Fr. Thomas Hopko on "Are Protestants in the Church?"
The following question
was asked by me (Patrick Barnes) at a lecture given by Fr. Hopko on November
2, 1996 at the Greek Orthodox Church of the Assumption, Seattle, WA. I have
highlighted the areas that caused a stir here in Seattle amongst those who are
aware of what our Tradition teaches. The most unfortunate thing about his answer
was the fact that he explicitly stated (as he always does when he speaks) that
he never teaches his opinion but only
clear and irrefutable dogma. His views, however, are at
best heavily disputed by others within the Church (at
worst, completely wrong, even opposite
to what our Tradition teaches—see,
for example, his definition of economy, below). After doing some research I
discovered that his opinions had been answered in print years ago. Many
articles have been written showing the weakness of his position. He is therefore quite
aware of the fact that many in the Church find his views unTraditional.
Q: If I (speaking as a Protestant) have put
on Christ through baptism (Gal. 3:27), and thus am a member of
His Body (Eph. 5:30), and if His Body = the Church (Eph.
1:22-23), then am I not also a member of the Church? And if the
Orthodox Church is the "one True Church," how can I not
be a member of it?
Hopko: The answer depends on how one uses the
term "church"; you need to know that this term has been
used in a variety of ways throughout church history. For example,
sometimes it is used as the object of our faith [in the Creed]
that we believe in, that has a human-theandric form as a
concrete historical reality; or, you can have the term
"church" simply as a group of people, you know, like
this parish, or this or that church, or the OCA, etc., which has
more of a sociological connotation. In recent times, particularly
in the ecumenical movement, the Orthodox did not want to use the
term "church" except for itself; because, they
reasoned, we know that this is the Church, and technically
speaking, if you are going to use the term as the object of that
which we believe in, and it has a human-theandric form [the
definition of the Church flowing from the definition of
Christ—one Person in two natures (see the Chalcedonian
Definition of 451)—because the Church is His Body. PMB],
then I do not believe in the Lutheran "Church" and I do
not believe in the Anglican "Church" and I do not
believe in the Roman Catholic "Church", I believe in
the Church that is the Orthodox Church, and we don’t want to
confuse people with a wrong use of this term. And therefore,
using the term in this way, you would have to speak of
non-Orthodox as being outside of the Church.
But you would have to immediately follow this
with a qualifier that this does not mean they are excluded from
knowing God, doing good, etc.; we just don’t want to use the
term "Church" with those various groups of people
because we don’t believe technically that it is the
Church because it is not in the apostolic succession through
history, because the Church is not a Platonic ideal or an
invisible reality, it’s an absolutely historic, concrete,
continuous reality. And so we know where it is; you can trace it
through history. Thus, if you are going to use the term
in that way you must be ready to say that there are Christians
outside of the Church, that their baptism can be a real baptism,
that God really acts there. If a person in good faith
believes in Jesus as their Lord, gets baptized into His
death and follows the Scriptures, we Orthodox are not
going to say, "oh nothing happened, that Mother Theresa or
the Pope are just a couple of heathens, etc." So how one
answers your question depends on the use of the terms. The terms
must be defined.
Other people would use the terms this way: the
churches which clearly and historically do hold to the
apostolic tradition, that is the main apostolic sacraments and
teachings, could somehow be considered to be "church"
in a way that others that would not be, nor claim to be. Using
the term that way, one could say that Orthodox, Roman
Catholics, Copts, Ethiopians, Indians—those in the
"classic" tradition, with an episcopate, sacraments,
yet arguing about specific doctrines that have led to schisms
within "the Church"—as opposed to "classical
Protestants" who believe, according to their own catechisms,
that the Church is invisible, that it is a "spiritual
reality," that any creaturely form of the Church is
defective and even has sins in it. No group within the
"classical apostolic Tradition" would ever say that, as
their understanding of the nature of the Church is fundamentally
different. We say that the Church is made up of sinful people and
that everyone in the Church is a sinner, but the Church itself
is not sinful! The Scriptures, sacramental rites, etc. are not sinful.
