Constantine in 312, was when Christianity was experienced eschatologically, essentially in expectation of the return of Christ. Then Orthodoxy was understood as simply glorification. [17]

The second age, from 312 to the failure of the Council of Florence in 1439, was when Christianity was lived politically, with Christians as participants in the building of an earthly city. Then Orthodoxy was understood as the correct truth, authentic belief. [18]

The third age, from 1439 to 1918, was when Christianity was lived confessionally, through Christians' belonging in a particular territory to a universal church. Then Orthodoxy was understood as faithful memory, beyond the conflict between faith and reason. [19]

Finally, the fourth age is when Christianity is lived 'sapientially', i.e. as a way of life attempting to give adequate expression to its faith and its works. Now Orthodoxy is experienced as new life in Christ by the Spirit. [20] In this sense, orthodoxy means catholicity, participation in the whole triune divine life. Understood as striving towards the orthopraxis of the Kingdom, Orthodoxy is also rediscovering, beyond all the mistakes and tentativeness of the historic churches, the prophetic sense of the Reformation as a return to the living Tradition and of the Counter-Reformation as a defence of the primacy of Peter.

This pragmatic approach enables us to include non-confessional orthodoxy within the history of Orthodoxy. It also allows confessional Orthodoxy to purify its memory of the dross of the past. This pragmatic approach, this Jacob's ladder of Christian awareness, provides a paradigm for the plan of history in general but needs also to be seen in the context of its age, of religious communities and of individuals.

Seen in this Christian perspective, the history of Orthodoxy holds many surprises for those who have ears to hear. History becomes the power of the resurrection. Ecclesiology becomes a discovery of the angelic hosts. Theology ceases to be the defence of a fortress but becomes an invitation to spiritual adventure.

Conclusion

By stating loud and clear that, beyond all confessional allegiance, its profound identity is life in Christ in the Holy Spirit, the Orthodox world could allow the whole of the Christian world to reach out anew towards Orthodoxy. No one could accuse the Orthodox church of unhealthy proselytism, but all would rejoice in enjoying its blessing. As WCC theologians write in the document The Nature and the Mission of the Church, "The Spirit given to the Church is the Spirit of the Lordship of Christ over all creation and all times. The Church is called to remove all obstacles to the full embodiment of what is already its nature by the power of the Holy Spirit." [21]

Time is short. As Rev. Dr Walter Altmann, WCC central committee moderator, said at its meeting in Geneva in September 2006, the decision after the Porto Alegre Assembly by the Brazilian Methodist Church to withdraw from the National Council of Christian Churches in Brazil shows that there are real tensions between the churches. The political situation in the Middle East is a reminder to Christians of how much their witness, in the full sense of the word, will be necessary to avoid a fresh conflict between all fundamentalisms. During the recent conflict the peace-making role at the United Nations of Dr Tarek Mitri, the present Minister of Culture of the Lebanese government and the former WCC staff member responsible for inter-faith dialogue, provides ample evidence of this.

In order to solve the institutional problems facing the ecumenical movement, Rev. Dr Samuel Kobia, the WCC general secretary, has ventured to speak of 'friendship' to the central committee members. It could well be possible that this rediscovery of the idea of friendship, of the depth of meaning in Christ's words "I have called you friends" (John 15:15) will prove to be the surest path towards the kingdom for the ship of the ecumenical movement.

 

Translated from the French, Language Service, World Council of Churches.

 

[1] Jill Tabart, Coming to Consensus, A Case Study for the Churches, Geneva, WCC, 2003.

[2] "The biblical images already treated as well as others as the flock (John 10:16), the vine (Isa. 5, John 15), the bride of Christ (Rev. 21:2, Eph. 5:25-32), God's house (Heb. 3:1-6) and the holy city the new Jerusalem (Rev. 21:2), evoke the nature and the quality of the relationship of God's people, to one another and to the created order.", The Nature and Mission of the Church, Geneva, WCC, 2005, pp. 22-23.

[3] Le partage eucharistique est possible, theses sur l'hospitalite eucharistique, (Eucharistic sharing is possible, theses on eucharistic hospitality), Centre d'Etudes CEcumeniques (Strasbourg), Institut de recherches oecumeniques (Tubingen), Institut de Recherches Confessionnelles (Bensheim), Fribourg, Academic Press, 2005.

