Episode 318 - Orthodox Questions with Father John Strickland. Part 1

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Hello everyone and welcome to the History of Byzantium, episode 318, Orthodox Questions with Father John Strickland Part 1

It's my pleasure today to welcome back Father John Strickland to the podcast.

Four episodes ago we talked in detail about the Divine Liturgy and its place at the heart of Byzantine life.

I put out the call for listeners to ask questions, particularly those of us not familiar with orthodoxy or ecclesiastical issues in general, and Father Strickland has kindly returned to answer them.

The questions are wide-ranging and so demand thorough answers, which Father John provides, so we decided to split them over two episodes.

Today we tackle the Orthodox view on salvation and purgatory, as well as the role of the ecumenical patriarch and thoughts on the Byzantine understanding of how the divine played a role in daily life.

And then we finish with the Orthodox view of Catholicism, church union, and evangelization.

Thank you for these excellent questions.

They provoked what I found to be a fascinating discussion.

For those just tuning in, John is the pastor of an Orthodox church in Pulsborough in Washington State.

He wrote a four-volume series about the history of Christian civilization called Paradise and Utopia.

He's also recorded a podcast of the same name as an accompaniment to the books, which you can find wherever you get your podcasts or at ancientfaith.com.

If you're interested in ancient languages, then check out the Paidea Institute website.

The link is in the episode description, and I'll talk more about what they offer after the interview.

Father John Strickland, welcome back to the history of Byzantium.

Thank you, Robin.

It's good to be with you again.

It's wonderful to have you back.

The last conversation stirred up lots of discussion amongst the listeners and lots of questions.

I asked for questions before our first chat, and then more have come in since.

And they are covering all

potential questions under the sun when it comes to the Orthodox faith and its relationship to Byzantium and to other Christian denominations.

So I've tried to narrow the questions down to distill them into a more accessible form.

And you've kindly agreed to do your best to tackle them today.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Well, they say orthodoxy is the best-kept religious secret in the West, and I think that's largely true.

It's a very unknown thing, even though it's changing these days.

And as an historian, I think it's the best-kept historical secret as well, in terms of historiography and

working the

experience of the Orthodox Church into historical narratives.

Absolutely.

Well, that's why we've come to you

as a scholar and as an Orthodox pastor.

So let's begin with some questions about the Orthodox faith.

And the first one is what is required to achieve salvation within the Orthodox faith?

And one listener elaborated, is it faith and good works, as in Catholicism, faith alone, as in most Protestant sects, or something else?

Yeah, right.

And again, you know, a lot of the question is framed in a very very Western way.

For an Orthodox, it's somewhat difficult to step into that debate, which was so

strident and disruptive from the 16th century forward between Roman Catholic and Protestant apologists.

I think the Orthodox Church,

if forced into this debate, which is foreign to us, it's not our debate.

But if we were asked to come and contribute to it, we would emphasize certainly more faith than works.

But you really can't separate the two.

But certainly it's our faith in Jesus Christ that is at the center of our salvation, our faith in him, our absolute and total unwavering faith in him.

And I think that's how the Orthodox tradition kind of plays itself out and articulates itself over the 20 centuries we've had since Pentecost.

And would you mind elaborating on what you mean by you can't separate faith or good works?

Well, again, so

the Orthodox

understanding of salvation, you know, and that word could be defined so many different ways, salvation, but the orthodox understanding of salvation is most often called deification, or in Greek, theosis.

So what this means is

certainly not that human beings become gods on their own in an autonomous sense.

That's absolute heresy.

But it does mean that because of the incarnation, and here the Orthodox Church is, I think, arguably more centered on the incarnation

in her model of salvation

than

Western non-Orthodox faiths are,

which tend to gravitate more toward the crucifixion and sometimes even isolate the crucifixion as if there's very little more to consider.

But for the Orthodox, theosis, deification,

is, or divinization, sometimes it's translated that way,

is

a consequence or an outcome of the incarnation.

So for Orthodox, there's a very clear doctrine that

Jesus Christ is the incarnate God.

That is to say, he's both God and man.

He's divine and he's human.

He's not more of one and less than another.

He's completely divine and he's completely human.

And in a very mysterious way, and here we may come back to this later in our discussion, the Orthodox Church, grounded especially in her experience of theologizing in the first millennium before the rise of scholasticism in the second millennium and the rise of universities and book publishing and debating that has taken place since the

Great Schism in the West.

