The Ecumenical Movement seems blocked in an impasse. From the movement’s beginnings early in the last century, Protestant and Orthodox Christians have made up the membership of the World Council of Churches, and to the present day bilateral dialogues have continued between various Protestant denominations and the canonical Orthodox churches. In recent years, Roman Catholics have joined in the dialogue process, both with Protestants and with the Orthodox.
A great deal of good has come from these discussions. Theologians have come to better understand and appreciate Christians of other confessions, and occasionally the papers produced by participants in the dialogues have marked a significant advance toward rediscovering the Apostolic Faith. The most recent example is the Roman Catholic / Orthodox agreement on certain aspects of the filioque controversy. Yet a gulf still exists between “East” and “West,” such that any prospect that true unity in terms of doctrine and polity will one day be achieved among the churches remains dim at best. Why is this so?
People have advanced any number of reasons. One of the most important is the fact that most Orthodox Christians are thoroughly comfortable with their own tradition as it has been preserved and transmitted throughout the centuries. Indeed, they love, honor and cherish it as Holy Tradition. Accordingly, they believe that any “unity” that might be achieved with other churches will mean unwanted compromise in matters of faith, worship and overall church life. Despite jurisdictional and other problems the Orthodox face, they instinctively feel that anything “other” will inevitably mean something “less.” Whether or not such fears are justified, they do condition the approach many Orthodox take to ecumenical dialogue.
Then again, the pluralism and moral degeneration so prevalent in Western societies today creates among many Orthodox a certain bunker mentality that spills over into the ecumenical sphere. If in some quarters “ecumenism” is regarded as the rankest of heresies, it is because of an understandable, if somewhat paranoid, sense that even engaging in dialogue—not to mention “praying with the heretics”—can only corrupt what they cherish as the treasure of Orthodox Christianity.
There are numerous other reasons for the present impasse in ecumenical relations. One, however, is more fundamental and more subtle than either of the above. It is the fact that Orthodox and Western Christians hold to very different and basically incompatible world views. Let me illustrate what I mean by referring to the domain of biblical interpretation.
Orthodox Christians intuitively identify with the Church’s patristic tradition. They consciously strive to adopt the “mind” of the Fathers. Whether they are “cradle” Orthodox or converts, they develop—through liturgical worship as much as through study of the Scriptures—a perspective on reality that is fundamentally at odds with the secularist, postmodern influences of the present day that so strongly shape Western culture, including Western interpretation of the Bible. Protestant and, increasingly, Catholic exegesis generally adopts a historical-critical approach, one that finds meaning almost exclusively in the “literal” or “historical” sense of the biblical text. (This unilateral focus is attenuated, but not significantly altered, by recent approaches known globally as the “new literary criticism.”) The literal sense refers to the meaning the author himself understood and attempted to impart through his writing.
The Church Fathers, on the other hand, had as their ultimate quest the “spiritual” sense of the text, that is, the meaning God, working through the Holy Spirit, reveals to the Church and world in every successive generation. They attempted to discover this “higher,” “fuller” or more spiritual sense by various interpretive methods, particularly allegory and typology. Yet they did so with the conviction that the spiritual sense flows out of the literal sense. Exegesis, therefore, properly begins with investigation of the latter, in order to discern in and through the biblical text the higher or fuller meaning the Spirit seeks to convey.
Use of historical criticism to discern the literal sense, therefore, is essential. Yet it is only one—albeit the most basic—element in an entire interpretive process. That process comes to completion with further discernment of the spiritual sense. This sets historical realities in the context of a genuine “salvation history,” the end of which lies beyond the historical realm, in the Kingdom of God.
Accordingly, the Fathers saw every earthly event as essentially symbolic. Events, institutions, persons and rituals of the Old Covenant were understood to be prophetic images of future or transcendent realities. The Exodus, for example, served as an image of liberation from slavery to sin and death, and the Promised Land of Israel was seen as an image of Paradise; Hebrew sacrificial rites prefigured the Church’s eucharistic liturgy; Abraham’s willingness to offer up his beloved son Isaac foreshadowed the Father’s gift of His beloved Son on the Cross, and so forth.
These types or prophetic images were interpreted in a larger framework, that of allegory. In a word, this means that behind and beyond the literal meaning of the biblical text there lies a deeper meaning that concerns the spiritual and moral life of believers in their quest for salvation. The Fathers took the notion of “symbol” seriously. A “sign” merely points toward some future or transcendent reality; a symbol enables one actually to participate in that reality. Biblical symbols serve to unite the believer with the transcendent reality that underlies them. Thus there is a continuum of significance from the manna in the desert to the Church’s Eucharist, and on to the heavenly Banquet. A similar continuum leads from animal sacrifice in the Hebrew temple, through Christ’s death on the Cross, to the “crucifixion” of oneself—of one’s passions and sinful disposition—in the ascetic effort that leads to God-given holiness and eternal life.
While this may sound “Platonic” to most modern ears, it is lived experience for an Orthodox Christian. In the Church’s Liturgy we reactualize and relive the saving events of ancient Israel’s history, as we do the events surrounding Christ’s passion, death and resurrection. The biblical witness, in other words, is not simply a record of past events that informs our faith. It promotes a living experience, in which past and future are telescoped into the present moment (and so we commemorate or “remember” even what has not yet occurred: the second and glorious coming of Christ!). Scripture, in this perspective, always points beyond itself; and its interpretation within the Church—through preaching and celebration—serves to lead the faithful beyond historical reality and into the realm of the “spiritual,” into communion with the transcendent God.
To the Orthodox mind, God is “everywhere present, filling all things.” Through historical events and circumstances, He ceaselessly guides His people beyond their ephemeral, earthly life, and into the beauty and joy of His Kingdom. There, and there only, lies ultimate reality. And there, too, lies the fulfillment of human life that gives ultimate meaning to an otherwise meaningless existence. Everything in Orthodox experience is oriented toward that transcendent goal: the Church’s worship, its interpretation of Scripture, even its acts of charity. It is an experience that creates in the Orthodox mind and spirit what the apostle Paul calls “the hope of glory.”
Until our Western partners in the ecumenical debate come to terms with the fact that Orthodoxy lives and breathes in this transcendent perspective, that it finds ultimate truth and reality beyond the bounds of time and space, that it grounds its very life in the immediate experience of the presence, power and majesty of the Living God, then we will continue to engage in a dialogue of the deaf.
Of course many Western Christians of all traditions share much of this same perspective and same experience. Nevertheless, typology and allegory remain for the Orthodox essential methods for interpreting the Scriptures, while most Protestants and many Catholics reject these methods as pre-critical and basically useless. This difference in approach to biblical interpretation is symptomatic of the fact that we indeed hold very different worldviews.
The transcendent worldview of the ancient Church Fathers may seem outmoded and naïve to many people today, not least of all to Western Christian theologians. To Orthodox Christians, however, the Scriptures themselves locate ultimate truth—and therefore ultimate reality—within the sphere of God’s own existence, rather than within the realm of historical event. Interpretation of the Scriptures, together with the whole of the Church’s liturgical life, enables the faithful to experience that reality in the here and now, while confirming the conviction that the true meaning and destiny of human existence lies elsewhere, in the Kingdom of “righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit” (Rom 14:17).
In the course of ecumenical dialogue, our Orthodox language and demeanor reflect this experience and this conviction. Where this experience and conviction are not shared, then, sadly, there is little chance for mutual understanding, and even less for meaningful unity.