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Unecumenism and the Sins of All

Unecumenism and the Sins of All

By Fr. Stephen Freeman
http://blogs.ancientfaith.com/
October 7, 2015

The concept of the One Church shifted during the Reformation. I offer a case in point as well as a reflection on how it changes our current understanding.

The old Anglican Book of Common Prayer offers one of the early examples of a subtle shift in Christian thinking and speech. In the Thanksgiving after Communion we read:

Almighty and ever living God, we most heartily thank thee for that thou dost feed us, in these holy mysteries, with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son our Savior Jesus Christ; and dost assure us thereby of thy favor and goodness towards us; and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son, the blessed company of all faithful people...

Here we have the context for a new meaning of the "one Church." Thomas Cranmer wrote this prayer for his first prayer book (1549), and it has continued its presence in subsequent versions. Like all of Cranmer's prose, it is a thing of beauty. But Archbishop Cranmer would need to answer some serious questions:

Does "the blessed company of all faithful people" include the Roman Catholics that you assisted your King in overturning? Does it include all of the monastics butchered by your king so he could steal their lands? Does it include the Pope?

The fact is, Cranmer would have excluded them. They were not "faithful" people, because they held to the Catholic faith. He would have been more kindly affectioned to Lutherans, Calvinists and Zwinglians, but in typical Cranmerian fashion, a very vague, undefined phrase of piety filled the space of the prayer and left certain questions to go begging.

But we must ask further questions: What constitutes being "faithful"? Is there a least common denominator for Christians that makes them faithful? Would the word have a different meaning than when it is used in the marriage service where a husband promises to be "faithful" to his wife?

For Cranmer, historical evidence suggests that "faithful people" did not included "Papists." It was a generic term used to suggest that some group of people known only to God were "the faithful." But for the first time, this collection is abstracted from the actual, historical manifestation of the Church. In that sense, the gathering of those on earth, was perhaps not "the Church" in the sense that the word was used prior to Cranmer. Cranmer's beautiful prayers presented a sanitized version of the rebellion and mayhem that was actually taking place within the kingdom. For the work of Henry VIII and Cranmer was not a spiritual work. It was political, financial and violent. Cranmer served his king well.

What was Christianity in England before Cranmer? From its earliest days, "Church" had a pretty clear meaning. There was only one. Though Celtic Christians in the north had been missionized quite early and were often out of contact with Christians on the continent, they nevertheless did not think of themselves as part of a "Celtic Church." When St. Augustine was sent by St. Gregory the Great in 597, he established the Church among the Anglo-Saxons, under the authority of the Bishop of Rome. Eventually, that Roman Church (in communion with the Orthodox of the East) met in council with the Celtic Christians (the Council of Whitby, 663 a.d.) and worked out differences between them. They all understood that there could not be two Churches in Britain. The crisis had arisen precisely because the Church could only be one.

A good example of the unity of the English Church can be seen in the appointment of the eighth Archbishop of Canterbury some 71 years after St. Augustine's arrival. Bishop Valerian of Rome sent a Byzantine Greek monk, St. Theodore of Tarsus, to fill the see of Canterbury. He became responsible for the reform and organization of the English Church. Prior to Augustine's time in England, three bishops from Britain were in attendance at the Council of Nicaea. The One Church extended from Britain across the European Mediterranean world, Africa and deep into the Middle East. It was the One Church -- one faith, one practice, one teaching, one mind. And the life of the One Church was universally expressed in the unity of her sacraments. Communion was not an act of hospitality, but itself the manifestation of the One life of Christ in His One Body.

That unity was shattered in the 11th century in the Great Schism between the Church in the East and the Bishop of Rome. This schism continues today. But both understood, then and now, that the Church can only be one.

But with Cranmer, and the other reformers, something new was set forth. There simply was no longer an expectation of the One Church. There were no particular efforts to form a single Protestant or Reformed Church. Something fundamentally new came into the world. It used all of the language of the One Church, but gave new meaning or subtle shifts of usage. Cranmer can speak of the "blessed company of all faithful people," and get away with it. His language was so generic that to dismiss it seems an affront to all faithful people. But it is also so generic that it defies any particular meaning.

The One Church had always known what "faithful" meant. It meant to accept without reservation the one faith of the one Church and to live in conformity with her canons and teachings. This was the ship of salvation established by Christ.

Charles Taylor notes that with the coming of the Reformation, the Church is no longer the ship of salvation, but rather a collection of row boats.

