The One True Church and the Partisans of Anti-Ecclesiology

I believe that the church in which I was baptized and brought up ‘is’ in very truth ‘the Church’, i.e. ‘the true’ Church and the ‘only’ true Church . . . I am therefore compelled to regard all other Christian churches as deficient, and in many cases can identify these deficiencies accurately enough. Therefore, for me, Christian reunion is simply universal conversion to Orthodoxy. I have no confessional loyalty; my loyalty belongs solely to the ‘Una Sancta’.

– Fr. Georges Florovsky, “Confessional Loyalty in the Ecumenical Movement”

It seems to be a sin in polite Christian parlance to suggest that one’s own communion is actually right about anything, and it is perhaps the unpardonable sin to suggest that one’s own communion is actually coterminous with the very Church that Christ founded. Yet it was not so very long ago (and I don’t mean centuries here, just decades) that nearly every Christian actually thought these things about his own communion—at the very least, that his own communion was right and that those who disagreed were wrong, even if that disagreement did not necessarily place other communions outside the Church.

It’s not entirely clear what has happened that caused this shift. It does seem to be the case, however, that we are willing to project a rather robust ecclesiology (though a pseudo-ecclesiology) elsewhere—on politics. One’s political opponents are not just wrong, but they are in fact evil and want nothing other than to destroy everything good and beneficial to mankind. Materialist messianism is characteristic of nearly all post-Marxist politics, and it is, I think, really the only way to do politics when you either believe or pretend as though you believe that there is no God Whose claims on man are in fact higher than the claims of the state.

That aside, have we actually advanced in some way by becoming ecclesiological agnostics? Have we gained something by effectively denying that there is actually only one Church that Christ established? Is the possibility for unity between Christians—the supposed goal of this anti-ecclesiology, the teaching that there is no true Church—actually greater now than when all Christians actually believed what they said they believed and they also logically believed that those who disagreed were wrong?

You may imagine from my rhetorical tone that I do not think so.

It should nevertheless be noted that I am not by any means calling for condemnatory statements, an attitude of triumphalism or superiority, withdrawal from inter-Christian contact, etc. What I would like to see is people who care about the things they say they believe or who have the integrity to abandon the communions whose doctrines they don’t actually believe. It’s not about becoming partisans (having “confessional loyalty” as per the Florovsky quote above) but about pursuing the truth wherever that leads and then having the guts to believe it and preach it. In short, what I really would like is for more people to call me a heretic.

If someone is willing to do that, not only to believe but also to preach with the conviction that his communion’s doctrines are true, he will of course be seen as a partisan by those who prefer the anti-ecclesiology, but that is because their own partisanship for theological agnosticism is unassailable. And it is not just an agnosticism, but a militant agnosticism, not merely “I do not know,” but “You cannot know.”

But is it indeed possible to be loving, kind, thoughtful, diligent, vigilant, pious, compassionate and serious, and also to believe that one’s own communion is not only right, but the right one? I daresay yes. I really cannot see how it can be otherwise. Does it make any sense at all to throw one’s lot in with a doctrine—even if it is a doctrine held by only one person—and then not to believe that deviations from it are wrong? Does not integrity demand such a conclusion?

I think part of what bothers the partisans of anti-ecclesiology is that they conflate the communion with the person. That is, if someone is fiercely loyal to his communion, it is because he believes himself to be always right. Indeed, I have had someone say exactly this in the midst of a discussion about theological truth: “It must be so exhausting to be right all the time.” My first thought was, “So you’re telling me that you’re wrong?” I will of course admit to vanity and pride being among my besetting sins, but that is not really the point here. The point is that this objection essentially presumes what is precisely at debate, because it presumes that there is no Church, but only the individual. I cannot say, “The Church is right, and I believe in it.” I can only say, “I am right.”

This dynamic is characteristic of how far the atomism of our age has come. We as a culture do not actually believe in communion, nor even in communions, not in the sense of a real community to which we are responsible. We only believe in a sea of opinions and competing interests, rolling about on the waves of individuality. But this erodes the truth of who man is and how he is made. Mankind wants communion. He is made for it, and even the most anti-social among us are usually so because we are bitter at our inability to attain to it.

Therefore, it is not I who am right. There is only one I Who is right, and that is the I AM Himself, Who is the Head and first Member of His Body, the Church. The Church’s rightness—her uniqueness and unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity—have never been taught in the stream of ancient Christian tradition to flow from the individual or even collective worthiness of her fallible human members. Rather, they flow directly and solely from her Lord, Who is Himself both the comprising and constituting element of the Body.

