First published @ http://radio-awakening.com/index.php/73-light-from-the-east-orthodoxy-for-traditional-anglicans-2
When I read the news about traditional Anglicans who become more and more disillusioned with the liberal direction that the Anglican Communion has chosen in the recent decades and thus decide to become Catholic converts and about the plans of the Roman curia to accommodate them within a special Ordinariate, I have dual feelings: on the one hand, I'm happy that there are so many Christians who genuinely wish to follow the Biblical teaching on morality and ecclesiastic issues and remain unscathed in the face of aggressive secularism; but on the other hand, I cannot approve of the way they have chosen, bearing in mind the history of Orthodox-Anglican dialogue in the past centuries and the perspectives it has opened for both parties.
Hopefully, this article will find an answer in the hearts of both the Orthodox and the members of the Anglican community who are considering their next steps. It wasn't my aim to write another polemical anti-Catholic pamphlet (there are already tons of them in circulation nowadays) – and I will be really sorry if anyone considers this article to be one.
Obviously, one of the main stumbling blocks on the road to full communion with Rome for both the Orthodox and the Anglicans has been the issue of papal supremacy, i.e. the doctrine that the Pope, by reason of his office as Vicar of Christ and as pastor of the entire Christian Church, has full, supreme, and universal power over the whole Church, a power which he can always exercise unhindered [i], and the issue of papal infallibility, i.e. a dogma of the Catholic Church which states that, by action of the Holy Spirit, the Pope is preserved from even the possibility of error when in his official capacity he solemnly declares or promulgates to the universal Church a dogmatic teaching on faith or morals [ii].
Why Does Rome Claim to Be the Final Authority?
We see in all early Christian manuscripts that during the first three centuries of the Christian era (the time of persecution and martyrdom) every diocese was self-governed and each bishop was equal to the rest of the bishops in terms of ecclesiastic authority [iii]. This was natural due to the fact that they did not have cell phones or the Internet – and because of constant struggle for survival. When the persecutions finally ended in 313 AD, the bishops of the main cities of the Roman Empire gained more authority and ecclesiastical units bigger than a diocese (i.e. Metropolitanates, Patriarchates) were established. However, there was no single bishop who would be considered the bishop-in-chief. Even the most influential bishop of Rome was regarded as primus inter pares (i.e., first among equals).
Unfortunately, in the course of history, human pride and infirmities, combined with the natural position of the Roman bishop as the highest Church authority in all the vast Western part of the Empire – and the only political figure capable of resolving arguments between Barbarian kings and giving them a real feeling of belonging to the much-admired Roman culture – led to the development of the un-Christian doctrine of domination of the Roman Popes and their ability to execute their power not just within the borders of their own vast Patriarchate, but also in all other Churches. They claimed that it was thanks to Apostle Peter who was the Prince of Apostles and later the first bishop of Rome that they had this power. This claim has several weak points, and let us underline them:
- Apostle Peter was NOT a bishop in the modern – and even not-so-modern – sense of that word. Let’s see what the concept of Apostolic succession of bishops means. Basically, the idea is that present-day bishops, as the successors of previous bishops, going back to the early days of Christianity, have spiritual and ecclesiastical power by this unbroken chain of ordinations stemming from the Apostles. However, according to early Christian sources, an Apostle could not stay in one place for more than a couple of days [iv], while a bishop is ‘married’ to his see. Thus, the ministry of the Apostles was somehow unique in the Church, and bishops inherit just their ecclesiastical power, not their ministry.
- Apostle Peter was the bishop of the Church in Antioch BEFORE he was the “first bishop” of Rome. Does it mean that Antioch (now a small town in Syria) must be the sole authority for all other Churches?
- Apostle Peter did NOT preside during the very first Apostolic Council in Jerusalem (Acts 15). St James did. Does it make Apostle James the Prince of Apostles, and thus, the Jerusalem Patriarchate the sole and infallible authority for all other Christian Churches?
Given that, and the joint witness of the writings of the first millenium of the Church history [v], we come to the conclusion that the claim of Rome to be the final authority for all Christians is ungrounded.
