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What happened to the New Testament Church? by Fr. Chrysostom MacDonnell An Orthodox view of Church History A few years ago I met an Anglican clergyman who was married to a Greek Orthodox lady. They once went to Greece for a holiday and visited her home village. Naturally, she introduced her Anglican husband to the local Papas (the Greek Orthodox parish priest,) who spoke a little English. At the time there was a little old Greek lady standing beside them who asked the Greek priest who this visitor was. "He’s an Anglican Christian," the priest responded in Greek. "What’s an Anglican?" the old lady inquired. "They’re Protestants," replied the priest. "You know, like Roman Catholics." The Greek word for ‘protestant’ - Diamarturoi - actually has the sense of a confession, a separate form of Christianity, as opposed to Christianity itself, which naturally for the Orthodox means Orthodoxy. Translated into English, however, the story has an ironic feel, given our history. For many in the west, Orthodoxy is virtually invisible, yet Eastern Christianity is the form of Christianity which has the second largest body of united believers. From the Orthodox perspective - we must be honest at the outset - the Christian world is a very different place to that perceived in western Christianity. And not the least important here is the view of our Christian history. It is a vast generalisation, but it is, nonetheless, therefore generally true, that the western mind: energetic, exploratory, analytical, systematic, rational and empirical, has made a Christianity of its own. One can trace a clear historical line in western theology from St. Augustine, through the scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, to the crisis of the Reformation and the fragmentation into either a monarchical concept of papacy on the one hand, and the idea of every man his own pope on the other. In other words: the disintegration and loss for most people of the mystical sense of the ecclesia, the body of Christ, in any real form save that of an institution. This opposition of the Catholic and Protestant camps, in all its shades and nuances, juxtaposes the monolithic institution against the individual conscience. In its turn it throws up, or perhaps, lets loose Rousseau, the Rights of Man, the Death of God and the rise of Nazism. Interestingly, as the old institutional forms of Christianity decay in the west, metaphysical and supernatural beliefs are not dying off, much to the chagrin of secular humanists. Rather, we see a complex web of belief systems, often quite privatised, and readily bought from the supermarket of New Age paraphernalia. A very different history is to be found in Eastern Christianity. On 16th July 1054 Cardinal Bishop Humbert of Silva Candida, the papal Legate, walked into the Great Church of Hagia Sophia at Constantinople and slapped a papal bull of excommunication down on the alter during the Divine Liturgy. A Subdeacon tried to hand it back, but it was thrown down and landed in the gutter. It was retrieved and passed on to the Orthodox Patriarch, Michael Cerularius. By return, as it were, an equivalent was issued to the Pope, and the breach between these two sisters was settled. On the face of it, some might consider the arguments between these two sparring partners as somewhat ethereal, even quaint: The famous Filioque Clause in the Creed, admitted by the Romans at a time when their scholarly understanding and control of the ancient faith had not been quite what it used to be; the wearing – or not – of beards by the clergy; whether those who joined the priesthood could be married men – or not; whether the traditional leavened or the recently introduced unleavened bread should be used for holy communion… Whatever the case, underneath all this there was a substantive issue: that of the power and authority of the papacy in Rome. Did the Pope have universal jurisdiction over all baptised people? And was the Patriarch of Constantinople wrong to assume the title of Ecumenical Patriarch – Universal, really? Or was it, as he claimed, just the appropriate title for the head bishop of the ecumenical, that is, the universal city, the second Rome: Constantinople? The fact is, for all the posturing, the actual breakdown of communion, certainly at a parochial level, was a long time in coming. In fact, it was only the sacking of Constantinople by the Crusaders in1204 which finally set the seal. Yet here again, the ripples of that history are still with us. To the western mind the idea of the crusader, at least until political correctness and revisionism took over, was a magnificent and heroic term. Even President Bush could employ the idea in his War on Terrorism. That is, until his advisors pointed out that Muslims weren’t too hot on the concept either. When the Emperor Alexis of Byzantium had asked for a bit of western military help to defend his domain during a little local difficulty, what he got was quite beyond his imagination. The first Crusade, launched in 1099 destabilised a whole region and fixed a sad enmity not only between the west and the