Believing in the truth and the uniqueness of one’s own communion therefore does not require (nor should it even lead to) any sense of personal superiority. It also does not necessarily require such a believer to condemn all those who disagree or who belong to other communions, particularly because the game, while surely afoot, is far from ended. Most communions with a robust ecclesiology—a sense that there are actual boundaries to the Church here on Earth that can be pointed to—would never teach that formal membership in this life is identical to eternal membership in the next. That is, the final makeup of the Church can only be accounted for in the eschaton, the age to come.

We do not have to be mean in order to believe that our church truly is the one Church, the true Church. There are people who are mean, people who are triumphalistic when they say such things, but their belief is not really being manifested in their persons, so it becomes the theology of demons, the theology which is technically true but has no incarnation in them. We should not mistake such people for being true representatives of those doctrines.

But one would also be hard pressed to find any saint—however any Christian communion might define a person who is a shining example of their communion—who did not believe that the communion to which he belonged was not only right, but was the right one. That is, the best and brightest that any Christian group has to offer is almost always one who believes in the truth of its doctrines and that what deviates from them is therefore not true. He also therefore must of necessity believe that his own communion is uniquely faithful to the truth, because he cannot help but see that all others are not only different but actually contradict those truths to which his fellow communicants cling faithfully.

I am no saint, but I believe that Orthodoxy is that true Church, the one Church, because of her faithfulness through the ages to that revelation of God in Christ given once for all to the Apostles. The truth of Orthodoxy is much larger than I and in no sense depends on me or is any credit to me. Being a member of the Orthodox Church does not make me “right” any more than being a patient in a hospital makes me a paragon of health. It only means that I am participating in that truth, even if imperfectly.

Soli Deo gloria.

23 comments:

  1. “It’s not entirely clear what has happened that caused this shift [towards anti-ecclesiology]”.

    You point out how precise the position must be in order to have firm convictions without articulating them for the sake of “being mean”.

    Much of the contemporary criticism of Christianity is that it is “hateful” towards various groups of people and that it fails to express its own doctrine of “love” because love is “accepting” and love is “nice”.

    I realize I do little but voice my own generation’s biases towards the one directly preceded us (and that this is a very cliched thing to do) when I point the finger for “this shift” straight at The Boomer Generation and their embracing of a watered-down, pop culture style understanding of Buddhist and Taoist religion which Western Boomers turned into philosophy and psychology.

    If you listen to the way the Dalai Lama speaks about “major world religions” and their “potential to produce good hearts”, and you don’t understand that for a Buddhist, the producing of “good heart” is the life of the faith you will mistake his words for a broad, generous ecumenism steeped in the colloquial post-modern absolute relativism of which the Boomers have been so fond.

    We see the final manifestation of this in in the birth of “Non-denominational” churches — a self-defeating name for a group of churches if ever there was one! We’ve become so uncomfortable with asserting who we are, as distinct from who you are, that we won’t even give our denomination the validity of a name. After all, that might in some way fail to be sufficiently welcoming or relevant.

    Maybe the shift goes one generation back from there, and at “nearly 40” I’m simply too young to see that context, but from what I can tell, a large part of this problem (if not all of it), stems from the sloppy, lazy, pharmaceutically driven world view of the Boomers.

  2. I agree with what’s put forth here. In my experience, it’s incredibly difficult to have discussions about it with those who don’t share the belief in a true catholic and apostolic church though. Their thinking is such that any allusion to these ideas is seen as unloving and quite unlike Christ. They will say that nobody has it all right, which on an individual level may be true enough, but the implication is that we should therefore make no serious effort to discern what is true and instead ought to rely on our own sincerity and emotions to guide us.

    An example of this might be a common saying I often encounter amongst my protestant friends. They say, “A person with an experience is never at the mercy of a person with an argument.” This statement obviously has traction amongst those who think in that way, but I’ve always struggled to see why. The assumption is that an experience is always rightly perceived and above criticism. I would recommend as a remedy Akira Kurosawa’s film “Rashomon” which deals with how different people can differently interpret the same experience, but I expect that in most cases the individual’s internal resistance would cause the message to fall on deaf ears.

