The Prophetic Role of
Orthodoxy
by Andrew Walker
To be a prophet is to know and speak
the mind and will
of God. It was the Fall that hid
this knowledge from us, just as it perverted our God-given
kingly power, and weakened our natural propensity for mediation
between the created order and God.
Throughout the Old Testament, we read
of men and women who had flashes of insight — people able to
re-connect with the original created human being who knew God’s
mind, and who could speak the will
of God. In the New Testament, it is
the Lord Jesus who is supremely our
prophet. As baptized disciples, we are called to follow in his
footsteps. As St. Paul writes: “Therefore, if anyone is
in Christ, he is a new creature, a
new creation. Old things have passed away, behold, all things
have become new” (2 Cor 5:17).
It is in the
Gospel of St. Luke that Jesus identified himself as a prophet.
Speaking in the synagogue at his
home town of Nazareth, Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is
upon me because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the
poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach
deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the
blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised. To preach
the acceptable year
of the
Lord.” (Luke 4:18-19)
In Mark’s
Gospel, Jesus begins his ministry with the words, “Repent and
believe the Gospel.” Jesus, the Son of God made Son of Man, is
revealing to us the mind of God. God’s will for us is that, like
the prodigal son, we must turn from our failure and degradation
and return to the Father who is always ready to reaffirm and
cherish us. It is the Son who reveals this to us, who alone
speaks the truth from the mind
of God, who is
the way home, life itself.
As we learn from St. John Chrysostom,
Holy Tradition always needs to be applied to our contemporary
condition. So having grounded the
role of prophecy in
the life of
Christ himself, let me turn to the
role of the
prophet today, writing as a western member
of the
Orthodox Diaspora.
But first there is something that we
must make clear, and it is something that I believe we
Orthodox already know
in our hearts. It is that we must
try to avoid individualistic notions of the “prophet.” There may
be individuals whose utterances are more prophetic than others.
We know from the writings of St.
Irenaeus that there were still institutional
prophets in
the late second century. However, what makes the prophet
significant is not the novelty of individual insight, but the
faithful recollection of Tradition. Tradition is the divinely
inspired — though human, and hence fallible — mediation of
the mind and will
of God.
We distinguish individualism from
personhood. Individuals are disconnected persons, separate
islands of consciousness, lost selves; whereas persons are
constituted by their relation to others in
communality, and supremely through the Holy Spirit. While the
Holy Trinity is the only perfect communion, where relationships
are unbroken between the distinct,
though never separate, divine persons, members
of the
Church are by definition joined one
to another.
We are prophets precisely, and only,
because together with our Lord we are the
totus Christus . We are prophets because we are “little Christs.”
We are prophets because we are
adopted by the Spirit into a new
personal creation — this newly constituted humanity
of which Christ is the firstborn
through the incarnation and resurrection. The
Church cannot help but be prophetic.
It is not really possible for the
Church not to be prophetic.
Let us consider the prophetic
significance of the Orthodox
Diaspora in the modern world, seeing
it not only in terms
of war, civil strife, sociology and
economics, but on the spiritual level, aware that God has called
the Orthodox
Church into the West. With all its faults and weaknesses,
the Orthodox
Church finds herself in a world both
secular and religious that is becoming increasingly fragmented
and polarized. In such a world, all
that the Church
is called to be is to be herself. To be herself is to be
prophetic.
To give an example, an American
colleague tells me that increasingly Protestant Christians are
beginning to understand that the history of fragmentation within
Christendom goes back at least to the Reformation — and we would
say much earlier. While the Reformers genuinely desired to
return to the catholicity of the creeds and councils, instead
they gave us reformation ad nauseam . What my colleague sees
when he looks at the
Orthodox Church
is a body of Christians who have
maintained the apostolic faith, because the
canonical structures have been maintained and kept secure.
My friend claims that one of the
greatest failures of the Reformation was precisely that it did
not recover or recapture the foundational canonical structures
of Christianity that were laid down, not only in the New
Testament, but also by the Fathers of the Church. In that sense,
what the Church does by being itself
is pointing to unity and showing something of
the mind of God. It is certainly
audacious, but it is also auspicious and prophetic
in an age of disunity. It is not so
much that unity is a question, as Roman Catholics might put it,
of an unbroken apostolic succession, as if this were an
entitlement to legitimate churchmanship, like a deed of property
or a right to dominion. And it is certainly not a question
of untrammeled holiness — God knows
that have we sinned immeasurably.
