The documents approved by the Primates of the Church for the Great
and Holy Council are not particularly controversial. They are the
product of consensus, negotiated over decades, that often repeat
previous declarations rather than addressing the more challenging
questions that face the modern Church.
The one possible exception is the document Relations of the Orthodox Church With the Rest of the Christian World,
which seeks to clarify the purpose of the Orthodox Church’s engagement
in the ecumenical movement. Because the document censures ecumenical
obstructionists, it has seen the lion’s share of criticism from certain
self-described traditionalists.
Much of this criticism relies on a highly selective and reductionist
appropriation of our rich canonical tradition to justify simplistic
ideological conceits.
For example, Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus,
in a wide-ranging condemnation of the Great and Holy Council took
particular exception to use of the term “church” for non-Orthodox
communities in the document about ecumenism. From his point of view,
assigning the term “church” to Roman Catholics and Protestants
simultaneously validates their “heresies” and undermines the truth
claims of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. It is noteworthy
that the Metropolitan did not produce any Patristic witness for his
objection to this term. But, then, he couldn’t—the fathers routinely applied the term “church” to communities that they considered heretical.
A far more serious objection to the document on ecumenism has been
lodged by His Eminence, Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos of Nafpaktos,
the author of many important books on Orthodox spirituality. Writing an
open letter to the Synod of Greece,
the Metropolitan points to an inconsistency in the document, which
simultaneously claims that the “unity of the Church cannot be shattered”
but, at the same time, implies that Christian unity was lost for some
Christians after the Ecumenical councils.
The most spirited of the Metropolitan’s objections to the document on
ecumenism, however, concerns clause 20, which specifies that the Church
follows the canonical tradition (Constantinople 381 Canon 7 and
Quinisext Canon 95) regarding the admission of converts to Orthodoxy who
are coming from other Christian traditions.
Metropolitan Hierotheos requests that the text be altered to make
clear that converts to Orthodoxy who were not baptized “by three
immersions and emersions according to the Apostolic and Patristic form”
must be baptized anew. From his perspective, while Roman Catholics might
properly confess the Trinity in baptism, the current ritual form of
their baptism is in violation of the Patristic tradition.
At issue is a distinction that the canons make between Arians, who
can be admitted into the Church via Chrismation, and other heretics,
particularly the Eunomians, who must undergo baptism. Both canons note
in their condemnation of the Eunomians that the group only performs a
single immersion. According to Metropolitan Hiertheos, Eunomians must be
rebaptized not only because of their errant theology but also because
of the errant form of their ritual.
To clarify, the Eunomians were a radical sub-sect within a broader
Arianism. Because the Arians tacitly accepted the divine character of
Christ (even if they did not confess Him to be co-essential with the
Father), they performed three immersions in baptism as commanded by the
Gospel. But the Eunomians were so radical in their rejection of Orthodox
teaching that they flatly denied any divine character to Christ or the
Holy Spirit, and that is why they performed only a single immersion (in
the name of the Father alone). For this reason, the canon’s description
of Eunomian single immersion should be understood adjectivally—a
ritualized reflection of their heresy. And, indeed, no Byzantine
canonist ever interpreted the error of the Eunomians to be primarily an
error of ritual itself; their error was the rejection of the Trinity.
What is more, no Byzantine canonist or apologist ever thought that Latin theological errors, such as the filioque, were so great that they required rebaptism. Neither Balsamon nor Chomatenos (the 12th and 13th-century
canonists who were the first to deny the Eucharist to Latins), nor even
St. Mark of Ephesus ever suggested that the Latins should be baptized
before admission to the Church.
In other words, Metropolitan Hierotheos has adopted a decidedly
“innovative” reading of the canons and history to build his case against
heterodox baptism.
To be clear, Metropolitan Hierotheos is not the first to attempt to
apply the canons against Eunomians to Western Christians. During the
Ottoman period, an especially divisive Patriarch of Constantinople,
Cyril V, issued an edict calling for the baptism of Catholic converts to
Christianity because of the inadequacy of their ritual. In fact,
Metropolitan Hierotheos cites Cyril’s edict as the lone proof for what
he audaciously calls the “entirety of ecclesiastical tradition.”
What Metropolitan Hierotheos does not tell us in his letter is that
the edict of Cyril V was denounced by other Orthodox leaders at the time
and that Cyril was deposed by his own Metropolitans for having issued
it.
Today, none of the fourteen autocephalous churches in the Orthodox
world officially require baptism for Trinitarian Christians who convert
to Orthodoxy. Nor should they.
The earliest post-biblical attestation we have for the Christian rite of baptism comes from the Didache,
which quite explicitly prefers that baptisms occur in rivers but allows
for both immersion in still water (the dominant Orthodox practice) or
sprinkling on the head (the dominant Roman Catholic practice). Moreover,
subsequent Patristic authors allowed for ritual and symbolic variation
in baptism, so long as the confession of faith was Trinitarian (e.g. St.
Gregory the Dialogist, Ep. 1.41).
In sum, the self-proclaimed “traditionalists” are demanding that the
Great and Holy Council abandon the historical and canonical practice of
the Orthodox Church in order to ward off an imaginary dilution of
Orthodox purity. Their claims are couched in the language of Apostolic
and Patristic tradition but, ironically, their position is dangerously
innovative.
This essay was sponsored by the Orthodox Theological Society in
America’s Special Project on the Holy and Great Council and published by
the Orthodox Christian Studies Center of Fordham University.
George Demacopoulos is the Fr. John Meyendorff and Patterson
Family Chair of Orthodox Christian Studies and Co-Director of the
Orthodox Christian Studies Center at Fordham University.