Altar Girls

Most Orthodox churches of my acquaintance in North America are served by “altar boys”—that is, by boys of pre-pubescent or adolescent age, vested in a sticharion robe and helping the priest by holding a candle, fetching the censer, and otherwise assisting him in the performance of the Divine Liturgy and the other church services.  Sometimes this office is fulfilled by grown men, often of advanced age.  Sometimes such men have been ordained as subdeacons (one can tell if they have by the orarion or long stole which they wear across their torso).  In the early church it appears that such older ordained men were exclusively chosen to serve this function of assistance at the altar, and that the phenomenon of young “altar boys” serving in this capacity is a later one.  The wisdom of such a development will not be debated here.  Here I would like to examine the question of whether or not this youthful function of liturgical assistance in the altar should be extended to girls as well as boys.  We now have altar boys.  Why not altar girls?

            Some voices in the Orthodox Church are calling for precisely this extension.  Thus, for example, Nicholas Denysenko, in his fascinating volume Liturgical Reform After Vatican II:  The Impact on Eastern Orthodoxy.  After surveying a number of different Orthodox approaches to the issue of liturgical reform, Deacon Denysenko writes about the desirability of expanding the boundaries of liturgical participation available to women in the Orthodox Church.  For him this includes the creation of an order of deaconesses, and the formal tonsuring of women as readers in the Church.  “But,” he writes, “the integration of women into liturgical ministry should not end here.  Women and girls should also be permitted to serve as acolytes and enter the sanctuary.  Many Orthodox churches prohibit women from entering the sanctuary on account of rules of ritual impurity, a theological problem exacerbated by a limited episcopal directive in the United States that prohibited women from holding the cloth during Holy Communion.  The prohibition of women and girls from serving as acolytes depends on the faulty theology underpinning rules of ritual impurity and the dubious connection between serving as an acolyte and seeking ordination to a major order [such as deacons and priests].”

            What are we to make of all this? 

            First of all, we can agree with him that the rules of ritual impurity which would supposedly bar women from entering the altar sanctuary and holding the Communion Cloth are indeed based a faulty theology.  Concepts such as ritual impurity, either for women or men, are an essential and universal part of all religions, but the Christian Faith is not a religion.  Rather, it is a participation in the powers of the age to come, and therefore transcends such stoichea or elementary rules of the world such as govern religions (see Galatians 4:3-9, Colossians 2:8).  Concepts governing ritual impurity therefore do not apply to us—not because of any feminist rejection of the concepts as archaic, primitive, misogynist, and out-dated, but simply because these concepts have no relevance for Christians who are rooted in the age to come.

            That said, it is simply not true that the “connection between serving as an acolyte and seeking ordination to a major order” is “dubious”.  On the contrary, it is a proven historical fact, and moreover one that has happened in our own day.  When I first entered the Anglican Church, everyone serving at the altar was male—both the clergy and the junior “altar boys” (these latter called “servers”).  It was understood that only men could become members of “a major order”, and all the laity, both women and men, accepted it.  If asked why this was so, they would not have quoted St. John Chrysostom, or the referred to the consensus patrum, or even a verse from the Bible, though these existed in plenty.  Rather, plain and untrained people that they were, they would have simply replied that “it didn’t look right”.  That is, they had never seen a female in a clerical collar or church vestments standing about the altar (choir robes clearly were something else), and it was this emotional unfamiliarity that made them feel that such a thing as women priests “didn’t look right” and so should not be introduced.  Scholars like Denysenko might live in a world where Scripture, history, and liturgical precedent carry the day, and thus see no connection between acolytes and clergy.  It is true that Scripturally and historically, the two roles of acolyte and clergyman were quite distinct, and had little to do with each other.  But your average Anglican layperson did not inhabit that world.  They just went to their local parish and saw what they saw.  Both the short boy in a vestment and the taller man in a vestment stood about the altar and did liturgical stuff.  Often the short boys grew up and became clergymen themselves.  Indeed, if one served faithfully within the sanctuary as an altar boy it was almost taken for granted that one would eventually pursue Holy Orders—or at least that’s how many clergy felt, and often asked the faithful altar boy if he ever considered becoming a priest when he grew up.  For those living in the parish and not the towers of Academia, the connection between acolyte and major order was the most natural thing in the world.

