FOR THE LIFE OF THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT

 

 Ecumenical Trends Vol 49 No 5,  Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute  September/October 2020, pp.14-18.

 Dr. Dale T. Irvin is a founding member of the faculty of the New School of Biblical Theology located in Orlando, Florida, as well as an adjunct faculty member at Georgetown University in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies. A graduate of Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv) and Union Theological Seminary in New York (PhD), he is the author and editor of several books, a founding editor of the Journal of World Christianity, and currently, the Chair of the Ecclesiological Investigations International Research Network. He is an ordained min-ister in the American Baptist Churches USA

For the Life of the World: Toward a Social Ethos of the Orthodox Church, which was approved by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in January and released in April 2020, is by all accounts an extraordinary accomplish-ment. The document was produced by a special theological commission that was appointed by his All-Holiness in June 2017 following the Holy and Great Council that was held in Crete a year earlier. In carrying out its work the commis-sion, which was made up of lay and ordained theologians and included two women among its twelve members, gath-ered reports from a number of eparchies around the world that then helped to guide them in completing the 33,000-word text. John Chryssavgis and David Bentley Hart served as general editors of the document, which was formally approved by the Holy and Sacred Synod of the Ecumenical Patriarchate before undergoing final editing.The relationship of this document to the Holy and Great Council is important to note in considering its significance. The closing line of For the Life of the World (FLW) states: It is the earnest prayer of all who have been associated with this document that what is written here will help to advance the work inaugurated in 2016 by the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church, and will further aid in fulfilling the will of God in his Church and in the world. (§82)1In an article published in Commonweal a month prior to the formal release of the document, John Chryssavgis elabo-rated on its relationship to the work of the Holy and Great Council in more detail. He noted that the social teachings of Orthodoxy over the past century had turned inward both “as the means of survival in times of persecution and oppression” and due to “the tendency to denounce or dis-miss anything that resembles Western Christianity.”2 He pointed to a statement issued by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000, “The Basis of the Social Concept,” as an example of an Orthodox approach that was only critical of “the world.”3 The Great and Holy Council, on the other hand, was informed by a more “ecumenical” understand-ing of the contemporary context in which the Orthodox find themselves (“ecumenical” used here in the sense that the term has acquired in the modern Ecumenical Movement). Chryssavgis continues:In contrast, it was at least partly the encounter with other traditions and cultures, other branches of Christianity and even other religions, that inspired the worldwide Orthodox Churches to convene the Holy and Great Council in Crete in 2016. Meeting together for the first time in almost a millennium, Orthodox patriarchs and hierarchs – together with a handful of consultants – issued a formal decree as well as an encyclical message on “the role of the Orthodox Church in the contemporary world.” The new document complements the work of the Council and can be understood as part of the process of its reception.4Setting FLW in this relationship with the documents of the Council of 2016 (especially the much-shorter document issued by the Council, “The Mission of the Orthodox Church in Today’s World”)is important for understanding not just the content of this most recent statement, but also its purpose and intended impact.5The document’s title comes from John 6:51, where Jesus says, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh” (NRSV). It is what might be called a eucharistic text. The section headings, in turn, are taken from the divine liturgy of Saint John Chrysostom, which continues to be celebrated by Orthodox of all nationalities throughout the world today. This is not surprising, as the Orthodox tradition is so deeply liturgical. However, what has not been readily noted in the commentaries on FLW to date is its relation to another text, also deeply grounded in Orthodox life and liturgy, and also explicitly engaging the modern ecumenical “encounter with other traditions and cultures, other branches of Christianity and even other religions.” I am referring to the extraordinary book by Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, which was first published in 1963 and has remained continuously in print since then.Nowhere in the body of the current text of FLW do I find even an indirect reference or passing allusion to that earlier book by Schmemann. But I cannot believe that the reference implied in the title is coincidental. Schmemann’s For the Life of the World would become not only one of the most important books on Orthodox understanding of the sacraments in the twentieth century, but one of the most widely read ecumenical texts as well. The text opens with a meditation on food, the material source of life. In the bibli-cal world, Schmemann observed, food (like material things in general) is a means of communion with the divine. God makes “all creation the sign and means of [God’s] presence and wisdom, love and revelation.”6 He continues:In the Bible the food that man [sic] eats, the world of which he must partake in order to live, is given to him by God, and it is given as communion with God. The world as man’s food is not something “material” and limited to material functions, thus different from, and opposed to, the specifically “spiritual” functions by which man is related to God.7Humanity is hungry, he said, not just for food, but for God:The natural dependence of man [sic] upon the world was intended to be transformed constantly into communion with God in whom is all life. Man was to be the priest of a eucharist, offering the world to God, and in this offering he was to receive the gift of life. ... Things treated merely as things in themselves destroy themselves because only in God have they any life.8Starting in this way from the material world and im-plicitly from the general experience of physical hunger (being a matter of social, political, and ecological injustice in the world), then moving to the particular experience of the eucharist in chapter 2, allowed Schmemann to bridge the church-world