As Far as the East from the West

The Russian Political and Ecclesial Mission in Beijing, Hong Fang, a Gift from Emperor Kang Xi to the Russian Tzar

On the Problems of “Pseudomorphosis” in the Foundations of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia in China and Its Lessons to Continuers Contemplating Conversion to Russian Orthodoxy

By Bishop Joseph (Anglican Vicariate)

Introduction

The Anglocatholics around the world find themselves at a crossroad, beset from within by massive apostasy and heresy, and from without by other communions trying to dissolve the Anglican Patrimony into their own western missions. Chief among those posing an outward threat is the Russian Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), which has backed a major push to pick up clergy and parishes alienated by apostate Anglican bishops. The ROCOR’s mission in the United States has been extremely effective in the last few years at appealing to dissatisfied and disenfranchised clergymen, and have substantially bolstered there once failing numbers, even while forcing most of the original “Western Rite” parishes in the US to effectively become “Eastern Rite” over time. 

While there are many things that we can learn from the ROCOR’s conservative commitments and their tirelessness in the face of opposition, their major faults have not been significantly discussed from an Anglican patristic and canonical perspective, which has led to major “buyer’s regret” on the part of clergy who were hoping for it to be the answer to Anglican apostasy. Many parishes have been duped by clever and politically motivated “economia” (temporary change in the canonical practice) into thinking that they could, essentially be “Continuers”, but with the financial and political support of a large Eastern Orthodox Church behind them. Many have found out only too late that they have become a part of one of the largest political, cultural and religious assaults ever to be launched upon Western Christendom, and accomplices in the very undermining of the Anglican Tradition that they were attempting to save. 

Because much of ROCOR’s story occurred in China, the Missionary Diocese of East Asia has a unique perspective to offer the Anglican World, which reveals some of the major canonical fault lines and narrative inconsistencies of the ROCOR’s missionary propaganda in the West. 

The Fall of White Russia 

October 25th, 1917, on the Julian Calendar, the unthinkable happened in Russia - the imperial “Symphonia" between Emperor and Orthodox Church that was established during the reign of Justinian at the Council in Trullo, came to an abrupt and brutal end. With the abdication of Tzar Nikolas II and the refusal of his brother, Grand Duke Michael to claim the throne, political chaos plunged Holy Russia into an atheist revolution. The Imperial Family was slaughtered, Imperial Nobles and White Russian armies were all put to flight, and those amongst the loyal and religious Russian peasants could only flee in hopes of sparing some of their children’s fragile lives. All of these profoundly unfortunate events would directly effect the Chinese Mission in devastating ways and challenge the Orthodox vision of indigenous missions to its core. Immediately, the Chinese mission was cut off from the Russian Government and the Holy Synod of Moscow. Very quickly it was apparent that there would not be a stable, synodal body under which to submit the mission, and so Metropolitan +Innokenty came under the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and the Diocese of Beijing became the first diocese in China. Over the next few years, hundreds of thousands of White Russians entered northern China, living mostly in Harbin, first under the Chinese Republican government in a special protectorate, and then as a persecuted minority under Japanese rule as all with Russian ethnicity were feared as allies against the Axis and spies for the Soviet Union. The Russians also trickled down to other areas of inland China: Beijing, Wuhan, Guangzhou, all had a sudden burst in Russian population, but none as great as Shanghai, where the Russian population numbered over 300,000 at the beginning of the 1930’s after the defeated White Russian Navy limped to its ports from Vladivostok in 1922. Shanghai established 8 parishes with 4 large churches and became in the East was Paris was to the Russian Emigres in the West, a center of Russian intellectual life and culture for those in exile.  

