Happy Reformation Day!

Today is Reformation Day—and not just any Reformation Day, but a very special one. That's right, I'm going to take you on a tour of no fewer than seven different "reforms" that have been attempted in the Orthodox Church. (What do you mean, that isn't what Reformation Day means?)

Images of the Holy

Icons are a ubiquitous and central part of eastern worship, as spending any amount of time in a Orthodox church will make clear. The main part of the church will be full (in some cases practically covered) with images of the Lord, the Mother of God, the saints, angels, and significant events from biblical and church history. Orthodox homes will have a corner with icons for prayer and the reading of Scripture. Of course, this is a matter of considerable diversity among Christians; Catholic Churches tend to have not only images but statues, and most Protestant churches use no images in their worship besides the cross (and, perhaps, a smattering of "inspirational" stock photos).

This ambiguity has something of a parallel in the early Church. The use of images in worship developed largely organically in the early church and there are only brief mentions of it in the writings of the early fathers. After the conversion of Constantine and the subsequent spread of Christianity through the empire, it became commonplace for churches to be decorated with many religious images—along with images of the emperor. This may have been a Christianization of the pagan practice of depicting the divine in human form, which doesn't mean the Christian faith was being compromised; the church has a long history of selectively appropriating the best of the faiths around it, a reflection of the fact that though it uniquely proclaims the Truth in its fullness, the Church does not have a monopoly on truth. Early apologists like Justin Martyr applied this with regard to Greek philosophy, and later the pagan feast of Sol Invictus, the unconquered sun, was "Christianized" into a celebration of the nativity of Christ, the true Light of the World and fulfillment of the feast.

So when the church borrowed from the practices and ideas of the world around it, it never did so uncritically. But inasmuch as icon veneration was borrowed in this way, it was unusual in that there was no systematic defense or condemnation of the practice for the first seven centuries after Christ, only scattered expressions of approval or disapproval, such that both supporters and detractors of icons could find plenty of material in the writings of the Fathers to support their positions. This began to change in the eighth century when a series of Byzantine emperors, starting with Leo III, began trying to reform icons out of the Church. Leo's position on icons was somewhat obscure (letters by Patriarch Germanos refer to him as a friend of icons), but he seems to have raised concerns that their veneration was idolatry and to have taken measures to remove them from public places and ban their use in worship.


Leo's son, Constantine V, was much more unambiguously opposed to icons and more theologically literate in his stand against them. In 754 he summoned to the palace of Hieria a council of 338 bishops to (but not including representatives of any of the five patriarchs), which condemned the depiction of the saints "in lifeless pictures" as "vain and introduced by the devil". Still less could the "divine image of the Word" be represented with material colors; how could mere wood and paint possibly do justice to the Incarnate God? Supporters of Constantine's stand against icons, the iconoclasts ("image-smashers"), cited the second commandment (Exo 20:4-5), which prohibited the making of "graven images" or likenesses of created beings as a form of idolatry, a return to paganism. Christ was suppposed to have inaugurated an hour in which the faithful would worship "in spirit and in truth" (Jhn 4:23); the adoration of images represented a regression back to pre-Christianity, the worship of material creature rather than bodiless Creator.

There was also a Christological component to the argument against icons; material images would necessarily either depict only Christ's human nature, separating it from his invisible divine nature (a form of the heresy of Nestorianism), or else conflate and confuse his natures by attempting to circumscribe the divine nature in a portrait along with the human (the heresy of monophysitism). Constantine, something of an armchair (throne?) theologian himself, considered a true image to be "identical in essence with that which it portrays", a definition repeated by his iconoclast supporters; of the "images" of Christ, only the Eucharist met this condition. In light of all these dangers, the iconoclasts called for the end of Christian religious imagery except the cross and the Lord's Supper. The Hagia Irene Church in Istanbul remains as an example of the changes wrought by the iconoclasts; instead of an image of Christ or the Theotokos in its apse as is now considered normal, it has only the stark outline of a cross. No church would again be gutted in such a way until the rise of Reformed Protestantism.

The Council of Hieria was considered ecumenical (expressing the mind of the whole church) by its participants, but was summarily rejected by the wider Church as a "robber council". It was condemned in 769 by a council held by the Pope (who had not even been invited) and thoroughly overturned by a council held in Nicea in 787, which is now recognized by Orthodox and Catholic Christians as the seventh ecumenical council. This council heartily approved the Church's long-standing use of images and rebutted the anti-icon arguments of the preceding council. To the objection that it was demeaning to portray Christ with material paint and wood, it was rejoined that Christ made himself material by taking on flesh. What an icon does is not to circumscribe Christ, but merely to depict him as he manifested himself to us. And what is depicted is not Christ's natures in isolation, but his person in which both natures come together. Against Constantine's definition of an image, the orthodox presented a variety of alternate definitions which did not mandate that images be identical in essence with their subject. They drew both a close relation and a precise distinction between image and subject. St. John of Damascus, the most influential supporter of images in the years leading up to the council, defined an image as "a mirror and a figurative type, appropriate to the dullness of our body." He likened their veneration to showing affection to the garments or image of a departed loved one—for that is what the saints are to the Church.

Similarly, the second Council of Nicea drew a careful distinction between veneration and worship. It is possible to show honor to images without worshipping them, just as it is possible to honor friends, family, or teachers without making them into idols. St. Basil the Great was quoted as saying that "the honor that is paid to the image passes over to the prototype." Added to this was a healthy appreciation for the role of the material in our salvation, which began with the Savior taking on material flesh. Iconoclasm seemed to deny this role, coming dangerously close to the old material-denying heresy of Gnosticism. Saying it was blasphemous to depict Christ in a portrait seemed like docetism; if Christ truly became one of us, how could his body not be pictured like anyone else's? The distinction between pagan and Christian worship, the iconophiles insisted, was not one of matter versus spirit, but false realities versus true ones. Pagan idolatry is idolatry because of the ultimate unreality of the objects of worship, whereas icons depicted real people worthy of real honor, and the real Savior worthy of worship. The veneration of icons, far from a regression to paganism, was a celebration of Christ's triumph over the "elemental principles" of this world.

As for the iconoclast's protests on the basis of the second commandment, the supporters of icons followed an increasingly common Orthodox practice in referring it back to the first commandment: "You shall have no other gods before Me." Icons per se are not objects of worship, but representations and symbols of the One truly worthy of worship; still less are they analogous to pagan idols; therefore the second commandment prohibition does not apply against them. It should be noted that the second commandment in the Septuagint prohibits the making of eidola (that is, idols), not eikona (that is, images, as in Gen 1:26 or Col 1:15); the common King James translation of the prohibition to "graven image" obscures this distinction. This interpretation is bolstered by the fact that later in Exodus God instructs the Israelites to make the Tabernacle with images of cherubim (Exo 25:18-22, 26:1,31, 36:8,35). And finally, icons were and continue to be valuable teaching aids for presenting the content of the faith, to the illiterate and those unable to afford books (in the earlier church), to children, and to converts like myself. Just as preaching and the liturgy bring the words and teachings of Christ and the apostles to us in the present day, icons make them visually present to us.

A second period of iconoclasm began in the early ninth century. Emperor Leo V may have been influenced by a series of defeats at the hands of the radically iconoclast Muslims as a sign of divine displeasure. For inspiration he looked back to Constantine V who, besides his campaign against images was also remembered for his successful conquests against the empire's enemies, and rediscovered the acts of the council of Hieria. Despite the more recent memory of the second Council of Nicea, he became convinced of iconoclasm and once more began to roll back the veneration of images. This second phase of the controversy continued until icon adoration was restored once and for all in 843, a day which is still celebrated on the first Sunday of Great Lent as the "Sunday of Orthodoxy".

Like the heresy of Arianism centuries before, the iconoclast controversy found prominent leaders in the Church arrayed against a movement led and emboldened by a series of emperors determined to push the doctrines they had come to believe in upon the faithful. Whereas in the western churches the accumulation of excessive temporal power by bishops became a serious problem, the Christian east has struggled more with "cesaropapism", the appropriation and exercise of spiritual authority by secular rulers. This was especially true of the Byzantine emperors, but later on the Russian tzars (the word "tzar" coming from "Caesar") and their successors would follow in their footsteps.

An ill-fated truce

By the 1430s, the situation of the Byzantine Empire had become truly desperate. It had shrunk from once encompassing the entire Mediterranean to a few scraps of land on the west side of the Bosphorus, the Peloponnese peninsula, and some scattered Aegean islands. The Ottoman Empire surrounded it on all sides, and the Muslims continued to close in. Emperor John VIII Palaiologos knew that the Empire's only hope of survival lay in timely assistance from the Christian west. In 1438 he accepted an invitation from Pope Eugene IV and sailed with seven hundred diplomats, scholars, and representatives of the Church to Ferrara (later Florence), where what the Catholics consider their 17th ecumenical council was in progress, to negotiate a reunion of the eastern and western churches as a prerequisite for military aid. In the formula of union that was drawn up, the Orthodox would accept the filioque clause (a western addition to the Nicene Creed stating that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, which was a major factor in the east-west schism four centuries earlier), papal supremacy, and the doctrine of Purgatory. In exchange, they would keep most of their distinctive rites of worship and traditions, such as married priests and the use of leavened bread in the Eucharist, while in communion with Rome (these are basically the terms by which the Eastern Catholic Churches would later reunite with Rome).