divide coming from the side of the world, rather than presupposing the church’s own terms of en-gagement. Communion with the divine, the source of life of communion, is through the material world, neither apart from it nor replacing it. One of the central acts of the Orthodox eucharistic lit-urgy is instructive for understanding not only Schmemann’s For the Life of the World but also the recent social ethos document that shares its name – and for understanding the resonance between the two. The round loaf of leavened bread that is offered in the Orthodox eucharist is called pro-sphora in Greek (“an offering”). During the liturgy, a large cube with the imprint of the lamb on it is cut from the center of the loaf. It is this cube, approximately one-quarter of the full loaf, that is consecrated and served to the faithful in the eucharist. The remaining three-quarters of the loaf are called the antidoron (“instead of gifts”). This too is blessed, although not consecrated, and thus not restricted to the eucharistic liturgy, or even to the Orthodox faithful. Members of the congregation are invited to take pieces of the anti-doron home and eat during the week as the first food of the day. “It is the practice in many places, especially in the Diaspora, for antidoron to be offered to [non-Orthodox] vis-itors as a sign of Christian fellowship,” notes The Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity.9I noted above the relationship between FLW and the documents that were issued by the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church held in Crete in 2016, espe-cially that statement on mission. Crete was decidedly a closed Orthodox affair. Invitations to delegates from other Christian traditions were only sent to communions formal-ly involved in ecumenical dialogues approved by Orthodox hierarchs. Ecumenical relations were almost entirely de-fined as participation in the World Council of Churches. Several official delegates from the Pontifical Council of the Roman Catholic Church, which is not a member of the World Council of Churches but is a member of the Faith and Order Commission, attended. No representatives from the world Pentecostal movement were invited.10 There was no ecumenical consultation regarding either the original or final drafting of documents of the Council, contrary to what had been the hope of a number of prominent Orthodox theologians.11 The few delegates from other communions who did attend the Council at Crete were not allowed to participate in any of the discussions at the end. Instead they were invited to attend a briefing at the end of each day, and otherwise to be tourists on the island.The deliberations of the Holy and Great Council of 2016 were treated like the prosphora in the eucharistic lit-urgy of the Orthodox Church. FLW, on the other hand, is the antidoron, offered not just to the Orthodox faithful but to the wider community of visitors and guests as a blessed gift of life. The document is the antidoron provided as nour-ishment for the faithful as they engage the modern world, but also offered to the wider Christian world (including evangelicals, Pentecostals, and others who were not part of the twentieth-century Ecumenical Movement), to the wider human religious community, and to the whole creation as an Orthodox offering for life.Chapter 2 of Schmemann’s text is on the eucharist, set-ting the liturgical tone for what follows. Chapter 3, although explicitly on the theme of mission, is in fact a meditation on time (“The Time of Mission”); throughout the book, more-over, one finds time at the heart of Schmemann’s thinking about the church and the world. He regularly refers to our time as the modern era, but the specific focus of his attention is on “secularism.” Indeed, much of the book is given over to engaging with those for who secularism is a new reli-gion. Secularism for Schmemann has flattened the meaning of time and thus of faith to a one-dimensional experience: “A secularist views the world as containing within itself its meaning and the principles of knowledge and action.”12The more recent social ethos document is equally mind-ful of the time in which it is published. While one finds occasional references to secularism in describing our age (§13, §80), along with references to secular states or secular government (§8, §67), it is far more common to see FLW describing the present time as “modern.” Paragraph 80 explains the terminological distinction by noting that ours is an age of religious and ideological pluralism, and that “secularism itself is a form of modern ideology.” The term “modern” appears 46 times in the document, describing our world, age, societies, economy, and in two instances (§12, §39), Christians. The manner in which §21 and §39 frame the con-cept of the modern as problematic for Christians is instruc-tive regarding the wider usage of the term. As §12 states:One of the more morally corrosive aspects of modern democratic politics is the tendency to slander and revile - even, in fact, to demonize - others with whom one does not agree. Indeed, there is no other space than in the political, perhaps, where the modern Christian must strive more assiduously against the prevailing tendencies of the age, and seek instead to obey the commandment of love [emphasis mine].The modern Christian is implored to strive to resist the political tendencies of the age. In a similar manner, §39 warns modern Christians against succumbing to the dom-inant material economic forces of our age:It is not by accident, moreover, that Christ’s parables and injunctions so often advert to the crushing weight of indebtedness under which the poorer classes of his day struggled; and modern Christians should not allow an overly spiritualized reading of his language to hide the social issues he was addressing from view [emphasis mine].13This keen awareness of the church being located in the context of the modern era or late modernity, rather than framing it in terms of a colonial or post-colonial context, might be said to reflect the experience of churches mostly in what is often called the Orthodox diaspora. This is a subtle distinction, but it distances the document from the twen-tieth-century experience of oppression under communist regimes, and from the longer experience of oppression un-der Turkish and Arab rulers, which alike have often framed Orthodox ethics in past generations. It is also not the colo-nial or post-colonial context of churches in regions where the Orthodox presence is small, in Latin America, Africa (apart from Egypt and Ethiopia), and East Asia. This par-ticular, Euro-American location in the diaspora is important to note, as it conditions the document’s ecumenical under-standing and positioning. Concomitant with the modern orientation of the docu-ment, its core