Apology to an Orthodox Priest

By Bishop Joseph (Ancient Church of the West) 

...I have been thinking about this in similar terms, but trying to understand where the Han "ethos", not an "ethnic priority", originates, and how it relates to the course of Apostolic blessing and Church formation, from history, philosophical influence, all through the transformations we see in the Chinese culture today. I have been working on understanding Church history and visions of authority through the evolving cycles evident within the "Book of Changes", THE foundational document of the ancient and modern Chinese worldview. The results have really blown my mind.

What it proves to me is that there is a predictable pattern of cycles that are a part of God's process of creation, clearly obvious to the Ancient Semitic and Chinese minds, so accustomed to village life, rule by mutual consent and accountability, and the guidance of elders and village head-man. These realities were later obscured by the Greek Fathers' Platonic desire to create unity that reflects a heavenly form, which moved the center of authority from the “village” to an “imperial status”, sacrificing the natural process for a brittle and artificial ideology imposed from above as a state religion to preserve human, imperial power. This was a conscious decision, made mostly in Greek-Speaking lands, by highly educated and philosophically trained Hellenic leaders. The Syriac Tradition never moved away from their vision of the Local Church and the equality of bishops, although they later accommodated the Western Canon and centralized their system in name, but never in function. They were always highly decentralized. The Greek Church acknowledged it in theory, but ceased practicing it after the reign of St. Proclus of Constantinople and the Council of Chalcedon, focusing on the authority of Constantinople in the appointing and ordaining of bishops and metropolitans, rather than on the important role of the individual locality in the blessing and ordaining of representative leaders. Rome countered it with a bigger claim to institutional authority, which led to even bigger problems! Rather than waiting for the long and painful process on agreement on commonly held beliefs to form Orthodoxy from below, as had been the case in the Church all the way to Nicea, issues were “forced” with imperial authority, which resulted in more division - first with the Oriental Orthodox, and ultimately with Rome.

This calcification took place at the expense of locality and human relationships, instead of focusing, as the Jewish Scriptures, Christ, and His Apostles did, on the universality of place, face and grace - Christ manifest in the repenting congregation, in one place, by a bishop, elders, and deacons gathered around the Scripture and the Eucharist. The Early Semitic Christians, Jews and the Chinese all share a way of thought that sees the Early Church’s locality and relational mentality as universal and uniting, a continual process of creation, rather than something that is already accomplished and existing as a generality, a "eidos" (form or idea) in heaven. The history of Byzantium's successes and failures are a powerful and amazingly consistent study in how the Ancient Chinese got their theory of creation and their understanding of God's work through authority right! The prove that the earlier idea of locality, representation, and equality work better, and protect systems from the institutional rot that gradually occurs within imperial systems. China’s strength always lay within its village system, and this was why the Empire, which did relatively little, always lasted so long. The authority was in the system, not in the leadership.

I think that it is better to think in biological categories about this, rather than in theoretical or philosophical categories. What we know is that the Early Church had a certain form, and indigenous and extremely hardy, survival-oriented nature. While fully able to hold mutual recognition with the other Churches, there is a general perception that the Church is complete and Catholic in a localized sense, and that the expression of Christ’s Body has a local, tangible, and visible cell-like formation. These cells were organic, holistic, and focused on reproduction of other autonomous and mutually dependent cells. The Bishops acted as the translators of the DNA at the core of the cell, just as an organic cell has the three, agreeing, mutually relating and accountable “codons” that read the information of the genetic code and give commands regulating the processes of the cell. There are many other functions within the cell, but the basic idea is the faithful interpretation of the genetic code (Scripture), consumption of food (Eucharist), cleaning away of waste and build-up (Repentance and Confession), and reproduction through interphase and cell division (Evangelism and Church-Planting). If the cells divide properly, there is still mutual recognition and cooperation between the cells, but, under stress or due to outside environmental factors, information can be lost or changed between the cells, creating the inability to work as one organism. There is also the possibility of cells malfunctioning and reproducing without consideration of function or locality, thus creating tumors or cancers within the body.

