On
The Church
May 19, 2010 By Fr. John A.
Peck
by Fr. John Romanides
Our father in the faith, John
Romanides (1927 – 2001), was a prominent 20th century Orthodox Christian
priest, theologian, and writer. He argued for the existence of a “national,
cultural and even linguistic unity between Eastern and Western Romans” that
existed until the intrusion and takeover of the West Romans (the Roman
Catholics) by the Franks and or Goths (German tribes).
The Church is the body of Christ, which is comprised of all
those faithful in Christ; of those who participate in the first resurrection
and who bear the betrothal of the Spirit or even those who have foretasted
theosis (deification).
The Church has existed even before
Creation, as the kingdom and the glory that is hidden within God and in which
God resides, along with His Logos and His Spirit. By a volition of God, the
aeons were created, as were the celestial powers and the incorporeal spirits or
angels therein, and thereafter, time and the world within it, in which man was
also created, who unites within himself the noetic energy of the angels with
the logos-reason and the human body.
The Church is both invisible and
visible; in other words, She is comprised of those who are enlisted (in active
duty) on earth and those who are in the heavens, that is, those who have
triumphed in the glory of God.
Among
the Protestants there prevails the opinion that the Church is invisible only –
where the sacraments of Baptism and the Divine Eucharist are merely symbolic
acts – and that only God knows who the true members of the Church are. The
Orthodox Church, on the other hand, also stresses the visible aspect of the
Church. Outside the Church, there is no salvation.
The Church, as the body of Christ,
is the residence of God’s uncreated glory. It is impossible for us to separate
Christ from the Church, as it is to separate the Church from Christ. In Papism
and Protestantism there is a clear distinction between the body of Christ and
the Church; that is, one can participate in the body of Christ, without being a
member of the Papist church.
This is impossible for Orthodoxy.
According
to the Calvinists, after His ascension, Christ resides in heaven, and
consequently the transformation of bread and wine into the actual Body and
Blood of Christ is impossible. A complete absence of Christ. Approximately the
same thing is highlighted in the Papist church, because Christ is regarded as
absent, and through the minister’s prayer, He descends from the heavens and
becomes present. This implies that Christ is absent from the Church.
Members of the Church are – as
mentioned previously – those who have received the betrothal of the Spirit and
the deified ones.
When the ancient Church referred to
the body of Christ as the Church, and Christ as the Head of the Church, they of
course did not mean that Christ was spread out bodily all over the world and
that He – for example – had His Head in Rome, the one hand in the East and the
other in the West, but that the whole of Christ exists in every individual
church with all its members, that is, the Saints and the faithful of the
universe.
In this way, according to the
teaching of the Fathers, when we perform the Divine Eucharist, not only is
Christ present, but all His Saints and the Christians of the Universe are
present, in Christ. When we receive a tiny morsel of the Holy Bread, we receive
all of Christ inside us. When Christians gather together for the same reason,
the whole Church is gathering together, and not just a fraction of it. This is
the reason that it has become predominant in Patristic Tradition to refer to
the church of a monastery as the “Katholikon”.
The destination of all the faithful
is theosis (deification). This is everyone’s ultimate objective. This is why a
Christian must proceed “from glory to glory”; in other words, the slave must
first become a salaried worker, then a son of God and a faithful member of
Christ.
There cannot be salvation outside
the Church. Christ offers redemptive grace to all people. When one is saved
outside the visible Church, it means that Christ Himself has saved him. If he
is a heterodox member then he is saved because it was Christ who saved him, and
not the religious “offshoot” that he belongs to.
His salvation therefore is not
effected by the ‘church’ he belongs to, because One is the Church that saves –
and that is Christ.
Wherever the Orthodox dogma does not
exist, the Church is in no position to opine on the authority of the
sacraments. According to the Fathers, the Orthodox Dogma never separates itself
from spirituality. Wherever there is an erroneous dogma, there is an erroneous
spirituality and vice-versa.
There are many who separate the
dogma from piety. That is a mistake. When Christ says “become ye perfect, as
the Father is perfect” it implies that one must be familiar with the meaning of
perfection. The criterion for the authority of the sacraments for us Orthodox
is the Orthodox dogma, whereas for the heterodox, it is Apostolic Succession.
For the Orthodox Tradition, it is
not enough to trace one’s ordination back to the Apostles, but to possess the
Orthodox dogma.
Piety and dogma are one identity and
cannot be separated. Wherever there is upright teaching, there will be upright
action. “Orthodox” means:
a)
Upright glory
b) Upright action
b) Upright action
The terrestrial, actively engaged Church is the Orthodox
Church. “Orthodox dogma” and “Scriptural teaching” are one and the same thing,
because the dogma exists, and it comes from within the Holy Bible.
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