The Church’s "words" (dogma, liturgy, etc.) are
indeed human words (as the Church is divine and
human—Chalcedon), but inspired by God and totally
dependable. Thus, those who don’t claim that, or affirm
that, though they may believe it in a "spiritual"
sense, are not believing as the Church has always taught and
held, and thus are not in it (in the historical concrete sense).
Now, there is a third way of using the term
"Church." And this would be simply speaking about the de
facto Church. Using the term that way you can speak about the
divisions in the Church, schisms in the Church, the Church being
sinful, etc. St. John Chrysostom at times used the term this way.
He would say, "the Church is supposed to be the Body of
Christ, but the Church today is a ‘headless
corpse’ ... the Church is the Bride of Christ, whom He
loved and is faithful to even unto His own death in the flesh for
Her; but the Church is a ‘husbandless whore’." In
other words, you can sometimes use the term "Church"
when you are speaking about the actual people not following God
in that way if you want to. But this hasn’t been the typical
Orthodox way of using this term because it can lead to the
teaching not that we believe in "One, Holy, Catholic and
Apostolic Church" but "many, sinful, defective, inward
looking churches", etc., etc. Now Protestants historically
have affirmed that when the Church formulated and confessed the
Nicene Creed that they meant the Church as that "invisible
reality of the saints who accepted Jesus as their Savior that can
be identified with no concrete historical community in
history" because they are all somehow defective, made up of
sinners and saints, and so on. This is the classical Protestant
teaching and is why the Orthodox from the very beginning of the
ecumenical movement refused to use the term "Church" in
that way. They preferred to follow St. Paul’s use in 1
Corinthians, which is the same way it was (and is) confessed in
the Creed. When talking about the divisions in the local
Corinthian parish he says, "Is Christ divided?" In
fact, do you know that the Good News for Modern Man Bible
actually translates this as if St. Paul were saying "Christ
is divided"? But the whole point of the sentence is that
Christ is not divided and cannot be divided! You
can divide yourself from if, you can be in it and sin against
it, but you cannot harm it itself. St. Paul continues,
"don’t you know that you are the Body of
Christ?! How then can you go unite yourself to a
prostitute?" He doesn’t say, "since you go to a
prostitute you are not in the Body of Christ because the Body of
Christ is indivisible . . ."; no, he says, "the bread
that we eat, is it not the Body of Christ? The cup that we drink,
is it not the Blood of Christ?" It is! And it
doesn’t depend on whether you are holy or not, it depends on
God. So, that’s why when we say that we believe "in
the Church" we mean that we believe in a concrete historical
human-theandric body of people that is, because God is present in
Her, totally holy, totally godly, totally dependable and
absolutely from God, though we may sin against it a thousand
times a day. This is even why our confession prayer says
"reconcile and unite him (or her) to the Holy Church."
Because your sins put you out of it. And here is another example
of the clash of terminology; for when an Orthodox Christian sins,
it is still a member of the True Church that sins and puts
himself out of it.
It is popular today to use the term
"Church" in the second way mentioned, thus
including all Christians with a proper baptism, and to say they
are "somehow" in the Church by virtue of their really
having been baptized. It would be on that ground that a person
who is a Christian but not in the Church can still have the Holy
Spirit, preach the Gospel, do good works, love God, and
even perhaps be saved on the day of Judgment; whereas a person
who is a member of the Church may go to hell. But this is
problematic because it leads to a certain kind of vagueness that
you can be sort of baptized "in general" but not
baptized into anything, that is, into a body of people who
confess the Trinity. The Orthodox Church has always held that
baptism and chrismation should lead immediately to the
Eucharistic meal where the Church is chiefly actualized in space
and time, where you knew where it was, who went there, what was
confessed, prayed, and taught there, etc. So, baptisms are meant
to be ecclesial acts—one is to be baptized into a
rightly-believing community. Then the question becomes "what
community?" and this leads back to the question "What
is the Church?".
