Green Patriarch

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 →

From his speech today at the Brookings Institution, “Saving the Soul of the Planet”:

… in addition to our international ecological symposia, the Orthodox Church has decided to establish a center for environment and peace. Hitherto, the Ecumenical Patriarchate has endeavored to raise regional and global awareness on the urgency of preserving the natural environment and promoting inter-religious dialogue and understanding. Henceforth, the emphasis will be educational – on the regional and international levels.

The Center for Environment and Peace is planned to be housed in a historical orphanage, on Büyükada, one of the Princess Islands near Istanbul. The building was once the largest and most beautiful wooden edifice in Europe, and it will embody a new direction in the initiatives of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Whereas the orphanage was at one time forcibly closed by Turkish authorities in an act of religious intolerance, it is highly expected to be returned to the Ecumenical Patriarchate through a just process in the European Court of Human Rights, which ruled in favor of returning this historic property of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The purpose of the Center will be to translate theory into practice, providing educational resources to advance ecological transformation and interfaith tolerance.

The Center will focus on climate change and the related changes needed in human behavior and ethics. It will serve as a source of inspiration and awareness for resolving religious issues related to the environment and peace, in cooperation with universities, and policy centers on both local and international levels.

Full text of speech follows: Continue reading →

(sigh) Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew was at Fordham University in New York to receive an award yesterday and give a speech. A number of things jump out. First, a recap.

In his post, “The Patriarch, the Enlightenment, and the Environment,” here on the Observer, Fr. Gregory Jensen reminds us that the human heart needs communion with a person, not an inanimate object.

Whether in the Holy Trinity or in the human family, personal communion is radically different then the union possessed by “molecules of water” or by “particles of atmosphere.” The union of the physical creation is impersonal. There is no communion between molecules of water or particles of air.

Thus the comparison of the human to the non-human world in these terms makes all conversation about what is in our best personal or national interest meaningless. When particularity is subsumed into an abstraction, the differences between people ultimately have no meaning.

But, in his Fordham speech, Patriarch Bartholomew offered this:

The truth is that we refuse to behold God’s Word in the oceans of our planet, in the trees of our continents, and in the animals of our earth. In so doing, we deny our own nature, which demands that we stoop low enough to hear God’s Word in creation. We fail to perceive created nature as the extended Body of Christ. Eastern Christian theologians always emphasized the cosmic proportions of divine incarnation. For them, the entire world is a prologue to St. John’s Gospel. And when the Church overlooks the broader, cosmic dimensions of God’s Word, it neglects its mission to implore God for the transformation of the whole polluted cosmos.

Certainly, in a setting like Fordham, it is appropriate to offer a gracious nod to the “ecumenical imperative.” But in his speech, the Patriarch went beyond this to invoke the familiar tropes related to the “end of history” and the “clash of civilizations” to show how these were obstacles to interfaith relations — and the “true nature” of religion.

Christians and Muslims lived alongside each other during the Byzantine and the Ottoman Empires, usually supported by their political and religious authorities. In Andalusia Spain, believers in Judaism, Christianity and Islam coexisted peacefully for centuries. Such historical models reveal possibilities for our own pluralistic and globalized world.

He did not indicate when this golden age of interfaith comity in Spain ended, but it certainly ran out of steam with the Reconquista, a program which asserted a very particular understanding of religious faith. What’s more, the Patriarch could have helpfully pointed out that Christian-Moslem dialogues are too often one-way conversations. As Archbishop Anastasios (Yannoulatos) has written in “Facing the World: Orthodox Christian Essays in Global Concerns”: Continue reading →

His All Holiness, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew recently published an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal (“Our Indivisible Environment,” 26 October 2009) in which he argues that “just as God is indivisible, so too is our global environment.”  He asserts that as the “molecules of water that comprise the great North Atlantic are neither European nor American” so too the “particles of atmosphere above the United Kingdom are neither Labour nor Tory.”

On the surface, his words reflect a cultural and intellectual tradition with deep roots in classical, pre-Christian Greek thought (especially Aristotle) as well as Holy Scripture and the teachings of the fathers of the Church (East and West).

His observations also owe much to Scholasticism, those Medieval Catholic scholars wrestled who the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christian faith, as well as the relationship of Christian faith to Judaism and Islam.  To his credit, the Patriarch is also in a discussion with scholars of different faith and intellectual traditions.

There is a difference here worth noting, however, and it is the difference between Christian scholars and scholars of other faith and ideological traditions. At the core of biblical faith lies the “scandal of particularity,” the notion of God’s election of a particular people, the Jews. This notion also lies at the heart of the Christian Gospel.

Continue reading →