The Orthodox Church is very comfortable with mysteries.

And so, the union of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ and his incarnation

is a great mystery that really can't be explained completely in a logical way, but it's a dogma, it's a conviction we have.

It was established

at the Fourth Ecumenical Council in Chalcedon,

helped along by our Orthodox Pope.

Back then

the Roman popes were Orthodox from our point of view and Leo I, Leo the Great, issued a very famous statement that helped clarify for that ecumenical council in Chalcedon, more or less in Byzantium, as you know,

the doctrine that Jesus is both God and man.

He has two natures, united without confusion, together in one person.

Because of that, and there's a little bit of theology there, so I apologize if that's kind of a lot to hear,

but because of that, back to the differences between Orthodoxy and, say, Western Christianity.

Because of that,

we believe that the human being participates, therefore, in the life of God in a way that's just not possible under any other circumstances.

Here, for instance,

Orthodoxy distinguishes itself as a form of Christianity that is different than any other world religion.

Christianity is absolutely unique because Christianity teaches that a pre-existing God, God Himself, the Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity,

became human in time, became part of this cosmos, and assimilated to Himself in Greek anthropos, humanity.

And Anthropos and Theos became one, Theos being God.

And so we have this theanthropic kind of piety in the Orthodox Church that's centered on that incarnation.

And deification is possible and an outcome of it because once God takes the initiative to join our humanity to his divinity, he enables us to

to grow in his divinity.

And that growth in his divinity, that participation in his very divinity, is called theosis, or in Greek or in English, deification.

Now, that doctrine is the center of our salvation.

That's what we speak of.

And so, with that preface aside, I think I can come back and just, you know, maybe try to answer your question, what's the difference between faith and works and how do they relate to each other?

If a human being is baptized sacramentally into the body of Christ and becomes part of the life of Christ and therefore enters into

this process of deification, then his faith as well as his works are really not distinguishable.

At some level, they're really part of the same package,

the same life, the same experience.

And so we don't isolate one categorically and rationally and logically and say, okay, faith is this

and works is this.

And so which one of these is prior to the other?

Which one, you know, cancels out the other?

You know, these kinds of debates for us seem very confusing and very unnecessary.

But they, of course, were very...

considered very compelling and necessary in the 16th century when large numbers of Roman Catholics decided that Roman Catholicism, circa 1500, was no longer acceptable in its current form and tried to separate themselves and define themselves against Roman Catholicism by taking on the name of Protestant, and by doing so, you know, attacked and

in many cases attacked, some cases just distinguished themselves from Roman Catholic practices which had come into existence in the 500 years since the Great Schism, since the time Roman Catholicism separated from Orthodoxy.

And so a lot of those were like, you know, indulgences, the most famous, and that's, of course, what Martin Luther

was reacting to most immediately when he launched the Protestant Reformation in 1517

and famously issued his 95 Theses Against the Sale of Indulgences.

And that brings attention to what can one do for their salvation?

Can they obtain these so-called indulgences that depend upon papal authority and the grace that's transmitted or mediated from it?

And if not, then those works are not necessary.

It's just my faith that's necessary.

And that's kind of how Luther came to the

Protestant kind of slogan of sola fide, a faith alone.

And to this, you know, others reacted

and the Roman Catholic Church in turn reacted.

And that just launched Western Christianity about 500 years ago into

a mode where we Orthodox, you know, it's just not our argument.

It's just not our experience.

It's not our doctrine.

Very, very good.

Well, a lot of these questions

are both asking about Orthodoxy, but also sort of comparing and contrasting

with Catholicism and Protestantism.

So the fact that that answer has touched on that issue already, I think, is telling from where a lot of the listeners are coming from.

So the next question may have a hint of that as well.

Does Orthodoxy reject the idea of purgatory?

And one listener added, What do you believe happens after death?

Okay, so I'll take that one on.

Small thoughts.

First question, easy.

Second question, not easy.

The Orthodox Church does reject

the doctrine of purgatory.

I'll say doctrine here rather than idea, as you phrased it, because the idea,

there's maybe more nuance, more room for disagreement, for opinions here,

but we definitely reject the doctrine of purgatory.

It's a dogma in the Roman Catholic Church.

It had its origins in the 12th century.

If one wants to read a really interesting book, there's a book out there called

The Birth of or Origin of Purgatory, which is like a really thorough, solid historical account of

the kind of clarification within the Roman Catholic Church and

the dogmatization

of that doctrine.