If the church is understood through this biological model, the first 500 years make complete sense. The church was “seeded” throughout the world, grew into highly functional and capable local bodies, each with bishops who were accountable locally to one another for the direction of the Church - “rightly dividing the word of truth.” It not only worked, spreading faster than any time in history, producing the greatest martyrs and saints, and effectively challenging two of the largest empires in history, but it did so without turf wars, in-fighting, or claims of absolute or definitive human authority. When outside organizational constraints were placed on the Church, turning the Church into a political system of rule and governmental policy, the Church suffered from a loss of locality and contextual relationships. Originally, even villages had bishops, but after the episcopate was “granted” from above and given powers by the Emperor to rule and legislate as an extension of the government, the power of the bishops was concentrated in the big cities, removed from direct contact with the average believer, and started to function in a way that was alien to the earlier system.

In a cellular analogy, the cells started to turn into an organism, and the presbytery started to function as the bishops had, only without the teaching authority or the mutual accountability (and their interpretive power for the average believer also broke down, leading to the superstition that became in the norm in the later Byzantine Church) - now the cells were ruled by remote for the advantage of a governmental system that did not have the Church or the spread of the Gospel at heart, but functioned for the preservation of its own best interests and claims of authority. And, it is at this juncture that Church Unity starts to break down, every area starts to assert their independence from an imperial system that used the Church as a claim to power. Armenia, Ethiopia, Antioch, Egypt, and even Rome start to challenge the system. Rapid decline in communication between the cells occurs. Immune-like reaction of one cell to another cell begins to occur. Each group holes up in its place and starts to insist on the admissibility and divine character of their own culture and language. Rome challenges the Emperor’s stranglehold through its claim of Petrine authority, which eventually evolved into the papal claims of universal jurisdiction and infallibility that create such difficulties today. The others, at a disadvantage geographically and historically, had to make their language and culture the prerequisite for “orthodoxy", and found an “easy out” in the Christological debates of the 5th century where the Byzantine Emperor’s will and unsatisfactory wording were the most visible. No one doubts that Ephesus I&II and Chalcedon were the results of Imperial force, one pushing through an Alexandrian line in an attempt to reunite Egypt with the Empire, and the other being a compromise that completely lost the original meanings of “hypostasis”, “physis” and “ousia” as used by the Church Fathers in an attempt to make the Antiochian and Alexandrian philosophies reconcile. Authority and interpretation were no longer found within the integrity of the cellular system itself, focused on mutual recognition, submission, sharing, and love, but on categories that were forced upon it from outside by the interests of State. The fruit of this artificial approach shows in its inability to create unity, but instead, its result was the shattering of the Christian world into localized groups that could no longer recognize all the commonalities that they held with one another. In biological terms, it was a loss of information that created cellular rejection, a kind of a cancer, a mutation in the cells, rather than an answer to the problems at hand.

This problem is visible now from our position, as we watch the fighting between Constantinople and Moscow. They are both unarguably “Orthodox”, but yet there is an effective schism between them. Constantinople won’t recognize the traditional “one bishop one vote” formula for 2016, afraid of the results of unleashing 900+ Slavic bishops on an ecumenical council, and harangues the ancient patriarchates to tow a Greek line. Moscow responds by declaring 2016 “Pan-Orthodox Meeting” will have no ecumenical, canonical or binding nature, and looks at its own Holy Synod of Moscow as the seat of all doctrinal authority. What is the root of this problem? What keeps Orthodoxy from having doctrinal authority and dealing with the issues that face Christians around the world? Dare I say that it is the same problem that undergirds the Pope’s fall into heresy and self-sufficiency? From a historical view, it is the tendency of centralization, amassment of power and wealth, and the confusion of this kingdom with the Kingdom to Come. Exactly as it is in governments, once you vote yourself a right or power, it becomes impossible to take it away once it is granted. Constantinople voted itself into a kind of supreme guardianship of Christendom, and now, even though they have 30 people left in Istanbul, they see this right as inalienable. Moscow is trying to reproduce the Church/State paradigm from Byzantium. If this was the origin of Byzantine authority in the past, why is it not the mark of supreme Orthodoxy and Divine Right to Rule now for the Russians? What gets lost on both sides is the Life of Christ in Human Relationships and Particular Space that made the Early Church so powerful. It was not the Patriarchates, the Councils, or the Empire that makes the Church great - these are all asides from its truth! It is the Life of Christ, founded on the Faith of Peter (“You are the Messiah, the Son of God”), lived in the reality of the Sacraments (“This Do in Remembrance of Me”), in the local community, which is the foretaste and covenantal Body which strives for redemption and resurrection in the Kingdom of God!

