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Address of His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew
“A Changeless Faith for a Changing World”
Center for American Progress and Georgetown University
Gaston Hall of Georgetown University
Washington, DC
(November 3, 2009)
Remarks as Prepared for Delivery
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Thank you very much, Professor James J. O’Donnell, Provost of Georgetown University, and John Podesta, President of the Center for American Progress. We are also especially grateful for the students who are present with us today, and for their interest.
Progress is often equated with change. So let us acknowledge this: it may appear strange for a progressive think tank to sponsor a lecture by the leader of a faith that takes pride in how little it has changed in 2,000 years. The fact is that our first instinct in Orthodoxy is to conserve the precious faith that has been handed down to us in an unbroken line from Jesus Christ through the Apostles. In the case of our Ecumenical Patriarchate, the First See of the Orthodox World, it has been handed to us through St. Andrew the Apostle, to whose See we are the 270th successor.
But even though our faith may be 2,000 years old, our thinking is not. True progress is a balance between preserving the essence of a certain way of life and changing things that are not essential. Christianity was born a revolutionary faith – and we have preserved that. In other words, paradoxically, we have succeeded in not changing a faith that is itself dedicated to change.
Let us, as the lawyers would say, make a disclaimer: By calling Christianity revolutionary, and saying it is dedicated to change, we are not siding with Progressives – just as, by conserving it, we are not siding with Conservatives. All political factions believe God is on their side – as Abraham Lincoln said of the Union and Confederacy, “Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other.”
The only side we take is that of our faith – which today may seem to land us in one political camp, tomorrow another – but in truth we are always and only in one camp, that of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Continue reading