So I think it is better to use the term
"Church" in the first sense but then to
immediately qualify it by saying that God can and does act
outside the canonical boundaries of the Church, and the Church is
even capable in certain conditions of recognizing a real baptism
outside her boundaries when that person decides to
join the Church. Then the Church makes the decision as to
whether God has really acted in this person’s life, the
"validity" of the baptism, etc. Up until very
recent times, beginning with the canons of the Nicene Council,
the Church has affirmed that God has really acted in baptisms
outside Her folds. That’s why the canons of the Nicene
Council did not even call for the rebaptism of Arians who wanted
to be reconciled to the Church. The people who were
baptized into the Arian groups were mostly victims of subtle
heresy as the Arians baptized in the name of the Trinity, they
believed Christ was their "savior", the people
sincerely thought they were being joined to the Church, etc. and
it was obvious that God acted in their lives. Economia
does not mean "making something present that is not
there" but rather "affirming that something was present
even in the divided circumstances" and therefore can be
"validated", fulfilled, and sanctified when brought
into the Church [!]. And the teaching that is becoming popular
today, that the Orthodox should baptize everyone
who was not baptized by immersion in an Orthodox Church (because
everything outside Her canonical boundaries is absolutely
nothing, dark and graceless)—all I can say is that this is a
radical innovation! It
is being presented as if it is a conservatism , but it is in fact
an innovation. Because throughout history the Orthodox Church was
willing under certain circumstances to recognize the real
activity of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in the rites and
teachings of other ecclesial communities with which it is not in
communion because it felt they were, to one degree and way or
another, defective, though not totally and
completely defective so as to not be Christian.
It’s an issue of truth. An example of this would be
something Fr. Peter Gillquist once told me. He was talking to an
Orthodox bishop overseas before being received into the Church.
And this bishop said to him "outside the Church there is no
Holy Spirit, and no grace." And Fr. Peter responded,
"well then what Spirit brought me here today, your
eminence?" What Spirit inspired Cornelius to call for the
apostle Peter? God is not a prisoner of His own Church! [Here
Hopko confuses the issue, failing to distinguish between
ecclesial grace and the general salvific activity of the Holy
Spirit outside of the Church. For more on this see my essay
"On the Status of
Non-Orthodox Christians"—PMB].
So when you deal with the term you have to be
really careful how you use it. And I think it is best to say that
the Church is the concrete historical community through faith
that has kept the Faith from age to age (1 Timothy 3:15) and we
believe that is the Orthodox Church. And the other ecclesial
communities are "churches" in a sociological way, can
have many good and wonderful things in them that are really of
God, and He really does act in them—we see holy people in
them; we’ve even canonized and put in our calendar
people who were never technically Orthodox. Constantine the
Great, for example, was baptized on his deathbed by the Arian
bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia. He never for one
minute of his life, was a member of the Orthodox Church.
Isaac of Syria was a Nestorian bishop who quit his see and lived
in solitude, prayed, and wrote many things which got into our
Church, and now he is on our calendar as a saint. His writings
were the most read (by quantity) of any writings in the Russian
Orthodox Church during the 19th century monastic
movement, and he technically was not a member of the Orthodox
Church. Almost certainly the author of the Dionysian corpus was a
monophysite. So we do believe that God acts outside the Church.
And to answer your question more
directly, yes, someone with a true baptism is "somehow"
a member of the Church, united to the Church, joined to it, etc.;
but it’s very difficult to find a way to speak
about this "somehow" without falling into one trap or
another—that it doesn’t matter, the Church is
defective, invisible, etc. No! We need to protect the full
meaning of the word "Church" and how we have always
viewed it. On the other hand, we don’t want to claim
that "outside the canonical boundaries of Orthodoxy there is
only ‘undifferentiated demonic darkness’" [again,
see my "Status" essay—PMB]. That is just
not true. There are many Christians, and we would say even
technically non-Christians or atheists perhaps in whom God
Himself is really acting, and they may even be loving God in a
real way, and in fact, want no part (to their credit) of the
Church that they have seen or come into contact with, or think it
is; and they could even be in better shape in God than many in
this church right now; and thus St. Paul says this in Romans 2:
"my name is blasphemed among the people because of
you." And it may well be that there are people who, what
they see of Christianity, what they see on TV, what they see in
our Orthodox communities, that they want no part of it; and it
may be to their glory. But that doesn’t make the Church
false.
|