At last, this was it! The Great Schism of 1054 finally ended by consent of the Pope, Emperor, and Ecumenical Patriarch! All the bishops present, knowing that they had little choice, signed the formula—except for one: Mark, Archbishop of Ephesus. Mark, who is today commemorated as a saint and a "pillar of Orthodoxy", turned out to have the broad support of the Church on his side; the union was widely rejected by monks, civil authorities, and laypeople; many of its signatories revoked their signatures when they returned home; the emperor did not dare proclaim it publicly in Constantinople until 1452. Byzantine Christians would rather suffer under Islamic rule than compromise their faith. The Russian church angrily rejected the union upon hearing of it, and prelates who showed any sympathy for it were ousted. Despite the emperor's best efforts, little western aid came to Constantinople, and it fell to the Turks on May 29, 1453.

The failure of the "union of Florence", like that of the "union of Lyon" in the thirteenth century and the Council of Hieria in the eighth, is demonstrative of the nature of authority in the Orthodox Church. Authority is not simply top-down, residing in any one leader or even a ruling council; nor is it simply bottom-up, with prelates ultimately subject to the will of the laity. The final authority is rather the whole Church, the apostolic consensus that has always been the core of Holy Tradition. The Church is the pillar and ground of the truth (1 Tim 3:15), the true temple in which the Holy Spirit dwells (1 Cor 3:16), and this Church always gets the last word on the acts of the hierarchy. The difference between an ecumenical council and a "robber council" like Hieria or Florence is whether its rulings are received or rejected by the whole Church.

St. Nilus and St. Joseph

A major critique of the Protestant Reformers against the Roman church was its excessive wealth and opulence, which compromised the church's intended role as defender of the poor and its ability to truly be "in the world, but not of the world". This problem was somewhat mirrored in the Christian east, though more with land than with riches; by the turn of the sixteenth century, about a quarter to a third of the civilized land in Russia belonged to monasteries. In 1503, at a synod in Moscow, the monk St. Nilus of Sora (or Nil Sorsky) raised the question of whether this should be so. Similarly to the Reformers to the west, Nilus and his supporters (who came to be known as "Non-Possessors", due to their belief that monasteries should not possess land) argued that such excessive landownership made monasteries too worldly, compromising them in their calling to prayer and piety. Monks were supposed to support themselves with the work of their hands, not act as wealthy landlords.

Responding to Nilus at the synod and in the wider controversy that followed was St. Joseph, abbot of Volokalamsk, who emphasized the social role of monasticism: caring for the poor and the sick, showing hospitality, offering religious instruction; these tasks require money, and therefore land. Monks do not use their land or money for themselves, but for the benefit of others. His followers, the Possessors, had the saying: "The riches of the Church are the riches of the poor."

Besides their disagreement over monastic holdings, Sts. Nilus and Joseph clashed on a few other subjects centering around the relationship of Church and state. Joseph, like most Christians of his time, supported the imposition of civil penalties on heretics (the burning of heretics has historically been much rarer in Orthodox than in the western churches, but it was sadly in practice at that time), whereas Nilus thought the state should take no part in the punishment of heretics. The Possessors believed in a closer partnership between Church and state, whereas the Non-Possessors were more aware of the other-worldliness of the Church. Joseph the abbot focused more on rules and discipline, Nilus on in the inner life of prayer and personal relationship with God. Joseph celebrated the role of beauty and the material in worship (in this he was largely in line with the second Council of Nicea); Nilus emphasized the need not to be ensnared by the material, but to look beyond to seek knowledge of the invisible and indescribable God.

The fact that both participants in this debate are now recognized as saints shows that it was not as one-sided as the other controversies I've been describing. The Russian church recognized that both saints placed stress on valuable and real parts of the Christian faith—although the Non-Possessor movement per se did not do so well, and Russian monasteries continued owning land until the Russian Revolution in the twentieth century.

The tragic tale of Cyril Lucaris

Cyril Lucaris (1572-1638), Patriarch of Constantinople, was a brilliant man born into a very difficult time for the Church. When Lucaris was born, the Reformation was convulsing western Christendom, with opposing Catholic and Protestant foes exchanging verbal if not physical blows. As a resident of Crete, part of the Venetian Republic, Lucaris had a closer view of this enmity than most Orthodox, especially as he studied at the university in Padua (discreetly hospitable to Protestants), and later in Wittenberg and Geneva. Caught in the crossfire between Catholicism and Protestantism, he began to develop sympathies for Reformed Christianity. These sympathies were bolstered by his intense hostility to Catholicism, which may have led him to feel an affinity for Reformation leaders also struggling against Rome.

This hostility was bolstered when, at the age of 24, he was sent to lead the Orthodox opposition to the Union of Brest-Litovsk, a union between Polish-Lithuanian Orthodox and Rome similar to the one attempted at Florence—only ultimately successful. Lucaris was appalled at the capitulation, attributing it to the inferior education of Orthodox clergy compared to the erudite and missionary-minded Society of Jesus. In 1601 he was elected Patriarch of Alexandria, and in 1612 he became the Patriarch of Constantinople. With this authority, he set out to reform the Church to better withstand Catholic influence—along increasingly Reformed lines.

As Ecumenical Patriarch, Lucaris reopened the old Academy in Constantinople and provided it with a printing press to publish instructional materials. He sponsored the first translation of the New Testament into modern Greek. He corresponded with English and continental Reformed leaders, and sent Orthodox clergy to their schools for training. Fatefully, he authored a Confession of Faith (as numerous Protestant groups were had been doing), first published in Geneva in 1629, which expounded a synthesis of Orthodox and Reformed theology. Among other things, it espoused justification by faith alone, unconditional predestination, a rejection of icons, a rejection of the infallibility of the Church, and acceptance of only baptism and the Eucharist as sacraments.

Most other Orthodox were livid at Lucaris' Confession (no doubt encouraged in their rejection by the Jesuits, though there was plenty in the Confession to reject anyway), and he spent his later years embroiled in controversy not just within the Church but also as Constantinople became another front for the Reformation; he was forced to resign five times at the influence of Catholic diplomats and reinstated at the influence of Protestant ones until finally being sentenced to death in 1638, strangled by Ottoman Janissaries and thrown into the Bosphorus. His Confession was repudiated by six local councils in the following decades, and two other Orthodox hierarchs, Peter Mogila of Kiev and Dositheus of Jerusalem, composed their own confessions to oppose Lucaris' and reiterate Orthodox doctrine. Dositheus' Confession in particular is regarded to this day as an apt exposition of the Orthodox faith in distinction from both Catholicism and Protestantism, though written in a Catholic tone.

Two fingers or three?

Nikon, who became Patriarch of Moscow in 1652, was not a very humble man. He sought to reverse the decline in the Patriarch's power relative to the Tsar's, assuming the Tsar's title Veliki Gosudar (Great Lord), and even claimed the right to intervene in secular matters like the popes had done centuries earlier. This eventually earned the resentment of the Tsar, who called a council that deposed him in 1666. But Nikon undertook another initiative which would have more lasting consequences. A strong admirer of all things Greek, he was concerned with how Russian liturgical usages deviated from the Greek ones. So he had Greek service books translated and set out to impose them on his flock.

The reforms Nikon proposed seem trivial to us today (saying three alleluias instead of two, spelling the Lord's name slightly differently, removing a few superfluous words that had been added to the creed), but they provoked fierce opposition. A particular sticking point was his attempt to change how Russian Orthodox made the sign of the cross: not with two fingers extended (representing Christ's two natures), but three (representing the Trinity, as all modern Orthodox make the sign). The ubiquity of the sign, not just in church but in everyday life, and its deep symbolic connection with the dogmas at the very center of the Orthodox faith, made changing it feel like changing the faith itself. The old two-fingered sign became a symbol of conservative resistance to Nikon's reforms.

Compounding this was the heavy-handed, characteristically authoritarian way in which Nikon tried to make his changes. He did not consult parish clergy or call a council, he continued to press on even as opposition arose, and he persecuted resisters fiercely, repeatedly imprisoning their leader, Avvakum, who was eventually burned at the stake in 1682 (a practice which, it should be remembered, is historically rare in eastern Christianity, and which had already ceased in the west). He even had churches whose architecture he deemed nonconforming demolished and rebuilt in a more suitably Byzantine style, and had soldiers search houses for icons whose style was deemed too "western" and destroy them.

Given all this, it's not too surprising that a vehement resistance to Nikon's reign developed. Despite persecution at the hands of church and state, the movement persisted, eventually going into full schism with the Orthodox Church while continuing to suffer persecution. They remain in schism to this day, and are known as the Old Believers.