           That was Anglicanism, of course.  But are Orthodox parishes so very different?  Is your average Orthodox layperson fully formed and immersed in Scripture, Patristics, and Lituriology?  (If it comes to that, is every Orthodox priest fully formed and immersed in Scripture, Patristics, and Lituriology?)  Can one realistically expect your average Orthodox layperson to give more weight to scholarly studies of the history of Holy Orders than to what they see each Sunday with their own eyes?

            Anyway, the Anglican Church of my experience began to expand the liturgical boundaries and allow girls to function as “servers” (referred to by one wag as “serviettes”).  The faithful laity therefore came to see vested girls in the altar sanctuary as normal.  Note well please:  this was before the first female was ordained to a major order.  Those justifying the female servers were adamant that this new development was okay:  the connection between serving as an acolyte and seeking ordination to a major order was dubious. 

            Except that it wasn’t.  Within a few years, the feminist push to obliterate the boundaries set by Holy Tradition succeeded in having women ordained as deacons (including declaring that women previously ordained as deaconesses were now deacons, whether they liked it or not.  Some did not.)  But deacons only, of course.  No one ever said that women could be priests.  That was a completely different Order.  The connection between serving as a deacon and serving as a priest was dubious.  Except that this wasn’t any more dubious than the connection between acolyte and major order, and soon enough a woman was ordained as a priest.  But a priest only, of course.  Not a bishop.  No one ever said that women could be bishops.  The connection between serving as a priest and serving as a bishop was dubious.  Then, of course, came women bishops.  Scholars might now cry out all they like that all these connections were dubious, and had no historical validity.  That is correct.  It is also irrelevant, as recent history has shown.  Developments in the Church occur and the laity acquiesce, not on the basis of sound scholarship, but on the basis of more humble and fundamental things—things like visual familiarity.  That is why our liturgical decisions must take account of how things actually function in the parishes.

            The drive to allow girls in the altar is misplaced, and is a symptom of a greater and more fundamental malaise.  It is easy to see what motivates good people like Deacon Denysenko—they see how girls feel left out and they want to do something to compensate.  The girls cannot grow up to become deacons or priests, but surely we can find something important for them to do so that they will not feel left out?  A girl sees her little brother serving in the sanctuary and looking important and is disappointed that she cannot do the same thing.  Perhaps she can hold the Communion cloth?  Or maybe let’s say that only girls can hold the Communion cloth?  Either way, we must find some way of (as the phrase goes) “involving them in the service”.
            Here, I submit, is the real problem—a devaluation of the role of the laity as laity, a problem which grows from the hidden root of clericalism.  This view of liturgy presupposes that the really important stuff that is done involves having a title and a vestment and a visually prominent role.  Merely being a communicant—i.e. someone who has become a child of God and has crossed over from darkness to light, from the power of Satan to God, and who dares to stand before the heavenly God with open face and boldly call Him “Our Father” and who receives the Body and Blood of His Son, after serving with those at the altar to offer the Eucharistic Sacrifice with them—this is nothing.  It is does not have a title.  It does not stand out and call attention to itself.  Though it feeds the soul, it does not nourish the ego.

The truth is that the very title “layman” in our culture has become synonymous with “outsider”, “untrained”.  If I say, “I am a layman in these matters”, this means that I don’t really know what I am talking about.  In fact a member of the laity is the insider, the initiate, a member of the holy laos and people of God, an exalted member of the royal priesthood.  Compared with this, who needs a title or a vestment or a special job?  We have equated the clerical state with power, and therefore have declared the laity to be those without power, gift, or ministry.  This is wrong, and in fact demonic.  Our first task must be the recovery of the dignity of the laity, and a recognition that each baptized Christian has a spiritual gift to be used in the building up of the local Church, in service to the Christian community—a gift which may or may not come with a title or a vestment.  Creating a new category of “altar girl” or finding things for them to do so that they will “feel special and valued” (as I have heard it phrased) is exactly the wrong thing to do.  For our value does not depend upon jobs that are special, but upon our common membership in the holy Body of Christ.

