ORTHODOXY WITHOUT BORDERS: A GREEK ORTHODOX CHURCH FOR ALL NATIONS!

Vasilis Adrahtas

In what follows I will firstly try to make a theological case for a Greek Orthodox Church that aspires to go beyond its own Greekness – while at the same time remaining truthful to it – and then I will put forward this case as an apposite framework for envisioning the future of our Church in Australia. My intention is not to appropriate a prerogative which belongs to His Eminence Archbishop Makarios, namely, the right and responsibility to set out the parameters that should guide the life of our Church as a collective body, but to share some thoughts with my sisters and brothers in Christ regarding certain aspects of our ecclesial life in Australia. I firmly believe that, if these thoughts have any substance at all, our Archbishop is the only person who can turn them into something really constructive for the salvation of the faithful.

The Ecclesial Transcendence of Hellenism

St Paul exclaims: ‘There is no longer Jew or Greek… for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’ (Gal. 3: 28; NRSV translation), and in light of such an utterance one could hardly claim that ethnic priorities have anything to do with being a Christian. Nevertheless, I tend to juxtapose the Apostle’s unmistakable message with statements such as the one made by the most prominent 20th century Orthodox theologian Fr Georges Florovsky: ‘Hellenism… has incorporated itself in the very fabric of the Church as the eternal category of Christian existence’! In other words, ‘no longer’ vs ‘eternal category’… and the result is that I wonder... Are we faced here with a contradiction or are both voices witnessing distinct yet undivided truths? Although I will probably keep on wondering, I reckon that both St Paul and Fr Florovsky are telling us something more than what they are just saying…

Quite naturally we call and understand our Church as Greek Orthodox, but what exactly does this mean? It is easier to start by saying what it shouldn’t mean. It shouldn’t mean that our Church is reserved for ethnic Greeks. It shouldn’t mean that our Church is the business of a certain country. It shouldn’t mean that our Church is exclusivist. All these were most emphatically condemned at the Holy and Great Synod of Constantinople in 1872 under the name of ethnophyletism or, to put it in up-to-date terms, ecclesiastical racism. However, this condemnation does not mean that our Church doesn’t cherish Greek ethnicity. It does not mean that our Church doesn’t bear witness to Greek historicity. It does not mean that our Church excludes Greekness. Besides, in order to become a member of the Church, one has to already be someone, to come from somewhere and to be addressed precisely as such…

As such and such… but, more importantly, beyond such and such… towards the ‘one in Christ Jesus’. We belong to the Greek Orthodox Church because we know where this Church comes from; because we know its course through and with Hellenism for centuries upon centuries; because we do know of Hellenism ‘in the very fabric of the Church’. By being Greek the Orthodox Church affirms the transcendence of Hellenism, that is, the transformation of Hellenism from a temporary into an eternal category – as is proper and fitting for ‘Christian existence’! The Greek Orthodox Church is not the Church of the Greeks, for the Greeks and by the Greeks! The Greek Orthodox Church involves Hellenism as a spiritual yearning throughout history for something more than Being, something more than knowledge, something more than reason; it involves Hellenism as a calling to pursue unity in the abundance of life (cf. John 10:10). And as such the Greek Orthodox Church shall always be a Church for all nations!

Truthful to the Ecumenicity of our Patriarchate

If there is an ecclesiastical jurisdiction that has been bone and flesh of the linguistic, cultural and intellectual bones and flesh (cf. Gen. 2: 23) of Hellenism, that is the Ecumenical Patriarchate. And if there is an ecclesiastical jurisdiction that has turned these bones and flesh into the distinctive bones and flesh of so many Churches by enabling them to be more than Greek (that is, Serbian, Bulgarian, Russian, Romanian, etc.) through its own Greekness, that is again the Ecumenical Patriarchate. The Great Church of Constantinople has truly become a Mother Church by giving birth to a multitude of Daughter Churches through Hellenism as ‘the eternal category of Christian existence’. In this sense, the Ecumenical Patriarchate is the most Greek amongst the Orthodox Churches, for it has realised in history more than any other Church the all-inclusive, supranational and Christ-seeking intentionality of historical Hellenism.

As an organic part of the Ecumenical Patriarchate, our Church in Australia cannot but continue the aforementioned legacy by emulating the Hellenic disposition as realised in the Orthodox Church, namely, the disposition of showing that Being cannot be whole without ‘the wholly Other’; that knowledge is the most powerful means for others to consolidate their otherness; and that reason is truly relational and unifying when it manages to acknowledge the otherness of faith. With all the talk in Australia going on about otherness and difference – and, unfortunately, with the concomitant lack of a genuinely relevant framework being implemented – it becomes clear that we are in urgent need for a living historical legacy that can accommodate, facilitate and consolidate our nation’s desire for unity in diversity. Is there at hand something better than the Hellenic paradigm as implemented in the case of our Orthodox Church, and especially the life of the Ecumenical Patriarchate?

But, practically speaking, how are we supposed to go about the all-inclusive, supranational and Christ-seeking legacy of ecclesial Hellenism in our modern Australian milieu? Firstly, we have to transform the more or less migrant and parochial mentality of certain circles in our Church into a genuine witnessing of universal Orthodoxy. Secondly, we have to work towards a Pan-Orthodox jurisdictional unification within the Archdiocese of Australia by envisioning at some stage a truly multi-lingual liturgical life and a multi-ethnic hierarchy under the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Thirdly, we have to put into action the calling of our Church to the Indigenous peoples of this Land, so that they can come to share in the good news of the Kingdom of God already palpable in the life of the Church as the body of Christ. And, lastly, we have to be the champions of unconditional coexistence, that is, living together and for one another regardless of whatever differences.

All this might strike someone as commonplace and self-evident, since inclusiveness, respect for difference, valuing diversity and otherness, are more or less what our mainstream society is all about. However, it seems that we are still struggling with these idea(l)s… and I wonder why… For one thing, as a collective body we don’t have the slightest idea where they come from or how they came to be. We take the secular jargon of our time and age for granted, and ignore its history and background, which has a very specific name: it is nothing less than an adaptation through secularisation of the age-long legacy of Hellenism as the latter had been ‘incorporated… in the very fabric of the [one and undivided Orthodox] Church’ – to paraphrase a bit that so Greek Russian theologian by the name of Georges Florovsky! By recalling the legacy of this historical memory through theory and action, deeds and beliefs, ethos and praxis, we can prove to be true members of a local Church that has reached ‘the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the full stature of Christ’ (Eph. 4:13; NRSV translation), which is – simply speaking – Orthodoxy without borders!