Russian Meddling

Tsar Peter I "the Great" was determined to prevent any more Nikons from challenging his authority. When Patriarch Adrian of Moscow died in 1700, he declined to appoint a successor, instead having another bishop administrate the church in his stead. In 1721 he abolished the patriarchate and organized the twelve-man "College for Spiritual Affairs" or "Holy Synod" to rule in the stead. His aim was to make the Russian church subservient to the Russian state; the arrangement was unprecedented in Orthodox canon law but similar to that of state Lutheran churches in northern Europe (where Peter had gone to study how "enlightened" western states were run). The Synod's members were nominated by the Tsar, and could be dismissed by him if they got out of line. Even more radically, a 1722 decree obliged clergy to break the confidentiality of confession if they heard any plans against the government. Monasticism was restricted; westernizing reforms were imposed. It was not an attempt to destroy the church but rather to make it an arm of the state.

Perhaps the most distressing thing about the two hundred-year reign of the Holy Synod was how little opposition there was to it. Protests within Russia were stamped out, and the rest of the Orthodox world, mostly living under Ottoman oppression of their own, were not in a position to stop the reforms. It was a time of relative stagnation and westernization for the Russian church, but all was not lost. St. Tikhon of Zadonsk had a mystical streak like that of St. Nilus, and he drew upon western theology without abandoning Orthodoxy. Under the imperial radar and in reaction to the church's domination by the state, the tradition of the Non-Possessors was increasingly reintegrated into Orthodox spirituality and teaching. The nineteenth century saw the rise of the starets (elder), through whom the continuing vitality of the monasteries influenced the life of lay people; the extraordinary monastic St. Seraphim of Sarov is the best example of this. There was also an increase in mission work (including the spread of Orthodoxy to North America, by way of Alaska); later in the nineteenth century, Russian theology increasingly broke free of its western influences and saw a revival both within the empire and beyond which arguably continues to this day.

The Synod remained until 1917, when the Patriarchate was finally restored after the collapse of the old Russian regime. But there was little time to celebrate before the church entered into seventy years of persecution by a militantly atheist regime without historical precedent.

What's the difference between eastern and western Christianity? Thirteen days

For the first fifteen centuries of the Church, all of Christendom used the Julian calendar, introduced before Christ by Emperor Julius Caesar, which adds a leap day once every four years. During the Middle ages, Catholic scholars realized that this calendar was inaccurate, drifting backwards one day relative to the true astronomical time every 128 years. As a result, the calendar date had drifted over a week back from the "true" date. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII decreed a new calendar, in which every year divisible by 100 but not 400 would not be a leap year. This mostly fixed the problem of the calendar drift. To correct the drift that had already happened, he also decreed that October 4th of that year would immediately be followed by October 15th, which must have been an extremely disorienting change. The Protestant churches at first rejected the new "Gregorian Calendar" as a papal innovation, but eventually came to accept it, as has most of the world.

Such a jarring reform needed the authority of a pope to make it happen, which may be partly why the Orthodox world never adopted the Gregorian Calendar (except for the Finnish Orthodox Church). By the early 20th century, the gap between calendars had grown to thirteen days. Finally, in 1923, Patriarch Meletios of Constantinople gathered a council which called for the adoption of the Revised Julian Calendar (RJC), developed by Serbian astronomer Milutin Milanković. This calendar would be slightly more accurate than the Gregorian Calendar (though remaining identical to it until the year 2800) and come with a time jump of thirteen days to get back on track. The "new calendar" proved controversial; some churches adopted it for fixed feasts while others rejected it, and no one has adopted it for reckoning the date of Pascha and all the feasts dated relative to it. Some small groups have gone into schism over the matter of the calendar, and others, while remaining in communion with the Church as a whole, regard those who have adopted the RJC as having compromised the purity of the faith.

Before you conclude that Orthodox are inflexible grumps who hate any change, no matter how small, some context is in order. Patriarch Meletios called the council a "Pan-Orthodox Congress" (an unusual and unprecedented title), but in reality only Constantinople, Cyprus, Serbia, Greece, and Romania were represented. Conspicuously missing were representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church (the largest one) and the other three ancient patriarchates, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. His own canonical status was in question; he was allegedly a freemason, which is forbidden for Orthodox; a meeting of clergy and laymen even sought to depose him during the Congress. Much like with Patriarch Nikon, there was a good deal of attempting to push well-intentioned reforms through in an underhanded and one-sided manner.

The content of the reforms sought was also problematic. The congress was called in response to a 1920 encyclical which marked the entrance of the Orthodox Church into the ecumenical movement and called for the rekindling of love among the churches, "so that they should no more consider one another as strangers and foreigners, but as relatives, and as being a part of the household of Christ and “fellow heirs, members of the same body and partakers of the promise of God in Christ” (Eph. 3:6)." The first measure the encyclical called for was the acceptance of the RJC. Other measures included allowing priests to wear lay clothing outside of church and marry or remarry after ordination. Most troublingly, representatives of the Anglican Church were invited to one session of the Congress and given seats of honor. They bore a petition by 5,000 Anglican clergy calling for union with the Orthodox (a dream of Patriarch Meletios'); the reform of the church calendar to match the Anglicans' was explicitly construed as a first step toward that union. Of all these measures, only the calendar reform was accepted, and even then only for fixed feasts (those not dated relative to Pascha, which is why Orthodox usually celebrate it after western Christians have had Easter).

The result of all these reforms being introduced at such an unusual council by such a controversial patriarch was that the matter of calendar reform was poisoned in the minds of many Orthodox, especially those belonging to churches not represented at the Congress. The rejection was an example of a staunch opposition to the great heresy of "ecumenism" (i.e. the compromise of Orthodox faith and tradition in order to get along or achieve "union" with other Christian communions) that still exists in the Church today. This article expressing the "old calendarist" view describes the association of the RJC with ecumenism: "The basis for Church Calendar reform obviously does not have its roots in tradition, theology, liturgical life or the canonical rules of the Orthodox Church, but rather in the one-sided, semi-religious, semi-social approach of the ecumenical cult which is grounded in a political-religious ideal of 'Christian unity.'" Opponents of the RJC also point of that the reasons given for changing the calendar tend to be social or worldly (getting along better with other Christian communions, better scientific accuracy) and not theological, and that since the Julian calendar was officially adopted by the Council of Nicea, only another ecumenical council can replace it.

Proponents of the RJC argue that there is nothing sacred about the Julian calendar (which was, after all, developed by a pagan); that the Council of Nicea did not intend to sacralize the Julian Calendar in particular but simply to adopt the civil calendar of its time for church use; and that calendars are ultimately just manmade tools and not articles of revelation or doctrine. A calendar is a system for measuring time based on the motions of astronomical bodies, and the fact is that the RJC simply does this task better and more accurately than the Julian Calendar; therefore it should be preferred. To the "new calendarists", the old calendarists display the same kind of dogmatism on peripheral points and usages as the Old Believers, and a tendency to denigrate the importance of the Church's relationship with the world (as both creation and mission field) in favor of her spiritual relationship to God. They also tend to conflate the matter of calendar reform with the compromises of early 20th-century ecumenism rather than consider it on its own merits; changing the calendar is seen as a prelude to changing any number of things and ultimately capitulating to western errors. But is the Church really taking the same approach to ecumenism today as she was 100 years ago?

We should, after all, earnestly hope for the reunion of Christians; this is not a goal to be scoffed at, and we already pray for "the peace of the whole world...and the unity of all" in every liturgy. And there are other ways to frame the question of calendar reform besides the first step toward the kind of formal union-by-majority-vote the early ecumenical movement seemed to think was imminent. We are not nearly so close to this union as some of the early ecumenists seemed to think and there are plenty of legitimate obstacles to it, but need the calendar be one of them?

Though I disagree with the Old Calendarists, I find it more comforting than discouraging to belong to a church that can't even update its calendar. For we it can't do this, it's hard to imagine our forebears radically changing the faith once delivered to the saints.

In Quest of Reform?

A basic definition of "reform" is making a change to something in order to improve it. In the modern, progressive world, reform is generally considered a Good Thing. We want reform for our healthcare system (though there are wildly differing visions of what kind of reform), for our educational system, for our economic system, for the government itself. And we as modern people celebrate the Protestant Reformation for ushering in the world we know, if not for its liberation of the true gospel from papal tyranny. When a system or institution has become corrupt, mired in abuses or stubbornly clinging to outmoded ways, reform is usually the go-to solution.

But as history shows, reform can just as easily be the means by which something is corrupted, rather than how institutional corruption is corrected—especially for the Church. Attempts to impose heresy on the Church (as with iconoclasm, Arianism centuries earlier, the ill-fated Union of Florence, or Cyril Lukaris' Reformed reforms) are obvious examples of the former.