The Empty Throne – The Introduction from my latest book

In our little church in Langley, B.C., there is a chair on which no one sits, nor would anyone ever dare to.  We have many chairs and places to sit—we have benches along the sides of the nave (but no pews), chairs in the narthex for overflow visitors, chairs in the church hall for our post-Liturgy lunch.  We have chairs in the library.  We have places to sit in the altar.  But this chair remains empty, as if there were an invisible RESERVED sign resting upon it.  It is found in the back of the altar area, and it is the episcopal throne, in its traditional place.  (In churches using the Greek style of church architecture, the bishop’s throne is located outside the altar, on the south side of the nave.)  It is clearly episcopal, for it is a part of the synthronon or bench for the clergy to sit on during the reading of the lessons at Liturgy, and in our church it is the only part of the bench that comes with arm-rests.  Sometimes leaving the throne vacant feels a little like reserving a chair for Elijah at a Jewish bris:  one always keeps the chair available, even if one never expects its occupant to actually show up.  If the sacramental reality of Christ’s true Body and Blood in the Eucharist has been called “the Real Presence”, there is a sense that the bishop’s reality in the Eucharist might be called “the Real Absence”:  we have his picture in the narthex, we elevate and pronounce his name repeatedly throughout all the services, we have his crucial signature on our antimension, we love him and have him always in our prayers and in our hearts.  But despite all this, he is pretty much never actually here. 

In this our bishop is like every other bishop I have ever heard of.  His own cathedral city and home (the so-called “see”, from the Latin sedes, or seat) is many miles away, and he is very busy taking care of his diocese and his many parishes.  Not being able to bi-locate, of course he can only be in one place at a time, and so most parishes have to do without the bishop’s actual presence for most of the time.  When he does come to visit, it is an occasion of joy, and celebration, and high festivity.  We bake special bread which we offer him along with salt as the traditional gifts of welcome when he first enters.  Everyone wants to see him, and get his blessing, to exchange a few words with him.  (I always make sure that our catechumens in particular get some time with him.)  At the service, we pull out all the liturgical stops as we vest him and make things as fully glorious as we can.  The choir has been practicing the special music well in advance of his arrival, as have the subdeacons.  Lots of photographs are taken when he comes. Everyone is happy when he visits.

Note the verb in the last sentence:  we are happy when he visits.  It is this verb and this reality which most differentiates our situation from that of the early church.  In the days prior to Constantine and even afterward in the days of St. John Chrystostom, the bishop never visited a church any more than I can be said to visit my little parish in Langley.  I don’t visit my church; I am there because I am the pastor.  So it was in the days of Chrysostom:  he didn’t visit the Church of the Hagia Sophia; he was there all the time because he was its pastor—that it, because he was its bishop. 

And it was not just the church in the Imperial capital that experienced its bishop as its normal Sunday morning pastor and weekly preacher.  Every church was like that.  The bishop was everywhere the pastor of the local church.  And in that day, “the local church” was really local.  Every little village, hamlet, town, or city had its own bishop, so that his “church” (what we now call his “diocese”) consisted of the village or city where he lived and the surrounding countryside.   (We even see this reflected in our Liturgy today, when we pray for Christians in “every city and country”—for by “country” is not meant “nation”, but “countryside”, the region surrounding the city.)  The bishop was the local pastor, the one who blessed and presided at every baptism, who anointed all in his church who were sick, who excommunicated the straying, and who reconciled the excommunicated back into the communion of the church when they repented.  He was assisted in his pastoral work and deliberations by a committee of presbyters, and further helped by his deacons.  But he was the face of the local church, the pastoral face upon which all the faithful looked every Sunday.  In the early days he was chosen by them and was bound to them until he died.  He never “visited” his church, for he never went away.  

