MESSAGES OF WARNING
From The Loving Heart of God

On and off the Orthodox Church has been engaged in ecumenical contacts with both the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches. This has been the case since the great schism of 1054 AD and since the historic correspondence between the German successors of Martin Luther and the Patriarch of Constantinople, Jeremiah II (1573 AD).

Ecumenism has been a very important area of Orthodox outreach especially since the World Council of Churches was organized soon after World War II. Ordinarily, we speak of ecumenical contacts as “dialogues”, as, for example, the Roman Catholic-Orthodox dialogue that has been taking place on a rather regular basis.

In effect what occurs at these dialogues is a coming together of theologians and church leaders from both churches to discuss the differences that keep them separated. The understanding is that with regular dialogues there may be a likelihood for finding common ground to transcend our differences and ultimately come to the stage of restoring the unity between the Christians both East and West.

I have had several opportunities in the past to participate in ecumenical encounters as an official representative of our church. Consequently, much of what I am sharing with you is rooted in personal experience which I have combined with my findings from my studies into the history of the Early Church and into the causes that led up to Christian disunity.

I have found that too often many ecumenical dialogues amount simply to taking out a laundry list of church doctrines and practices on which we differ and which have been led to disrupting the unity of the Christian world. Then we discuss the points of doctrinal disagreement and do our utmost to reach some kind of understanding of such divisive articles of faith. By doing this we hope possibly to reach a fresh reinterpretation of certain doctrines in question and a possible joint agreement and restoration of theological consensus.

In the course of my ecumenical ventures I came to finally recognize that dialoguing on isolated doctrines, dogmas, and practices was an exercise in futility. This approach to our differences is superficial and betrays something of a theological naïveté.

From my earlier years I had an almost instinctive awareness that the ecclesiastical alienation between East and West was rooted in a growing divergence in ethos and mentality. I came to the conclusion that the backdrop to the theological estrangement between East and West must be defined primarily in terms of a basic acceptance of divine immanence in the East in contrast with an emphasis on divine transcendence in the West.

The only intelligent approach to understanding the Roman-Orthodox schism is to take into account the cultural and philosophical factors involved. Let me be more specific:

• The gradual disappearance of classical Greco-Roman ethos in the West.
• The emergence of a Teutonic ethos with the invasion of Italy and western Europe by the barbarian Germanic races from the north.
• De-hellenization and Latinization of the West.
• The emerging tension between faith and reason, resulting from the West’s alienation from the principle of the indwelling Logos (Resson).
• The loss of cultural homogeneity with the cosmic Logos as the all-embracing truth that relates together every area of human experience.
• The replacement of the theology of the indwelling Logos with the theology of grace in the West.
• The great schism in the church can be traced back to the polarization of early Greek and Latin theology.
• The contrast between a God immanent and a God transcendent is the master-key to the many contrasts between the theologies of the East and the West.

Much of this insight I had drawn from my personal study and research. I could not always articulate those principles and share them effectively with others in the Church, until I discovered a book in which the author confirmed these fresh findings, paying special tribute to Greek theology and lamenting its disappearance in the West. The more remarkable is the fact that he is not Orthodox.

This book, entitled The Continuity of Christian Thought is authored by Alexander V. Allen, an Anglican scholar, published in 1894 and still available.

“The fundamental principle of Greek theology, underlying every position, which it assumed,” states Alexander Allen, “was the doctrine of divine immanence, the presence of God in nature, in humanity, in the process of human history; in Latin thought may be everywhere discerned the working of another principle, sometimes known as Deism, according to which God is conceived as apart from the world, localized at a vast distance in the infinitude of space” (p. 176).

In light of this basic principle, it is understandable that the Pope in the Roman Church became the vicar of Christ. In the absence of the indwelling Logos, papal supremacy compensates for the distant, transcendent Christ. Authority becomes externalized.

On the other hand, in the Orthodox Church authority and personal faith involve primarily inner vision and an immediate intimacy with Christ and His lordship. The theology of grace, developed in Latin theology, replaced the indwelling Holy Spirit. If you are searching for God’s presence in the western tradition, you end up with grace, an impersonal force imparted to fallen man by a sovereign transcendent God.

I am inclined to believe that the Pentecostal movement of our day represents God’s corrective intervention for restoring the primacy and immanence of the Holy Spirit as originally taught in the Greek theology of the Early Church.

Regrettably, however, even our own theologians have little, if any awareness of this insight. Thank God for the Anglican scholars. It will take non-Orthodox historians of Christian history to remind us of the uniqueness of our own Orthodox theological heritage. It is revealing how positively British scholars assessed the legacy of the Greek Fathers at the turn of the twentieth century in contrast with the anti-Hellenic approach of German theologians, as Harnack, Barth, and Brunner.