With the huge influx of Russian nobility, 20 Churches were built in Harbin. Sundays in the summers became a White Russian holiday, adorned with women and children out for pick nicks in the parks driving Russian-style carriages, dressed in starched and billowing white dresses. In 1919, St. Jonah of Manchuria came from Russia to lead the Northern Chinese Church (汉口教区). He brought the Icon of Tabynsk with him, which had been revered in Russia for 300 years because of its miraculous ability to determine its own resting place and its affinity for salt springs, where it would do mysterious works of healing. Until his early death, Bishop +Jonah established an orphan home for 40 children, supported 500 students to study for free, had a church kitchen open daily to feed 200 people, and opened a free clinic for people too poor to pay for medical assistance amongst the Russian refugee population. St. Jonah oversaw the construction of the famous St. Sophia of Harbin, finished in 1924, and in 1935 the St. Alexy Church was completed, which was the last Russian Orthodox Church built in China. 

The De-Indigenization of the Orthodox Church in China

In 1929 the Russian Soviets sued the Chinese Mission for all funds, properties and holdings, stating that the Russian Orthodox Church was an organ of Russian polity and belonged to the ruling government of Russia. Metropolitan +Innokenty wisely chose to define the Orthodox Church in China as an independent body, pointing to the separation of the mission from the political embassy in the 1860’s and the appointing of a canonically self-sufficient hierarchy as evidence. The Chinese Republican High Court, under the direction of Chiang Kai-Shek, ruled that the Orthodox Church was a native body and was in no way subject to the Patriarchate of Moscow, thus protecting all holdings from seizure. While the Russians residing in China rejoiced that the Soviets had been defeated, they violently rejected Metropolitan +Innokenty’s proposal to elevate worthy Chinese hieromonks to episcopal status, and at the Metropolitan’s death in 1931, they passed over the senior-most Chinese hieromonk, Sergei Chang Fu, to enthrone another Russian monk and assistant to +Innokenty, Archimandrite Simon, to the Diocese of Beijing. This resulted in the Chinese clergy protesting to the government that the “Chinese Orthodox Church” had been taken over by Russians and not functioning as legally dictated by Chinese law. Chiang Kai-Shek tried to have Fu installed as the new Metropolitan, but the Russians rioted and the Chinese government had to come to terms with the fact that the Church was “Chinese” in name only, completely unworkable with the boycott of the Russian faithful and clergy.  Just two years later, in 1933, Archimandrite +Victor, a bright young monk who had studied under Met. Innokenty for over a decade, was elevated to the episcopacy at the passing of Met. +Simon, and resumed the vision of an indigenous Church. 

One Final Attempt to Establish Chinese Eastern Orthodoxy

Interestingly, it was during the same time that Metropolitan Dositej of Serbia, a close friend of the first head of ROCOR and mentor to Met. +Innokenty, Met. Anthony Kharprotsky, established “brotherly” relations with Catholicos Geevarghese II of the Malankara Orthodox Church of India.  This is the first well-documented attempt to find grounds for unity between Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Churches. The Serbia and India exchanged visits and ROCOR was heavily involved in the project, via their Mission to Jerusalem. Two ROCOR priests were also in residence with the Malankara Orthodox, Archimandrite Lazarus Moore (a converted Anglican priest who would later become famous by mentoring Fr. Peter Gillquist and the Campus Crusade for Christ leaders into the Orthodox fold), and the future rector of St. Tikhon’s Seminary, Archimandrite Andronik (Elpedinsky), helping the two sides understand each other better at the “Mount Thabor Ashram/Darya” in Pathanapurum. Nicholas Zernov also came to lecture in Kerala at this time and had a profound effect upon ecumenical relations.  Roughly between 1933 and 1937, the head of the China Mission, Bishop +Victor, left China and took up residence on the Malabar Coast, attempting to bring about the anticipated communion within the scope of the China Mission, for the establishment of an “Asian Orthodox Church.”  This was perhaps because of the general perception that the Chinese Orthodox Church, already 10,000 strong, would only be able to find a sustainable solution to the problem of polity and identity within an Asian Church, one with a distinct identity from the Russian Church. It was commonly assumed by many hierarchs at the time that a new day was dawning for inter-Christian communion and Met. +Anthony was known for his advocacy of receiving Anglican Clergy in their orders, which meant that, if doctrinal agreements could be reached, the Schism between East and West could come to an end and true catholicity could be shared with the whole world.  It was an ambitious plan and a goal that riveted the Eastern Orthodox world with a new sense of purpose, unfortunately, this attempt to unite the Indian Orthodox and Russian Orthodox Church was unsuccessful for reasons obscured by time and intentional obfuscation. Perhaps it was the repose of Met. +Anthony in 1936 and the enthronement of Met. +Anastasius Gribanovsky, the very one who had received and re-ordained Archimandrite Lazarus contrary to +Anthony’s opinion and who represented a faction that was increasingly anti-ecumenist and actively involved in undermining the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the decisions of the Pan-Orthodox Conference of 1923, of which Met. +Anthony had been so favorably involved? 