My contention in these articles is to point to these fundamental changes in meaning. You cannot claim to rightly interpret the Scriptures if the words are no longer allowed to mean what they meant without interruption for 1500 years. If the Church is the blessed company of all faithful people, then they may be recognized by their visible communion in the one life of the one visible Church. And the One Church never meant anything other than this.

I do not write in order to scold people from a triumphalist position of historic Orthodoxy. I write in order to draw attention to what Fr. Georges Florovsky called the "tragedy" of the West. That tragedy is not just found in the schism that split the Catholic Church from the Orthodox. It is even more profoundly encountered in the continuing fragmentation and atomization of Western Christianity in general. To speak of the unity of an invisible Church is make-believe, and one which seeks to obscure the true tragedy in which we live.

The fragmentation and atomization of Christianity has also contributed to the growth of radical individualism and the psychologization of our culture. Just as the unity of the Church has become an abstraction, at best a psychological moment of sentiment, so, too, the unity of our humanity has become nothing more than a slogan. When classic teachings of the Orthodox Christian faith that are rooted in the true spiritual and organic unity of mankind are presented, modern Christians are confused and reject them.

An excellent example is the simple assertion that each individual person has a share and participates in the sins of every human person. "Each man is guilty of the sins of the whole world," in the words of Dostoevsky. This profound reality lies at the very heart of the classical Christian faith. It is only because it is true that Christ could take upon Himself the sins of all. Our union with Him as we are Baptized into His death, as we are daily crucified with Him, receives its meaning and reality from this fundamental Christian understanding.

But modernity has removed such solidarity from its consideration. Every man is an island, with a personal, i.e., "private," Savior. Church is whatever he wants it to be while at the same time he insists that "we are one."

Orthodox Christianity is not a denomination. It is not a church among churches. (Indeed, I defy anyone to describe it as "organized religion.") It is the union of humanity with the Crucified Christ through history. The one faith of the Orthodox has been maintained through history. Modern Christians may not realize or understand the sacrifice of love that this represents nor the great ascetic effort involved in maintaining the "unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." It continues to be a great struggle.

In the modern model, such a true union would have been abandoned long ago and justified by announcing, "We are one."

Classical Christianity is a marriage, a true union. It is not maintained in its One existence by the casual treatment of denominationalism. The modern charges that "you are just one of us," seeks to deny the sacrifice of the centuries and even deny that such union is possible. But Orthodox union of life is a witness to the Apostolic faith:

Now I plead with you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that you all speak the same thing, and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment. (1Co 1:10)

Finally, brethren, farewell. Become complete. Be of good comfort, be of one mind, live in peace; and the God of love and peace will be with you. (2Co 13:11)

And here is the great mystery. Although all Christians do not have union in the One Cup, we at least have union in our sins. And in our sins we have union with Christ, who became sin that we might become the righteousness of God. And it is perhaps there that we shall all be saved:

But if we walk in the light as He is in the light, we have communion with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanses us from all sin. But if we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. (1Jo 1:7-8)

Forgive me.

MORE FROM FREEMAN

Most recently, I've turned our attention to the question of the Church in modernity. For the modern world has completely re-thought the matter of the Christian Church, and the state of things today is the result. In particular, modern Christians have largely lost the ability to think of the Church as "One," in any way that is not a vague, nebulous unity of abstraction. This is in utter contrast to the very concrete unity of the early Fathers who proclaimed the Church as "One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic."

So we'll engage in a thought experiment.

Put yourself in the fourth century. There is only one Church, and that Church is One. It is united in faith, teaching, practice, communion, etc. It's not perfect (there never has been such a thing), but it is One. If something or someone challenges that united faith, teaching, practice, communion, etc., they are themselves barred from communion. This happens not just at great Ecumenical Councils, but is the provence of each bishop and every synod of bishops. The great Councils are only necessary because the Church is One.

However, begin to think. Consider how the verse, "the Church is the fullness of Him who fills all in all" (Eph. 1:23), and what it means. In this 4th century experience, you can not only ponder this meaning in the abstract, but the very Cup you drink, and everything you tangibly know as Church, is included as well. No longer is the "stuff" of the Church interchangeable with other things. Everything about the life of the Church carries this very same fullness. You eat the fullness and breathe the fullness. When you think about the Church your conscience isn't troubled and your sense of belonging is unshaken.

We'll continue the experiment. Consider the word union and its cognates: union, communion, participation (it works in Greek), etc. That union means a sharing and participation but it also carries the meaning of the One. When you think of union with God (and this is the meaning of every sacramental act of the Church), you also think and understand union with the Church. The One God is made known in the One Church.

