Ecumenical Patriarchate Press Office
Orthodox ecumenists and anti-ecumenists
both start from the same fundamental ecclesiological principle,
succinctly expressed in an anti-ecumenical statement of the Sacred
Community of Mount Athos in April 1980
: “We believe that our holy
Orthodox Church is the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of
Christ, which possesses the fullness of grace and truth.”[i]
But pro-ecumenical and anti-ecumenical
Orthodox draw radically different conclusions from this one principle.
Ecumenists, focusing on the notion that the Orthodox Church possesses
“the fullness of grace and truth,” conclude that other Christian churches also
possess grace and truth, if not in their fullness. This realization
opens the door to considering non-Orthodox Christians as true brothers
and sisters in Christ and hence to the possibility of dialogue in love,
growth in mutual understanding of each other's faith and traditions, and
discovery of common elements which unite Christians of different
denominations. This does not mean that all Christian communities are
equal in matters of faith and doctrine, since Orthodox ecumenists agree
with anti-ecumenists that the Orthodox Church alone possesses the fullness of the Christian faith and is the true visible Church of Christ.
For Orthodox anti-ecumenists, the
presence of the fullness of grace and truth found only in the Orthodox
Church means that grace and truth are absent in non-Orthodox
Christian communities, that their members are heretics and hence
deprived of the means of salvation. A recent declaration of Bulgarian
clergy and monastics states for example that “the apostolic and
millennium-old patristic tradition unequivocally considers that heretics
are outside the ship of the Church and as a consequence, beyond
salvation.”[ii]
The theology behind these affirmations
reposes on a rigorist interpretation of St. Cyprian of Carthage’s famous
dictum “No salvation outside the Church.” Cyprian held that salvation
is possible only in the visible Catholic (Universal) Church and that
those outside, even in other nominally Christian bodies, could not be
saved.[iii]
Modern retention of this doctrine, which is not at all sustained in
Orthodox Tradition, constitutes a misreading of the main body of
patristic theology and of the history of the early Church. As Fr.
Georges Florovsky points out, the strength of Cyprian’s dictum is that
it is a tautology: “salvation” and “Church” are seen as one and the
same.[iv]
The question is then, What is the Church? Florovsky concludes from the
practice of the early Church in not systematically re-baptizing
Christians (or even at times re-chrismating them or re-ordaining clergy)
returning to the Catholic Church from schismatic and heretical groups,
that the Church considered that sacramental grace exists in Christian
communities other than the Catholic Church herself – in other words, the
sacramental, charismatic or mystical boundaries of the Church do not
correspond with the visible canonical boundaries of the Orthodox Church,
but go well beyond.[v]
Florovsky demonstrates that Orthodoxy follows Augustine’s sacramental
theology and the practice of the early Church of seeing in the
recognition of the validity of sacraments outside the Catholic Church
the continuation of links of heretics and schismatics with the Church of
Christ.
The theological consequences of
asserting that non-Orthodox Christians are deprived of the means of
salvation are monumental. Even assuming, generously, that all baptised
Orthodox (realistically, perhaps 150 million people) will be saved, this
means that the remaining two billion Christians will be condemned to
eternal damnation, basically for not being Orthodox. And presumably,
extending this reasoning to its logical conclusion, salvation is
impossible for all non-Christians as well. Thus of the current world
population of some 7.4 billion, only some 150 million (about 2%) are
even eligible for salvation.
A doctrine which denies the possibility
of salvation to the bulk of humanity violates several fundamental
principles of Orthodox theology. In the first place, it denies that God
is a good and loving God who seeks the salvation of all humans, but
rather turns God into a cruel divine caricature who creates humans whose
only final destiny can be eternal torment. This is not at all the
Orthodox notion of God as the Lover of Humankind (philanthropos), the Merciful One (eleémón), Benefactor (energetēs), the Most Compassionate (panoiktírmōn).
The denial of all possibility of
salvation outside the Orthodox Church also violates several other basic
tenets of patristic anthropology. The a priori condemnation of
most of humanity to damnation is a form of predestination, a doctrine
which the Orthodox Church has consistently rejected over the centuries.
It is also contrary to the fundamental teachings of patristic
anthropology that all humans are ontologically equal, created in the
divine image, and that all possess free will and are each and every one
responsible for his or her own destiny, in cooperation with or in
resistance to divine providence and mercy. As in the parable of the
talents, each person is responsible for the measure of divine light and
truth freely offered to him or her (Mt 25:14-30).
Finally, in affirming that divine grace
is not and cannot be present beyond the visible Orthodox Church, this
theology seeks to impose human-devised limits on divine action. On the
contrary, Orthodox Tradition steadfastly maintains that God is indeed a
God of love and mercy, who freely provides the means of salvation for
Orthodox, non-Orthodox and non-Christians in the context of the
existence of each person, in ways that may be unknown or
incomprehensible to human understanding. The Incarnation of Christ means
that all men and women, throughout all time, can be saved.
The recognition that God acts beyond the
boundaries of the visible Orthodox Church constitutes the basis, the
prime justification and the imperative for Orthodox participation in
ecumenical endeavors. Goodness, divine presence and salvation are found
not only where we think that they should be, but where the Holy Spirit,
in absolute divine freedom, blows throughout all time for every person,
who thus has the possibility of being born of the Spirit (Jn 3:8; 1:3).
Paul Ladouceur, PhD, is Adjunct
Professor, Orthodox School of Theology at Trinity College (University of
Toronto) and Professeur associé, Faculté de théologie et de sciences
religieuses, Université Laval (Québec)
[i]
“Announcement of the Extraordinary Joint Conference of the Sacred
Community of the Holy Mount Athos [April 9/22, 1980]”
<http://orthodoxinfo.com/ecumenism/athos.aspx> (08.04.2016).
[ii] Russian text on AgionOros.ru:
<http://agionoros.ru/docs/2257.htm> (08.04.2016). French
translation on Orthodoxie.com:
<http://orthodoxie.com/category/actualites/relations-oecumeniques/>
(08.04.2016).
[iii] Cyprian’s exact phrase is Salus extra ecclesiam non est, but it is typically rendered Extra ecclesiam nulla salus. See Epistula 4, 4 and Epistula 73, 21, 2. A less categorical expression of this notion occurs in Cyprian’s The Church Is One: “He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother” (The Church Is One 6).
[iv] Georges Florovsky, “Sobornost: The Catholicity of the Church” (1934), in vol. 1 of the Collected Works of Georges Florovsky (Belmont, MA: Nordland, 1972), pp. 37-55.
[v] Georges Florovsky, “The Limits of the Church,” Church Quarterly Review 117 (1933), pp. 117-31.