[4] Peter Bouteneff, Looking Towards the Future: Ecclesiological Implications and Challenges of the Special Commission Report, Grace in Abundance, Orthodox Reflections on the Way to Porto Alegre, pp. 92-99.

[5] For myself, I was impressed by the quality of the interconfessional common prayer at the Assembly. In my Porto Alegre diary for 18 February I wrote: This morning, at the interconfessional common prayer in the great tent where twice a day there gather 4,000 representatives from all Christian confessions from some one hundred countries from around the world, Peruvian music accompanied an Australian prayer, read by the worship leader:

"God of wandering camels and faraway places, Of remote red gorges and Aboriginal faces; God of deep silences and awesome setting sun, Of the moonlit plains and dingoes on the run; ... God of immense horizons and blowing sand; Confront us and teach us within this cryptic land."

The crowd then prayed a traditional Urdu prayer 'Khudaya raeham kar, Khudaya raeham', meaning 'Lord, have mercy on us'. At the end of the time of prayer, while Brazilian drums rolled, a smiling young woman presented me with a sunflower. I find this 'world spirituality' deeply moving. There is no trace of New Age in it, but rather a sense of purity, of mountain-top experiences. On the other hand Lydia d'Aloisio makes me double up with laughter when she tells me about the Bible study she had attended the previous day (and there was no maliciousness in her story just the comedy of cultural dissonance). A woman in green dungarees read Bible verses out loud and invited the particpants to hum "ahumm" while moving from foot to foot! Really you can find everything in the ecumenical movement.

[6] I am very pleased that the WCC finances so many social initiatives (such as help for people with HIV, support for minorities and for the poor etc ...). But does the WCC have any indicators which allow for an evaluation of the "added value", the long term effects and results obtained through programmes financed by the churches compared with the state or NGO programmes? Robert van Drimmelen proposed that the WCC ask the churches to supply reports of the state of development in their own countries.

[7] Dominique Cerbelaud, Ecouter Israel, une theoloqie chretienne en dialogue, (Listening to Israel, a Christian theology in dialogue), Paris, Cerf, 1995. The deepest and most thorough attempt to think about Wisdom from an ecumenical and inter-religious perspective that I know of is that made by Father Sergius Boulgakov in his book L'Epouse de l'Agneau (The Bride of the Lamb), Paris, YMCA Press, 1944. Cf. Antoine Arjakovsky, Essai sur le pere Serge Boulgakov, philosophe et theologien chretien, Paris, Parole et Silence, 2006.

[8] Taking the Jerusalem meridian as the reference point.

[9] On this question of the ecclesiology of the Eastern Catholic churches see also, Antoine Arjakovsky, Entretiens avec le cardinal Lubomyr Husar, Paris, Parole et Silence, 2005.

[10] John Erickson, The Challenge of our Past, Crestwood, SVSP, 1991, chap VII.

[11] Mary Tanner, "The significance of the Special Commission", Grace in Abundance, op. cit., p. 117.

[12] Report of the Consultation, Grace in Abundance, op. cit., p. 9.

[13] A. Eltchaninoff, V. Ern, P. Florensky, Istoria Religii, Moskva, Ruski Put', 2004 (1909).

[14] T. Ware, The Orthodox Church, updated ed., Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1993.

[15] Olivier Clement, L'Eglise Orthodoxe, Paris, PUF, (1961), 1985, p. 5.

[16] www.ucu.edu.ua/fr

[17] For instance we know that 'doxa' is the translation used in the Septuagint for the Hebrew term 'kabod' which means glory of God.

[18] This definition can be found in the patristic writings from the time of the Arian controversy onwards.

[19] In Poland identification is even made between the Orthodox world and the world of the pravoverny (those who have true faithfulness).

[20] This quotes a definition of Orthodoxy given by Sergius Boulgakov on the first page of his book L'Orthodoxie, (Orthodoxy) published in Paris in 1931. This definition is reinforced later in the book.

[21] The Nature and the Mission of the Church, op. cit., p. 32.

 

Source: The Ecumenical Review, Volume 58, Issue 3‐4, July‐October 2006, pages 265-279.