The Ecumenical Conundrum: Divergent Worldviews
The Ecumenical Movement seems blocked in an impasse. From its beginnings early in the last century, Protestant and Orthodox Christians have made up the membership of the World Council of Churches, and to the present day bilateral and multilateral dialogues have continued between various Protestant denominations and the canonical Orthodox churches. In recent years, Roman Catholics have joined in the dialogue process, both with Protestants and with the Orthodox. Yet nearly all of the participants are asking just where the movement is headed, as they forge ahead with their conversations, looking for signs of agreement amid diminishing prospects for meaningful unity.
In all, a great deal of good has come from these discussions. Theologians have come to better understand and appreciate Christians of other confessions, and occasionally the papers produced by participants in the dialogues have marked a significant advance toward rediscovering the Apostolic Faith. A recent example is the Roman Catholic / Orthodox agreement on certain aspects of the filioque controversy.1 Yet a gulf still exists between “East” and “West,” such that any prospect that true unity in terms of doctrine and polity will one day be achieved among the churches remains dim at best. Why is this so?
People have advanced any number of reasons. One of the most important is the fact that most Orthodox Christians are thoroughly comfortable with their own tradition as it has been preserved and transmitted throughout the centuries. Indeed, they love, honor and cherish it as Holy Tradition. Accordingly, they believe that any unity that might be achieved with other churches will necessarily involve unwanted compromise in matters of faith, worship and overall church life. Despite jurisdictional and other internal problems the Orthodox face, they instinctively feel that anything “other” than what they know, practice and love will inevitably mean something “less.”
Then again, the pluralism and moral degeneration so prevalent in Western societies today creates among many Orthodox a certain bunker mentality that spills over into the ecumenical sphere. If in some quarters “ecumenism” is regarded as the rankest of heresies, it is because of an understandable, if somewhat paranoid, sense that even engaging in dialogue—not to mention “praying with the heretics”—can only corrupt what they cherish as the treasure of Orthodox Christianity.
There is another reason, however, more fundamental and subtler than either of the above. It is the fact that Orthodox and Western Christians hold very different and basically incompatible worldviews. Let me illustrate what I mean by referring to the domain of biblical interpretation.
Orthodox Christians intuitively identify with the Church’s patristic tradition. They consciously strive to adopt the “mind” of the ancient Fathers. Whether they are “cradle” Orthodox or converts, they develop—through liturgical worship as much as through study of the Scriptures—a perspective on reality that is fundamentally at odds with the secularist, postmodern influences of our present day that so strongly shape Western culture, including Western interpretation of the Bible. As we noted earlier, Protestant and, increasingly, Catholic exegesis generally adopts a historical-critical approach, one that finds meaning almost exclusively in the literal or historical sense of the biblical text. (This unilateral focus is attenuated, but not significantly altered, by recent approaches known globally as the “new literary criticism.”) The literal sense, once again, refers to the meaning the author himself understood and attempted to convey by his writing.
The Church Fathers, on the other hand, had as their ultimate quest the “spiritual” sense of the text, that is, the meaning that God, working through the Holy Spirit, reveals to the Church and world in every successive generation. They attempted to discover this higher, fuller or more spiritual sense by various interpretive methods, particularly allegory and typology. Yet they did so with the conviction that the spiritual sense flows out of the literal sense. Exegesis, therefore, properly begins with investigation of the latter, in order to discern the higher or fuller meaning the Spirit seeks to convey in and through the biblical text.
This movement from the literal to the spiritual sense was possible, in the vision (theôria) of the Fathers, because earthly realities in the framework of salvation history are essentially symbolic. In their understanding, events, institutions, persons and rituals of the Old Covenant are prophetic images of future or transcendent realities. To take the most well-known examples: the Exodus served as an image of liberation from slavery to sin and death, and the Promised Land of Israel was seen as an image of Paradise; Hebrew sacrificial rites prefigured the Church’s eucharistic liturgy; and Abraham’s willingness to offer up his beloved son Isaac foreshadowed the Father’s gift of His beloved Son on the Cross.
These types or prophetic images were interpreted in the larger framework of allegory. In a word, this means that behind and beyond the literal meaning of the biblical text there lies a deeper meaning that concerns the spiritual and moral life of believers in their quest for salvation. The Fathers took the notion of symbol seriously, since a symbol enables one actually to participate in the reality to which it points. Biblical symbols serve to unite the believer with the transcendent reality that underlies them. Thus, there is a continuum of significance from the manna in the desert to the Church’s Eucharist, and on to the heavenly Banquet. A similar continuum leads from animal sacrifice in the Hebrew temple, through Christ’s death on the Cross, to the “crucifixion” of oneself—of one’s passions and sinful disposition—in the ascetic effort that leads to God-given holiness and eternal life.
While this may sound “Platonic” to most modem ears, it is lived experience for an Orthodox Christian. In the Church’s Liturgy we re-actualize and relive the saving events of ancient Israel’s history, as we do the events of Christ’s passion, death and resurrection. The biblical witness, in other words, is not simply a record of past events that informs our faith. It promotes a living experience, in which past and future are telescoped into the present moment (and therefore in the Church’s anamnesis, or liturgical memorial, we commemorate or “remember” even what has not yet occurred: the second and glorious coming of Christ!). Scripture, in this perspective, always points beyond itself; and its interpretation within the Church—through preaching and celebration—serves to lead the faithful beyond historical reality and into the realm of the “spiritual,” into communion with the transcendent God.