Met. +Victor returned to China in 1938, and was proclaimed Archbishop of China by the Russian Church Abroad at the beginning WWII when communication became impossible. The situation in China had become increasingly perilous as the Japan annexed the old Russian parts of Northern China and formed the new country of Manchuko under the rule of the puppet emperor, Puyi, forcing more Russians to relocate to Shanghai, which was turned into a battle front just months after the relocation in 1937. What followed was 7 years of horror as the Japanese exterminated millions of Chinese and thousands of Russians. At the end of the war, in October of 1945, +Viktor was received back into the Russian Orthodox Church, Moscow Patriarchate, in anticipation of peace between the Nationalist Chinese Government and the Soviets, hoping to get the mission back on track after over a decade of turbulence. In defiance of +Victor’s decision, the ROCOR consecrated Bp. +John Maximovitch as a rival to the claims of the Moscow Archbishopric of China and he set about immediately to counter Metropolitan +Victor’s “ecumenism”, effectively splitting the Russian Emigre community in China (which numbered around 3 million) and ending the popular Russian support of a Chinese mission. When China underwent its own Communist Revolution in 1949, the Moscow Patriarchate ordered Metropolitan +Victor to turn the mission over to its native clergymen, of whom two, Symeon Du and Vasily Shuan, were elevated by +Victor to the episcopate, and the church was granted autocephalous status by the Holy Synod of Moscow in 1956. Understaffed, underfunded, and quaking under four decades of tight Russian control and ethnic politics, the few Chinese clergy gave out, +Vasily died in 1963, Bishop +Symeon traveled to Russia to be with +Victor where he stayed until his death in 1965, and the rest were imprisoned during the years of the Cultural Revolution. The whole project was effectively shuttered by 1967, with only three surviving priests and two deacons. Thus, 300 years of the Russian Orthodox Mission in China came to a tragic end. 

The Context of Contemporary Eastern Orthodox Missions

“Pseudomorphosis” of Chinese Eastern Orthodoxy

St. John Maximovitch’s mission and the change of Orthodox attitude towards missions and dialogue with other churches would be presciently stated in the profound thesis of his anti-ecumenist enthronement sermon, where he directly opposed the spirit of the Pan-Orthodox Conference of 1923 and stood in direct contradiction to Met. +Anthony, Met. +Innokenty and Met. +Victor's vision of an indigenous Orthodox Mission in China. This shows the genuine extent of the Russian “pseudomorphosis” of Chinese Eastern Orthodoxy, which is an unwillingness to allow the Chinese to make the Tradition their own and a general desire to recognize everything of the Russian Tradition as divine and inspired.  There is no better picture of what Fr. Georges Florovsky accused the West of doing within the Eastern Orthodox Church as the they did to the Far Eastern Mission, where forms were kept, but the self-governance and cultural conscience of a people was completely discarded for the advantage of another group’s governance and questions, mistaking the prerogatives of culture for the claims of unchanging truth. The Chinese were only allowed to deal with Russian prerogatives within the framework of Eastern Orthodoxy, never able to use a Chinese understanding of Christianity to answer Chinese cultural problems. Even after many generations, the Chinese race would remain students to the Russian masters. The stance of the White Russian Church Abroad would labor for 70 years within Eastern Orthodox circles to paint “Ecumenism/Anglicanization” and reform within the Orthodox Church as the harbinger of the Antichrist, a direct plot to plunge the world into the Apocalypse, pre-figured by the Russian Revolution, and seen as a result of an ill-advised openness and nascent westernism on the part of Russian intellectuals. In this formulation, everything “foreign” was to blame for the fall of Russia, Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism were the handmaidens of demons, and the Russian Homeland was a martyr, the Ecumenical Patriarchate was a false prophet, and the life of naturally wholesome and good Obshchina, the Peasant Village, was a Paradise Lost.  China, being “foreign," had nothing to offer Eastern Orthodoxy, even though it offered the Orthodox a home for some 40 years. Unlike Paris, which hosted a great cross-polination with Roman Catholicism and trained the great Orthodox thinkers of the 20th century, the Russians never fully engaged the Chinese tradition, Confucianism or the compatible cultural categories. In many ways, the sameness of the East did not allow for mutual comprehension.  