Ecumenical Councils as the Alternative Way of Problem Resolution in the Church
Okay, okay. How can Christians stand up to the multitude of challenges plaguing the modern world: rampant immorality, melting of the original Christian doctrine and merging it with non-Christian teachings in a syncretic way, widespread poverty and injustice – if they do not have the central authority giving an ex cathedra answer to all their questions?
We have already mentioned that there was no concept of papal primacy in the most part of the first millenium of the Christian era. However, the challenges that the Church had to answer to could hardly be called smaller than those it has to find answers to nowadays: rampant immorality in the pagan societies of ancient Greece and Rome is no secret to all interested in history; the number of heresies and sects trying to use the Christian teaching as the basis for their own doctrine was countless, just as it is now. Assuming that the Church was able to preserve the integrity of its teaching and structure, we should look at how they managed to do that.
The answer lies in Acts 15: 5, 6 “But there rose up certain of the sect of the Pharisees which believed, saying, That it was needful to circumcise them, and to command them to keep the law of Moses. And the apostles and elders came together for to consider of this matter.” Following their example, the Church held a number of Ecumenical Councils, starting with the First Ecumenical Council in Nicea in 325, where doctrinal matters were discussed. The Popes were not present on every one of these Councils due to long distances and dangerous roads. They sent their representatives (legates) who were entrusted with the right to agree on the decisions of the Councils on behalf of the Pope.
Moreover, – and this is essential to mention if we are to understand the principle of how the Ecumenical Councils worked – the Councils did not ‘invent’ new dogmas, contrary to the public perception. They reinstated them and bore witness to the original teaching of the Church [vi]. And this is hard to overestimate! Because after the so called ‘Great Schism’ in 1054 (even though this date is arguable) the Roman Catholics held a number of what they called “Ecumenical Councils”, with virtually not one Eastern bishop present, and added several important doctrines to the original Christian teaching, viz., the purgatory, the Treasury of Merit; the papal infallibility and the immaculate conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary in 1854 [vii]. These newly invented teachings, stemming from a very ‘legal’ understanding of the work of Christ and salvation, have never been supported by the East, just as they are rejected by Protestants. It is noteworthy that the Tübingen Lutherans, seeking for a church authority to go to after leaving the Roman Catholic Church, wrote to Jeremiah II, Patriarch of Constantinople [viii], enquiring about the faith of the Eastern Church.
The Eastern Orthodox church, traditionally divided into a number of self-governing Patriarchates, yet unified in common faith, has been loyal to the original teaching of the Seven Ecumenical Councils and thus to the faith given to us by the Holy Apostles and our Lord Jesus Christ himself so it is the most likely claimant of the title of the One Holy Apostolic Church that the Nicene Creed refers to and a more welcoming destination for the traditionalist Anglicans than the Roman Catholic Church. Let me prove that by turning to the history of Orthodox-Anglican relations.
Just One Step Apart: A Brief History of Orthodox-Anglican Dialogue
Our story begins in the earliest years of Christian witness in the British Isles where the Celtic churches of Wales, Ireland, and Northumbria had a clearly Greek rhythm to their calendar and to their customs [ix].
Relations between the Orthodox Church and the Anglicans began in the seventeenth century between the Patriarch of Constantinople Cyril Lucaris (1572-1638) and George Abbot, Anglican archbishop of Canterbury. In 1679 the Archbishop of Canterbury and York and King Charles II built a church for the Greek community in London. The Bishop of London then organized a college at Oxford (now Worcester College) that was to be for Greeks and twelve seminarians came from Greece to establish this college in 1680 [x].
With the Assize Sermon in 1833, the Oxford Movement began. And, even though one of the founding fathers of this movement, John Henry Newman, ended up in the Roman Catholic Church, it was obvious that for the other prominent Tractarians, such as Keble and Edward Pusey, the primary goal was to bypass the Middle Ages, to bypass the claims of Rome, to move back to the Patristic Era, and to find their roots once again in the authentic, non-papal, Apostolic Christianity [xi]. It was with this idea in mind that they published the 48-volume Library of the Fathers – one of the best collections of English translations of Patristic texts.