To the Orthodox mind, God is “everywhere present, filling all things.” Through historical events and circumstances, He ceaselessly guides His people beyond their ephemeral, earthly life, and into the beauty and joy of His kingdom. There, and there only, lies ultimate reality. And there, too, lies the fulfillment of human life that gives ultimate meaning to an otherwise meaningless existence. Everything in Orthodox experience is oriented toward that transcendent goal: the Church’s worship, its interpretation of Scripture, even its acts of charity. It is an experience that creates in the Orthodox mind and spirit what the apostle Paul calls “the hope of glory.”
Until our Western partners in the ecumenical debate come to terms with the fact that Orthodoxy lives and breathes in this transcendent atmosphere, that it finds ultimate truth and reality in and yet beyond the bounds of time and space, that it grounds its very life in the immediate experience of the presence, power and majesty of the Living God, then we will continue to engage in a dialogue of the deaf.
Of course, many Western Christians of all traditions share much of this same perspective and same experience. Nevertheless, for the Orthodox allegory and typology remain essential methods for understanding the Scriptures, because they succeed most adequately in revealing and representing a transcendent realm of being in and through the biblical text itself as it interprets events of history. Most Protestants and many Catholics, on the other hand, reject allegory and typology as “pre-critical” and basically useless. This difference in approach to biblical interpretation is symptomatic of the fact that we indeed hold very different worldviews. Western culture, and the forms of biblical interpretation it has spawned, is characteristically secular and dualistic. Just as it tends to separate body and soul, it also separates and compartmentalizes transcendence and immanence, the eternal and the historical. As a result, eyes of faith in Western traditions often perceive God not as intimately and universally present, but as breaking in to creation, into the midst of the historical order, at discrete temporal moments, in order to work His “mighty acts.”
As Mary Ford has noted, this secular perspective that separates the sacred from the profane, eternal reality from historical contingency, is responsible for (and reinforced by) a dualistic Christology that is incapable of grasping the reality of two natures, divine and human, fully united in a single Person, Jesus Christ.2 In extreme forms, this incapacity leads Western theologians to see no ontological relationship whatsoever between the eternal Word of God and the man Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is reduced in this perspective to the human vessel in which God’s Word came to expression. He is no longer seen as the God-man, the eternal Word truly incarnate in human flesh. Secularism, then, is characterized not so much by a denial of God’s existence as by a tendency to relegate God to a realm “out there,” beyond time and space, beyond the sphere of our daily experience, where He is no longer with us.
To the patristic mind, no such dichotomy exists. This explains why the Fathers could envision time and space as charged with eternity, filled with the grandeur of God. It explains as well why their approach to Scripture is so different from the approach taken by post-Enlightenment historical-criticism. To recall an insight of Frances Young: “A culture which can conceive of the material universe as interpenetrated by another reality, which is transcendent and spiritual, will read the reference of scripture in those terms. This is far more significant for the differences between ancient and modem exegesis than any supposed ‘method’.”3
The transcendent worldview of the ancient Church Fathers may seem outmoded and naive to many people today, not least of all to Western Christian exegetes. To Orthodox Christians, however, the Scriptures themselves locate ultimate truth—and therefore ultimate reality—within the sphere of God’s own being rather than within the realm of historical event. Interpretation of the Scriptures, together with the whole of the Church’s liturgical life, enable the faithful to experience that reality in the here and now, while they confirm the conviction that the true meaning and destiny of human existence lies elsewhere, in the kingdom of “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:17).
In the course of ecumenical dialogue, our Orthodox language and demeanor reflect this experience and this conviction. Where this experience and conviction are not shared by others, there is, sad to say, little chance for mutual understanding, and even less for eventual unity.
- This refers to the addition to the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed of the term filioque (“and the Son”), made in the sixth century by Roman Catholic theologians. It concerns the clause that speaks of the procession of the Holy Spirit: “and in the Holy Spirit… who proceeds from the Father [and the Son]….” Eastern Orthodox Churches rejected the addition because it posits the Father and the Son together as sources of the Spirit, thereby undermining traditional trinitarian theology. Traditional doctrine holds the Father to be the eternally “ungenerated” source, who eternally “generates” the Son and “processes” the Spirit. The three Persons share a common divine nature or essence, yet within the Trinity there is a hierarchical order: Father, Son and Spirit, who are equal and undivided. The effect of the filioque is to subordinate the Spirit by depicting Him as proceeding from both the Father and the Son as equal principles, thus compromising the identity of the Father as the Monarch or archê, the unique principle of all things, both created and uncreated. The recently concluded agreement situates the “coming forth” of the Spirit from both the Father and the Son within the sphere of the divine economy (God ad extra) rather than within the being of the Trinity itself (God ad intra). This conforms to Jesus’ teaching on the Spirit in John 14-16, and it recalls the image of St Irenaeus of Lyon, who spoke of the Son and the Spirit as “the two hands of the Father” (Against Heresies, ca. 188). ↩︎
- See her important article, “Towards the Restoration of Allegory: Christology, Epistemology and Narrative Structure,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 34.2-3 (1990): 161-195. ↩︎
- Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture (Cambridge, 1997), 139. ↩︎