St. John reported to the All-Diaspora Sobor in 1938: "To the Russians abroad, it has been granted to shine in the whole world with the light of Orthodoxy, so that other peoples, seeing their good deeds, might glorify our Father Who is in heaven, and thus obtain salvation for themselves.  But if it does not perform this purpose and even abases Orthodoxy by its life, the Diaspora will have before itself two paths: either to be converted to the path of repentance, having acquired forgiveness through prayer to God and being reborn spiritually and to being capable of giving rebirth to our suffering homeland; or else being rejected by God and remaining in banishment, persecuted by everyone, until gradually it will degenerate and disappear from the face of the earth.”  St. John would be a new Moses, the Russians were the People of Promise, and God’s Divine Providence had allowed the Russians to be led into the Wilderness, where He would test them, try them, and bring the promise of Eastern Orthodoxy to the world. China was abandoned, the Chinese Orthodox left without recourse or support, merely as a stopping-over point in a grand pilgrimage back to “Holy Russia.”  In the end, blood was thicker than baptismal water.

Slipshod Establishment of an Uncannonical “Autonomous” Church 

The problems with the establishment of the Russian Church’s autonomy is the undercurrent - at the dissolution of the patriarchate in the Russian Church, after its advantageous push for independence at the Fall of Constantinople and its triple (uncanonical) consecration of its first Patriarch, the Greek Church has always struggled for a way to understand the Russian Church and itself without a canonical mechanism for establishing “independence.” Patriarchates acknowledged in the early councils were by default, by the fact that there was ancient apostolic tradition, and the fact that the cities were regional heads of parts of the Roman Commonwealth. At the fall of Egypt, the Levant and Syria to Islam, the Pentarchy no longer functioned in real ways, but were installed as titular heads upon Constantinopolitans “In Partibus Infidellium”, therefore, strengthening the Patriarch of Constantinople’s place as a single, real, monarchical ecclesial power. This, amongst other doctrinal factors, was one of the primary ways in which Constantinople was alienated by, and was in turn, rejected by Rome. With the break of Communion between Old and New Rome, the Holy Synod of Constantinople became essentially unquestioned, assuming all of the rights and powers of all the patriarchates, and installing canonical interpretations that fit this view. Theodore Balsamon, the titular Patriarch of Antioch, shows this dynamic change when he reinterpreted centuries of Roman Law and Canon Law by requiring that “All practices must conform with those of the Great Church of Constantinople", vocalizing that which was the de facto position already in the Eastern Orthodox world - that all was administered and interpreted by the Holy Synod of New Rome. 