ethical concerns are those faced not only by Orthodox Christians but by all who must navigate the swift social and political currents of our time. Thus the document takes on a tenor of “proclamation to all people,” in this respect being resonant with the great papal encyclicals of the last half-century. Nowhere is this notion of being a prophetic sign to the rest of creation clearer than in the doc-ument’s eucharistic meditations:The Eucharist, in being celebrated and shared by the faithful, ever and again constitutes the true Christian polity, and shines out as an icon of God’s Kingdom as it will be realized in a redeemed, transfigured, and glori-fied creation. As such, the Eucharist is a prophetic sign as well, at once a critique of all political regimes insofar as they fall short of divine love and an invitation to all peoples to seek first the Kingdom of God and its justice (Matthew 6:33). (§8) The notion that the eucharist is to be a prophetic sign and a critique of all political regimes assumes that it is being witnessed by others who are not members of the church, and perhaps who are not even visitors attending the liturgy. Paragraph 44 reminds the faithful that “In every celebra-tion of the Eucharist, the Church prays in her Great Litany ‘for the peace of the whole world, let us pray to the Lord.’” But the text does not consign this hope to being heard only inside the church. The sign of the eucharist shines out beyond the church and its liturgy. It is quite significant that the invitation is not to accept Christ as savior or to join the church, as one might hear in other traditions. It is instead an invitation “to seek first the Kingdom of God and its justice” (§8), which are universal in their scope.14The document continues in this manner to address a wide range of contemporary ethical issues, including mar-riage and family life (which were addressed by the Holy and Great Council at Crete as well). FLW assumes that marriage is between a man and woman, but it pointedly avoids any direct condemnation of same-sex marriage. Paragraph 19 acknowledges:We live in an age in which sexuality has come more and more to be understood as a personal fate, and even a private matter. A great many political and social debates in the modern world turn upon the distinct demands and needs of heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, and other sexual “identities.”It does not make any explicit judgment regarding such “demands and needs,” other than to note that “inclinations and longings” are complex and often formed early in life. It then moves to make its explicit pronouncement regarding such matters:It must be accounted, moreover, a basic right of any per-son – which no state or civil authority may presume to violate – to remain free from persecution or legal dis-advantage as a result of his or her sexual orientation. But the Church understands human identity as residing primarily not in one’s sexuality or in any other private quality, but rather in the image and likeness of God present in all of us. All Christians are called always to seek the image and likeness of God in each other, and to resist all forms of discrimination against their neighbors, regardless of sexual orientation.Other matters regarding human sexuality and marriage are addressed mostly in terms of pastoral needs and practices attentive to what the 2016 Holy and Great Council in its statement on marriage termed “the exercise of ecclesiastical oikonomia.” Of particular note are the document’s indica-tions with regard to contraception and abortion. Paragraph 24 states: “The Orthodox Church has no dogmatic objec-tion to the use of safe and non-abortifacient contraceptives within the context of married life, not as an ideal or as a permanent arrangement, but as a provisional concession to necessity,” a position that is significantly different than that taken by Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae(“Of Human Life”). So too, the document unequivocally states that the Orthodox believe life begins at conception, but recognizes the need for a pathway to reconciliation for those who have terminated a pregnancy, noting that, “as the act of abortion is always objectively a tragedy, one that takes an innocent human life, reconciliation must involve the acknowledgment of this truth before complete repen-tance, reconciliation, and healing are possible” (§25). These paragraphs offer a consistent ethic of life that at the same time allows for pastoral discernment.FLW is likewise consistent in its condemnations of poverty and economic inequalities in the modern world, in light of their accompanying problems of hunger and lack of access to adequate health care (§40), yet it levels such critiques without taking a stance on the moral superiority of one economic system over another. It does not go so far as Pope Francis has done in calling upon the church to become “the church of the poor,”15 but it does come close to embrac-ing what Liberation Theology has called “the preferential option for the poor”:16[The Church] must always, as heir to the missions of the prophets and to the Gospel of the incarnate God, be a voice first for the poor, and a voice raised whenever necessary against the rich and powerful, and against governments that neglect or abuse the weak in order to serve the interests of the strong. (§41)The blessing that comes through the antidoron belongs especially to the poor.FLW is probably one of the most important Orthodox statements on social ethics in centuries. It is also, I would suggest, one of the most important ecumenical texts of the last century. The hope it voices that “Christians of all communions can meet together in love and work together for the transformation of the world” (§52) should remind us of the vision behind the Universal Christian Council on Life and Work that was held in Stockholm in 1925. But FLW is not inviting us only to engage in common practice in the world. In a profound way it is inviting us all to commit our-selves and our communions to a new openness and soli-darity grounded in a shared appreciation for the depths of Christian faith found among each of our traditions. As we read in §54:Our commitment to ecumenical relations with other Christian confessions reflects this openness to all who sincerely seek the truth as the incarnate Logos, Jesus Christ, and who remain true to their conscience, even while we continue to bear witness to the fullness of the Christian faith in the Orthodox Church. Moreover, the Church can stand with other Christians in this way not only out of solidarity in light of a shared history and moral vision, but also because such Christian groups, through their Trinitarian baptism and confession of the faith of the Councils, profess and share many aspects of Orthodox teaching and tradition.

