Thoughts on the Quad-City Anglican Interview with Ex-Anglican ROCOR Priests

In response to Quad-City Anglican Interview with Ex-Anglican ROCOR Priests, as a Western Orthodox I think it is important to have a truthful and gracious response. However, in all fairness, a couple things need to be pointed out - 

Most Orthodox apologetics works off of a rhetorical mechanism whereby all criticism of Orthodoxy is dismissed offhand as "heresy" or "heterodoxy", making the internal doctrinal, historical, political, ethnic and canonical contradictions of the Orthodox context off limits. The Orthodox then go on to criticize other apostolic churches in minute detail, to the point where there is nothing left of value and all Western Christendom has been apostate and heretical since the time of "Blessed Augustine." The problem with this "Ecclesial Calvinism" is that is assumes the necessary preservation of the Byzantine Church up and against all other local Catholic Churches, for no other reason than that the New Testament was written in Greek and that there was a well-developed Greek philosophical contribution and cultural presence in the West as Christianity was being established as the Roman imperial religion; while ignoring all other contradictions, schisms, disagreements, and yes, even heresies (mostly of Massalian tendencies in the later days, assuming the salvific superiority of monasticism, politically reinforced by a secular addendum to Church Canon at Trullo by Justinian, facilitating a complete monastic take-over of the Church). 

In my experience at Orthodox seminary, professors and seminarians mock Anglican "niceness" constantly, talk openly about the gullibility of those colonized by the Western Rite, and all the while rely upon texts and translations created by Anglican scholars on Church History, Liturgics and Anglo-Catholic Dogmatics because of their quality, truthfulness and humility. This is not to mention that the Orthodox were perfectly fine with pastorally allowing their membership to receive baptism and Eucharist in Anglican Churches before they had established a presence in the West, wrote many books and encyclicals promoting and defending Anglican apostolicity, and also had many inter-church agreements, all up until their numbers were large enough in the West to establish their own churches under old-world bishops, at which time they withdrew from their agreements and their "pastoral practices," acting as if they never happened. It is tempting to see Anglicans as too nice and agreeable, but for those who know, Anglicans were the party that acted like Christians, sacrificially helped and supported their Middle Eastern and Slavic brothers, supported rather than persecuted, and even now, continue to do so at their own hurt. This is not gullible, “nice for its own sake” behavior, but truly bearing the Cross of Christ and demanding more of ourselves than of others. 

On my part, I would rather be with those who obey the Gospel in love and humility, putting themselves down, truly holding to an ecumenically and authentically received Tradition, than with those who boast to high heavens about their "original Liturgy" (finished developing in the 14th century), their "canonical purity" (which means, for the most part that they hold all bishops to be infallible and conveniently enforce whatever is advantageous in a 1500 year tradition of uncategorized, mutually-contradictory ecclesial laws), and their counter-cultural fidelity (forgetting that the reason that they allow rampant divorce and remarriage is that their emperors were as sexually deviant as Henry VIII ever was, with the added perk of being able to depose and elevate any patriarch as they pleased). I would rather be Western Christian, where the brokenness and heresy are apparent, where we are struggling against it with all our might, and retain integrity and honesty. Orthodoxy (as a polity, not a belief) has unfortunately decided to hide their infidelity, dishonesty and heresy under the facade of ornate Liturgy and local folk practices, triumphalistically and insistently holding that cause for repentance has, miraculously, never occurred within their canonically defined borders. Such has never been the case for any Local Church. Christ's promise that the "gates of hells shall not prevail" did not mean that we could avoid the tribulation of tares amongst the wheat. Instead, Christ told us to have courage and be of good hope, because He would be with us "even until the end of the world."