Reform can still be risky even when the change desired is not outright heresy. Patriarch Nikon's goal of bringing Russian and Byzantine liturgical practice into sync was admirable, but the authoritarian way in which he tried to do so caused a tragic and entirely avoidable schism. If the Revised Julian Calendar had been proposed at a more inclusive council by a less controversial patriarch, it might be in use by all Orthodox today. For a western example, the repeated about-faces in the direction of the English Reformation depending on the convictions of the current monarch engendered hardened dissent and numerous schisms that are responsible for much of the present-day diversity of Protestantism.

By nature, reform tends to be centrally imposed by a visionary individual or small group. It is self-consciously inorganic change. Sometimes this is necessary to end abuses, but when Christian reformers seek to alter the structure or faith of the Church according to their convictions (or nefarious schemes), the universality of the faith is endangered. No individual, whether Pope, saint, or brilliant theologian, can possess the fullness of the Christian faith; it is the property of the whole Church. If a reform is the expression not of the broad consensus of the Church but merely of the mind of a reformer seeking to reshape it according to their will, it will fail, or worse, lead to a schism. This pattern is borne out time and again in the history of Christianity, both eastern and western.

The Incarnational Unity of the Church

I, therefore, the prisoner of the Lord, beseech you to walk worthy of the calling with which you were called, with all lowliness and gentleness, with longsuffering, bearing with one another in love, endeavoring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace. [There is] one body and one Spirit, just as you were called in one hope of your calling; one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of all, who [is] above all, and through all, and in you all. (Eph 4:1-6 NKJV)

And He put all [things] under His feet, and gave Him [to be] head over all [things] to the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills all in all. (Eph 1:22-23 NKJV)

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This post is something of a sequel to the one in my Journey to Orthodoxy series on ecclesiology, the nature of the Church. In it, I compared and contrasted the prevailing Protestant and Orthodox views on the Church. I gave some reasons for my finding the Orthodox telling more convincing, but also laid out two of my lingering doubts about it. This time around, I hope to go somewhat deeper, spending some time on the history of the Protestant visible/invisible Church distinction itself, and to offer some better conclusions from what I have learned of Orthodoxy in the past year.

Tracing the dichotomy back to Augustine

First, the history of the distinction made by Protestants between the invisible Church (the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic body of Christ, the company of the predestined or the justified known only to God) and the visible Church (the local gatherings or manifestations of the true Church, always intermingled with hypocrites and the reprobate in this life). I will refer to this distinction as the "invisible-church theory", keeping in mind that those who hold to it do not deny that there can be and are authentic visible manifestations of it. The Reformation teachers of this distinction traced it back to proto-reformers like Hus and Wycliffe, and before them to Augustine and his interpretation of Scripture. Millard Erickson summarizes:

This distinction [the relationship between the visible church and the invisible church], which first appeared as early as Augustine, was first enunciated clearly by Martin Luther and then incorporated by John Calvin into his theology as well. It was Luther's way of dealing with the apparent discrepancies between the qualities of the church as we find them laid out in Scripture and the characteristics of the empirical church, as it actually exists on earth. He suggested that the true church consists only of the justified, those savingly related to God. (Christian Theology, 966)

Thus, when Luther described the Church as the congregation of the justified and Calvin as the sum total of God's elect throughout time, known only to God (2 Tim 2:19) and marked by the true preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments, they did so with reference to Augustine as the patristic foundation and chief proponent of this teaching and the interpretation of Scripture on which it is based. This claim is more striking than it might seem at first. Did Augustine really espouse a prototypical form of the invisible-visible church distinction which would only be taken up and given its proper place a thousand years later by the reformers?

The father of the west states something like this idea in his work On Christian Doctrine 3.32 (actually in the context of describing the seven "rules" or teachings of the heretic Tichonius, but he seems to be in agreement about the rules themselves). He writes:

The second rule is about the twofold division of the body of the Lord; but this indeed is not a suitable name, for that is really no part of the body of Christ which will not be with Him in eternity. We ought, therefore, to say that the rule is about the true and the mixed body of the Lord, or the true and the counterfeit, or some such name; because, not to speak of eternity, hypocrites cannot even now be said to be in Him, although they seem to be in His Church. And hence this rule might be designated thus: Concerning the mixed Church. Now this rule requires the reader to be on his guard when Scripture, although it has now come to address or speak of a different set of persons, seems to be addressing or speaking of the same persons as before, just as if both sets constituted one body in consequence of their being for the time united in a common participation of the sacraments. An example of this is that passage in the Song of Solomon, I am black, but comely, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon. (Song of Songs 1:5) For it is not said, I was black as the tents of Kedar, but am now comely as the curtains of Solomon. The Church declares itself to be at present both; and this because the good fish and the bad are for the time mixed up in the one net. (Matthew 13:47-48) For the tents of Kedar pertain to Ishmael, who shall not be heir with the son of the free woman. (Galatians 4:30) And in the same way, when God says of the good part of the Church, I will bring the blind by a way that they knew not; I will lead them in paths that they have not known; I will make darkness light before them, and crooked things straight: these things will I do unto them, and not forsake them; (Isaiah 42:16) He immediately adds in regard to the other part, the bad that is mixed with the good, They shall be turned back. Now these words refer to a set of persons altogether different from the former; but as the two sets are for the present united in one body, He speaks as if there were no change in the subject of the sentence. They will not, however, always be in one body; for one of them is that wicked servant of whom we are told in the gospel, whose lord, when he comes, shall cut him asunder and appoint him his portion with the hypocrites. (Matthew 24:50-51)

Elsewhere, in On Baptism 5.27, he writes that the presence of both the godly and the ungodly in the Church at the present time does not falsify Scriptures testifying to the purity and holiness of the Church, as they are speaking of the predestined, those whom God knows are his:

And in that the Church is thus described in the Song of Songs, "A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed, a well of living water; your plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits;" (Song of Songs 4:12-13) I dare not understand this save of the holy and just,— not of the covetous, and defrauders, and robbers, and usurers, and drunkards, and the envious, of whom we yet both learn most fully from Cyprian's letters, as I have often shown, and teach ourselves, that they had baptism in common with the just, in common with whom they certainly had not Christian charity. For I would that some one would tell me how they "crept into the garden enclosed and the fountain sealed," of whom Cyprian bears witness that they renounced the world in word and not in deed, and that yet they were within the Church. For if they both are themselves there, and are themselves the bride of Christ, can she then be as she is described "without spot or wrinkle," (Ephesians 5:27) and is the fair dove defiled with such a portion of her members? Are these the thorns among which she is a lily, as it is said in the same Song? (Song of Songs 2:2) ... The number, therefore, of the just persons, "who are the called according to His purpose," (Romans 8:28) of whom it is said, "The Lord knows them that are His," (2 Timothy 2:19) is itself "the garden enclosed, the fountain sealed, a well of living water, the orchard of pomegranates with pleasant fruits." ... For, in that unspeakable foreknowledge of God, many who seem to be without are in reality within, and many who seem to be within yet really are without. Of all those, therefore, who, if I may so say, are inwardly and secretly within, is that "enclosed garden" composed, "the fountain sealed, a well of living water, the orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits."

Augustine seems to be making exactly the same distinction that the reformers did, between a visible Church composed of a mixture of true and false believers, of the predestined and the reprobate (it bears reminding that predestination was one of the areas in which Augustine departed from the consensus of the rest of the patristic fathers) and the true Church composed of those whom God knows are his. Like Calvin, he cites 2 Timothy 2:19 in support of this idea; he also draws from the imagery of the parables of the wheat and the weeds (Matthew 13:24-30) and the dragnet (Matthew 13:47-50) to describe the present Church as a mixture of those who will be welcomed into the Kingdom and those who will be turned away at the last judgment.

Yet if you look at the context in which Augustine utilized this picture of the Church, you see that he did so in a way that differs sharply from the reformers. Augustine was responding to the claims of the Donatists, a schismatic, rigorist Christian sect (to which Tichonius somewhat inconsistently belonged) that held that the Church had to be holy, composed of saints rather than sinners, and that its very unity and catholicity depended on its holiness. They believed that the Church at-large had fallen into corruption and abandoned the true faith, except of course for the Donatist churches, by receiving and restoring traditores, Christians who had handed over copies of the Scriptures to escape persecution. They believed that this and other serious sins disqualified a Christian from roles of leadership, even after penance; any sacraments administered by a traditor bishop were invalid, and churches under the authority of traditores were not part of the one Church. The Church, to be holy, had to be led, and the grace mediated through the sacraments administered, by those who were still capable of doing so, who were not put themselves out of the Church by such sin.

In response to this, the Catholic/Orthodox (Catholodox?) Church taught that the grace mediated through the sacraments works ex opere operato, "from the work having been done"; that is, it is dependent only on the holiness of God in which the Church shares, not on the holiness of the officiant. Rather than the holiness of the Church depending on the holiness of its earthly members, Christians are made holy through their sharing in the holiness of God and his bride, the Church.

