orthodox ecclesiology

orrologion says it’s time to open the windows of our Orthodox house and let in some fresh air:

I for one am glad that these sorts of conversations are being had. They reveal us. Our creation myths can be challenged. Our skewed views of ourselves can be corrected. Greeks can hear how they are perceived; Russians and Americans and Arabs likewise. We’re all used to the smell of our own stink; we forgive our own pet sins, but not others’. We can see how our actions (and lack of actions) hurt others, and we can change (hopefully). We can compare and contrast our strengths and weaknesses, our love, our piety, our good works, patience, kindness. We can learn from each other and grow. We can live rather than simply preserve and grasp. We can see how Orthodoxy is not only what I grew up with, what ‘my’ spiritual father told, what Prof./Fr../Geronda/Vladyka said it was – we can see Orthodoxy is bigger than my family, my clan, my tribe, my culture, my opinions, my theological clique. Our laxity, our excuses, etc. can be revealed, and our shame can change us, we can be corrected. We are all in desperate need of having the windows opened to air out the house; and converts need their new homes to be lived in, to be used and filled, to become home.

Let us all welcome the opportunity to become the servants of each other. Let us compete to serve and sacrifice more than each other. When all sides do this, then will they way be clear to us all – God’s way and not our own. Let the OCA lay down her claims of autocephaly and sole jurisdiction, let the EP lay down its demands of obedience to primacy, let us all place Christ and His Church, the Orthodox faith, ahead of all things including language, culture and our pet ecclesiologies and theologies and forms.

Read “Sacrificing All” on the orrologian blog.

George Michalopulos, frequent contributor to the AOI blog and author of several articles on the AOI website, is this week’s guest on The Illumined Heart, a program on Ancient Faith Radio.

In June 2009 leaders of all autocephalous Orthodox Churches – excluding the OCA or any representatives from North America – meet in Cyprus or Geneva (undetermined at the date of this posting), at a meeting convened by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholemew I. This meeting is being called to discuss “the so-called Orthodox Diaspora, with a view to overcoming every possible influence that is foreign to Orthodox ecclesiology.” The American Orthodox situation and its disunity is at the top of the agenda. In this edition of The Illumined Heart, host Kevin Allen and author George C. Michalopulos discuss this meeting, the history and state of Orthodoxy in North America and possible outcomes of this potentially pivotal convocation.

Listen to Part 1

Listen to Part 2

From Interfax:

Moscow Patriarchate disagrees with Constantinople desire to play special role in Orthodoxy

MOSCOW (April 10) — Bishop Hilarion of Volokolamsk, the head of the Moscow Patriarchate’s external church relations department, has criticized the Constantinople Patriarchate’s intention to control all church communities within the Orthodox diaspora.

“I see the situation in the inter-Orthodox relations surrounding the Constantinople Patriarchate’s claim to have some special role in the Orthodox Church as one of the key challenges today,” Bishop Hilarion said at a press conference at the Interfax main office in Moscow on Friday.

“What is happening is in fact an attempt to impose a model existing in the Catholic Church on the Orthodox Church to have as centralized church power as possible, with one bishop leading it as the head of the Ecumenical Church,” he said.

“There has never been such a model in the Orthodox tradition,” Bishop Hilarion said. He doubted that “we are entitled to revise our teaching about the Church.”

The leading hierarchs of the Constantinople Patriarchate are calling for revising the principle of primacy in the Orthodox world, Bishop Hilarion said. This model presumes that the Constantinople Patriarchate “should administer all the churches within the so-called diaspora,” that is, that all the communities outside the borders of the historical canonic national churches should be within Constantinople’s jurisdiction, he said.

Bishop Hilarion said this issue will be discussed at an inter-Orthodox conference in June.

Also see “The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology” by Fr. Alexander Schmemann.

Many of the current jurisdictional controversies within the Orthodox Church involving the Ecumenical Patriarch, relations between Constantinople and Moscow, the status of the “autocephalies” — even the future of the American Orthodox Church — hinge on the question of primacy. While Orthodox Christians have rejected the Roman model of primacy as “supreme power” over the Bishop and local Church, the question of primacy within the Orthodox Church is a complete muddle. In “The Idea of Primacy in Orthodox Ecclesiology,” an essay written in 1960 and now available on the AOI main site, Fr. Alexander Schmemann examines various aspects of the primacy question, an issue he describes as “on the agenda for our time.” As he reminds us, the ecclesiological interpretation of primacy — regional, autocephalous, and “universal” — is “virtually absent” from from Orthodox theology. “We badly need a clarification of the nature and functions of all these primacies and, first of all, of the very concept of primacy,” Fr. Schmemann writes. “For both in theory and in practice there is a great deal of confusion concerning the definition of the ‘supreme power’ in the church, of its scope and the modes of its expression.”

Excerpts:

It would not be difficult to prove that the canonical and jurisdictional troubles and divisions, of which we have had too many in the last decades, have their roots in some way or other in this question of primacy, or, to be more exact, in the absence of a clearly defined doctrine of the nature and functions of primacy. And the same unsolved problem constitutes a major handicap for the unity and, therefore, the progress of Orthodoxy in countries like America where, paradoxically enough, the loyalty to a certain concept of “canonicity” leads to the most uncanonical situation that can be imagined: the coexistence on the same territory of a number of parallel jurisdictions, and dioceses…

[ … ]

In the early Church the canonical tradition was an integral part of ecclesiology — of the living experience of the Church. But little by little it became an autonomous sphere in which the visible ecclesiastical structures, the functions of power and authority, and the relations between Churches, ceased to be explained in terms of the Church-Body of Christ. Loosing its ties with ecclesiology, the canonical tradition became “canon law.” But in Canon Law there was no room for the notion of the Body of Christ because this notion has nothing to do with “law.” Continue reading →