J.B. Heard is another Anglican scholar who expounds even more incisively on the far-reaching contrast between Greek and Latin theology. He called the writings of Alexander Allen “epoch-making”.

I, in turn, have more reason to call the writings of both men “epoch-making”, especially J.B. Heard’s master-work entitled Alexandrian and Carthaginian Theology Contrasted. It is a veritable treasure trove of theological nuggets that opens new horizons for any student of theology, but especially for the Orthodox student.

“I have found,” he states, “the key to this standing contrast between new and old in theology. To have found the true thread to the labyrinth of the root of contrast between the one and the many is what multitudes have toiled after and still are in search of”.

The writings of J.B. Heard are not for beginners. The ordinary Orthodox believer, be he ordained or a layman, could find him more than he could handle. His thoughts do not fit in convenient familiar categories. He delights in contrasting St. Augustine with the Greek Fathers:

“Let us then cut the cords which tie us to the traditionalism of one Church Father (St. Augustine). The age asks for a new theology, and we can offer it one both new and old, if they will be old Catholics of an Alexandrian not of a Carthaginian type. To timid minds who dread the new merely because it is new, it may be some solace to know that the new is in truth the old which was from the beginning” (p. 198).

J.B. Heard, like Alexander Allen, dwells on how the Logos doctrine, together with the doctrine of the spermatic logos became a dead letter in the West, the moment it was replaced with the doctrine of grace. The Johannine teaching on the Logos is “one neglected thought of God which the West has let go”, thus banishing the principle of the immanence of God both in the cosmos and in man.

It was the tragic misfortune of the Christian West to translate the “Logos” of the fourth gospel, rather than transliterate it. Logos became sermo or verbum in the Latin translation of the New Testament. Then verbum in turn became “word” in the English translation. As a result, its continuity with the Logos of Greek philosophy was permanently lost in the West.

The seeds of the tension between faith and reason were sown and western society was doomed to be torn thereafter by the divorce between science and religion. This evil has been haunting our culture to this day, leading our world to the brink of a nuclear catastrophe.

Let me introduce another non-Orthodox scholar who dwells on the far-reaching contrast between the Eastern and Western Churches. His name is Charles Guignebert, professor of Christian history at the University of Paris. In his book Christianity: Past and Present, this French theologian makes the following remarkable statements:

“It is not paradoxical to say that western peoples in the early centuries of the Christian era never really understood the Christian dogmas, nor have they understood them since.

“The religion which they have constructed upon these dogmas through their own efforts was something different, both in spirit and in essence, from Eastern Christianity; issuing, as it did, from the depths of their own mentality, and in accord with their own sentiments, it was cast in formulas ill able to contain it.

“The Western people have, strictly speaking, never been Christians, a statement which this book justifies although on its face it appears to be a paradox” (p. 500).

You might wonder, dear reader, why only non-Orthodox scholars have rediscovered the Logos-centered theology and philosophy of the early Greek Fathers. As a matter of fact, most of our modern Orthodox theologians linger under the Augustinian influence of Western theology. They have failed to grasp the contrast between Eastern and Western Christian thought that I have presented in this article.

However, cheer up. There is one exception. One of our own Orthodox thinkers and writers is the Greek theologian, Apostolos Makrakis (1831-1905). In his monumental writings, all translated into English, he sums up in an impressive system of thought the basic teachings on the theology and philosophy of the Logos bequeathed to us by the early Greek Fathers.

A. Makrakis (who never heard of J.B. Heard, A.V. Allen, or C. Guignebert) made the continuity between the classical Greek Logos and the Johannine Logos foundational. If J.B. Heard had the opportunity to find A. Makrakis, he would not have made that pessimistic statement:

“The honest verdict of history is that there is little to choose between East and West in their downward descent to superstition after the great age of the three Cappadocians” (S.S. Basil, Gregory the Theologian, Gregory of Nyssa).

In the anointed writings of A. Makrakis, Christ is affirmed as the all-embracing Truth that must be relevant to every area of human endeavor – not only to religion, but to science and art, as well as to the institution of government, since He fulfills the three-fold office of High Priest, Tutor, and King.

Christ is the answer to the Jewish quest for the perfect atonement as the lamb of God, to the Greek quest for perfect knowledge, as the Tutor and Logos, and the Roman quest for a universal united commonwealth, as the King. It was not an accident of history that the inscription over Calvary’s Cross was in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.

The limits of space painfully compel me to stop here. I simply want to close by stating that A. Makrakis is the best kept secret in the Church for which he toiled as a martyr. He was not only a highly gifted thinker and author, but anointed by God as a prophet. He went the way of all prophets, never received in his own country. Hopefully, the Adversary will not have his way indefinitely.