This is the context in which Augustine wrote against the Donatists. He sought to account for the apostasy and unholiness of many of the Church's members while undercutting the heretics' call to separate from the visible Church by upholding the continuing holiness of the one Church herself. In the present age, the Church is like the field in which both wheat and weeds have been sown, or the net in which both good and bad fish are caught. At the end of the age, God will separate the two, but until then, we should not be shocked that they are mixed together in one Church, and we certainly shouldn't go into schism over it! (For we will very quickly find that the new, schismatic "church" is little better) We Christians are charged with sharing in God's holiness, a project that will not be perfected in this life, yet our failures and faults do not endanger the holiness of the Church, which comes from Christ rather than her earthly members.

...and through to the Reformation

How does this bear on the reformers' use of Augustine? When he says things like "for that is really no part of the body of Christ which will not be with Him in eternity" (On Christian Doctrine 3.32), or "For in the ineffable foreknowledge of God, many who seem to be outside are actually within, just as many who seem to be within are in reality outside" (On Baptism 5.27), he certainly sounds a lot like them. Yet at the same time he vigorously opposed the possibility of schism from the visible Church, which he certainly still considered to be essentially one. His description of the Church as the collection of the predestined was not used to justify the division of the visible Church while affirming its continuing, invisible unity, but to affirm its visible and invisible unity in spite of the unholiness of its members. The Church may be a mixture of light and dark in its worldly existence, yet it remains one. Jaroslav Pelikan writes in his history of Christian doctrine:

[Augustine's] definition of the church as the "number of the predestined" was to figure prominently in the polemics of the late Middle Ages and the Reformation against the institutional church, but in Augustine's theology it has precisely the opposite function. It enabled him to accept a distinction between the members of the empirical catholic church and the company of those who would be saved, while at the same time he insisted that the empirical catholic church was the only one in which salvation was dispensed; 'for it is the church that gives birth to all.' Although God predestined, 'we, on the basis of what each man is right now, inquire whether today they are to be counted as members of the church.' It was to the church as now constituted that one was to look for grace, for guidance, and for authority. Those who accepted 'the authority of the Scriptures as preeminent' should also acknowledge 'that authority which from the time of the [earthly] presence of Christ, through the dispensation of the apostles and through a regular succession of bishops in their seats, has been preserved to our own day throughout the world.' (1.303)

Briefly applying this to the parables of Christ that Augustine draws from, we note that in both parables, the ones who draw the distinction between good seed and bad, or between good fish and bad, and who carry out the work of separating between the two, are God and his angels (13:37,39,49)—and this separation happens at the end of the age. (vv. 40,49) In the parable of the wheat, the sower (God) warns his harvesters (the angels) against gathering up the weeds prematurely, because they might uproot some of the wheat with them. (That is, seeking to weed out false Christians at the present might bring about the loss of some who would otherwise have found salvation)

Thus the end of the age, the final harvest, is when the present impurity of the earthly Church, the presence of hypocrites and the unholy within and of the righteous without, will be fully resolved, and the Church as a whole will at last be "on earth as it is in heaven". Those who, like the Donatists, attempt to purify the Church through schism are attempting to carry out the judgment God will perform at the end of the age, before the appointed time and with their own limited human knowledge and wisdom. Thus Augustine's distinction between true and false members of the body of Christ, far from justifying any attempt to separate out the two through schism, would instead condemn such efforts as a betrayal of the unity of the Church and a usurpation of God's role as judge.

Thus I think that Augustine's argument, when read in its context, argues against his later use by the reformers rather than supporting it. In fact, the interpretation used by the early Protestants, that the true Church is the number of God's elect regardless of visible church affiliation, would have played right into the Donatists' hands, justifying their split from the catholic Church to escape what they saw as its apostasy (while maintaining their membership in the invisible Church) rather than militating against it. Fr. Stephen Freeman, who has lately been blogging on ecumenism and the unity of the Church, writes that although the idea of a "hidden Church" consisting only of the truly faithful known only to God dates at least back to Augustine as we have just seen, the novelty introduced by the Reformation is that "for the first time, this collection is abstracted from the actual, historical manifestation of the Church." The adjective "faithful", in Protestant usage, loses its specific foundation in the apostolic faith of the one historic Church and takes on a much more nebulous, generalized meaning (that still somehow excludes Catholics).

In significant ways, then, the early reformers resembled their chosen church father Augustine less than they did the Donatists that he rebuked. Yet they also differed in other ways, which would prove to be problematic as well. Chief among these is the fact that the Donatists still considered the Church to be visible and one; they simply considered themselves to be the last faithful remnant of it. In the later Chalcedonian and Great Schisms as well, both parties considered themselves to be the continuation of the one indivisible Church—in accordance with their common ecclesiology, albeit in contradiction to each others' claims. But with the Reformation (and the figures preceding it, like Wycliffe and Hus) we see something new. Though the unity of the Church is still seen as essential to its nature in some way, this apparently no longer prevents it from being disrupted or broken.

At the dawning of the sixteenth century, in spite of the corruption that prevailed in many quarters, and of the many voices clamoring for reformation, there was general agreement among Christians that the church was in essence one, and that its unity must be seen in its structure and hierarchy. ... Most of the major Protestant leaders did believe that the unity of the Church was essential to its nature, and that therefore, although it was temporarily necessary to break that unity in order to be faithful to the Word of God, that their very faithfulness demanded that all possible efforts be made to regain their lost unity. (Justo Gonzalez, The Story of Christianity 1.163)

To a classical Christian, the possibility of breaking the unity of the one body of Christ would have been unthinkable, impossible, precisely because that unity is essential to what the Church is. But not so anymore. Instead of one of its basic, defining traits, after the Reformation the unity of the Church becomes an ideal to strive for, desirable but not currently realized. Later movements like the Disciples of Christ and the modern ecumenical movement would do just that. Pelikan contrastingly describes Augustine's theology thus:

Unity, on the other hand, was not the final result of a long process of growth, but the immediate and necessary corollary of grace. 'If baptism is the sacrament of grace while the grace itself is the abolition of sins, then the grace of baptism is not presence among heretics (although baptism is). Thus there is one baptism and one church, just as there is one faith.' The one sin that threatened the church [during the Donatist crisis] was not the adultery or even the private apostasy of a bishop, but schism. (Pelikan 1.311)

If I had to briefly summarize the difference between Augustine's ecclesiology and its later use by the reformers, I would put it this way: Augustine drew his distinction between the visible, mixed Church and the invisible, true Church in the context of a strong affirmation of the essential unity of the Church in order to oppose a schism. The reformers picked it up in the context of at least a practical denial of the essential unity of the Church in order to justify many schisms.

Consequences of an essentially invisible Church

This shift in ecclesiology had the effect of relativizing (or outright ignoring) the promises of classical ecclesiology as they pertained to the visible Church: it was no longer essentially, indivisibly one, only the invisible, "true" Church was. This invisible Church was also no longer related in any definite way to the visible one. There was not even one particular visible church body; any body meeting certain criteria or possessing certain "marks" was believed to be a manifestation of the invisible, true Church. In this way, it was believed, the Church remained one, holy, catholic, and apostolic, despite the increasing divisions being wrought in its visible outworking.

For although the sad devastation which everywhere meets our view may proclaim that no Church remains, let us know that the death of Christ produces fruit, and that God wondrously preserves his Church, while placing it as it were in concealment. (Calvin, Institutes IV.1.2)

In concealment, but also in abstraction. Freeman comments: "For the modern world has completely re-thought the matter of the Christian Church, and the state of things today is the result. In particular, modern Christians have largely lost the ability to think of the Church as “One,” in any way that is not a vague, nebulous unity of abstraction." Insisting that the Church is one in some invisible, abstract way cannot but alter our working definition of "unity", generalizing it until it means little more than a sentiment of warm-heartedness, mutual appreciation, or willingness to cooperate, expressed by gestures of hospitality like joint prayer, the sharing of preachers, and open communion. Just as I was composing this, Peter Enns articulated the same sort of difference between unity in general and unity in particular: "When we are talking 'general' unity, it’s all good. But when we get to specifics, things get awkward." No amount of wordplay can change the fact that the invisible Church of the modern world is not "One" or "united" in any way remotely resembling how the ancient Church was. Freeman continues in a follow-up post:

My writing painfully about the meaning of union and the One Church, is not to argue about the status of various Christian “Churches.” ... Rather, it is first to return the meaning of “One Church” to its proper place, with all of the pain and scandal that attends it. The One Church is ultimately found in One Cup, and there, only through true repentance and acceptance of the fullness of the faith. And if we are not there, then at least we must say so and cry out to God. He gives grace to the humble and resists the proud. It is beyond arrogance to say we are one when we are not. There can be no communion in a lie, or only a communion of death.

Another effect of this new ecclesiology is that it subjectivizes membership in the Church. The marks used to identify the presence of this Church, like sincere and true preaching of the Scriptures, the right administration of the sacraments, belief in some "essential" Christian doctrines, or simply an authentic, heart-felt inner faith are all just that—subjectively discerned. They cannot simply be seen; they have to be evaluated. Different groups will evaluate them differently. The turmoil and conflicts of the early Reformation make this abundantly clear; Calvin would not have included Catholic churches as manifestations of the true Church, and were they following his criteria Catholics would likely not have said the same of Reformed churches either. Membership in the true Church (or equivalently, being "saved" or simply being a "true Christian") all become subjectively defined, invisible even to the individual in question, a matter of opinion, a value judgment. It becomes impossible to speak of the extent of the Church without making at least an implicit pronouncement on the state of the faith of others.