Does Orthodoxy fit this description? Yes, at the local level it does! The Patriarchates create division, however, instead of promoting peace, though, and I think I’ve finally been able to discern why - They were added as a governmental interface and a centralization of power, foreign to the Early Church and the original episcopal system. They turned a representational form of government, based on the age and merit of elders in the community, into a form of princely rule that was granted by the Emperor! Does this mean that Orthodoxy is wrong - not really, but it does show us a way to get back to Christian unity and live as Christians in a day where Christian Empire does not exists (regardless of what the Russians will say). It also shows how the Oriental, Roman Catholics, and Church of the East Churches are still a viable part of this whole equation, without giving over to any heresy, or merely local, interpretations that there might be. What is Catholic and Orthodox is what, as St. Vincent of Lerins said, is what has been believed “Everywhere, Every Time, and by All…” This is a simple, Apostolic faith that even the Protestants can’t compete with, and that will ultimately win them over!

As I study China’s ancient Christian heritage and its involvement with the Church of the East, this problem becomes even more clear. The effects of centralization on the Ancient Church were immediate and continuous - St. Proclus, in making the Church into a “Greek Institution”, moved against the teachers of St. John Chrysostom, Mar Diodor and Mar Theodore Mopsuestia, and caused a rift between the Constantinopolitan bishopric and its theological mother, the Ancient Seat of Antioch. This all on the heels of Chrysostom’s banishment and death, and Nestorius' trial in absentee (for charges against beliefs that the accused himself did not believe, as his own writings in his “Bazaar” make clear) by St. Cyril of Alexandria at Ephesus with his sixty bishops, where Alexandrian bribes (tons of gold paid to the imperial court) and unbelievably uncanonical behavior (self-convoked council, not allowing anyone else to attend!) converged to create one of the most scandalous chapters in Orthodox history.

After St. Proclus, not only would all the Patriarchs of Constantinople be appointed to, from and for Constantinople, but most of the other Patriarchates would be appointed from afar to largely-absent Constantinopolitans, who were patriarchs in name only, living in imperial luxury while their sees suffered from Islamic persecution. This included the Antiochian and Alexandrian Patriarchs, who, after the 9th century, were mostly Constantinopolitan bishops who ruled “In Partibus Infidellium” (by remote in non-Christian lands). The Greek annexation of the Tradition is everywhere evident in the extinction of the ancient liturgies (all replaced with the Rite of Constantinople), the Neo-platonic theology that focused on mediation of worthiness and the equation of "forms" with "heavenly prototypes", and the political take-over of all the other Patriarchates. St. Proclus' actions would also be fateful in that all the teachers of the Antiochian School, with the exception of St. John Chrysostom, would gradually be anathematized and excluded from the history of orthodoxy - even though they died in communion and were considered pillars of Orthodoxy in their day. Thus, Orthodoxy was retroactively, permanently, and to its own detriment, cut off from the Judaic roots of Hebrew/Aramaic-Speaking Christianity, grafted on to the trunk of Greek thought and Roman polity, and gradually changed from the faith of the people that had challenged the empire to the faith of an empire that challenged the faith of the people. The only Church that survived the usurpation was the one beyond the Roman Empire, in India, Persia, and China, constantly persecuted and reviled, keeping the faith of the Ancient Church, distilled in the conservative homiletics and hermeneutics of the Apostolic Fathers, Mar Theodore, St. John Chrysostom and the Antiochian/Mesopotamian Tradition - which eventually became the indigenous Chinese Church of the East!

This is an aspect of the history that we really need to honestly deal with, in light of what we now know…

How does this fit with the Han mentality? Well, the Traditional Village System, central to the Han mentality, is actually closer to the Ancient Church than most Orthodoxy is today. This organic and “leaderless empire” that was only represented by the Emperor, but effectively ruled by the village elder, is the same kind of system as the Early Church. It had the same relational dynamic of "Face, Place and Grace” as that which is ensconced within the Chinese culture itself! This must be allowed to inform the Orthodox mentality, and in the process, strengthen and correct philosophical tendencies within Orthodoxy that has made it impractical and unsustainable in lands without a "top down" Christian enforcement. This is something that the Chinese are instinctively able to do, and something that the Orthodox desperately need. In the process of this happening, then, the Chinese will be able to reclaim their own birthright, and help Orthodoxy learn how to incarnate its own doctrine and heritage!