And now let's return to the present.

The plurality of Churches (sic) makes it impossible for most people to think of the concept of the Church being One in anything other than an abstract sense. "We are one body," cannot be said or thought without a sense of irony. And so the very word "One" begins to undergo changes. Communion (the Eucharist) is not a true communion. It can be thought of as some sort of special relation or experience of God, but if we think of it as including a true communion with His Body, the Church, that sense of irony returns and true communion necessarily disappears.

Many, of course, strongly insist on some sort of invisible reality called, "the Church." But the Church consists solely of people, none of whom are in any way abstract. You cannot be in communion with those who do not consider you to be in communion with them, or communion becomes a form of spiritual rape. "We are One" becomes a threat or a coercive assertion. Of course, it's easy to have communion with invisible, imaginary people. But whatever that is, it is not the Church.

And so, union and communion are largely excluded from the vocabulary of modern Christians. They are often offended by the refusal of Eucharistic "hospitality." To visit an Orthodox Church during the Eucharist, is also to be told that you are not in communion and that something stands between you and communion with the Church. The politeness of most contemporary Christian groups creates a false communion, a participation in some minimalist version of the faith, marked by asterisks, caveats, and...irony.

There is a cosmic aspect to all of this as well, and consequences for how we think about many things of great importance. For the One Church is also the firstfruits of the One Creation. It is the single work of God "gathering together all things in One" (Eph. 1:10). That same work of union that is the "mystery hid from the ages," is obscured in the verbal abstractions of a modernized ironic unity.

What we have to stop and see is that the churches of the modern world have been robbed of their godly inheritance. Christians in the contemporary world are simply overwhelmed by the divisions and diversity of church groups. It is completely understandable that alternative theories will appear that seek to make sense of things. Chief among these is the notion of the "invisible" Church. This account, in its various guises, simply looks at the whole mess and says that the truth is something else, obscured by human sin. "We are one!" becomes an assertion that denies our manifold divisions. But in denying them, it also relativizes them, and makes the concrete realities of our churchly existence to be of little consequence -- for, after all, if we are really one, then what do all of these divisions really mean or matter?

More subtle than this, is what this abstracting does to the meaning of unity and union. Our culture has now had nearly two centuries of treating Christian unity as an abstract notion, manifest, at most, as friendliness. And this has had a concomitant effect on the meaning of union and unity elsewhere. The fact that our culture can describe a same-sex relationship as a "union" is a particularly egregious example. For such a union can have no true concrete expression. But our culture, driven by a false ideology of unity, cannot think of why such a relationship is not a union. "They love each other," we are told. Sentiment trumps reality.

I point to this example in part to demonstrate how devastating the malformation of words and meaning can be. Union is not something that is achieved by greater and greater generalizing -- it comes in greater and greater particularity and specificity. In encountering Christ, we ultimately are not asked to just do something. We are asked to do some one thing, with all our heart and soul: we die. And we do not die "in general." Love is quite specific and concrete or it is nothing at all.

And so, I bring us to the point. My writing painfully about the meaning of union and the One Church, is not to argue about the status of various Christian "Churches." There is no accusation nor calumny intended. Rather, it is first to return the meaning of "One Church" to its proper place, with all of the pain and scandal that attends it. The One Church is ultimately found in One Cup, and there, only through true repentance and acceptance of the fullness of the faith. And if we are not there, then at least we must say so and cry out to God. He gives grace to the humble and resists the proud. It is beyond arrogance to say we are one when we are not. There can be no communion in a lie, or only a communion of death.

Christ prayed that we "all may be one," even as He and the Father are one. That cannot be a vague, ephemeral notion. It must be real, true, concrete and without irony. But Christ did not pray "that they all may be one someday..." His prayer was not an expression of a hoped-for reality. It is His own great Eucharistic prayer in which the Church becomes One. For what He asks, the Father grants. Just as surely as we pray for the Holy Spirit to "make this the most precious Body of our Lord, and God, and Savior Jesus Christ," and so it is -- so the Church became One in that Eucharistic Prayer of Christ Himself.

It is a prayer that will indeed have an eschatological fulfillment: "All things will be gathered together in one..." But in Christ, the Eschaton has already come. We may eat and drink of that One and become the life of the One fulfilled in this world. But it will not be true if we choose to distort the very meaning of the word.

Don't ignore the pain.

Fr. Stephen is a priest of the Orthodox Church in America, serving as Rector of St. Anne Orthodox Church in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. He is also author of Everywhere Present and the Glory to God podcast series.

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