Unity is an ontological fact.
In the language of Metropolitan John
of Pergamon, we are the Church
instituted by Christ and constituted by the Spirit, and yet our
unity is the mystery of our calling.
Lest we should boast, we are reminded, paradoxically, that to be
Orthodox is to be willing, if it is
possible, as St. Paul says, to be castaways that all may be
saved. Our unity, then, is not an expression of smugness but
of mission. The Lord Jesus himself
makes this clear in his prayer for the
Church: “That they all may be one:
as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be
one in us: that
the world may believe that thou hast sent me.” (John
17:21)
The
Diaspora’s role in mission, however,
has been mixed and not always prophetic.
Orthodox missionary shortcomings in
the West have been elegantly
articulated by Metropolitan Philip of
the Antiochian Church in America. He
says that the Diaspora has arrived bodily in
the West, but remains absent
psychologically, living elsewhere in
their hearts. The “old country” naturally exercises a strong
pull on imagination and memory, but it can also lead to a
perpetual daydream where Christian responsibility is negated by
nostalgic longing for the past.
His argument has been that the
Orthodox Church must cease to be a
Diaspora Church in
the sense of a museum or an ethnic
enclave, and become a missionary Church.
To be institutionally present in the
West is not enough. It is not enough just to survive or even to
grow. The Church must be a prophetic
presence speaking the mind and will
of God.
There is a more positive way to look at
the role
of the Diaspora over the last decades. First, let me look at
this sociologically. I have been a member of
the Russian Patriarchal
Church in Great Britain since 1973.
When I joined, I saw myself as a guest in
the Russian Church. Being a guest,
albeit a welcome one, did not distress me. I realized that when
a new group arrives from one land to another, if it is going to
maintain the structures and traditions of
the Church, sometimes it has
to be, as Metropolitan Anthony of
Sourozh once said, “sniffy.” It wants to put its roots down and
create something firm and deep before it grows, otherwise
the plant will wither and die.
My own view is that the Diaspora has
needed to be in the West for a while
and bide its time before it reaches out in
mission — although, like Metropolitan Philip, I think that time
is now ripe. But there is an inbuilt strength
of the Diaspora that feeds
the prophetic
role, and it is this. People who are refugees, who come
from one land to another, are resident aliens. They are resident
in the country, but they do not
fully belong. Strictly speaking, that is what all Christians
are, regardless of whether they are actually
in an historical Diaspora or not,
for we are citizens not of earth but of
heaven.
To a certain extent, to be a resident
alien means that you are open to the prophetic. That is why C.S.
Lewis, always at odds with modernity — like the anti-hero of
Dostoevski’s Letters from the Underworld — was the outstanding
European Christian apologist in the twentieth century. We notice
in literature and in the secular world that the outsider often
has an interesting way of seeing things. He or she has a unique
perspicacity that insiders do not possess, because things happen
underneath the noses of insiders, but they cannot see the
obvious staring them in the face. So
I think there is a very positive sense in
which the Diaspora, because of its marginality, its status as
the outsider, is well positioned to be prophetic — as long as it
remains attentive to the mind
of God.
To be on the edge is a curious
experience demanding discernment as well as faithfulness to
the Tradition.
Orthodox Christians who settle in
the West discover a mystery. On the one hand, by being what we
are, Orthodox, with all our
weaknesses, we witness to the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic
Church. On the
other hand, we discover, to our amazement, that there is more
of a family resemblance with
the heterodox than we had imagined.
We find brothers and sisters in Christ in
many countries. Even if they are estranged family members,
the family resemblance is
unmistakable.
This was one of
the great shocks for Nicolas Zernov when he arrived
in Europe from Russia after the
Bolshevik Revolution. He discovered that there were Christians
everywhere and many of them were asking for Orthodox help and
illumination for Western theological problems. He found, as do
many Orthodox today, that there were
heretics too. But he became convinced that
the adage of Metropolitan Sergius Stragovodsky
of Moscow is true: “We know where
the Church is, but we do not say
where the
Church is not.”
In Britain, Metropolitan Anthony has
long supported what little trickles of Orthodoxy he has been
able to find bubbling up in other
Churches, even if they never fully flow into the
Orthodox Church.