We have always rejected that insofar as we've been aware of it and been asked to comment on it.

And what we do not believe is that the doctrine of purgatory, which is understood differently in the Roman Catholic Church, and I'm not a Roman Catholic theologian and don't have

a right to make claims, wide, broad claims about what Roman Catholics believe.

But if I'm not mistaken, the doctrine

does

require that a person who

is saved, to use that word again, a person who at death

will enjoy the bliss

and peace of

the kingdom of heaven eternally, must nevertheless go through an arduous and in many ways painful, punishing and terrorizing, in some representations of it, process of purgation for their sins in this world, in this life,

unless through indulgences of one form or another, they have obtained remission of

that temporal punishment.

And so what this kind of highlights for us Orthodox is a tendency after the Great Schism of 1054 in the direction of legalism, of salvific or salvational or soteriological legalism that we Orthodox see in the Roman Catholic Church, in increasing attention to legal categories of salvation and understanding salvation in

an increasingly legalistic way.

So that someone's sins that they forgot to confess,

if they confess, they received a rather legal kind of penance that they had to complete.

Maybe it's a pilgrimage, maybe it's fasting, maybe it's a certain number of prayers, that sort of thing.

If they didn't complete that, they will pay for that.

They have to pay for that through punishment in purgatory after they die.

And for the Orthodox, this is just not how salvation is offered by Christ.

And so,

this tremendous obstacle, you might say,

maybe obstacles not fair, but this long process of painful

punishment in order to enter the kingdom of heaven is just not the Orthodox

piety and experience of salvation.

As a matter of fact, our experience of salvation is that that kingdom of heaven, that peace, that joy,

that beatitude is already experienced in this life in very real and immediate ways.

Our saints often emphasize this.

People like Simeon the New Theologian, who died actually before the Great Schism, and I think Roman Catholics would see him as a saint.

Maximus the Confessor, Basil the Great, so many of these saints, Gregory of Nyssa, that are also Roman Catholic saints,

said that we already in this life begin to experience

the kingdom of heaven.

So a disruption, which by some medieval accounts, I think these be largely criticized today by Roman Catholic theologians, but in the medieval piety of the West, which piety was shared by high-class theologians,

you know, read, one can read St.

Patrick's Purgatory, for instance, a harrowing account of this.

The punishment of purgatory is the equivalent of hell itself.

And it can go on for thousands of years, even

though, you know, what is a year after this age has passed, it can go on for a long, long time.

In Dante's famous divine comedy, he has, of course, a whole volume, Purgatorio, dedicated to poetically reflecting on purgatory.

And there you have this strong sense that there's a joy in suffering because that suffering is understood to be leading up higher and higher the mountain

toward paradise.

So, you know, there is a kind of, there's certainly, from a Roman Catholic theological point of view, a kind of

a nuance to this punishment but it is from us orthodox or our point of view a punishment that's just simply not god's plan for us and completely disrupts the experience of growing deification in this life in this world now which just continues beyond death uh eternally and for that reason we reject and always have rejected purgatory But you asked also, what do you believe happens after death?

Here, I would say that we Orthodox accept mystery again.

I emphasized that earlier.

We're much more comfortable with, I don't know, I don't know.

We're assured that after death, there's some experience of God's presence.

And certainly, for those who are

after the second coming of Christ and the general resurrection, we'll experience paradise.

Certainly, our canonized saints are understood to already experience paradise.

But what happens after death for someone is a big mystery.

And there are some Orthodox who

teach that there is some process of confrontation with one's sins after their death,

before they enter heaven.

This is sometimes called the theory of toll houses or the doctrine of toll houses.

It's kind of like you're going through a sequence of confrontations with

demons that would drag you into hell if they could.

And the toll house kind of you one passes through that if they have lived a good life and are blessed by God and accompanied by his angels.

Some believe this, and this is

completely documented in a lot of the piety of the saints and so forth.

Others don't accept this doctrine of toll houses.

But in either case, the doctrine of toll houses, which is accepted in the Orthodox Church not as a dogma, but as a pious opinion, a theogemenon we have in the Greek language,

a pious opinion that Orthodox are blessed to hold until such time as maybe another ecumenical council is assembled and it teaches one way or the other about this.

And then we're not free to hold an opinion any longer.

But some hold this opinion and others do not.

