On a Hermeneutic of Consensus

By Chorbishop Joseph (Anglican Vicariate)

I have been thinking about the topic of "conciliarity" for a long time, coming to conclude that when we debate between Catholic, Orthodox and Protestant positions, we're ultimately talking about epistemology and hermeneutics, not "Soli Scriptura", "Papal Infallibility", or "Conciliar Revelation." 

The Early Church clearly appropriated Scripture into their own cultural categories, reading it as a group rather than as an individual, and believed in a process of ecclesial reception of Scripture that was confirmed through personal faith, evidenced in outward works of repentance, righteousness and love. Only later, as Eusebian political theory became a dominant occupation of Constantinopolitan bishops out to prove the legitimacy of the Church's temporal power, finalized at the Council in Trullo (692AD), did the authority of Scripture acquiesce to the authority of "Our Holy and God-bearing Fathers." But, because they received Scripture culturally, there were great differences between the Jewish, Greek, Syriac and Latin Churches from the beginning. The Ancient Church never questioned the validity of cultural elements already established as "reality". They understood such acceptance and accommodation as "Incarnation" of Christ's Life into the context of the temporal and imperfect Church. Thus, the Greeks accepted and modified Neo-Platonism to fit their cultural desire to define how theological events occurred and what they "essentially" accomplished; the Latins translated the Scriptures into legal terms and categories and created beautiful, simple "regula" and "liturgica" to modulate their cyclical patterns; and the Syriacs maintained their age-old Semitic prophetic tradition, so resonant with the motives and forms of the Old Testament, creating ecstatic prose to be sung in antiphonal choirs, imparting a sensation of the Revealed Word as a creating and all-encompassing conversation between the Creator and His creation. 

With this in mind, we must look at how this differs from the Reformation, since it did not "incarnate the Church into the conscience of the individual” as is so often believed - that was already present in all Christian Traditions before this point - no, it incarnated the Gospel into the culture of the Germans, Swiss, Scottish and English. To what extent those cultures received and maintained continuity with the older cultures was exactly the same extent to which they maintained the old forms and rites, comprehensible to the older traditions. Thus, while Anglicans maintained all qualifications of episcopal, doctrinal and historical continuity, the cultures of estranged German peasants received none, violently reacting to venerable Catholicism as a form of cultural coercion, forming the Anabaptists and all the reactionary, fragmented and politically motivated church splits that followed. They emphasized the culture of personal heroism and conviction, so obvious in these cultures before their conversion to Christianity in the Norse and Germanic sagas, to the point that no cultural bond was more valuable than the sensation of pushing through it and destroying it - theological "Bezerkers" who, like their Norse fathers before them, saw their madness as a form of heroism! Modern individuality is the triumph of that wild, anti-cultural culture that made the Vikings, the Baptists, German Romantics, and contemporary critics and scholars so formidable - they all care about their own stories of heroism and fearlessness more than the core story that imparted their beliefs to begin with, mistaking their inner emotional energy and fervor for "consistency" and "truthfulness".

I find it ironic how all of Christianity's current doctrinal disagreements centers so much upon one place and its culture... a place not mentioned in the Councils or the seat of an Ancient Patriarchate, but the seat of all the cultural contradictions we've just mentioned - Germany! Coming to terms with Germany is still impossible for the Orthodox and Oriental Churches, identifying it with heresy as they do, showcased in Russian apologetics at the turn of the last century and the writings of Romanides. If Christianity could not acculturate there, in the same open, fair and raw way that it did with Roman collectivism, Greek sophism and Syriac ecstaticism, then what hope does the "Ancient Path" have in China or Africa?