ECUMENICAL CHRONICLE

ORTHODOX YOUTH AND THE ECUMENICAL MOVEMENT

From January 8th to 13th of this year, a small Orthodox youth conference was held in Bossey, which endeavoured, although its chief concern was with questions relating to Orthodox youth movements, to study at the same time the Orthodox attitude within the ecumenical movement. The views expressed are summed up in a statement which we are reproducing for the benefit of readers of the Ecumenical Review, as it seems to us to throw light on certain aspects of the ecumenical problem as it appears to the Orthodox mind.

First of all, however, for the better understanding of the nature of this document, a few words on the conference which produced it. It was during the Amsterdam Assembly that some of the Orthodox youth delegates had the idea of reinforcing their spiritual and practical unity by means of an Orthodox youth conference. The Youth Department of the World Council, supporting this project, suggested the Chiiteau de Bossey as a meeting-place, and gave material assistance. Time, and various other factors, did not allow of the calling of an “official” conference, so that it was a private meeting for the exchange of ideas, attended by a number of Orthodox students and theo- logians, and not committing in any way either the churches or the youth movements. As practically all the Orthodox nations were represented, however, and represented by active members, indeed leaders, of various student groups, the conference fairly accurately expressed the views of the different branches of Orthodox youth. To complete the picture, it may be added that with the exception of the Greek and Syrian members the delegates came from the Orthodox “diaspora,” which has been very markedly on the increase during the last few years. Thus, though nobody at Bossey was entitled to speak “for” anyone whatever, all those present were most anxious to speak in accordance with their Orthodox views, and to express, so far as in them lay, what seemed to them consistent with the Orthodox faith. It was in this spirit that three statements were drawn up at the end of the conference : we give below the text of the one dealing with ecumenism, with some comments. This is therefore a wholly unofficial document, simply an

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expression of their common opinion by a group of Orthodox youth desirous above all of standing fast by the Church:

Thirty years’ participation by most of the autocephalous churches in the ecumenical movement enables us to discern the directive principles in this participation.

(1) In ecumenical work, the Orthodox confess their fidelity to the dog- mas of the Church and their intransigence towards all error. They cannot be convinced of anything which does not conform to Orthodox doctrine.

Ecumenical activity, undertaken in the spirit of love and humility, helps the Orthodox to understand the plenitude of their faith, to overcome certain prejudices and to see in the representatives of other confessions brothers in Christ.

(2) The Orthodox participate in the ecumenical movement with the consciousness of their Christian responsibility : to be a living and effective witness to Orthodoxy, ready to explain those of its dogmas which are least understood by other Christians, particularly the place of the Holy Virgin and Mother of God in the life of the Church.

We are conscious of the necessity of working for the union of Ortho- doxy with the dissident Eastern churches.

We are equally conscious of the importance of fraternal encounters with the Roman Catholics.

This text requires a certain amount of elucidation, since as it stands it might come as something of a shock to a number of non-Orthodox followers of the ecumenical movement. Does it not in fact appear to run counter to the essential ecumenical position, penitence and the longing for a renewal of the Church ? Will there not be, to many minds, a note of arrogance in this proclamation of “intransigence” on the part of the Orthodox, and of their unpersuadability over anything not in conformity with Orthodox doctrine ? And does it not imply a refusal, pure and simple, to join in the common search after truth that is the very essence of the ecumenical movement ?

The first point to be emphasised, in answer to these questions, is that this statement is primarily addressed to the Orthodox themselves, and is an effort to define Orthodox participation in the ecumenical movement from within. From this standpoint, the ecumenical problem carries with it to the Orthodox mind one very special difficulty, the clash between, on the one hand, the indisputable fact of the Orthodox churches’ participation in the ecumenical movement - we need only recall that one of the Presidents of the World Council of Churches is an Orthodox archbishop - and hence in the common search, and, on the other, what might be termed the absoluteness of Orthodox ecclesiology, i. e., belief in the Orthodox Church as being verily the One Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, infallible in dogma and possessed of all truth. A real antinomy is thus involved, and the difficulty lies in the need to explain and evaluate the “ecumenical fact” in terms of this absolute eccle- siology .