And so what happens after death, I think many Orthodox can answer, we don't really know.

And it's really probably not

the scripture or tradition of the church to clarify that exactly in dogmatic terms, as the Roman Catholic doctrine of purgatory holds.

Yeah.

Very good.

So the next question is: Does the ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople still play a primary role in the Orthodox Church?

Well, it depends on what's meant by primary here.

So, you know, the Orthodox Church has always believed in primacy

from the beginning, from, you know,

From the Gospel of Matthew forward, we have an apostle, Peter, who's identified as being primos.

That is to say, having primacy among the other apostles.

And Peter was always held to be the first of the apostles.

Of course, that's what primos means.

And so, primacy

was an important

feature of

church administration, jurisdictional administration from early times.

And as you've talked about in your own podcast, of course,

with time after the fourth century or with the fourth century and the founding of New Rome, of Constantinople,

there are five patriarchates that share in something called a pentarchy, a five,

a rule of five,

how that might be translated, rule of five.

And among those five patriarchs and all the other bishops that are affiliated with them, and there are hundreds and hundreds and thousands of these bishops, well, among them,

primacy

is assigned to Rome, that is to say, old Rome,

because Rome long had a very important place of leadership in the church.

That's partly due to

the effects of the fact that

St.

Peter, the apostle, wound up in Rome and was martyred in Rome and was always seen by the early church, especially the Orthodox Church of Rome, as being really the first great

presence there of the apostles.

Of course, Paul came a little, Paul was there as well.

Pardon me.

But

once New Rome or Constantinople is founded, that becomes an important secondary center of church administration.

And then there are three other important patriarchates, Jerusalem, Antioch, and Alexandria,

all of which eventually are overrun by the Arab Muslims, leaving just Rome and Constantinople by the end of the first millennium.

And so there's a functioning kind of diarchy by that point, even though the Pentarchy was still used as a model.

It's really just two poles.

And when Rome

separates from the Orthodox point of view, of course, this wouldn't be the Roman Catholic point of view, but when Rome separates from the Orthodox Church of the first millennium

and

the bishop or pope of Rome, successor to St.

Peter, is no longer part of in the communion of the church, then

the Patriarch of Constantinople effectively becomes the most important figure, the primary figure of church administration within the overall universal or ecumenical church, Orthodox church, so defined.

And from that point to the present, the Patriarch of Constantinople,

maintaining orthodoxy with some disruptions along the way, certainly in the first millennium, the Patriarch of Constantinople, Patriarchate of Constantinople, fell into heresies that were sometimes corrected by the Orthodox...

popes of Rome during that first millennium.

Again, the first millennium, the West was Orthodox from our point of view,

and that includes the popes of Rome were Orthodox.

Some of them are canonized Orthodox saints.

So from that second, throughout the second millennium, the Patriarchate of Constantinople effectively functions as the most senior and therefore primary center for church administration.

And some of the canons of the ecumenical councils and certainly the practices of the church bear witness to this and support this primacy, one might call it.

However, and I want to emphasize this, it all depends, I mean, everything comes down to the following point.

We have never, as Orthodox, seen primacy as a juridical category as the Roman Catholic Church came to assign authority and supremacy to the Pope of Rome.

We've never accepted, in fact, the great schism of 1054 largely grew out of the fact that we've never accepted that any one bishop will rule over the other bishops of the church, even a great patriarch.

We've always believed in a model of church authority called conciliarity.

Conciliarity, sometimes called synodality.

From the word conciliar coming from council, our understanding of a church administration is that councils of bishops assemble, and at those councils, all bishops are equal and brothers to each other one is appointed leadership and therefore becomes the primost or primary bishop among them the primate but he does not have power over the other bishops the way the pope of rome came to have power over all the bishops and all the christians of the roman catholic church For instance, I'm an Orthodox Christian living in 21st century America in the state of Washington.

I'm part of a jurisdiction called the Orthodox Church in America.

It's made up mostly of converts like myself to Orthodoxy who grew up

as either Protestant or Roman Catholic Christians.

We have plenty of people who grew up as atheists or something else like that.

But our jurisdiction called the OCA or Orthodox Church in America has multiple bishops throughout the United States and Canada and even Mexico.

And these local territorial bishops rule over, administer different sections of the United States of America or Canada or Mexico.

In our case, my bishop is named Benjamin.

And

he's just one of several bishops on a synod or council of bishops, which has a primate.