 

 Notes:1. All citations of the document are taken from the website of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America: www.goarch.org/social-ethos. 

2. John Chryssavgis, “The Orthodox Church and Social Teaching ‘For the Life of the World,’” Commonweal (March 23, 2020): https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/orthodox-church-social-teaching.

 3. The Russian Orthodox Church, Department for External Church Relations: “The Basis of the Social Concept”: https://mospat.ru/en/documents/social-concepts/. 

4. Chryssavgis, “The Orthodox Church and Social Teaching ‘For the Life of the World.’” 

5. See “The Mission of the Orthodox Church in Today’s World,” as part of the “Official Documents of the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church”: https://www.holycouncil.org/-/mis-sion-orthodox-church-todays-world.

 6. Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, revised and expanded version (Crestwood: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1973), 14. I will be citing from this 1973 edition, which contains two additional chapters that are identified as Appendices.

 7. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 14.

 8. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 17. 

9. Ken Parry et al, eds., The Blackwell Dictionary of Eastern Christianity (Malden: Blackwell, 2001), 35.

 10. See Iuliu-Marius Morariu, “Eastern Orthodox Churches and Ecumenism according to the Holy Pan-Orthodox Council of Crete (2016),” HTS Theological Studies 74.4 (2018), 1-5: https://hts.org.za/index.php/hts/article/view/4954/11387#CIT0009_4954. 

1. Radu Bordeianu, “The 2016 Pan-Orthodox Council and Ecumenical Relations (2015),” Public Orthodoxy (October 30, 2015): https://publicorthodoxy.org/2015/10/30/the-2016-pan-or-thodox-council-and-ecumenical-relations.

 12. Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 124. 

13. See also §11, 18, 20, 35, and 71 for additional significant engagements by the document with the conditions of “modernity” and indeed “late modernity.” 

14. The theme of proclamation to all people appears again in §10, coupled now with a criticism of an Orthodox tendency in the past to conflate faith and national or cultural identity. Such conflation might have served to help preserve Orthodox institutions and even Orthodox Christian identity in politically-hostile contexts in the past. It now hinders the vocation of proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ to all peoples – a position that sounds strik-ingly evangelical in its content. 

15. See Clemens Sedmak, A Church of the Poor: Pope Francis and the Transformation of Orthodoxy (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2016). 

16. See Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation,(Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1988), xxv-xxxvii; and Dwight N. Hopkins, “The Preferential Option for the Poor and the Oppressed,” in Hopkins, Heart and Head (NYC: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 53-74.,Although FLW is primarily addressed to “all the Orthodox faithful—clergy and laity, women and men” (§82), the riches of its insights are not only meant for the Orthodox faith-ful. In a profound sense they are addressed to all Christians, all humanity, and even all creation. Ecumenical renewal always begins from within the depths of one’s tradition, communion, or culture as these are found on the peripher-ies of history, whether this means scattered through dias-pora or marginalized in the life of the poor. FLW is deeply grounded in the life of the Orthodox faith, especially as it was articulated through the Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church in 2016. As §82 concludes, however, it is prayerfully offered in the hope that “what is written here will help to advance and will further aid in fulfilling the will of God in his Church and in the world.”