A celebration of the Eucharist was unthinkable without the presidency of the bishop.  We see this in a rule in an Egyptian Church Order that declares that a community of Christians cannot have their own bishop if they only number twelve persons.  This of course tells us that there were some little enclaves of Christians numbering less than twelve that still wanted their own bishop, otherwise the canon would have been unnecessary.  This reveals as nothing else could the importance of the bishop to the local church in those early days.  If the number of Christians grew in a village or city so that all could not meet in the same place, then the bishop would deputize one of the presbyters to serve that group.  But the bishop was still the main pastor of the village or city, the hub around which Christian life in that area revolved.

This means that things have changed dramatically in the life of the local church.  Now a presbyter, not the bishop, is the local pastor, for bishop’s church or diocese is now no longer a single community and its outlaying countryside, but a sizable area consisting often of many cities and villages and vast distances.  (Our own bishop has all of Canada for his diocese.)   He can only visit each of his parishes once in a while, and thus can only maintain a slight familiarity with the parishioners there.  For day to day pastoral care, the parishioners rely not on the bishop who often lives at a great distance away and who is busy with many other parishes, but on the local presbyter.  He is their priest (a title which once normally described not the presbyter but the bishop).  He is the one who gets the late night emergency call to the hospital.  He is the one who presides at the normal Sunday Eucharist, who baptizes the babies and catechumens, who anoints the sick, hears the confessions, and buries the dead.  The bishop is loved and respected, but he functions as a beloved but distant uncle more than as a father.  Things have changed.

Canonically and constitutionally, of course, things remain what they have always been.  Gregory Dix, writing some time ago in his chapter “Ministry in the Early Church” in Kirk’s large volume The Apostolic Ministry, distinguishes between what he calls the “constitutional” history of the episcopal office and the “administrative” one.  Constitutionally, the office remains what it was from apostolic days:  a ministry of shepherding, consecrating, ordaining, and (for the Anglican Dix in Britain), confirming.  But administratively the office underwent many changes.  Dix recounts:

“There is the first stage [in Britain] when the bishop is above all an evangelist, a missionary monk.  Under the Heptarchy he becomes something not very readily distinguishable from a tribal wizard.  Under the Anglo-Saxon monarchy he becomes a royal counselor…passing by slow degrees into a great feudal landlord and than a national noble.  After this, both before and after the Reformation, he is primarily the great civil servant.  Later still he becomes the somewhat torpid grandee of the eighteenth century.  Finally he is translated into the Victorian philanthropist and the modern spiritual bureaucrat.”[1]

Obviously Dix writes here only of bishops in his native Britain, but his point holds for bishops in all places, in that while the bishop’s constitutional role remains constant, his administrative role is in flux.  “Continuity of name does not necessarily imply continuity of function.”[2]  So it is that although the name of bishop has remained constant through Christian history and his constitutional role has remained unchanged, his administrative role has changed almost out of all recognition.

To truly help our bishops in their ongoing tasks, it is necessary to understand the history of the office, and to see how it has changed administratively since the pre-Nicene days.  That is not because the pre-Nicene period constituted a “golden age” of church history, but because it was only then that we first get to examine in some detail how the church was structured in the apostolic days and how it was meant to function.  As we will see, though there is little in the New Testament which would help us learn how the church leadership actually interacted with the rest of the church, many of these details can be found in the literature of the second and third centuries—details of an office first established by the apostles as part of the deposit of the Faith.

The present relationship of bishop to presbyter and parish in Orthodoxy is the fruit of a long and convoluted development, paralleling that the development of the bishop’s office in Britain that Dix recounted.  Therefore we will attempt to summarize some of those changes in the chapters to come, to show how we arrived at our present situation.  After a quick survey of the long evolution of the bishop’s office in the eastern part of the church, we will offer some concluding reflections.

We begin at the beginning, in the apostolic first century.