His name is

Teakin,

and he resides in Washington, D.C.

He is called Metropolitan of our Church, and

he's a superior to and a primate among the other bishops.

But if he, for instance, a teacon, wanted to travel to this diocese, he wanted to come to visit my parish, wouldn't that be nice if he did?

But he

probably won't see that happen anytime soon.

But if he did, he would have to ask for the blessing of my bishop Benjamin to do so.

He doesn't have the freedom or the authority to just go where he will in this Orthodox Church in America jurisdiction.

And that's how it's supposed to work.

So the bishops are all working together as brothers, accountable to one another, but not any one of them telling the others what to do.

They do not have that authority.

No primate has that authority.

So to kind of conclude what you asked about the Patriarch of Constantinople, yes, he still plays a primary role in the Orthodox Church because he's the most

primary of all the ancient bishops, the Pope of Rome no longer being a member of the Orthodox Church, but he does not have power over the other bishops, theologically, doctrinally, and dogmatically, canonically, and so forth.

Our bishops, this is our belief, that our bishops work together by the rule of the Holy Spirit.

And they don't establish juridical legal boundaries that assign to any of them supremacy over the others.

And this is part of that mystery of the Orthodox Church, that the Church functions in unity despite and in the absence, express absence of this very worldly legal category of episcopal or primatial authority.

From an Orthodox point of view, the Roman Catholic Church looks marvelously united under one single bishop, the Pope of Rome.

And the Orthodox Church can, you know, as at present with Constantinople, the Patriarch of Constantinople at odds with the Patriarch of Russia, and things like this happen from time to time, and it looks rather disorderly.

But that's externally.

If one looks on the inside

of the Orthodox Church,

one will see the exact same liturgy is served every Sunday morning in Constantinople as in Moscow and all the other parishes associated with those two jurisdictions.

The doctrines, the faith is identical between the Patriarchate of the Patriarch of Moscow and the Patriarch of Constantinople.

The moral teaching, what it means to be human, what a marriage is, things like this, you know, are such a big deal in our culture today.

Absolutely the same doctrines are being held

in this church, even though there are different jurisdictions and not a single supreme primate over everyone.

But if one looks at other churches, including even the Roman Catholic Church, I think one has to acknowledge that there's tremendous diversity and disagreement within that otherwise marvelous from the outside unity.

Inside, there's much less unity.

That's certainly my take on it as an Orthodox Christian.

Fantastic.

Thank you so much.

The next question

could probably do with a little preamble.

The narrative of the podcast obviously takes place in a world where

the barrier between the supernatural and the everyday was not

as we perceive it today.

You would say

most children raised today in the West are taught that there is a strict division between the natural world and the supernatural claims of religions, whereas the Byzantines lived in a world where almost no no one felt that way, the supernatural was seen to be

a very ever-present part of daily life.

And so,

the way this is talked about in the podcast most frequently is around imperial legitimacy, that an emperor who is killed in battle,

for example, was not thought to have just been unlucky.

That was assumed to be the result of divine design.

And so it would go with the many civil wars in Byzantium that often they would be decided quite quickly and after a certain amount of time most people would conclude that that God had favored the winner to some extent and that God's purpose had been done

and so one listener said

how is this understood today in the Orthodox

church, the sort of divine intervention into daily life

which obviously the Byzantines took for granted, but the modern world does not.

Now, obviously, that's a question I'm sure that could generate a very, very long answer.

But perhaps,

given you've studied

the history of the church and so on, you have an answer that people can get their heads around.

Yeah, right.

Well,

there's a historical level to that, and there's a theological, or maybe just a pious one to it as well.

And it's a hard one.

I think it's a great question.

And I wish, I hope I can speak helpfully to it.

But I have to say,

as an American living in the 21st century, raised in the United States in the 20th century, it's very hard.

It takes something of a struggle to see that reality beyond the visible and material.

As you said, we're raised in a culture that doesn't accept or recognize this union of

the visible and the invisible, of the earthly and the heavenly.

And yet, the Orthodox faith certainly is one in which that union is taken for granted and asserted and even, you might say, dogmatically held.

When it comes to politics, because you refer to civil wars and battles and things like that, I think, you know, I would want to say that certainly as an Orthodox personally, but I would guess, you know, if pressed,

many people in the past would share the same view.

The jury is out, to use that phrase, on

what appears to happen in this world and where God stands in that.