John Mason Neale (1818-1866) was one of the first to bring the treasures of the Eastern Orthodoxy to the attention of the Western Church. Neale translated the Eastern liturgies into English and enriched English hymnody with many ancient and medieval hymns translated from Latin and Greek. More than anyone else, he made English-speaking congregations aware of the centuries-old tradition of Latin, Greek, Russian, and Syrian hymns. It was him who helped to establish the most longstanding ecumenical organization in the West, called the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association [xii], in 1862.
There were many other Anglicans who saw reunion with the Eastern Orthodoxy as a natural move for the Anglican Church. I cannot help mentioning Bishop Charles Chapman Grafton (1830-1912), a close friend of our Orthodox Saint Patriarch Tikhon. In his work The Reunion of Oriental and Anglican Churches he writes, “It is this spirit of love that makes them reach out to us and desire our possession of it in union with themselves. Hence while, Rome’s attitude towards us is that of an imperious demand of submission to her authority as the arbiter of doctrine and the source of all jurisdiction, the Orthodox Russian Church only asks: Do we hold together the same faith? If we do, we are brethren. We may differ, must now differ in matters of discipline, ceremonial, ritual; but the essential matter is, do we profess the same scriptural and traditional faith with themselves?… We have thus, it is clear, a great educative work to do before the Churches can be united. It calls for divine patience, divine enthusiasm, wonderworking faith. It is not to be the work of a day or generation. Our Church is in the transition period of recovering her Catholic heritage. The progress made in the century from 1803 to 1903 is indeed wonderful, and shows how God has been with us. It is the Lord’s doing and it is marvellous in our eyes. If we are faithful, in 2003 our successors will find a like advance. Man is ever impatient and in a hurry. God works slowly, but His work endures. The cause is God’s cause, and opposition cannot overthrow it. God will bless in the future, as He has in the past, our hindrances to the sanctification of His Church and the promotion of His Glory.”
At that time, he could afford the boldness of saying that there wasn’t much that kept the two parties apart. Since then, unfortunately, the situation within the Anglican community has seen drastic changes, including ordination of women (with Barbara Harris the first woman ordained as a bishop in the Anglican Communion, for the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts in 1989) and homosexuals (with Gene Robertson the first openly gay bishop ordained in 2004 for New Hampshire). Therefore, the Orthodox-Anglican dialogue having full communion as its aim is hardly possible today.
However, the Orthodox Church will always welcome the moves back to the faith and discipline of the Fathers, which, as we have seen from this brief article, has always been there in the Anglican community. As Orthodox, we pray for the unification of all during each Divine Liturgy (arguably one of the best English translations of which was made by Isabel Hapgood, an Anglican believer, with the blessing of Holy Patriarch Tikhon, then Metropolitan of North America) and remember the words of our Saviour who said, “Holy Father, keep through thine own name those whom thou hast given me, that they may be one, as we are.” [xiii] Even though our Churches may seem ‘too ethnic’ to some, this is not necessarily the case, as there are many English-speaking parishes and there have even been attempts to incorporate the Western Rite Liturgy (with the important strengthening of Epiclesis within the Eucharistic canon, adding the pre-communion prayers from the Byzantine Rite, prayers for the dead, the invocation of the saints to the rite prescribed by The Book of Common Prayer, and removing the filioque from the text of the Nicene Creed – as one possible option; Sarum Liturgy as another; and a number of other adaptations as well) into the Orthodox liturgical practice [xiv]. This project received approval, and there is a number of Western Rite parishes as part of the ROCOR Western Rite Vicariate [xv] and as a part of the Antiochian Western Rite Vicariate (AWRV) in the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America [xvi].
I hope to have given enough information for the inquisitive mind. You are welcome to comment on this article – here or via email.
[i] Cf. Paragraph 882 of the Cathechism of the Catholic Church.
[ii] Cf. Paragraph 891 of the Cathechism of the Catholic Church.
