On the Recent Attacks by Bishop Gregory Sully

This is a recent attack by a person with whom I have no contact, who did not ask me for a statement or clarification, and who is trying to present me in a negative light, as if I am lying about my marital status, but which has not only been a feature of my ministry, but a subject of a huge amount of my theological writing

By Abp. Joseph Boyd (Orthodox Archdiocese of America, Ukrainian Orthodox Church in East Asia, and the Ancient Church of the West)

Bishop Gregory Sully has recently circulated information about my wife and children as though my family were something I had tried to conceal. I have been married to the same woman for twenty-four years. She is the only person I have ever known intimately, and that has been exclusively within a covenantal Christian marriage; she remains the sacramental axis of my personal askesis as a Christian, a clergyman, and a theologian. We were married in an Orthodox church according to the Byzantine wedding rite, at St. Paul's Greek Orthodox Church in Irvine, California, and our marriage is legally registered in at least two countries. We have nine children, all of whom are my legitimate children. I love them, and they have grown up in the life of our Church. Anyone acquainted with our mission knows my family. My wife has been central to my life here, and through her, much of my connection to Chinese language and culture first took shape. My entire ministry in East Asia is a result of being engrafted into her family, finding my place within her village, and being accepted as a son and student within the tradition that her family represents (both within Chinese traditional music and also the study of Chinese philosophy).

I find Bishop Sully’s choice of attack particularly strange because he once wrote a well-known defense of married bishops, which I posted here on my blog and have cited multiple times in my own writing. The Church to which he belongs defends the practice and has many married hierarchs. His own Primus was married until the recent death of his wife, and we pray for the repose of her soul. I would like to know what principle Bishop Sully believes he is applying to me. If a bishop’s sacramental and biblically compliant marriage is now sufficient reason to denounce someone, his argument reaches into his own Church and contradicts his own published work. If marriage is not the issue, he should stop using mine as though it were a disgraceful discovery. I am not ashamed of my wife. I am grateful for her and will defend her until the day I die. 

He also appears to believe that we claim to represent the Kyivan Patriarchate. I do not make this claim. I am not a member of the Holy Synod of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church – Kyivan Patriarchate, and our mission has not been incorporated into its hierarchy. I have dealt extensively with the Kyivan Patriarchate over the years; I have defended their right to exist, and I have published multiple papers considering their perspective, and I have also sent letters personally to the thrice-blessed Patriarch Filaret while he was still alive, and I have been open about all those dealings. Our Church descends from Metropolitan Hryhorij of Chicago and is incorporated in two nations as the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in East Asia. The name states our succession, our jurisdiction, and the place where we carry out our mission. Bishop Sully’s own Church calls itself the Ukrainian Autocephalous Orthodox Church – Orthodox Church in America. He can hardly treat a Ukrainian ecclesiastical name as proof of deception in our case without explaining what he means by its use in his own.

I have written extensively about our practice of married episcopacy and its relation to Scripture and Holy Tradition, in several published books and in roughly a thousand blog posts here. I have shown, incontrovertibly, that the Ancient Church had married bishops, and that the subsequent exclusion of married bishops not only contradicts the Holy Scriptures, but also rejects the authority of the Apostolic Constitutions, the First Council of Nicaea, the Council of Gangra, and the subsequent reception of Gangra as holding ecumenical authority at the Council of Chalcedon. I have also shown how the reception of Trullo 48 was explicitly nullified by the rejection of the Pentarchy at the time, and only enforced later through coercive centralization, specifically because this council attached secular law, the “Codex Justinianus”, to the Church’s canon law, which was then amplified by the collapse of the Eastern Christian empire and the use of the Church as the religious governance system, called a “millet”, under the Turks. Married bishops were commonly known in the Byzantine Church up into the 8th and 9th centuries, and in the Oriental Orthodox churches for a bit longer. In Northern Europe, they persisted commonly until after the 11th century. All this to say that the theological fidelity our Holy Church represents is not a turn away from Orthodoxy or canonicity, but a strict adherence to the canonical principle that the older canons always hold more weight than the recent canons, and that the error of doctrinal development should not be allowed to take root in the Church. This stance does not denigrate the position of monasticism within the Church, which is seen as an equally grace-filled pathway to salvation in the Church. But, if St. Peter was married and the first in our lineage of Apostolic Succession, it is impossible to exclude the possibility of married men later on, even if a local church decides to enforce monasticism as a matter of discipline. It cannot be made a universal principle without undermining the validity of the entire Church. 

What, then, have I misrepresented? My marriage and children have never been hidden from our clergy or faithful. No one in our churches has been led to believe that I am a monk. The people with whom I have worked in East Asia for nearly twenty years all know me as a missionary, pastor, priest, and bishop, and they know that my family participates in every part of that work. Bishop Sully is entitled to disagree with our account of our origin, succession, or our ecclesiastical standing. He is not entitled to substitute an account we have never given and then accuse us of dishonesty for giving it. He bears the burden of proof, not merely insinuations and potshots aimed at our good people in East Asia.

I am asking him to identify the lie. He has offered my marriage, my children, and an allegation about our Holy Church somehow misrepresenting itself as the Kyivan Patriarchate; the first two have always been public, and the third is a claim I do not make. Meanwhile, he has left his readers without an explanation of how his attack can be reconciled with his defense of married bishops and the practice of his own jurisdiction. His personal celibacy does not answer that question. Nor does circulating information about my family. If this attack invalidates me and calls my sincerity into question, how much more does it do so to his own Church?

Holy Married Bishops of the Ancient Church, pray for us!