He has been encouraged by the many Christian people who have
been committed to the sort
of historic Christianity which
allows real debate to take place between East and West.
The Diaspora still has a long way to go
before it turns from a siege to a missionary mentality, but I
believe that the Orthodox
Church is turning outwards and is
beginning to share some of its treasures with others. I think,
for example, that the ecological dispute is one major area where
the majority of Western theology really has little to say about
the relationship between humankind and the
material universe, because it does not seem to have a full,
organic understanding of the
relationship between priesthood, prophecy, kingship and
the world. This is one major debate
where we have something prophetic to say.
Some Orthodox
argue that it is not our job to help Western Christians solve
their problems, a view I oppose not only because it is
exclusivist but because it is Pharisaical. I believe the right
attitude is much more that we are here, and that if we can offer
help, then we will. One of the ways
we can do this is by displaying for others what our theology is,
what our spirituality is, not in a
proselytizing, declamatory way that always makes people feel
uncomfortable, but by spelling out some of
the problems we all face as
Christians in
the modern world.
The World
Council of Churches’ Faith and Order Commission, with all its
faults, is better than it might have been precisely because
of the contribution that the
Orthodox Church
has made to it. For example, notice how the Trinity, baptism and
a high Christology are back on the
WCC agenda.
A number of leading Reformed
theologians are of the opinion that the Orthodox delegation at
the WCC Conference at Canberra in 1991 saved the council from
disaster, when its participants were urged by Chung Hyun-Kyung,
the Chinese feminist theologian, to embrace a syncretistic
understanding of faith far beyond the boundaries of revealed
religion. The Orthodox response to
Professor Chung, and by implication to all those who would turn
the Holy Spirit into Sophia , or a
deistic immanence, was to say: “Our Tradition is rich
in respect for local and national
cultures, but we find it impossible to evoke the spirits of
‘earth, air, water, and sea creatures.’ Pneumatology is
inseparable from Christology or from the doctrine of the Holy
Spirit confessed by the church on
the basis of
divine revelation.”
Here the Orthodox
Church — heartlands and Diaspora as
one — faced with a theological crisis as deep as the paganism of
early centuries, was unequivocal. Without a hint of the Erastian
and pragmatic spirit that has sometimes bedeviled our witness,
we spoke the mind
of God.
Not all Orthodox prophecy has been so
dramatic. Sometimes it has been a case of a gradual opening up
of the Church’s Tradition to the
outside world. Metropolitan John’s book, for example, Being As
Communion , is now standard reading in many Evangelical colleges
as well as Reformed seminaries. The
Orthodox adherence to the Cappadocian understanding of
the Trinity has had great influence
in recent years, moving people away
from a sterile modalism or impersonalism to a dynamic model of
personal communion. Not enough has been made of it, but the
accord between the Reformed tradition and the
Orthodox Church
on the filioque and the doctrine
of the
Trinity has been a major breakthrough in
ecumenical dialogue.
Those Orthodox who say that Protestants
and Catholics can never understand the Eastern
Church are sometimes guilty of
failing to learn the theological jargon of the West, or of
seeing how far Orthodox concepts can translate into Western
forms. Tell a Pentecostal that icons are images of the holy and
he will turn away in disgust. But talk to him of the synergy of
God and man and tell him that icons are paintings of the Holy
Spirit and he will prick up his ears. Or try telling a radical
feminist, without due care and attention, that the
Orthodox Church
will not reconstruct Father, Son and Holy Ghost into a
functional triunity of Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer, and she
may lose interest or take offence. But make
the effort to explain to her that there is no gender
in the Trinity, and that the Father
is not male (nor the Spirit female)
and one hopes she will listen with respect. Sarah Coakley
of Harvard University, an Anglican,
will even argue that it is the Holy Trinity, properly
understood, that is the best antidote to patriarchy — in
the oppressive sense
in which feminists use
the term.
These examples remind us of the most
neglected dimension to being prophetic. It is not enough to know
the mind of God; one also has to speak it in the language and
cultural context in which we find ourselves. This should also
remind us that prophecy is not the obverse of ascesis. Just as
the charism of discernment operates through the spiritual fruit
of sobriety, so too does prophecy speak from the familiarity of
ascetic attention to the mind of God on the one hand, and the
culture in which we live on the
other. Prophecy, in short, is hard work both
in listening to and speaking from
the mind of
God.
