Arabic original here.
Pentecost and the Ecumenical Movement: Observations and
Conclusions
Last week was Pentecost and today is All Saints’ Day. So, we
are within the scope and depth of the Church—the Church as the body of the Lord
Jesus Christ, to Him be glory. “We are members of His body, of His flesh and of
His bones” (Ephesians 5:30). But, is the body of Jesus other than the Lord
Jesus—that is, than the person of the Lord Jesus Christ? Should the Church be
seen as a part of Him, an extension of Him, or identical with Him? Should she
be seen as a sort of institution in His name or is she His presence in
fullness, extending into eternity?
She is not a part of Him nor is she an institution in His
name! When the Lord established the mystery of the Eucharist, He gave to His
disciples—and to us through them—His body and His blood. This means,
effectively, Himself completely. On that day He established the Church! His
body meaning Himself and His blood meaning His life. When the Chosen Apostle
stated that from now on—starting with Christ—we do not know anyone according to
the flesh, even though we have known Christ according to the flesh but now we
do not know Him any longer, when the Apostle stated this he wanted to cast
light on what he called “the new creation” (2 Corinthians 5:16-17) , meaning on
the Church who is herself the Lord Jesus Christ.
The disciples knew the Lord Jesus, before the Resurrection,
Ascension, and Pentecost, in human flesh. We, however, know the Lord Jesus in
the Holy Spirit. This does not place our knowledge of Him and our closeness to
Him apart from His flesh. Rather, it makes it a different kind of knowledge:
theanthropic—or, you could say, divine in the flesh! Not just divine, but
theanthropic. And not just spiritual. Pure spirit is unknown to us. For this
reason, when we say “spiritual”, we mean something that is human but
spiritualized, that which is spiritual but is in the flesh, as one and the
same.
The incarnation of Christ brought us to a new creation, in
which we treat spirit in human terms, just as we treat the flesh spiritually. Those
who reckon that there is still a division between what belongs to the body and
what belongs to the spirit and that the body has its bodily things while
spiritual things exclusively belong to the spirit are in error! The body in
itself, for your Lord, is of no use: it is the spirit that gives life! We have
come to be in a new, completely other realm of existence. In Christ, we deal
with everything that pertains to man, from the simplest matters to the most
complicated, but spiritually—or, you could say, incarnationally, not in a
bodily manner, but in a theanthropic manner!
This is a new datum, a new being, a new reality and so this
new sphere is the Church. As long as this remains the case, the body in the
Church is one, and the Church of the Body is one, because in both cases Christ
the Lord is the same. Likewise, the Spirit in the Church is one, because He
alone grants us to be of the one Christ and to live in Him. Thus, the Church
cannot but be one, in all cases. No one and no power outside of Christ
threatens the unity of Christ’s Church—her axiomatic unity! Neither Christ nor
His Holy Spirit can fragment her!
When we partake of the holy things, we receive in part from
what is visible; however, this visible, sensible part contains all of Christ as
one, who is unseen, and likewise all the Spirit. In other, perhaps more precise
words, the unseen is manifest in the seen, as in the Bible or as in an icon.
Thus, speaking of a divided Church is an incorrect image.
Christians alone are divided into opposing groups and rival factions. But the
Church is one thing and Christians are another. The Church might exist among
some people that we consider Christians, and Christians might exist in the
Church. However, the Church as an entity and Christians as a group are not
coterminous! Naturally, in common usage the word “churches” is used with the
meaning “groups of believers.” But in its deep and fundamental usage, the word
“Church” is used to mean “the Body of Christ.” Thus when we want to indicate
one of the Orthodox groups/churches, we say: the Church that is here or there,
indicating the one Church in each group or location—the one Church in her
fullness, in Spirit and in truth, here or there. If the fullness and unity of
the Church were not represented in a specific place and a specific group, then
we do not at all speak of the one true Church that is in this group or that
place. In that case, even within the one group, there may be a person from the
Church or there may not be. Or, you could say: the Church may be there or may
not be. It is possible, then, for there to be churches, but this does not
necessarily mean that each person from these groups/churches is in the body, in
the Church, in Christ and of Him! Someone like this comes from a Christianity—perhaps
a counterfeit one—and does not necessarily come from the Lord’s Christ and His
Spirit!
There are those, then, who are numbered within an ecclesial
group without being in the true, theantrhopic Church! It is possible for one
who is called a believer to belong outwardly to an ecclesial group: baptized,
professing the Creed, receiving the mysteries of the Church, even fasting and
praying, without being in the Church, in Christ—that is, without belonging, in
Spirit and in truth, as we have said, to the one Church that is the Body of
Christ. Naturally, belonging to the body of Christ, being a living member in
the Body of Christ, presupposes that one be baptized, just as it presupposes
everything we just mentioned. However, primarily and existentially it means
living a living and active faith in love. Belonging to the Church only through
visible things is not enough. We see what is unseen—we live at that level, we
practice it completely, even if, on account of our weakness, we are ailing from
sin. We live on the level of what is seen of our faith in the Lord Jesus, but
starting off from what is unseen, in terms of total, living faith in the Lord
Jesus that is active in love!