One last consequence is the multiplication of visible divisions in the church(es). In his extensive analysis, The Unintended Reformation, Brad S. Gregory writes that "having rejected the authority of the Roman church, Protestants shared no institutions or authorities in common to which they could turn to resolve disputes among themselves." (369) In the case of a disagreement on doctrine or practice, the easiest and most natural course of action was no longer to have a council or bishop adjudicate and expect both parties to abide by their decision, but simply to let them go their separate ways, believing and worshipping according to their consciences while still remaining somehow "one". So with Luther and Zwingli, so with the magisterial reformers and the early Anabaptists, so with the colonists who fled to American to practice their religion in peace. As I said in my last post on the subject, the Donatist controversy (and every other controversy in the early Church) would have ended very differently if this approach had been the prevalent one; there would probably still be a Donatist church (or churches) to this day. In such a system heresies can no longer be silenced; instead they simply continue coexisting separately alongside the parent church that turned them out, claiming to still be part of the same invisible Church. And who can tell them differently? Pelikan, describing the Catholic Church's rebuttal to Jan Hus' view of the Church, writes: "For while it was true that the predestinate were the ones who made the church 'the true body of Christ,' the Hussite definition would destroy all certainty about the church and with it all ability to function in the church." (4.75-76) There is certainly truth to such concerns.

On a more personal level, the subjectivism and fissiparousness of invisible-church ecclesiology gave rise to the "sea of relativism" I felt trapped in while seeking answers to my questions about the Bible—how to read and apply it, its place in the Christian faith, its relation to Jesus as the Word of God—and the gospel—atonement, the relationship between faith and works, Paul's view on the law, and the basic nature of salvation.  I was confused and questioning all of these things, and there were no definite answers that I could see, only a multiplicity of possibilities and Christian traditions I could turn to in order to validate them. Which one represented the truth? I couldn't see any way to tell, and they couldn't all be right. I saw no choice but to search for the truth on my own, independently of any church tradition, acutely aware of the implicit individualism of this quest. All I had to show for it were possibilities and theories, ideals that were much better represented in Christian academia than any church I knew of. Any faith I constructed from my readings and theologizings would be little more than a cognitive web of ideas more of my own creation than God's, a far cry from the all-embracing life that the Christian faith is supposed to be.

Excursus: The branch theory

I only briefly touched on the branch theory in my last post. Basically, it is a theory within Anglican theology that the three major Christian communions claiming apostolic succession (Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy, and the Anglican Communion) do not truly represent schisms in the Church, but rather are "branches" of the one holy catholic and apostolic Church. This theory is a non-starter for Orthodox theology for several reasons.

1. It is even more innovative than the invisible-church theory; I have never heard anyone claim it dates back to before the nineteenth century, let alone that it was taught in the early Church. This inspires little confidence that it is not also an attempt to explain the visible division of the Christian churches and avoid the need to rejoin the Catholics (or Orthodox).
2. It also strains and abstractifies the definition of "unity" just as much as the invisible-church theory. In what meaningful, concrete sense can church bodies that deny each other communion and teach radically different faiths (in the case of Anglicanism, there are radical internal differences between the evangelical and Anglo-catholic wings, precipitating the archbishop's recent decision to reorganize the Communion into a looser affiliation) constitute one Church? The Catholic author Adrian Fortescue rightly writes of the Eastern Orthodox: "The idea of a church made up of mutually excommunicate bodies that teach different articles of faith and yet altogether form one Church is as inconceivable to them as it is to us [Catholics]." To both of these churches, "faith" does not describe a sentiment or general conviction; it is specific and content-laden. Fr. Freeman explains: "the One Church had always known what 'faithful' meant. It meant to accept without reservation the one faith of the one Church and to live in conformity with her canons and teachings. This was the ship of salvation established by Christ."
3. Its opening admission that the Church has fallen into schism within itself amounts to an outright denial of its unity.

The fullness of him who fills all in all

To (re)introduce the Orthodox perspective on the nature of the Church, I'll quote Bishop Kallistos Ware at length, who says it much better than I can (with my own comments interspersed).

The Church—the icon of the Trinity, the Body of Christ, the fullness of the Spirit—is both visible and invisible, divine and human. It is visible, for it is composed for specific congregations, worshipping here on earth; it is invisible, for it also includes the saints and the angels. It is human, for its earthly members are sinners; it is divine, for it is the Body of Christ. There is no separation between the visible and the invisible, between (to use western terminology) the Church militant and the Church triumphant, for the two make up a single and continuous reality. "The Church visible, or upon earth, lives in complete communion and unity with the whole body of the Church, of which Christ is the Head.' it stands at a point of intersection between the Present Age and the Age to Come, and it lives in both Ages at once.

Ware recognizes Augustine's distinction between the visible and invisible dimensions of the one Church while expanding them both. The Church is visible, earthly, human, and mixed, but it is also invisible, heavenly, divine, and pure. Before it was ever used to argue against the invisible-church theory, the dogma of the unity of the Church was an affirmation of the indivisibility of these two realities of the Church. The key to this unity, as Ware argues at the end of this paragraph, is eschatology: at present, the Church is still a work in progress, but viewed through the lens of eschatology the Church is glorified and perfect. But that contrast isn't the end of it: Orthodox believe that through the incarnation, through the cross and the resurrection in particular, the eschaton, the age to come, the End (see Rev 21:6) has broken into the present, and that in the Church these two realities exist on top of one another. Fr. Freeman puts it this way: "[Christ's prayer 'that they may all be one'] is a prayer that will indeed have an eschatological fulfillment: 'All things will be gathered together in one…' But in Christ, the Eschaton has already come. We may eat and drink of that One and become the life of the One fulfilled in this world."

Orthodoxy, therefore, while using the phrase 'the Church visible and invisible', insists always that there are not two Churches, but one. As Khomiakov said:

"It is only in relation to man that it is possible to recognize a division of the Church into visible and invisible; its unity is, in reality, true and absolute. Those who are alive on earth, those who have fulfilled their earthly course, those who, like the angels, were not created for a life on earth, those in future generations who have not yet begun their earthly course, are all united together in one Church, in one and the same grace of God ... The Church, the Body of Christ, manifests forth and fulfils itself in time, without changing its essential unity or inward life of grace. And therefore, when we speak of 'the Church visible and invisible', we so speak only in relation to man."

The Church, according to Khomiakov, is accomplished on earth without losing its essential characteristics. This is a cardinal point in Orthodox teaching. Orthodoxy does not believe merely in an ideal Church, invisible and heavenly. This 'ideal Church' exists visible on earth as a concrete reality.

This is, roughly, how Orthodox account for the present discrepancy between the visible imperfection of the Church and the language of perfection applied to her in the Scriptures. It is not that only the invisible Church is the true one, and visible gatherings of truly faithful Christians, regardless of church affiliation, are manifestations of it (this explanation reeks of Platonic dualism). Because the end of the ages has come upon us (1 Cor 10:11) in the form of the resurrected Lord, it is possible to affirm that the visible, human, concrete Church is, by the sacramental grace of God, already the eschatological, purified bride of Christ. Through our present, visible participation in the concrete Church we are blessed to be able to join in the heavenly worship offered to God by the angels in the heavenly Church, for these two Churches are one. To separate them because of that which is passing away is to redefine the Church on our own, human terms.

How can this mysterious union of this age and the age to come be? The Incarnation shows how:

Yet Orthodoxy tries not to forget that there is a human element in the Church as well as a divine. The dogma of Chalcedon must be applied to the Church as well as to Christ, Just as Christ the God-man has two natures, divine and human, so in the Church there is a synergy or co-operation between the divine and the human.

Here Ware describes the analogy between the incarnate Christ and the Church, his body. The Church is both fully divine and fully human in something like the way that Jesus is (and the Scriptures as well). There is thus a congruency between ecclesiology and Christology. Vladimir Lossky fleshes this out further, describing the invisible-church theory as the ecclesiological analogue of the Nestorian heresy:

The Church, in its Christological aspect, appears as an organism having two natures, two operations and two wills. In the history of Christian dogma all the Christological heresies come to life anew and reappear with reference to the Church. Thus, there arises a Nestorian ecclesiology, the error of those who would divide the Church into distinct beings: on the one hand the heavenly and invisible Church, alone true and absolute; on the other, the earthly Church (or rather 'the churches') imperfect and relative, wandering in the shadows, human societies seeking to draw near, so far as is possible for them, to that transcendent perspective. (The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, 186)

He goes on to describe a monophysite ecclesiology as the divinization of every detail of the Church and resultant inflexibility (as seen in the old believer schism), a monothelite ecclesiology ("a negation of the economy of the Church in regard to the external world"), and its opposite, an over-readiness to compromise and sacrifice the truth in order to adapt to the external world. But just as Christ is fully God and fully man "unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably" and without denigrating either nature, so the one Church is both visible and invisible, earthly and heavenly, of this age and the age to come.