world of Islam, but the Orthodox world as well. This division between the Catholic west and the Orthodox east was, however, not a sudden development. Truth to tell, they had been drifting apart probably since the gradual collapse of the empire in the west in the fifth and sixth centuries. The fact is now, that we are faced with two kinds of Christianity. We do well to face it, but from the Orthodox perspective there is still Orthodoxy and there is the rest; there are the Orthodox and there are the Diamarturoi in all there multifarious forms. The issues that divide the most Orange Protestant from the most Ultrmontaine Catholic deal in a language and with matters theological which have, with respect, no relevance to the Orthodox who, at times, see these two western protagonists as but two sides of the same coin and literally, of another denomination of currency. The title of this address is ‘What happened to the New Testament Church?’ It would be disingenuous to skirt around this issue. One has to be candid and say that, in Orthodox thinking, there is no difference between the Apostles gathered on that Day of Pentecost, fifty days after the Resurrection of our Lord and any parish gathering with their Orthodox priest to celebrate Divine Liturgy. In illustration of this I should like to digress for a while and examine, at this point, the Orthodox attitude to the scriptures. This is important as it highlights a real difference between eastern and western approaches. Starting with our old friend in western Theology, Thomas Aquinas, the scriptures begin to be seen as a form of revelation; that God reveals himself to the reader, in some form, through the book. This idea, of course, is readily taken up, following the development of printing and the greater availability of books, in the Protestant Reformation. Sola Scriptora becomes the cry; the Bible as the one source of theological authority in the Protestant scheme of things, once set loose from the papal Magisterium. Looking on the Orthodox side, we see a very different approach:
It should begin to become clear by now that any attempt to separate the Bible from the Church, as if it had floated down from heaven, freshly inscribed on vellum in letters of gold, is doomed to failure. It is not that one can read the New Testament as a kind of do-it-yourself church construction manual. Rather, in the pages of the book you find the story of a Church that already exists. We are examining the Eastern Church’s perspective on ecclesiastical history. I want, however, to shift the focus to the western church. In none of what I have said should I wish to suggests that the New Testament Church was only to be found, later on, within the bounds of the old Eastern Empire. The particular contention and belief of Orthodox Christians in this country is, that, up until 1066, Britain was an Orthodox land. This is not a mere romanticisation of history. The church here, under the Roman Patriarchate and using the western rite for its services would, on the surface, appears very different to the Byzantine Church. Yet in their consciousness, their spirituality, their way of theologising, the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon churches were the inheritors of the same Apostolic Tradition as flourished in the east. It is only with the brutalising effects of the Norman Conquest, carrying with it the blessing of a newly invigorated Papacy, that the religious life of these islands begin the change. It is interesting to note that, following 1066, young and ambitious Englishmen found a way of advancing through the world by leaving their home and finding service in the Verangian Guard of the Byzantine Empire. Here, they felt spiritually at home. There was, up to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, an English church in the city, serving the western rite in Latin for the descendants of these people, fully in communion with the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Within its wall this little church even possessed an icon of St. Augustine of Canterbury. Since those times, however, Britain has been the inheritor of a very different spiritual history and of very different paradigms in respect of the Christian vision. Mediaeval scholasticism, Protestant Reformation, monarchical Acts of Settlement, Recusantism, Civil War, Presbyterianism, Nonconformity, Evangelical and Anglo-Catholic revivals, Modernism, Post-Modernism: they have all played their part in a rich and often confusing religious tapestry, not to mention the results of the 2001 National Census! The question might now be posed, what is this eastern paradigm and version of the New Testament Church doing here in our land, apart, that is, from operating as an ethnic chaplaincy, ministering to about 300,000 Greeks, Russians and other assorted visitors from Eastern Europe and the Middle East? Are we not just adding to the confused voice, trying to sound the Christian gospel in an increasingly neo-pagan or materialistic and secular nation? The answer to this I find within myself. I am from the West Country; my ancestors were Bristolian and English and I am a quarter Dutch on my