There were plenty of councils held over the centuries, so-called robber councils, as you know, that claimed to be ecumenical, claimed to be, you know, teaching the faith, and then they were completely repudiated by later councils.

And those later councils came to be accepted as truly ecumenical, authoritative councils.

And the robber councils, as many bishops, hundreds sometimes, as it assembled, and confident that they were speaking,

you know, kind of victoriously for God

and his truth, were rejected.

And so I think the same certainly, even more more so would be the case with wars and battles.

That

it might be military or political figures who were or or

you might say hierarchs,

clergy that are very closely associated with the power structures of Byzantium that would be

prone to

stamp

God's favor or disfavor on one or another outcome in such battles and wars and such, but that the larger faith of the Orthodox Church was more reluctant to do so.

That would be my take.

But again, we probably want to talk about specific instances and who, you know, and what do they document?

How are they documented and what kind of

parties, what kinds of statements are being made about them.

One thing that's interesting, though, Robin, in your question is like, again, this question of Byzantium as

the polyteb,

the Orthodox state, you know, as she was understood.

And you've done a lot more research into this than I have, so I don't want to make too strong a claim.

But my understanding of Byzantium is certainly that she understood herself as the Roman Empire.

And since Constantine, with the exception of the heretics and the case of Julian the Apostate, she was ruled by Orthodox sovereigns.

and these Orthodox sovereigns were often fighting pagan

invaders.

And it's pretty easy in that kind of a context to say, oh, you know,

we're the good guys and they're the bad guys.

We're the ones favored by God and they're the ones

not so favored.

And so I think it's easier in that kind of a political culture to make categorical statements about how the invisible realm of the divine meets the visible realm of the human in this world when the human realm is

self-consciously Christian.

How does one do that in our modern state?

I think we may get to this a little bit later in our conversation, but how does one make such categorical statements in a democracy or something like that?

Much harder to do that.

Much harder to do that.

But just to summarize, I do think that the Orthodox Church has always encouraged and guided her members to be assured that what happens in this world is according to God's plan, God's will.

Nothing takes God by surprise.

Nothing confuses God.

Nothing sets God back to have to return to the drawing board and figure out a new plan.

God has everything

in his mind omnisciently.

And when bad things happen in this world, and they do, as they did to his son, Jesus Christ, who was sent unjustly to his death, it's all for the salvation of the world, including the suffering of people who otherwise are just and

shouldn't have bad things happen to them, but they do, and God allows it for their salvation and the salvation of the world around them.

Okay, so

moving into questions

sort of directly comparing or contrasting Orthodoxy with the other Christian denominations.

Again, this is phrased as a very large question, but hopefully we can distill it down.

What is the Orthodox view of the Catholic Church today, and why is church union still so difficult?

Yeah, well, it's a tremendous question and a good one.

And obviously,

I can't do it justice.

I can only speak from my own very limited and only partially educated perspective.

I wrote a book called The Age of Division as part of a larger four-volume history of the West from an Orthodox point of view, where I tried to bring in the views of Orthodoxy into the whole history of the West from the first century all the way up to the 21st century.

And one volume,

the one called The Age of Division,

tried to address this Orthodox view of the Catholic Church in history and up to today.

Subsequent volumes continue to look at the church, Roman Catholic Church that way.

And it should be, I think, clear to a lot of people why church union is so difficult if they really look into the experience of

the schism, of the great division, I call it.

Now, my history,

my book series is primarily interested in cultural history, the history of the civilization we call the West.

Of course, myself consider myself a member of the West.

I'm not a part of the East, except that I hold the Orthodox faith, but the Orthodox faith was once, you know, the faith of the West for a thousand years before the Great Schism, whether one was in Italy or Spain or

Germany or Ireland or England, it was all one church.

And so one of the things that I think we Orthodox would immediately comment on is

the church

that's different from us is we know as the Roman Catholic Church.

So this is important to us.

I know that it's just expedient to use the word Catholic Church to describe that church, but indeed the Orthodox Church considers herself to be the Catholic Church.

Both the adjectives Orthodox and Catholic are Greek words in their origin and were used in the first millennium to describe the one church that the Orthodox Church considers herself continuously to be, the one holy Catholic and apostolic church, we say in the Nicene Creed.