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Even supposing such an explanation were possible, this was not the end which the Bossey conference had in view. Their statement does not explain anything, it simply states. It states the fact of participation, and it states the essential conditions for participation without which the Orthodox churches would no longer be Orthodox. It deliberately takes its stand, therefore, upon this absolute ecclesiology, since any other attitude could only be the expression of a personal opinion, a sort of theologoumenon. But it would be a mistake to detect in this document any kind of human “arrogance.” Orthodox ecclesiology knows no other Church than that of St. Augustine’s magnificent definition, quoted by Father Florovsky in a recent study, “Totus Christus, caput et corpus” - uniting in one reality the seen and the unseen, Christ and His members. The Orthodox may not possess their faith in its fulness: that they may come upon through ecumenical seeking. But what they seek, what they come upon will be their faith and their truth, for that belongs ips0 facto to the Church and is contained in its doctrine.

Subsection 2 of the statement emphasises a very particular duty of the Orthodox within the ecumenical movement. They are conscious that problems are very frequently raised in ecumenical work in specifically Protestant, or at any rate Western, terms. Is it not, then, the ecumenical responsibility of the Orthodox to set about broadening the outlook of the movement by the presen- tation of the Eastern point of view ? The special allusion to the place held by the Holy Virgin in our ecclesiastical life reflects what is to us an absolutely vital problem, organically bound up with Orthodox ecclesiology as a whole. The ecumenical movement will never, in our view, be sufficiently ecumenical as long as it does not take this question into account, even though this involve various grievous difficulties.

In the last sentence, we come to a reference to the Church of Rome. Here again we have one of the constant preoccupations of the Orthodox in the ecumenical movement. If my memory serves me aright, the one para- graph on the Roman Catholic Church in the whole ecclesiological work of Amsterdam (see report of Youth Section I) was largely due to the Orthodox delegates to that Section. The Orthodox realise that in the ecumenical move- ment they are encountering not only other Christian confessions, but the Christian West, whose whole religious drama is for us inseparable from Rome.

Such, in brief, is the content of this statement. As I say, I consider that it throws light on certain specifically Orthodox elements in the ecumenical problem. But it may be that for that very reason it will prove of service to the work as a whole. The ecumenical movement is one enduring paradox and tension. It cannot lose this tension without at the same time losing its highest value. The whole point of the Orthodox Church’s participation is that it should stand as one of the farthest poles of this tension. The day the ecumenical movement loses this inherent antinomy, it will be apparent either

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that it has never been more than a man-made affair, or that it has reached its goal, which is itself already outside the movement proper, for it is called Una Sancta. It is in relation to these various aspects that the findings of the Orthodox conference in Bossey should, in their small way, be understood.

A. SCHMEMANN.

“PARISH MISSION” IN HUNGARY

It is not often that a church can be so unreservedly stated to have reached a turning-point in its history as can the Reformed Church in Hungary at the present time. All the involved, contradictory phenomena connected with this transformation can in actual fact be reduced to one common deno- minator : the church in its entirety has reached the revival point. This, and this only, justifies us in speaking of a historical revolution. Hungary has seen the ossified framework of a traditional “established church” shaken between one day and the next to its deepest foundations, and the whole structure cracked wide open to a tremendous diversity of spiritual influences. The seat of the earthquake which has brought this to pass is not within the church : the church’s crisis is the result of the vast process of social restra- tification which has been taking place since the war. The former ruling class has disappeared, and fresh layers have come to the surface which are moul- ding all life in accordance with their own requirements. Land reform and the socialisation of heavy industry are the two great events which have altered not only the social status of every single individual, but the whole structure of society into the bargain. This upheaval has brought individual Chris- tians, and the Church as a body, face to face with decisions on which no guidance of any kind is to be found in the traditional system of ethics and casuistry. Under these changed conditions, the problems of property, work, law and family life on the one hand, and of the relation of Church to State and Church to society on the other, have become an absolute enigma, and an enigma crying aloud for an immediate solution. The earth seems to be giving way under men’s feet, and in their bewilderment and despair they stream into the churches hoping to hear something that will help them to find their bearings.

This state of affairs should not, however, lead us to dismiss the growing interest in religious problems as a socio-pathological phenomenon. Apart from the fact that all great revival movements in Church history have r e d - ted from more or less similar processes of social restratification, it must be recognised that events in the social sphere do not create religious revival,

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