A New Orthodoxy
Is this the Faith of our Fathers?
The Orthodox Church professes to preserve the
Faith of the Apostolic Church. Wherever a right-believing Bishop
with Apostolic Succession walks in the spiritual footsteps of the
Fathers, there the whole Church of Christ is. Wherever there are
those loyal to the rock of St. Peter's confession of Christ as
the Son of the living God, there Orthodoxy is. And wherever the
traditions of the Church and the Fathers are guarded faithfully,
as St. Paul enjoins us to do, there we find our Faith. Spiritual
succession, the living Faith of the Saints, the unity of
God-inspired liturgical and spiritual traditions, the oneness of
witness in Orthodox Baptism and Communion—these express our
Faith.
But now we find, especially in America and
Western Europe, a new kind of Orthodoxy, based on innovation,
neo-papist notions of "officialdom," sophomoric
criticism of the Fathers and of the Church's liturgical
practices, and a relativism that places fidelity to the
humanistic dictates of ecumenism above the dictates of the
Christian conscience.
We are seeing inadequately converted clergymen
and scholars create, in the midst of several modernist
jurisdictions, a "church" which is far from that of the
Fathers. This new Orthodoxy has manifested itself in two forms.
On the one hand, there is a would-be "intellectual"
trend in modernist circles, replacing the pious study of the
Fathers that marks true theology in the Orthodox Church with the
traditions of textual criticism, often marked by a snide spirit
of doubt and impiety unknown to Orthodox spirituality. The
expertise of Latin scholarship is often exalted over that of
pious Orthodox theologians—"the superstitions of
simple-minded Greeks," as one seminary professor recently
remarked. So it is that another seminary instructor in a
modernist jurisdiction beset by this spirit of unedifying disdain
for Orthodox tradition began a course on liturgics with the
incredible comment: "Now we will see how the Liturgy came
into its present decrepit state...."
It is no wonder that these same
"intellectuals" clamor to create a monasticism which is
unrecognizable to us traditional Orthodox, compromised as it is
by innovation, a spirituality of the brain, not the heart, and by
a minimalism that dismisses traditional Orthodox asceticism with
unwise talk about its abuses, rather than its centuries of
triumphs —a monasticism of communal romanticism and social
service lived, at times, by unbalanced individuals more to be
pitied than emulated. No wonder, too, that such intellectual
circles have created a "reformed" Liturgy derived from
the data of historical research rather than the living, organic
witness of a Liturgy wholly adequate to those truly immersed in
the spiritual life which has formed it.
On the other hand, we are seeing the humble and
self-effacing example of our Saints swept aside by the pompous
and bombastic egotism of Bible-thumping "evangelists,"
who have come into various modernist jurisdictions with an
understanding of traditional Orthodox piety so minimal that one
blushes in thinking about it. The rubrics of pop-psychology and
the tactics of the "Jesus freaks" of the 1960s are now
openly preached in the name of the Orthodox Church, at times with
arrogant denunciations of the ethnics and" backward"
traditionalists into whose Church these misguided individuals
have entered by the back door. Gone for them is the sure guidance
of spiritual principles based on centuries of spiritual
experience—Holy Tradition.
One would, of course, delight at the thought of
a true Patristic revival in the Orthodox Church, a truly
intellectual movement towards the brilliant body of wisdom
contained in the Fathers. We desperately need such a thing. But
such a movement must be based in true scholarship, not on snide
commentaries gleaned from secondary (and usually non-Orthodox)
materials by those who can only minimally read the Fathers in the
original anyway. And certainly such a movement cannot divorce a
study of the Fathers from traditional piety, from profound awe
for what they have passed down to us, including the Divine
Liturgy in its present form, and for the common civility which
should mark true scholars, one aspect of which is respect for our
Church Fathers and for our elders in the Faith.
One could also do nothing more than shout for
joy at the return of Protestant evangelicals to the Orthodox
Faith. Sincere evangelicals, deeply rooted in a Biblical
Christianity and a respect for moral rectitude —how could
they do anything but fulfill their Faith and adorn our Church by
returning to Orthodoxy? But such Christians are a far cry from
the cigar-smoking, tract-distributing purveyors of the
"religious product" who now wish to use Orthodoxy to
"evangelize" America. Real evangelicals would truly
understand the need for self-perfection as a path to
evangelization. And certainly they would have entered into the
Church, not through innovation and "deals," but through
humble submission to the traditions of the Church—including
Orthodox Baptism, which is required for entry into the Eastern
Church, save in rare and individual cases.
In seeing all that this new Orthodoxy is, as
well as what it is not, one is prompted to ask: "Indeed, is
this the Faith of our Fathers, the Faith for which many of us
have sacrificed, even to the point of shedding our own
blood?"
An Inauthentic Witness
The majority of the Orthodox Church is
suffering under the yoke of communism and hostile oppression. The
modernists—a handful of Orthodox in Western Europe and the
Americas (less than 20% of world Orthodoxy) and the products, for
the most part, of the calendar reform of the 1920s—,
however, enjoy the freedom and wealth of the West. They have used
these advantages to establish their minority views, to foster the
un-Orthodox innovations which hold forth under the sponsorship of
their jurisdictions, and to gain the attention of the press in
the New World.