  3. The genesis of modern anti-ecclesiology was hastened, largely, through the work of the Faith and Order Commission of the World Council of Churches. There, a great deal of work was done on Eucharist and Baptism, which yielded a “trans-ecclesial” understanding of the sacraments. The result has been the demolition of ecclesial boundaries. Those (including some Orthodox) who advocate “eucharisitic hospitality” are subscribing to this destruction of the Church’s boundaries. Like the “boundaries” of a person – the Church does not exist without proper boundaries. The individual comes to replace the Church and the sacraments become “things” and not part of true ecclesial life. Thanks for the article.

    1. I studied with one of the great figures of the Faith and Order Commission, and a primary author of the Baptism and Eucharist work that it did. He was a true gentleman and Christian (a British Methodist). However, his ecclesiology was wrong. You cannot reach correct conclusions with faulty assumptions.
      Protestantism simply has no ecclesiology to speak of. Rome does, though I find it very static and mechanical (that’s a very subjective statement, I know). The dynamic of the Eucharist and the Eucharistic discipline are the best definition of the Church and her boundaries that I know. The Church is those with whom I am in communion. The Church is, indeed, a koinonia in the Blood of Christ.
      There is, I think, a mystery regarding those outside those boundaries. There is a mystery because of the nature of the work of the Holy Spirit. Thus, I cannot actually pronounce very well what the actual nature or state of the non-Orthodox is. They are not of us. This I know. What they are, exactly, is not clear. They are not the same thing as the ancient heresies – for they were never Orthodox to start with. Schismatics from schismatics – it’s quite odd. And I think we should not press ourselves to say much more than that.
      But having said that, the Eucharistic identity of the One Church is utterly essential. It is a sine qua non as far as I can see.
      The well-meaning have changed the mystery of the eucharist into a token of hospitality – weaker, in some ways, than prosphora bread.
      The false ecumenism (and I heartily agree there is such a thing) is among the greater dangers in today’s Church – along with its sister, secularism. The bread of hospitality is the communion of secular Christianity.
      None of this is really all that intentional. But bad theology, is still unintentionally destructive.

  4. I would be interested to see if there is a related timeline of anti-ecclesiology in America vs. Generation “Me”. When society as a whole bombards you with how special *you* are and all that matters is what *you* think, feel, and believe then no wonder anything community-related disappears (the Internet doesn’t help in this regard).

  5. Reading this blog posting reminds me very much of my own branch of Christianity – the churches of Christ/Disciples of Christ Christian Churches that are descendants of the American Restoration Movement.

    The movement began in America in the early 1800’s as a movement to unit Christians from the various sects into one body. The thought was that if the Christians from all of the various sects (Presbyterian, Baptist, Catholic, Anglican, etc.)would drop their insistence on following their man made traditions and stop identifying themselves with sectarian names and return to the Ancient Order of Things that they could achieve unity and be the witness to the new republic (the United States) that God intended the Church to be. They thought they could do this by using the Bible as their only source for their faith and practice. This was not a nationalistic church, but the movement was driven in part by some of the ideals that shaped the new nation. This is a simplistic summary of the movement of course. These people believed that they were Christians but not the only Christians.

    It should be remembered that those who gave their livelihoods to promote this unity inherited the belief of sola scriptura from their western European roots. These people were products of the Reformation by birth. They realized that they needed to throw off the bondage of denominationalism, and they went about it as best as they knew how. They knew there was only one Church, and they wanted to return to that One True Church. They saw things through lenses that were a product of the Reformation. They knew nothing about Orthodoxy.

    At the time, the Orthodox faith had stepped foot in Alaska, but had little if any presence on the mainland from Texas to the Eastern Seaboard. And so the witness that could have come from Orthodoxy to this movement was absent. The very one thing that could have best shaped the movement towards its vision of restoring the Ancient Order of Things was left hidden. These Christ followers did the best they knew how to do. The movement still lives, but of course, the unity that was hoped for has yet to be achieved.

    In time, the Churches of Christ, for the most part, after being freed from the denominational interpretations of scripture began to think that they had correctly interpreted the scriptures themselves and that all of those who differed were sinful. They came to believe that they had restored the Church to what God had intended.