The book from which this Introduction was taken has been published by Ancient Faith Publications and is also available from Amazon.com

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[1] Gregory Dix, “Ministry in the Early Church, in The Apostolic Ministry, by K.E. Kirk, London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1946, p. 187-188.

[2] Ibid, p.189.

Remembering Elmer

I remember Elmer.  Elmer was an elephant, whose image adorned the backs of our notebooks when I was in public school, and whose face flew on a flag on our school flagpole.  Elmer was “the Safety Elephant” whose rules we were encouraged to always remember (like an elephant, since “elephants never forget”).  His rules consisted of such maxims as “LOOK BOTH WAYS before you cross the street” and “KEEP OUT from between parked cars”.  There were four other rules also, complete with pictures to illustrate them, but you get the idea.  If our school was accident-free, we were allowed to fly Elmer’s flag to celebrate this, but if a child was involved in a car accident we lost that right.  Even now I can hear our school Principal’s voice coming over my school’s public address system to sorrowfully announce, “We lost Elmer”.  The idea behind this educational initiative on the part of the grown-ups was that children, if left to themselves, would be heedless of the risks involved in traffic and would be hurt.  Thus the grown-ups, under the persona of Elmer the Safety Elephant, ceaselessly inculcated the six safety rules to keep the children safe from danger.

            Today’s young children are now in danger from a source other than traffic.  I refer to the pandemic of pornography sweeping our land.  In kinder gentler days, if a person wanted to view pornographic images he had to go to a place that sold them and ask for the magazine containing the images which was kept hidden behind the counter.  One ran the risk of receiving cold disapproving adult glances, and perhaps even being reported to one’s parents.  Now with the omnipresence of the internet, one can view such images in the privacy of one’s own home, or even with one’s friends at McDonald’s through an i-phone.  The average boy first discovers pornography in grade five, between the ages of nine to eleven, which of course means that some boys discover it earlier than nine years of age.  That means that these boys’ brains are spent marinating in a pornographic culture which distorts the relationship between men and women long before they have any meaningful relationships with women.  It does not take much imagination to see how such a generation of boys growing up damaged in this way will be hampered when it comes to their own adult sexuality and be further hampered in their task of conveying a healthy view of sexuality to their own children. 

            We need help from Elmer.  That is, as parents, grandparents, and adults with any responsibility for raising and influencing children, we need to warn them of the dangers of pornography in the same way as our parents warned us of the dangers of playing in traffic.  Elmer gave us six simple rules to keep us safe.  I suggest three simple rules, which should be pounded into the heads of our children with the same happy relentlessness in which traffic safety rules were pounded into ours.  They are:

1. Do not “sext”, or send sexually explicit messages to anyone.
2. Do not send sexually explicit or provocative photos to anyone online.
3. Do not view pornography.

In giving these rules and setting these parental boundaries, we should make it abundantly clear that we are not giving these rules because pornography is a sin (though in fact it is) but because it is dangerous.  The rules are given in the same spirit and with the same motivation as other rules such as “Cover your mouth when you sneeze”, “Wash your hands after handling food which might be contaminated”, and “Don’t run out into traffic”.  It has nothing to do with spirituality or religion, and everything to do with simple safety.  When a city faces a pandemic, we see health officials urging people to wash their hands, and people walking about the streets in medical masks.  It should be the same with this pandemic.  We take these precautions to keep our children safe from consequences that will follow them throughout their lives and have consequences for their children in turn.  It is imperative that we remember the plague that surrounds us, even if (like most plagues) it is often invisible, and take steps to stay safe.  Like an elephant, we must never forget.

The Elephant in the Ecumenical Room

           Especially in advance of the much-anticipated Great and Holy Council scheduled for later this year, there has been much talk about the importance of our ecumenical connections, including the possibility of recognizing the baptisms of all the other Christian churches and denominations.  Part of the discussion has revolved around the question of how to receive Christians from such churches who desire to convert to Orthodoxy—do we receive them by baptism, thereby effectively totally denying the basic ecclesial reality of their churches, or merely by chrismation, accepting their baptisms as valid and thereby giving more ecclesial validity to their churches?  Some of the scholarly discussion has invoked the wisdom of St. Basil, who dealt with questions like these in his “canonical letter” to Amphilochius, bishop of Iconium, which was in turn utilized in the canons attached to the Quinisext Council in Trullo, in canon 95.