So our understanding of the Catholic Church so-called is really of the Roman Catholic Church, a Catholicity defined by Rome,

and a Rome that

has departed from the practices and eventually even the beliefs of the Orthodox Church um that is documented during the first millennium so um our view of the of the roman catholic church today is you know i mean i'll speak personally the roman catholic church is a beautiful church there are beautiful people uh wonderful things have been achieved and done by the roman catholic church

And again, as an Orthodox Christian living in the West, I was never Roman Catholic.

I was Protestant once, but still I see in the West so many contributions made by Roman Catholicism.

And today,

so many things are done by Roman Catholics that are just splendid and marvelous

and

worthy of the highest praise.

I think of the things

some of them do to bear witness to Christ as they understand Him

in today's America, for instance, to be wonderful.

And I'm very pleased to sometimes participate with them in those things.

But church union is another question, and it is so difficult, as you say in your question,

because we now have a thousand years of separation.

And it's not simply a matter.

You see, the Orthodox Church doesn't see things just as like, if we can just agree on a bunch of doctrines, like let's list 10 doctrines and let's just check the boxes and kind of agree that we can accept those doctrines together.

That's not the whole picture.

The whole picture is much more sacramental or ecclesial.

From an Orthodox point of view,

to be an Orthodox Christian is to be baptized into or convert to and be assimilated into the body of Christ so defined as the Orthodox Church.

And so doctrine is very, very important in that.

As I said earlier, we Orthodox are remarkable in holding not only doctrines across space, across the planet today, even among patriarchates that are criticizing each other and excommunicating each other and showing great divisiveness, nevertheless, they hold the same faith.

It's not only important to hold that faith, but we hold the faith all the way back in time as well.

Now, for us Orthodox, the Roman Catholic Church departed from that faith by introducing dogmas like purgatory or papal supremacy or papal infallibility or the practices such as indulgences.

And there are other things as well.

For certain periods of time, the Roman Catholic Church banned

the use of the vernacular language in services and in scriptural readings.

The Roman Catholic Church to this day,

for a millennium,

has banned priests from being married.

I'm a married priest.

I have five children.

We have always, as Orthodox, had parish priests who were married, typically.

They can learn to be good fathers and good husbands, and that can train them to be good pastors as well, good fathers in the parish.

They're not separated out from and,

as it were, seem in some kind of clerical state different from the laity because of their celibacy,

to which is assigned like a kind of purity because they're not engaged

in relations with their spouses and things things like this.

We consider that all to be an outcome of the great schism that makes Roman Catholicism today very different than

the church of the first millennium, East or West.

And so I think it's very difficult for us to contemplate union today

based on just an agreement on certain doctrines or practices and things like that.

These are good to pursue, and the more we pursue them, the more familiar we become with each other.

But the Orthodox Church is very confident and assured that she follows the tradition of the apostles, and she can document that, and there's a consistency all the way back through her apostolic succession to those apostles and the practices and doctrines and worship and morality that has not changed.

And we would say that it has changed in the West, and that's what makes a union very difficult.

Well,

that question may be influenced by the narrative where church union

was a political issue

after the Fourth Crusade and the sack of Constantinople.

And

as we were talking about earlier,

I would say that

that's a practical consideration that can't be underestimated.

You're right.

Absolutely right, Robin.

You know,

the Orthodox have done terrible things to the Roman Catholics.

There was a massacre of Venetian, Roman Catholic Venetians in Constantinople about a generation before the Fourth Crusade.

That was not done in the name of, you know,

of conquering the West or forcing Roman Catholics to become Orthodox, but it was a horrible thing.

And there are other examples over time.

But there is, I think, overwhelmingly more of a burden of

responsibility on the side of the Roman Catholic Church in terms of the Fourth Crusade,

which I think one could say, you know, Innocent III, who launched that crusade

with his papal supremacy.

And here again, it's very noticeable.

The second millennium Western Roman Catholic Church is so different than the first millennium church.

There were no crusades in the first millennium when the Roman Catholic Church was Orthodox.

There were no Inquisitions.

And in the case of Crusades, now

there were no supreme popes either.

That's what our argument would be.

I think a Roman Catholic would challenge that, but I think I can argue that that's not the case until Leo IX

and the Great Schism.

But

on the question of the Fourth Crusade, as you said, in 1204, The Roman Catholic Church supports and even orders that crusade.

And though Innocent III, the pope who ordered it, forbade the crusaders to attack Christian lands, and they did so against his express

kind of condemnation and orders,

he did not excommunicate them when the time came for him to act on those orders.