    To summarize some of the main beliefs:
    1. Scripture is inspired by God
    2. God is in three person – the Trinity
    3. Jesus is fully God and fully man
    4. Baptism for the remission of sins is required for salvation
    5. The gift of the Holy Spirit is given to those who believe and are baptized for the forgiveness of their sins
    6. Faith without works is dead
    7. Weekly observance of the Lord’s Supper (Eucharist)
    8. Non-instrumental singing in worship – no instruments in worhip
    9. Life should be lived in prayer
    10. Must be faithful until death – there is no “once saved always saved”
    11. Autonomous congregations ruled by a plurality of elders
    (Most of this is familiar to an Orthodox mind.)

    They (my spiritual forefathers) sincerely believed that they had correctly read and interpreted the scriptures and that those who called themselves Christians who differed from these teachings were in error and likely damned. Membership in one of the “denominations” was sinful and damning. This is what I was born into and whole heartedly believed for most of my life.

    You stated that “Believing in the truth and the uniqueness of one’s own communion therefore does not require (nor should it even lead to) any sense of personal superiority. It also does not necessarily require such a believer to condemn all those who disagree or who belong to other communions, particularly because the game, while surely afoot, is far from ended.” Thanks be to God . . . many of us, including myself, have come to realize that condemning others is basically condemning ourselves. We have come to realize that our love for other believers who differ should not be in words only but also in deeds. And in fact, sometimes by listening to others, our eyes are opened to see truths we had not seen before. Sometimes it is good to see things through different lenses. We don’t know everything. Believe me, it is a hard lesson to learn when you once thought you did know everything.

    We have rediscovered one of the early statements that our forefathers held close to their hearts in the early years of the movement: “We are Christians only, but we are not the only Christians.”

    It is going to be interesting to see if and how Orthodoxy influences the movment. (I have already asked if we could hang some icons in our assemply room and was ignored.) I have come to believe that of all of the faith groups that exist in the world, only Orthodoxy is a contendor to our understanding of Truth. I haven’t yet decided which one is most faithful to the Truth. Of course, I will let you know when I decide.

    1. David – great comment. I came from several generations of Church of Christ preachers, and most of my family still belongs to the CoC (they are none too happy about my becoming Orthodox).

      1. Thanks Matt,
        I know this weighs heavy on your family’s heart. I hope they make peace with it. Thanks for sharing. Just curious, are you in Texas?

  6. I shared this article with someone who is in accord with the anti-ecclesiology presented above and he says he did not “get it”. Oh well. There are those who can appreciate what you are doing here.

    Is this article intended for the anti-ecclesiology crowd or would you say no, at least to this one in particular?

  7. Hi, David–Come and see! You said you are in Texas. Whereabouts? (trying to sound Texan) We are in Austin and there are many vibrant communities here. Several new members at our parish from the Church of Christ.

    1. Thanks Geri,
      I plan on visiting in Austin and Dallas. Which one do you attend? Is there a congregation in Austin that is part of the OCA?

  8. “unpardonable sin to suggest that one’s own communion is actually coterminous with the very Church that Christ founded.”

    Papists do it all the time. The very name that they use for their institution ‘Catholic Church’ infers that only their institution is somehow valid, and thereby label each other church body as somehow defective.

    Roman Catholics ought always and everywhere to be corrected when caught out using ‘catholic’ to refer solely to themselves. People may label the corrector as a pedant, but it is rather that the Roman Catholic is – albeit perhaps unwittingly – being rude and bigoted.

    1. This is precisely the point, though. RCs are just being faithful to their own doctrine. I don’t blame them at all for that. Indeed, though I don’t agree with their doctrine, I admire those of them who actually believe in it.

      It is not rude and bigoted for them not to recognize bodies other than their own as catholic. Doing otherwise would be a capitulation to doctrines they don’t believe in.

  9. For David–We attend St. Elias Antiochian parish in downtown Austin–have permission to have 2 services (we usually attend the 8:30 with Congregational singing). There is also a 10:30. There isn’t an OCA parish in Austin. We are very, very Pan-Orthodox–Texans, Lebanese, Romanian, Russian, Eritrean, Korean, Bulgarian…you get the picture! Fr. David Barr is the senior priest, Fr. Dave Lewis, the assistant–all of these Davids–you’d fit right in. Hope we can meet you! (Dn. Gregory Farman is usually serving at the early service and I am usually chanting at that service).

  10. Very good points, Fr. Andrew. Thank you for taking the time and energy to create this weblog. I’m very much looking forward to seeing (and hopefully joining) the many conversations to come. I don’t have the time to comment on anything right now, but perhaps I will in the next day or so.

Comments are closed.