But now I want to be less
self-congratulatory about what Orthodoxy may be able to do for
the West. This is because I think we
Orthodox Christians face what might
be called an “attitude problem” in
our dealings with those outside our community. To be prophetic
is to speak the truth from the mind
of God to the
Church and the world, but St. Paul reminds us that we
should speak the truth
in love. Love can be stern or severe
as well as gentle, but it is never a stick with which to beat
others who see things differently from us.
It is not necessary and it is sometimes
inaccurate to insist on using the
language of heterodoxy or heresy to describe various religious
beliefs and practices in the West.
To believe that there has been no richness of Christian
Tradition outside Eastern Orthodoxy since the Great Schism is
either ignorance or myopia, as if Calvin never once rang true,
or as if Charles Wesley didn’t write magnificent trinitarian
hymns. What allies the Orthodox
would find if they scoured the West for fellow travelers,
whether it be Edward Irving on the
humanity of Christ, Ives Congar on
the Church,
or Jurgen Moltmann on creation.
The question I am raising here is not
to doubt the richness of Orthodox
heritage, but to ask whether the
Orthodox are willing
in their critical judgment of
Western traditions also to look at themselves a little more
closely. I am not talking about importing Enlightenment
rationalism into Church Tradition,
with its concomitant cynicism and superior intellectual airs,
nor am I suggesting a lessening of
respect for the Patristic tradition. l am talking about ensuring
that the Church
speaks with a prophetic voice.
This needs nothing less than spiritual
discernment: remembering to distinguish Tradition from customs;
noting the gradations between dogmas, theological opinions, and
pious opinions; knowing when either irenic or polemical theology
is called for; having the discipline not to quote canon law or
the Fathers as indiscriminately as fundamentalists quote texts
of Holy Scripture; not falling into the
trap of liturgical legalism while
(quite properly) distancing Orthodox
Tradition from moral legalism.
It may be true, as my friend said, that
Orthodoxy has preserved the form of the
Church in its canons and in its theology, but in practice
Orthodox Christians have often
failed normatively to be the Church.
That is to say, that the outward
form of religion has been sustained in
terms of rites and practices, but sometimes there has been very
little inner reality of knowing the
mind of God.
Let me show you, if I may, what led to
this critical train of thought. It begins
in the passage from St. Luke: “The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me
because he has anointed me to preach the gospel to
the poor…”
We later read that Jesus makes it clear
that prophets usually have no honor
in their own country. St. John
Chrysostom points out that Jesus is talking about his own
brethren here. It is we ourselves who often fail to hear the
prophetic voice. A similar point was made by the late Fr. Lev
Gillet. Fr. Lev wondered why it was that
the Orthodox
of today, who know so much and have
had so much given them, were so steeped in
unbelief and sin.
Self-important and self-serving
prophecy is prophecy without cost, without pain, without
repentance. For to point the finger outside — at the West, at
the heterodox — prevents us from
having to look inside ourselves. When we do that, when we berate
others for their shortcomings and neglect our own, we cease to
be prophetic altogether and become stiff-necked Pharisees unable
to bend our heads in supplication
and prayer, and hence unable to know the mind and will of God.
It was not for nothing that the Fathers rightly saw that the
repentant publican was the true
model of
Orthodox spirituality.
There is no spirituality in Orthodoxy
without repentance. It is repentance that gives to spirituality
its route to the mind and will of God, not some vague cultural
essence that we have somehow picked up and kept going over
the years. Spirituality is something
that we have to rediscover in every generation,
in order that we remain
prophets in fact and not merely
in principle; that we are renewers
of Tradition, and renewed by it, and not merely rehearsers
of it.
I would like to give if I can some
concrete examples of this.
A journalist once asked me, “As an
Orthodox Christian, are you
embarrassed at what is happening in Bosnia?” What struck me most
about his question was the word
“embarrassed.” But it is not a question of embarrassment. It is
a question of having to admit that even in
the heartlands
of Orthodoxy, sin abounds. There is no other word for it.
We cannot dress it up.