Ware continues to describe the mystery:

Yet between Christ's humanity and that of the Church there is this obvious difference, that the one is perfect and sinless, while the other is not yet fully so. Only a part of the humanity of the Church—the saints in heaven—has attained perfection, while here on earth the Church's members often misuse their human freedom. The Church on earth exists in a state of tension: it is already the body of Christ, and thus perfect and sinless, and yet, since its members are imperfect and sinful, it must continually become what it is. [Footnote: 'This idea of "becoming what you are" is the key to the whole eschatological teaching of the New Testament']

But human sin cannot affect the essential nature of the Church. We must not say that because Christians on earth sin and are imperfect, therefore the Church sins and is imperfect, for the Church, even on earth, is a thing of heaven and cannot sin. How is it that the members of the Church are sinners, and yet they belong in the communion of saints? 'The mystery of the Church consists in the very fact that together sinners become something different from what they are as individuals; this "something different" is the Body of Christ.

So I was wrong last time when I said that the Church does not basically consist of people. It does, yet because of its incarnational, eschatological nature, its essential nature as the one holy catholic and apostolic body of Christ is not damaged or destroyed by the impurity of its earthly members.

Such is the way in which Orthodoxy approaches the mystery of the Church. The Church is integrally linked with God. It is a new life according to the image of the Holy Trinity, a life in Christ and in the Holy Spirit, a life realized by participation in the sacraments. The Church is a single reality, earthly and heavenly, visible and invisible, human and divine.

This paragraph beautifully summarizes the reality of the Church and how its unity fits seamlessly into this. The late Fr. Thomas Hopko similarly writes: "Within the unity of the Church man is what he is created to be and can grow for eternity in divine life in communion with God through Christ in the Holy Spirit. The unity of the Church is not broken by time or space and is not limited merely to those alive upon the earth. The unity of the Church is the unity of the Blessed Trinity and of all of those who live with God: the holy angels, the righteous dead, and those who live upon the earth according to the commandments of Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit."

To finish the Ware quote:

'The Church is one. Its unity follows of necessity from the unity of God.' So wrote Khomiakov in the opening words of his famous essay. If we take seriously the bond between God and His Church, then we must inevitably think of the Church as one, even as God is one: there is only one Christ, and so there can be only one Body of Christ. Nor is this unity merely ideal and invisible; Orthodox theology refuses to separate the 'invisible' and the 'visible Church', and therefore it refuses to say that the Church is invisibly one but visibly divided. No: the Church is one, in the sense that here on earth there is a single, visible community which alone can claim to be the true Church. The 'undivided Church' is not merely something that existed in the past, and which we hope will exist again in the future; it is something that exists here and now. Unity is one of the essential characteristics of the Church, and since the Church on earth, despite the sinfulness of its members, retains its essential characteristics, it remains and always will remain visibly one. There can be schisms from the Church, but no schisms within the Church. And while it is undeniably true that, on a purely human level, the Church's life is grievously impoverished as a result of schisms, yet such schisms cannot affect the essential nature of the Church.

Hopefully this sets Ware's closing affirmation, that there can be schisms from the Church but not within it, in its proper context. The unity of the body of Christ precludes not only the possibility of it being divided into pieces (or branches), but also the separation of its visible and invisible (or present and eschatological, or divine and human, or earthly and heavenly) dimensions. It is this very unity that assures its holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity; when we worship with the Church, we can be confident that we worship in the fullness of the faith once delivered, not merely in an imperfect human attempt to reconstruct it. The Church and membership in it are objectively, visibly defined; there is no room for ambiguity or controversy about what and where the Church is. This averts the consequences of the invisible-church theory I have described.

I would argue that this perspective on the Church resembles that of Augustine much more than the invisible-church theory. It does not legitimate schism; it denies the possibility of it, just as he did. It distinguishes between the visible and invisible dimensions of the Church as he did, while denying that they should or can be separated. It does not call for speculation into the state of other believers in order to trace the extent of the Church, but arises from the humility that views oneself as the worst all sinners. As Augustine said, "we, on the basis of what each man is right now, inquire whether today they are to be counted as members of the church." And if I, the first of the sinners, am counted worthy to be a member of the Church, how can I judge anyone else who has not put himself out of the body as unworthy? Of course, Augustine's perspective differs from that of the rest of the fathers in his one-sided approach to predestination and particular use of it when describing the invisible Church, as is well-known, but this does not invalidate his point.

Some closing questions

Why is all this important?
Why am I spilling all this virtual ink on a subject that I've already covered? In part, to show how it is possible to have very diverse views on something while affirming the same foundational statement ("one holy catholic and apostolic Church") about it. Though its adherents might claim to affirm the Creed, the invisible-church theory is an innovation; it is not how Christians have viewed the Church from the beginning, but rather uses familiar language to say something new. I have tried to express this as clearly as possible. This difference is not trivial; if one theory is true, the other cannot be.

With that said, perhaps the biggest reason I find the Orthodox teaching on the unity of the Church compelling is that it makes that unity so much more meaningful and coherent. It is no longer an abstraction, and neither is the Church. It now means something concrete to say that the Church is one: it is one body, praying and teaching one faith, united to God and the whole communion of saints through its eucharistic union with Christ by means of the One Cup, as Fr. Freeman was quoted as saying earlier. As well, this unity harmonizes perfectly, dare I say beautifully, with the unity of God, of Christ (whose body it is), of his humanity and divinity, of the Holy Spirit indwelling it.

Compared to this, the invisible-church theory feels like a compromise, a consolation, a quasi-Platonic denial of the reality of the visible disunity in favor of an intangible "spiritual" unity. Yet at the same time, no one would have adopted it without first concluding that the Church is visibly divided (else there would be nothing to explain)—the result of a judgment based too much on external impressions rather than faith in the unity of God. Yet Paul writes, "From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh." (2 Cor 5:16) This interpretation places strain on the very concepts of "one" or "unity". It does not integrate seamlessly with the unity of God and the incarnation. How can the body of Christ be spiritually one yet visibly divided? No, there is not one invisible, spiritual Church that we must find and convince ourselves has remained whole through all the denominational divisions; there is one particular, visible, incarnational Church, and so there has been from the beginning.

Isn't it arrogant to claim that your church is the One True Church?
Something I should have made clear to my Protestant friends a long time ago: My claim to be joining the "one holy catholic and apostolic Church" (which does implicitly exclude your church) is not a claim about the authenticity of your personal faith or salvation in any way, though I think it is often taken that way. Again, Orthodoxy strongly discourages speculation about the authenticity of the faith of others; first remove the plank from your own eye. Nor is it a claim that the Orthodox Church is somehow "better" or "truer" than the visible church body you are a part of. (Though I have definitely been guilty of this in the past) A few months ago Fr. Freeman wrote strikingly about Orthodox triumphalism:

the Orthodox Church is not better than some other Church. If you declare such a thing to be true, then you have actually denied the truth of Orthodoxy. We believe the Church to be One. We believe the Church is One because God is One. And, as in the case of God, it is One of which there is not two. If Orthodoxy is The Church, then it’s not the better Church. It is not something that can be compared to anything else. ... As soon as comparisons are made, the Church is reduced to one among the many and the concept of “many churches” is granted, denying the declaration of the Creed. The Orthodox Church is not better – it simply is what it is.

In other words, the Orthodox Church does not somehow gain the "right" to call itself the one Church through any sort of comparison process with any other Church, like you might apply when selecting a church. It confesses that there is no other Church, nor can there be. It does not become the one Church by qualifying for the honor, nor by meeting any sort of criteria or by the possession of particular "marks". It simply is what it is, and it always has been. Ware fleshes this claim out more:

Orthodoxy, believing that the Church on earth has remained and must remain visibly one, naturally also believes itself to be that one visible Church. This is a bold claim, and to many it will seem an arrogant one; but this is to misunderstand the spirit in which it is made. Orthodox believe that they are the true Church, not on account of any personal merit, but by the grace of God. They say with St. Paul, 'We are no better than pots of earthenware to contain this treasure; the sovereign power comes from God and not from us' (2 Corinthians iv, 7). But while claiming no credit for themselves, Orthodox are in all humility convinced that they have received a precious and unique gift from God; and if they pretended to others that they did not possess this gift, they would be guilty of an act of betrayal in the sight of heaven. (The Orthodox Church 246)

It actually feels liberating not to have to argue that the status of the Orthodox Church makes it "better" or "truer" than all other churches. There is plenty that is regrettable in the Church's history, and plenty that is praiseworthy in other communions, but this is because of the liberality and uncontainability of grace, not because of any abstraction of the Church. Orthodox are primarily interested in defining where the Church is, not identifying places where it isn't. Orthodoxy prefers to pay focus on the center of the Church (that is, Christ) rather than nail down its precise boundaries.