The Ecumenical Patriarchate also struggled with how to understand the re-instatement of a Patriarchate by the Russians in 1917, since this was a unilateral decision and was not granted again from the center of canonical authority, recognition of Constantinople, as it had been in the past. The breakdown of canonical polity from 1667 until 1917 should have returned canonical precedence back to the apostolic see from whence the patriarchal authority was issued, dissolving the Patriarchate of Moscow and All Russia, returning the honor of Patriarchal Headship to the Archbishop of Constantinople, as it had in the dissolution and reestablishment of Bulgaria, disputes with the Church of Georgia, and the canonical competition of Serbia. Instead, we see Bishops voting to instate their own representative head based on the Apostolic Canons, not consulting the centuries of legal refinement and change of conciliar interpretation that had accrued afterward.  For a Church with such a colorful and independent streak, without regard for the very canonical order and anachronistic developmental characteristics that defines Eastern Orthodoxy up and against the Roman Catholic and Anglican systems, and makes it an exclusive, self-contained system, to grant “autocephaly” to the Church of China, which has no bishops and is not recognized by the government, the only two qualifications that have held Eastern Orthodox jurisdictions together in the past, is highly debatable and could only occur if one’s definition of Eastern Orthodoxy ceased to revolve around Canons and became “confessional” and “self-identifying.” Then, the existence of a local church is dependent on local “believers", not upon the existence of a bishop within a local church, continuing in apostolic ministry in the Sacraments with the help of presbyters and deacons, thus undermining the very premise upon which the canonical system was built. Neither of these are acceptable to Eastern Orthodoxy, because it then puts the eclessial cultures of both the Constantinopolitan and the Russian Church on trial and provides answers that Anglicans and Roman Catholics have suggested that have already been roundly rejected by Orthodox Synods (i.e., the Anglican “branch theory”, the Lutheran “invisible church theory", and the Roman “valid but schismatic” definition of Vatican II).  

Strangely, it is the Slavic World in general and the Russian Church in particular that reacts to “the heresy of ecumenism” with violent protests, undermining the Great and Holy Council of Crete and resisting the agenda of the Ancient Patriarchates worldwide, not understanding that a strict reading of canons, which anti-ecumenism demands, expecting that God’s Grace is not only channeled by, but also restricted to, lines of Orthodox canonical communion, also undermines the very rights that these Churches demand and expect - namely, independence from Constantinople and local synods with absolute authority to determine their local issues without reference to a living locus of continuous Orthodox canon law. All of these contradictions and problems are brought to the surface by the claim of an autocephalous Chinese Church, administered from Moscow, which is the sole canonical authority upon which this claim exists, lending credibility to the thought that such a claim is a political tool for a Russian State that identifies the Russian Orthodox Church as its spiritual counterpart and the primary vehicle for its “soft power.” 

The Painful Realities of Eastern Orthodox Missions

On the tail of a tragically failed mission and the ambiguous canonical grounding of an “independent church," China's practical needs and the chaos of Orthodox claims, there are great opportunities and tragic realities that must be faced. The pre-canonical, apostolic history of missions provides us with the basis upon which canonical order can be established as a default reality. It requires apostolic succession and episcopal order that is not affiliated with government, ethnicity or western culture. It requires recognizing the validity of the Roman Catholic and Anglican’s martyrs, all of whom gave their lives for the establishment of a True Church and whom laid the foundations for its reality in China. 300 years has proven that hundreds of years of mission work can be destroyed by ethnic priorities and a lack of true pastoral concern and equality in Christ. For Eastern Orthodoxy to learn this lesson will be difficult, and may prove impossible if the nationalistic church narrative and desire for separatist power and ethnic prerogative remains at the core of the Orthodox vision. The warning of the Synod of Constantinople in 1869 against ethnophylitism is profound, but it is also unable to address the problem, due to the fact that it does not describe how churches were formed in the apostolic age, plainly attempting to reassert the importance of an Ecumenical Patriarchate that has outlived its political and economic usefulness. The assertion of Christ universality and unlimited nature of the Gospel goes back to Christ himself, while the idea that its transmission and the ecclesial recognition only goes back to the practical considerations that the emperor was resident in Constantinople in the elevation of a backwater to the status of patriarchate in the Council of Chalcedon. The Byzantine emperor is no longer resident in New Rome, thus, its claim is no longer canonically valid. This is a hard reality to except for an institution used to being at the head of ecclesial politics, the one body able to preserve and consolidate the canonical mechanisms against all encroachment. This new reality cannot be emotionally accepted, and so the patriarchate has fabricated a new interpretation of Canon 28 of Chalcedon, pretending that "Asia" in this context means "Asia" today, leading to a neo-Papalism of extended jurisdiction that flies in the face of the Eastern Orthodox jurisdictional tradition itself.  