[iii] St Jerome wrote, “Wheresoever a bishop is — whether at Rome or at Eugubium, at Constantinople or at Rhegium, or at Alexandria, or at Tanis, he is of the same worth, and also of the same priesthood (ejusdem est meriti, ejusdem est et sacerdotii). The power of riches and the lowliness of poverty do not make a bishop more exalted or more low. Besides, they are all the successors of the Apostles (ceterum omnes Apostolorum successores sunt).” (Jerome, Ep 146 to Evangelus, Migne PL 22:1192, Giles page 154).
[iv] Didache, Chapter 11, “Let every apostle who comes to you be received as the Lord. But he shall not remain more than one day; or two days, if there’s a need. But if he remains three days, he is a false prophet.”
[v] Let’s name just a few: In St. Augustine’s Retractions, he writes,
In one place I said… that the Church had been built on Peter as the Rock… but in fact it was not said to Peter, Thou art the Rock, but rather Thou art Peter. The Rock was Jesus Christ, Peter having confessed Him as all the Church confesses Him, He was then called Peter, the Rock …Between these two sentiments let the reader choose the most probable.(13th Sermon; Contra Julianum 1:13)
Again he says similarly in the same work,
Peter had not a primacy over the apostles, but among the apostles, and Christ said to them I will build upon Myself, I will not be built upon thee.
This quote is so important because of the importance of the teachings of St Augustine to the Church in the West and the fact that he was a ‘Westerner’ himself.
[vi] Take, for example, this quotation of St Cyril of Alexandria in his Third letter to Nestorius, found in the Acts of the III Ecumenical Council in Ephesus, “Following in all points the confessions of the holy fathers, which they made with the holy Spirit speaking in them, and following the direction of their opinions and going as it were in the royal way, we say that…”
[vii] In the Constitution Ineffabilis Deus of 8 December, 1854, Pius IX pronounced and defined that the Blessed Virgin Mary “in the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin.”
[viii] For more detailed information on their dialogue, see Augsburg and Constantinople: The Correspondence between the Tübingen Theologians and Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople on the Augsburg Confession. By George Mastrantonis. The Archbishop Iakovos Library of Ecclesiastical and Historical Sources 7. Brookline, Massachusetts: Holy Cross Press, 1982. xix + 350 pp.
[ix] Detailed study of disagreements between the Roman missionaries and the Celtic Christians is out of the scope of this article but let us just list some of them briefly. The Celts used a service similar to the Eastern Orthodox rite, while the Roman missionaries adhered to the customs which had developed later in the West. The Celtic Christians had monks and nuns, as well as married priests (in accordance with the early tradition which is still observed in Orthodoxy) but the Roman mission only had celibate or monk priests. There were other differences as well, most notably the disagreement on how to calculate the date of the Easter. Several books by Rev Andrew Phillips, rector of St. John the Wonderworker Orthodox Church in Felixstowe, Suffolk, in the United Kingdom (ROCOR), viz., Orthodox Christianity and the Old English Church, 1988, and The Hallowing of England, 1992 may be recommended for further reading on this topic.
[x] See a remarkable work The Greek College at Oxford, 1699-1705 by E.D. Tappe, as well as Fair Greece Sad Relic by T. Spencer for more information about this period of Orthodox-Anglican relations. This topic is also covered in depth by Judith Pinnington and Rowan Williams in their book called Anglicans and Orthodox: unity and subversion 1559-1725.
[xi] See more on Edward B. Pusey and his criticism of the Roman Catholic theological innovations in Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey: doctor of divinity, canon of Christ church; regius professor of Hebrew in the University of Oxford by Henry Parry Liddon, published by Longmans, Green in 1897.
[xii] See their website http://www.aeca.org.uk/.
[xiii] John 17: 11 KJV.
[xiv] For more information on Western Rite in the Orthodox Church see http://www.westernorthodox.com/ or http://westernorthodox.blogspot.com/. There is a good collection of links to other Western-rite websites at http://westernorthodox.info/links/websites.html.
[xv] More at http://westernorthodox.info/index_files/2011-05-rocor-vicariate.html
[xvi] See http://www.antiochian.org/western-rite.
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