As a matter of fact, when the dust settled in Constantinople and the fires kind of died out and the mourning of the

people who had lost so many loved ones to the Roman Catholic warriors who raped and murdered, when all the valuables and relics were stripped out,

the Roman Catholic Church presided over, the Pope presided over, the establishment of a Roman Catholic Patriarch of Constantinople.

That has to be considered.

Sometimes people will say, oh, this really wasn't the intention of the Pope.

Well, that's true, but he did make the most out of it.

And then

later events, there were crusades, the Northern Crusades against

mostly pagans of North Central Europe, but also Russia, the case of Alexander Nevsky defending the Russians against the Roman Catholic Teutonic Knights and things like that.

And the Uniate movement, where the Polish crown,

you know, in the service of the papacy, tried to pressure Orthodox communities to become Roman Catholic, and the Uniate movement of the 16th, 17th centuries, and things like that.

So there's just,

you know, your question is: why is union so difficult?

There is an experience in the past millennium of

that's very hard for us to just say, okay, you know, no big deal.

Yes, absolutely.

And those feelings still run deep amongst people who discover the story of the Eastern Roman Empire.

So the next question is about

proselytizing and evangelization.

One listener says, it appears to me that the Orthodox are much less involved in evangelization than Catholics or Protestants.

If that's correct, why?

Yeah, and it's a good question.

I think

it's a question that arises out of the second millennium and even past few hundred years of experience of history.

And we do indeed live in a particular time in history, and it's reasonable to base one's perceptions on what they experience in the world around them in a given generation.

If you look at the first millennium, you see that there was no distinction East and West.

Both East and West were very evangelically minded, very mission-minded.

I mean, of course, famously,

in the 9th century, Cyril and Methodius were sent out from Constantinople to evangelize the Slavs and did so very effectively.

And the outcome of their work, not in their lifetime, but eventually, brought in the East Slavs.

Today, the Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are all

Christian because, insofar as they are Christian, because of those missions, that evangelization that emanated from Constantinople and from the Greek East.

But I think,

and there are many other examples too, I mean, for sure.

In Russia,

there were very ambitious missions

throughout the history of Russia.

I think of

Stephen of Perm, who evangelized quite a lot of people in northern Russia.

There's, of course, more recently, more modern history.

The 19th century saw tremendous efforts to translate the scriptures and the services into a variety of languages.

In Kazan, Russia, there was a mission center

dedicated to the evangelization of the peoples of Siberia and Asia.

The famous Hermit of Alaska came to Alaska with some other missionaries and

conducted missionary work there.

Even more famously, Innocent of Alaska in the early 19th century came to

pagan Alaska.

And the first thing he did was translate the scriptures and the services into

Aleut, into the native people's languages.

He learned them.

He wrote a grammar book for them.

And then he communicated the faith in their language.

They did not need to become Russians or Europeans.

Their own culture

was, as it were, baptized

and Christianity was communicated in their own language and culture.

So there's always been

very bold efforts by the Orthodox Church to evangelize.

But again, to acknowledge the question or the experience behind the question that you received there, I do recognize that in the past couple of centuries, certainly in the past century,

there's been less, you know, kind of big

scores on the part of the Orthodox.

And one could look at the history and see why.

Byzantium was wiped out

by the Ottoman Empire.

Evangelization was absolutely out of the question.

I mean, you tell me, you know better than I do, Robin, about the impositions by the Turks on Christians living within the Ottoman Empire.

But if I'm not mistaken,

Christians who converted Turks

had their heads cut off.

They were executed if they did such a thing.

And there was certainly no

support or toleration for Christians Christians to undertake missions in the Ottoman Empire, which more or less, you know,

co

kind of

overlapped what the former boundaries of the Byzantine Empire.

And then in the past century, of course, Russia, which had, as I just said, in the 19th century done some really striking things to build up missions and mission projects, of course, fell under atheistic communism.

And that was the end of evangelization

then.

You know, it's picked up since the collapse of communism.

But the overall experience, I think, historically in the past century or more has been that the West has been free of these impositions,

whether it be militant Islam or militant atheism.

And so you see, you know, Africa evangelized.

You see, you know, a lot of things, dynamic things have happened in the West in that past century that really are remarkable.

And the Protestants and Roman Catholics are to be commended for their dedication to those projects of sharing the gospel to people who have not yet heard it.

Thank you so much to Father Strickland.

He will be back in our next episode to answer more of your questions.

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