These elements/truths
raises the issue of ecclesial unity, or you could say that it makes raising the
issue inevitable, not in human terms but in theanthropic terms. Unity is not an
issue of verbal expressions of the faith or of joint services! It is not a
question of a single human head or a single synod, nor is it a question of
total administrative unity! It is not an agglomeration of bodies and the
convergence of sects, nor is it the convergence of ideological opinions in how
groups deal with each other or how they deal with the world! Naturally,
ecclesial unity has some of these aspects: a single or unified creedal formula,
rituals with a single basic structure, leaders with various gifts,
administrations that manage their affairs in an appropriate and orderly
fashion, cooperation and mutual understanding between individuals and groups,
here and there. All of this exists with regard to our human, social reality, as
a domain in which true Christian unity might blossom forth. However, all this
is not what makes ecclesial unity a reality, but rather what is manifested as
an expression of it! To regard it as the basis for bringing back unity, after
the putative schism in the Church, prioritizes and substitutes what is human,
theoretical, and organizational over and in place of what is of the living Holy
Spirit. It likewise makes the Spirit and the activities of the Spirit in people’s
minds at the level of a support for human activities, something of a foregone
conclusion, or, you could say an attribute bestowed on people’s plans according
to their convictions, interests, and reckonings! In other words, they attribute
to the Spirit of God what is of them and for them, and thus they make
themselves into gods by pilfering what belongs to God, abandoning the spiritual
things that belong to the Spirit of God! This is a great error!
Let it be clear that the unity of the Church is eternally
actualized and the Holy Spirit ensures its persistence. People, as believers,
place themselves on the path of holy things, in the Spirit, in Christ. They
walk in faith, in Spirit and in truth. They receive the mysteries of the
Church. They keep the commandment. They practice repentance. They gird
themselves with Christian virtues. They are always armed with prayer in the
name of the Lord Jesus. They remain firm in the love of God and of their
brothers. They perfect all for Christ in life and in death! If they do this,
then in the Spirit they become one with God and thence one among themselves! We
are not the ones who bring about the unity of the Church. It is not possible
for us to bring it about ourselves in terms of unity of the churches. It is not
necessarily identical with the one Church, the Church of Christ and the Holy
Spirit, the Church of God which He purchased with His blood! We only
participate in the one Church or we are cut off from her. We belong to her, or
we are strangers to her, in Spirit and in truth! Thus, the Church’s unity
exists in the Holy Spirit, then in the Spirit it is reflected in us in our
relationship with each other. From below upwards, then it comes down upon us to
what is among us, in order to bring us together, one with the other, and raise
us all up as one to the one Father!
Thus, those who seek visible unity among us but do not
earnestly work to become one with God unwittingly fall into ecclesial paganism
and thence into demonic selfishness. They prepare, not for the coming of Christ
the Lord—“Come, Lord Jesus”—but for the coming of the Antichrist, unwittingly!
As the sphere of the great, effective apostasy, of which the
Chosen Apostle spoke in his second epistle to the Thessalonians, widens and as
the work of the ecumenical movement continues in earnest toward the putative
unity of the churches, it is appropriate for us to wonder: At root, is the goal
the one Church or is the goal something else? If the goal is sincerely the one
Church, then we are no doubt looking at an error that needs to be corrected. I will cite here the position of Fr Georges
Florovsky at the time of the founding of the World Council of Churches in 1938.
From the beginning, he stated that the Church is one and that the Greek
Orthodox Church alone preserves the apostolic consciousness across history
until today and that her role in the World Council of Churches is to help the
non-Orthodox recover that apostolic consciousness that they are lacking. If
this is really the goal, then it is for the one Church. But if the goal is
something else—and this is how it appears to many observers—then there is the
fear that the real goal is to unite the churches as preparation for uniting all
the religions of the world under the pretext of coexistence. As we understand
it, this involves the total elimination of Christ’s Church in the name of unity
of peoples, by emptying her of her Christ and her Spirit and placing her within
a relativist intellectual framework and thus regarding Christ as but one of a
newfangled council of gods! As for the Church, it effectively proceeds to
making a division between her being Christ Himself and her being an institution
in His name! In this case, it proceeds to being satisfied with her stone,
human, verbal, ritual, historical, organizational edifice! Deep down, our
feeling is that in this regard we are confronted with an earnest effort to turn
the Church into a museum, to psychologize her and make her worldly!
In the meantime, out
of sight and far from worldly lights, like what happened in a cave in
Bethlehem, there is a little flock where souls sigh for their Lord, from among
those who are strengthened by the Holy Spirit for the Holy Spirit, with
longing, desire, and overwhelming love for the one who is above. From them
emanates an aroma of divine perfume that spreads among those who have not yet
lost their spiritual sense of smell! To them alone is manifest the radiant
unity of the Church, perfect in her fullness, while the majority with their
failing vision seek the Church, the bride who is said to be missing! Where? In
the fog of the darkness of the mind and the shadow of death, the death of correct
consciousness, amidst the rubble of fantasies and innovations established as
newly-invented axioms!
In sum: give me an
authentic concern for holiness that shows you those who truly work to show the
manifestations of the face of the bride, the one true Church! Anything else
searches and strives for her in vain!
June 30, 2013
Archimandrite Touma
(Bitar)
Abbot of the Monastery
of Saint Silouan-- Douma
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