Orthodox scholars and apologists might
properly object that the Bosnian Serbs are not in fact from the
traditional heartlands of Orthodoxy, nor are they a good example
of a people who have been successfully socialized into the
Orthodox Faith. This is a matter of historical fact. If Catholic
Croatia was deeply influenced by fascism in between the two
World Wars, Orthodox Serbs in Bosnia
were subject to a surfeit of secularization under Marxist
Socialism during and immediately after the Second World War. We
could also properly object that the mass media has not been
objective in reporting the war. Serbs, too, have been on the
receiving end of “ethnic cleansing,” and they suffered as a
people in the Second World War
in their tens of thousands at
the hands of Croatian fascists. Many
of us know this, but it still does
not make Serbian conduct acceptable.
Of course, the
Church is not institutionally responsible for atrocities,
which have been rightly and courageously condemned by some of
the hierarchs, most notably by Patriarch Pavle. But the fact
remains that ordinary men from Orthodox
churches have been involved in crimes against humanity.
Sometimes the genuine light of
Christian community throws shadows of ethnic exclusivity and
tribal allegiance which can overcome that light, unless it burns
brightly in the
hearts and minds of ordinary men and
women.
Russia provides us with another
scenario for self-examination. When Russia was in the grip of
Soviet rule, many Orthodox around
the world were not slow to criticize the
Church in the USSR at that time. But now, as Communism
loosens its grip, will we also feel able to stand up to the
present dangers: for there is a threat of a Slavophile
neo-fascism within the
Church itself, with many
Orthodox Christians broadcasting
their hatred of Jews and Freemasons. One detects a national
fanaticism hatching in some
seminaries and parishes and a hatred of
all things Western.
This danger is all the greater because
much of what has been imported to Russia from the West is indeed
evil: consumer hedonism, pornography, greed, and pragmatic
triumphalism. All the more reason that the Church should remain
true to herself. When, however, a hierarch of the Russian Church
can encourage publication of a right-wing newspaper of a
virulent kind, saturate church
bookstalls with thousands of unacceptable pamphlets, and watch
while that old forgery much loved by the Nazis — The Protocols
of the Elders
of Zion — rears its head again, it is time for
the Church
to speak out with clarion certainty.
Here the prophetic voice is
unambiguous. There is Orthodoxy, the Church, and there is a
counterfeit religion looking much the same. It has identical
symbols and liturgical practices to the true
Church, but its spirit is not
the Spirit of adoption whereby we
cry “Abba Father” in repentance and
reconciliation, but the spirit
of discord.
This is not to attack the
Church, but it is to recognize that
within the ecclesia , within the
fold of God, we can and do find
wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Orthodox
problems in the Diaspora are mundane compared to those in
Eastern Europe, but they are nonetheless serious for all that.
Cardinal Suenens once told me that Catholics in Belgium and
France could no longer survive in the
Western world without true Christian commitment, because there
was no longer a benign Christian culture to encourage their
faith. Nominal Christianity is a particular temptation for
Orthodox living
in Europe or North America, cut off from their
Orthodox homelands, with their tacit
cultural support for the
Church.
Perhaps our missionary work needs to
begin with our own people. So many Orthodox
Christians have been secularized by the forces of modernity or
have married outside the
Church. In
the process, Orthodoxy has been diluted almost to
the point of
sterility.
For Orthodoxy to be prophetic, it
constantly has to remind itself that this is impossible without
knowing the mind and will of God. To know and speak the mind and
will of God is beyond human reasoning unless we are grafted by
the Holy Spirit into the living Christ and his
Church. In order to ensure that
the graft is not rejected, we have
to be daily renewed through repentance in
the very life
of the risen Christ.
Orthodoxy does not mean “right belief”
if by that we mean no more than correctly reciting dogmas.
Orthodoxy is better understood as true worship which is the
overflowing of God’s personal love into the
Church. This overflowing is like
abundant wine brimming in
the cup from which we must drink
deeply if we want new life, and drinking is both a physical act
of opening our mouths and a spiritual act of surrender,
of opening our hearts.
By the grace of God, the
Orthodox Church came to the West. I
believe it really is the true Church,
spotless and holy in the mystery of
its sanctuary but also teeming in
its empirical life with Judases and Pharisees as well as
publicans and sinners. Orthodox
prophecy is the voice of the mind
of God to the world, but also to the
Church. That same voice warns us
that when Jesus says, “I am the vine and you are the branches,”
it is quite dear that branches can wither and die if they are
not grafted firmly onto the vine.
There is no life in a dead branch,
no Spirit-bearing sap, and the
prophetic voice is silenced.