They have effectively disenfranchised the body
of True Orthodox. With their money, they have even taken over
several, dying ancient Patriarchates, or sought legitimacy from
captive Sees anxious to have any voice in the West. Mediocre
theologians and Churchmen, more marked by their experience in the
corporate boardroom than the cells of monasteries—the
traditional training grounds for spiritual leaders—, have
spewed forth notions of Orthodoxy that, while perhaps new and
intriguing to a naive heterodox audience, smack of the innovative
spirit of those who have little careful guidance and experience
in the way of life which they purport to teach.
We see converts and former Greek Catholics
dismissing traditionalist Orthodox as fanatics and "fringe
elements" outside the Church, all the while violating every
basic Canon of the Orthodox Church by inviting joint prayer with
those who are outside the Church—outside the Church, not by
virtue of traditionalist polemics, but by the decrees of the
Fathers and Councils who guide our Faith. All of this
characterizes this new church: an inauthentic religion rooted in
a deviation from genuine tradition and watered, at times, by an
unfortunate spirit of arrogance—a church fueled by hostility
towards authentic Orthodox tradition; towards the ethnics who
have, however perfectly or imperfectly, guarded it, following the
apostasy of the West; and towards all that calls Orthodoxy, not
to a witness of worldly officialdom, but spiritual succession and
honesty.
Sad Consequences
One of the sad consequences of the ascendency
of this inauthentic Orthodoxy over True Orthodoxy is that, at a
time when Western Christians are increasingly hungry for new
spiritual food, they are being offered a proverbial stone in the
place of Orthodoxy's Apostolic bread. Inauthentic Orthodoxy is
victimizing the hungry West.
Orthodoxy teaches that Christ established one
Church and that the Orthodox Church embodies this True Church.
There are Mysteries within this Church—Baptism and
Ordination among them—which belong only to Her. She is the
criterion of truth and within Her lies the fullness of the
Christian witness. She is the anchor after which many Western
Christians seek.
This new "Orthodoxy," seeking to
attain worldly recognition and to give wrong and un-Orthodox
beliefs the flavor of Orthodox historical primacy, has changed
this teaching. It has, in accord with political ecumenism, begun
to declare that the Orthodox Church is not the One, True Church,
the criterion of Christianity, but that She, in a spirit of deep
love, accepts the sacraments and Christian ways of others. They
have made of the Orthodox anchor a sail by which to blow the
dinghy of their self-created church here and there, according to
the whims of contemporary ecumenism.
Thus it is that the ecumenical movement is more
often than not deprived of the witness of True Orthodox—though
we emphasize here very clearly that there are yet some
traditional voices in the modernist Orthodox Churches and among
their representatives in the ecumenical movement, and that the
inauthenticity of what these modernists have created certainly
has not taken from them Orthodoxy in the canonical and technical
sense. In ecumenical meetings, the heterodox inevitably encounter
shaved clergy in Roman clerical garb. The witness of the Apostles
and Patriarchs embodied by traditional Orthodox garb they see
only in Hierarchs, many of whom are represented, not as equals
among the many Bishops, but as the equivalents of
"Cardinals," "Princes of the Church," and so
on. Few ecumenists see Orthodox representatives at their various
gatherings refraining from meat and dairy products on Wednesdays
and Fridays, and few, to be sure, realize that their steak-eating
Orthodox guests, who ignore these canonical prescriptions, are
violating the basic spiritual disciplines of the religion they
claim to represent.
The ecumenists learn from most of these
modernist Orthodox representatives that the
traditionalists—a majority—are a minority, overtaken by
a spirit of fanaticism and "legalism" incompatible with
the ecumenical spirit. Never do they learn that we who hold
strongly to the tenets of our Faith do so with a deep yearning
for Christian unity and with a deep love for our Christian
brothers and sisters outside the Orthodox Church. They do not
learn that we hold fast to our Apostolic Faith because we believe
that the non-Orthodox will one day return to it, finding in
Orthodoxy the fulfillment of their own sincere and honored
Christian aspirations. They do not know that our
"legalism" is based on honest adherence to our Church's
teachings and that our "fanaticism" is nothing more
than a fidelity which leads us not to hatred for the
non-Orthodox, but to a profound love for them.
Were sincere heterodox ecumenists to hear our
voices, they would hear both a stern and a loving note. And they
might encounter an Orthodoxy with a power far greater than the
inauthentic Orthodoxy which says: "Together with you we will
find the Church." Indeed, they might rejoice at the
refreshing honesty of an Orthodoxy that says: "We are what
you were, and in us you can return to a unity which belongs to
all of us, which was never really lost, and that has preserved
the Church of the Apostles."
The ecumenical spirit of the Faith of our
Fathers in based in honest and uncompromising love, not a love
created by inauthenticity and human machinations.
An Impediment to Unity
Another tragic effect of the ascendency of
inauthentic Orthodoxy is the separation of Orthodox themselves.
What is inauthentic is threatened by the authentic. It strives to
obscure the authentic. Thus, the modernist movements have found
themselves increasingly separated from True Orthodoxy. Even when
they go to such places as Mt. Athos, they seek out those who will
tolerate them, not those who can lead them, correct them, and
counsel them. If we can stop the course of Orthodox innovation
and persuade the innovators to leave their false ways, then we
Orthodox can find unity. This demands of us traditionalists both
a stern and uncompromising stand and a loving, open attitude. But
it demands from the innovators something which they do not have:
honesty and humility. They must turn from their errors, admit
those errors, and honestly confess that they are not what they
should be.
From Orthodox Tradition, Vol. 6, No. 4, 1989, pp. 1-2.
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