Summary

We are called to be "one" and the Early Church dealt with questions of doctrine and interpretation, like they did when they received the Holy Spirit in the upper room, when they were in one accord - by a process of mutual recognition, submission, prayer, fasting and communion. This is called the "conciliar" model of church governance, and it is the earliest, most biblical and apostolic model. We should only believe what has been received and believed by all Christians, everywhere, in every age. This is our “Rule of Faith” and it is kept and transmitted in the words of the Nicene Creed. In striving for this ideal, then, we have to ask many difficult questions, and become a part of the process of church history, and even, eventually, pick a side. This has, unfortunately, become easier to dismiss Eastern Orthodox claims now with a schism of the Hellenic and Slavic Eastern Orthodox worlds, with both sides still maintaining that they represent the one, true church, settled on the backs of centuries old debates with the Latin West and the Oriental East about the same claims. 

When the Anglican Church broke from the Roman Catholic Church, there were many factors at play, not least of which was Henry VIII's adultery and debauchery. The theologians around him were heavily influenced by Luther and Calvin, and dreamt of creating a Protestant State Religion to rival the political power of Roman Catholicism. For a few generations this vision held sway, but by the time of King James, it had become clear that theologically, politically and morally, such an argument could not be sincerely made. The Church of England had to return to the local, catholic, apostolic and conciliar model of the Early Church and the Eastern Orthodox practice. This is where we had the Caroline Divines, the Scottish Non-Jurors and the Oxford Movement, all focused on restoring the Church of England to the historically orthodox practices of liturgy, doctrine and governance. This was a vision of restoration, not reformation.

Thankfully, the Anglican Church had maintained bishops, which was the ancient practice of the Early Church, so a case could be made that if they returned to apostolic teaching, abandoning Calvinism and Lutheran dogma, that they could be considered a part of the Catholic Church. This question of doctrine and order is why our church, the Missionary Diocese of East and Southeast Asia, initially received its ordinal lineage from both Anglican and Old Catholic sources - since the Anglican source has been muddied with Protestant rebellion against doctrines and canons of the Ancient Church, and can be seen as losing sacramental validity. Old Catholic (Utrecht and Polish National Catholic Church) orders are recognized as "valid" (meaning fully compliant with the apostolic forms and practice) by Anglicans and Roman Catholics and welcomed as closer to Apostolic practice by the Eastern Orthodox, but we are not submitted to the pope or to the councils that the pope held, once there was a schism with the East. As of October, 2020, our clergy have been re-ordained and re-consecrated within the Orthodox Archdiocese of America, thus coming into Orthodox orders that were received from the historical Ukrainian Orthodox Church and the Alexandrian Patriarchate, and abandoning our claims to validity through the compromised Anglican sources. 

The Anglican Vicariate returned to the Seven Ecumenical Councils of the unbroken Church of both East and West as our rule for Church life, we maintain local episcopacies in conformity to the practice of the Early Church, and we are not under a national authority or a universal bishop (Pope). Theologically, we are identical to the rest of the Eastern Orthodox world. Liturgically, we look much like the Traditional Latin Mass, keeping the ancient western expression of worship as expressed through the Liturgy of St. Tikhon. While the ROCOR proclaims to allow this usage, it is actually our bishops who are some of the best examples of its practice. 

Ultimately, our faith must be in Christ, we must strive to obey Him by submitting, generation by generation, to the Church that He founded and heads, and that has been bequeathed to us through the laying on of hands for the reception of the Holy Spirit by faithful bishops. It is not complicated. It does not require a profound grasp of history or a lot of reading. It does not require canonical submission to another local catholic church or an Eastern Hierarchy. The Scriptures, historical doctrine, unbroken apostolic succession and a liturgy of worship, so that the congregation can work, fast, pray and commune with one another is all that is needed. These are treasures that have been passed down to us by the saints and martyrs of old, and that still have the power to transform and energize our spiritual life today. They are ever ancient and ever new, filled with the presence of the Holy Spirit in our praise and the Real Presence of Christ in our Eucharist.