            This material distinguished between three different situations—1. Christians whose faith (represented sometimes by the baptismal formula they used) was sufficiently different from that of the Church to require them to be received by re-baptism—which of course, was not really a re-baptism, but simply a baptism, since the baptism they received from their heretical church was regarded as no true baptism; 2. Christians whose faith retained enough similarities to that of the Church so as to allow them to be received by chrismation alone, without re-baptism; and 3. Christians whose faith was sufficiently similar to that of the Church so as to allow them to be received into the Church upon them simply renouncing and anathematizing their former heresies.  Examples of the first group of converts requiring rebaptism were the Paulianists, as well as the Eunomeans, who baptized with a single immersion.  Examples of the second group, those received by chrismation alone, were Apolliniarians, who declared that Christ had no human soul, but that the Logos took the place of the soul in Him.  Examples of the third group, converts received through simple renunciation of error, were groups like the Nestorians. 

Here the details concerning the heresies are less important than the underlying principle involved, which is that various groups were received according to the principle of how far their faith differed from Orthodoxy.  Groups judged close to Orthodoxy were only required to renounce their previous errors.  Groups judged further out and differing more dramatically from the faith of the Church were required to be chrismated.  Groups whose faith was judged as radically incompatible to Orthodoxy were received by baptism, with the implicit judgment that their former faith was not truly Christian, whatever it claimed to be and whatever its outward similarities.

            Many scholars still invoke these principles today, and on the basis of them suggest that the Church recognize the baptism of all the other Christian churches.  Those churches, they suggest, are sufficiently close to Orthodoxy so as to allow the Orthodox to accept their baptism because they accept the same Trinitarian faith as Orthodoxy does.  But are they really?

            Here we must speak of the elephant in the ecumenical room.  It is probable that most of the representatives of those Protestant churches do indeed accept a Trinitarian faith, and have enough proximity to Orthodoxy to allow them to hang out in ecumenical circles and talk to us very articulately.  But we Orthodox have had a similar experience before which should caution us to take what is said in such ecumenical discussions with a grain of ecumenical salt.  Our previous discussions with Anglicans, for instance, gave us the impression that 1. Anglicanism was confessionally homogenous, with all Anglicans committed to the same faith; and 2. this faith accepted (for example) seven sacraments and seven ecumenical councils.  That was because the ecumenical delegates talking to us at ecumenical gatherings accepted these things, and we assumed (gratuitously, as it turned out) that they represented all Anglicans.  It was not so.  Many Anglicans accepted not seven sacraments, but two, and not the seven ecumenical councils, but four (or possibly five or six), but certainly not the last one, which blessed icons.  It turned out that there were High Anglicans, Low Anglicans, and Broad Anglicans, and heaven knows what in between.  Having no such experience of confessional diversity (or “comprehension” as the Anglicans called it) we assumed that such diversity did not exist within the churches with whom we were speaking.  We were naïve, as it turned out, and were soon disabused of our naivety. 

            It is high time to learn from our past mistakes.  The delegates speaking for the various Protestant churches, let us charitably assume, are convinced and devout Trinitarians, persons whose faith approximates ours enough to allow them to take part in ecumenical discussions.  But the devout Anglican Trinitarian does not represent all Anglicans.  Anglicanism (to take but one example) allows its members and even its bishops a great latitude in their faith, so that some have been famously anti-trinitarian with no ecclesiastical consequences whatsoever (men such as Bishop Pike and Bishop Spong).  Evidently such diversity (or comprehension) is entirely legitimate within the Anglican Communion.