mother’s side. They don’t come much more Anglo and Saxon than that. The name MacDonnell is because my father, originally called Woodman, was adopted into family of Northern Irish origin, related to the Earl’s of Antrim, who themselves came originally as settlers from Scotland in earlier times: part of the Anglican settlement of the region, though one of my ancestors on this adopted side of the family tree, ‘Sorley Boy’ MacDonnell, caused a lot of grief to Elizabeth I – but he obtained a pardon. I have, therefore, a sense that, in becoming Orthodox after an Anglican upbringing, I not only bring my ancestors with me into that communion of saints; I feel, also, that I am rejoining them, reconnecting with the faith of my fathers: a faith beyond the disputes that have racked western Christianity; the faith written about in the New Testament, which I had discovered afresh. This is not about one ecclesial culture staging a hostile take over bid for another, currently losing market share in the market place of isms and ideologies. And a telling point: we do not even speak of conversion to Orthodoxy, but rather of becoming Orthodox. What will become of Western Christianity cannot be predicted; I am certainly not going to criticise. Who are we to judge another man’s servant? Orthodox Christians do not proselytise, embarrass passers-by in the shopping centres or go knocking on doors. Our witness is quiet, by example and by personal contacts through friends and families. If we Orthodox remain for the time being, to borrow the Pauline phrase: known yet unknown, it is to undo that very unfamiliarity that we should promote and publicise these ideas.. Our congregation belongs to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East. Our Patriarch, His Beatitude Ignatius IV, lives in Damascus, Syria. We like to think of ourselves as the second oldest church – after Jerusalem. It is the Church founded by Ss. Peter and Paul; the Church where the followers of the Way were first called Christians (Acts11:26). The Orthodox Church, although dispersed throughout the world under many divergent and ethnic jurisdictions, is still one communion and fellowship, seeing itself as holding the same doctrine of the faith and grounded in the teachings of the Apostles. The Greek Orthodox churches, whether of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Moscow or even here in Britain, consider themselves to be the one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church of Christ, written about in the New Testament and expounded by the Fathers. In essence and teaching unchanged, we have witnessed to the true faith ever since we were first given the dispensation of salvation by our one head, Christ our God. It is not for us, though, to pass judgement on the status of other communions. This deposit of faith was once the heritage we held in common with the Western Church as well, but the breach in communion between east and west is still a very real one. Divided by our Christian histories and holding on to different paradigms of what Christianity is, ecumenism itself is very often regarded with very great suspicion by the Orthodox east and, by some, as a modern heresy. We have to be honest and face that point. Strange though it may seem to western, post-modern eyes, the east can still smell the smouldering of the sack of Constantinople in 1204 at the hands of Crusaders, and the abandonment of the Byzantines to their fate under the Ottoman Turks in 1453. No wonder that a cry of ‘here we go again’ was heard when NATO bombed Serbia, no matter how just the cause against a detested regime. It is then, above all, in the recovery of the spiritual meaning of our history in these islands that we shall rediscover the vision to heal some of these divisions, and to help restore, in Britain, the faith once held by our Celtic and Anglo-Saxon forefathers before the Norman Conquest.. At a time when most of Britain has lost contact with the Christian faith and has ostensibly lapsed into non-belief, materialism or even neo-paganism, (the 2001 Census not withstanding) our purpose in being here, and in being what we are, is very obvious. Renewed contact with Orthodoxy in England goes back a long way, even to the seventeenth century. Today, though, Orthodox Christianity is a growing phenomenon when other forms of Christianity are in terminal decline. The seeds of any authentic renewal must be in the rediscovery of what we set out to be in the first place. If nothing else, this series of four articles, apart from teaching a little more about us, the Orthodox, may spur you on to a fuller rediscovery of your own tradition. And if it be a worthy tradition, its disciplines will bring you closer to Christ. And if we grow closer to Christ we shall grow closer to one another, as if we were standing on the rim of a great wheel and were walking along the spokes towards the centre. As Eliot writes in Little Gidding: ‘…And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.’ It might well be that we shall recover that same faith once held by your ancestors and help to restore what has long been broken down in this land… Fr. Chrysostom |