How do I view concerns for the unity of the Church as a questioning Protestant?
I still remember how ardently concerned I used to be for this thing call "church unity". I was deeply concerned with all the ugly conflicts, the misunderstandings, not to mention the differences in teaching and practice among those calling themselves Christians. I believed, as I still do, that it harms and hinders the witness of all Christians to the world. I dreamed of the healing of these divisions and how I could possibly be a part of it. Yet my concern sprang from my trusting my own impressions of disunity and division rather than the promises of God and the biblical account of the nature of the Church. Like so many others, I believed that the promised original unity of the Church was merely incidental, something that human error had since broken and that needed to be put back together again.

I am relieved that I was mistaken. There's no doubt that the urgency of my earlier ecumenical concerns has lessened as a result, but I still identify with Paul's wish "that there be no divisions among you, but that you be joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment" (1 Cor 1:10)—though in my actions I feel like I work to subvert that harmony as often as I build it up. There is a certainly nothing wrong with the measures I used to have in mind for healing divisions among the churches, like increased cooperation and more-aligned teaching between denominations and communions, but these advances cannot create the organic, one-body unity that Orthodox see in the Church. Again, the unity of the Church is not a project or an ideal, something future that one day may be accomplished. It is an eternal reality, a consequence of the oneness of God. The most "ecumenical" gesture I or any Christian can make is to simply join it, not to try to recreate it.

How would I answer my lingering doubts on the unity of the Church from last time?
The Chalcedonian and Great Schisms certainly stand as the most convincing counterexamples to the teaching I have presented. All of the parties involved agree that these schisms weren't qualitatively different than others, they didn't actually break the Church in two; they only differ in scale, and the fact that both sides of the schisms have continued existing as separate churches into the present. This continuation of both sides of a schism raises the natural question: how do Orthodox, or Catholics, or the Oriental Orthodox, or any church with apostolic succession know that theirs is the true Church and not the schismatic one? Don't their symmetrical claims cancel or disprove each other?

I don't think it's possible to "prove" which church is in the right, or these schisms would not have lasted so long. Does this mean these churches are stuck in the same sea of relativism that Protestants are? I don't think so. All of them still believe in the essential, incarnational unity of the Church. Their competing claims by no means entail that they are all wrong and that Protestant ecclesiology is right; their continuing agreement on the visible unity of the Church only strengthens the case for the truth of the teaching. In his latest post on unity and "un-ecumenism", Fr. Freeman writes:

Those who stand outside of Orthodoxy and point to the schisms between the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox, or the schism with the Roman Catholics, fail to understand what they see. Those schisms are real and they are indeed problems. But in each case, those involved have not renounced the reality of the One Church, nor the sacramental life of the One Cup. The schisms are something to be healed and are treated with great seriousness. But there can only be a true restoration of communion and union in the One Church. It is the very nature of that one life [that] is being preserved and proclaimed, even in the face of schism. If you will, the language and grammar of the One Church is spoken fluently in those ancient groups. Conversations are therefore possible. If, for example, a path of union were found between the Oriental and Orthodox Christians, it would not involve re-teaching the entire nature of what it means to be a Christian and what the character of that life looks like. Both speak the language of union.

There is no (or at least less) subjectivity in choosing between these churches because they all continue to believe that your choice between them matters. It matters immensely. You aren't simply choosing a visible church body that fits your convictions, conscience, and preferences while participating in the invisible Church through your authentic individual faith the whole time. You are searching for the one holy catholic and apostolic (and visible) Church. Catholics and both kinds of Orthodox all agree that only one of them can be it. Choose wisely.

With that said, I can at least give my reasons for choosing as I have. As a result of better communication, the growing consensus among Orthodox (confirmed by several meetings in the second half of the twentieth century) is that the schism with the Oriental Orthodox has been a 1500-year misunderstanding. There is no real disagreement between the churches, only the use of different words to express the same reality regarding Christ's humanity and divinity. They hold the same faith as the Orthodox Church, which would make a reunion a mere formality. And hopes for reunion are high, especially with the upcoming council next year. So it is actually possible (and hopefully the case) that the choice between Eastern and Oriental Orthodoxy (yes, the names mean the same thing) really doesn't matter, not any more than the choice between (say) the Greek or Russian Orthodox Churches matters. Perhaps if I'd read a book by an Oriental Orthodox first, I would be joining them instead. As it is, I look forward with hope to seeing the schism closed.

The Orthodox Church's differences with Rome are much better established and unlikely to be downgraded to a misunderstanding anytime soon. I believe the Orthodox Church has preserved the apostolic faith free from western distortions like the papacy and the Filioque; it is much easier for me to believe that these things are later additions to the faith (no one disputes the dating of the Filioque) than parts of the apostolic deposit. I don't think I should have to argue this point very rigorously to my predominantly Protestant audience. As well, the Orthodox Church has been preserved from the overriding rationalism and widespread corruption that gave birth to the Reformation, and through it modernity.

This post has gone on more than long enough. I'll close with one last extended quote by Cyprian of Carthage, a third-century bishop who wrote regarding a schism that broke out in his own diocese. As usual for the fathers, there is no hint that the unity of the Church only applies to its invisible dimension, or that the visible and invisible dimensions can be held apart at all. Rather, he presses hard for the essential unity of the Church with a variety of analogies, some of them quite beautiful—the marriage analogy, which I didn't have time to get into at present, is especially worth considering. More recent Orthodox don't share his hardliner attitude toward schismatics (it is directed at those who actually incite schisms, and tends to have the opposite of the intended effect on non-Orthodox Christians today), but his theological points stand.

Does he who does not hold this unity of the Church think that he holds the faith? Does he who strives against and resists the Church trust that he is in the Church, when moreover the blessed Apostle Paul teaches the same thing, and sets forth the sacrament of unity, saying, “There is one body and one spirit, one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God?” (Eph 4:4)

And this unity we ought firmly to hold and assert, especially those of us that are bishops who preside in the Church, that we may also prove the episcopate itself to be one and undivided. Let no one deceive the brotherhood by a falsehood: let no one corrupt the truth of the faith by perfidious prevarication. The episcopate is one, each part of which is held by each one for the whole. The Church also is one, which is spread abroad far and wide into a multitude by an increase of fruitfulness. As there are many rays of the sun, but one light; and many branches of a tree, but one strength based in its tenacious root; and since from one spring flow many streams, although the multiplicity seems diffused in the liberality of an overflowing abundance, yet the unity is still preserved in the source. Separate a ray of the sun from its body of light, its unity does not allow a division of light; break a branch from a tree,—when broken, it will not be able to bud; cut off the stream from its fountain, and that which is cut off dries up. Thus also the Church, shone over with the light of the Lord, sheds forth her rays over the whole world, yet it is one light which is everywhere diffused, nor is the unity of the body separated. Her fruitful abundance spreads her branches over the whole world. She broadly expands her rivers, liberally flowing, yet her head is one, her source one; and she is one mother, plentiful in the results of fruitfulness: from her womb we are born, by her milk we are nourished, by her spirit we are animated.

The spouse of Christ cannot be adulterous; she is uncorrupted and pure. She knows one home; she guards with chaste modesty the sanctity of one couch. She keeps us for God. She appoints the sons whom she has born for the kingdom. Whoever is separated from the Church and is joined to an adulteress, is separated from the promises of the Church; nor can he who forsakes the Church of Christ attain to the rewards of Christ. He is a stranger; he is profane; he is an enemy. He can no longer have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother. If any one could escape who was outside the ark of Noah, then he also may escape who shall be outside of the Church. The Lord warns, saying, “He who is not with me is against me, and he who gathereth not with me scattereth.” (Mat 12:30) He who breaks the peace and the concord of Christ, does so in opposition to Christ; he who gathereth elsewhere than in the Church, scatters the Church of Christ. The Lord says, “I and the Father are one;” (Jhn 10:30) and again it is written of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, “And these three are one.” (1 Jhn 5:7) And does any one believe that this unity which thus comes from the divine strength and coheres in celestial sacraments, can be divided in the Church, and can be separated by the parting asunder of opposing wills? He who does not hold this unity does not hold God’s law, does not hold the faith of the Father and the Son, does not hold life and salvation.
...
Who, then, is so wicked and faithless, who is so insane with the madness of discord, that either he should believe that the unity of God can be divided, or should dare to rend it—the garment of the Lord—the Church of Christ? He Himself in His Gospel warns us, and teaches, saying, “And there shall be one flock and one shepherd.” (Jhn 10:16) And does any one believe that in one place there can be either many shepherds or many flocks? The Apostle Paul, moreover, urging upon us this same unity, beseeches and exhorts, saying, “I beseech you, brethren, by the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that ye all speak the same thing, and that there be no schisms among you; but that ye be joined together in the same mind and in the same judgment.” (1 Cor 1:10) And again, he says, “Forbearing one another in love, endeavouring to keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.” (Eph 4:3)

Cyprian of Carthage, On the Unity of the Church, 4-6,8