            It is not just anti-trinitarianism that is allowed within the boundaries of their “orthodoxy”.  Their refusal to condemn abortion is allowed, as is the view which says that women can be bishops, and homosexuals and lesbians can be married (and ordained).  The rejection of Scripture, Tradition, and the canonical tradition implicit in accepting such teachings is also allowed and is mainstream in these traditions.  This reigning theological liberalism is the elephant in the room.  Bishop Spong, for example, may declare himself a Trinitarian according to his redefined definitions and recite the Creed every Sunday, but what of it?  Liberalism allows him to redefine the ancient creedal words in whatever way he likes, so that although he may say the traditional Creed, he may actually not believe a word of it.  We know that this is allowed, because Spong has written best-sellers to boast about it, and remained a best-selling bishop.  Anglican Comprehension apparently is wide and comprehensive enough to include such diversity.  Given this, it really scarcely matters what the devout Trinitarian attending the ecumenical gatherings believes.  His or hers is a private opinion, and cannot be regarded as really representing the church which he or she purports to represent.

            Let us for a moment prescind from this discussion and play a game of historical imagination.  Let’s pretend that St. Basil could be presented with the case of a church that allowed its bishops to publically and emphatically reject the virgin birth, the divinity of Christ, the existence of hell, and the uniqueness of the Christian faith.  Let us assume that he knew further that this church allowed abortion, blessed homosexual marital unions, and even ordained such homosexuals to the highest offices in the church.  In which of the three categories we have mentioned above do you guess he might place this church?  Is there any doubt that he would regard such a confession as essentially Gnostic, and receive its converts by baptism?  For all of the churches he surveyed in his days agreed with his Orthodox church regarding all these moral issues.   Churches which dissented so radically about such basics as our modern liberal Protestant churches do would not have been accepted by Basil and the Councils after him as sufficiently close to Orthodoxy as to allow their baptisms to stand.  The issue of what determines ecclesial legitimacy cannot be confined to Christological matters and Trinitarian theology.  It embraces orthodoxy of moral praxis as well as orthodoxy of belief, and churches which diverge so dramatically in matters of basic moral issues cannot be considered true churches.  Calling darkness light (see Isaiah 5:20) is enough to forfeit credible claim to be the Church founded by Jesus Christ.

            This being so, it has important implications for our ecumenical discussions.  All our past ecumenism has been based upon the happy principle of confessionalism—i.e. that a certain church or denomination was more or less consistent in its confession of faith.   Thus all Protestants could be counted upon to accept the divinity of Christ, all Calvinists could be counted upon to accept the Westminster Confession, and all Lutherans could be counted upon to accept the Augsburg Confession.  That is why the rite of receiving such converts found in Hapgood’s Service Book asks the Reformed converts (for example) if they renounce the “false doctrine of predestination of men”, because they assumed that all Reformed converts accepted the same Reformed confession of faith.  We assumed that each denomination was characterized by fidelity to its historic confessions and could be counted on to keep to that historic path.  For the last generation at least it has clearly not been so, and Christians from those confessions have been free to accept or reject the historic confessions of their past, or in fact anything else they liked.  That is why they now reject Protestantism’s historic theology of the sanctity of unborn life, of Holy Orders, of sexuality, and of gender.  It should be noted that I am here referring only to the “historic” Protestant churches of the Reformation now characterized by theological liberalism, not the more conservative Evangelical Protestant churches which have retained a more traditional moral praxis.  It should also be noted that these reflections are intended to have implications only for those converting to Orthodoxy in the future; those already received by chrismation alone should of course be fully accepted with no suggestion that their previous baptism requires remedy.

As long as Protestant churches allow such diversity (or heresy, to give its ancient name) our ecumenical discussions will partake of a certain unreality.  We will pass motions accepting the baptisms of all Lutherans, assuming that all Lutherans are like the Lutherans we have been talking to, when in fact many of them are nothing like them at all.  The fact that theological liberalism reigns in the historic Protestant churches has not been mentioned in any of the ecumenical documents I have seen.  If that elephant in the room has indeed been noticed by Orthodox participants, no one has been speaking about it.  It is time that we did.