I don’t know how many of our subscribers are Orthodox Christians. But from those who are, we get frequent complaints that insufficient attention is paid that very large part of the Christian world. So here goes. The occasion is a remarkable address by Professor John H. Erickson of St. Vladimir Orthodox Seminary in Crestwood, New York, delivered at the National Workshop on Christian Unity, which met last year in San Diego, California. Erickson reports that in 1990 he opined, “The Berlin Wall fell in 1989 and with it, communism. With it also fell ecumenism as we have known it.”
The last decade, he believes, has only reinforced that judgment. The Orthodox churches of Georgia and Bulgaria have withdrawn from the World Council of Churches (WCC), and other churches are under pressure to withdraw. In 1997 at Georgetown University, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew spoke of Orthodoxy as being “ontologically different” from other churches. This is sometimes referred to as the “friends, brothers, heretics” speech. Patriarch Alexei II of Moscow remains adamantly opposed to the Pope’s visiting Russia, and his other visits have met with a very mixed reception. At St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai joint prayer was carefully avoided; in Jerusalem Patriarch Diodorus made a point of noting that he had not prayed with the Pope. (But note that, as of this writing, there are signals that the Russian Church may be weakening in its opposition to a papal visit.)
Is it the case, as Samuel (Clash of Civilizations) Huntington has said, that ecumenism was a Cold War phenomenon that has given way to the stark division between the “West” and the “Orthodox” civilization of Russia and the Balkans? Erickson writes: “Some alarming questions arise. If the Orthodox mental world is so radically different from that of the West, what implications does this have for ecumenical relations, whether globally or here in North America? What implications does this have for people like me, who call themselves Orthodox Christians and belong to Orthodox churches, but who certainly are not only in the West but also in many respects of the West? From personal experience, I can tell you that the authenticity of our Orthodoxy increasingly is being questioned, both from abroad and here as well. And another, more far”reaching question also arises: Is ecumenism”like liberal democracy and for that matter communism”in fact simply a product of the West, one of its many ideologies, whose universal claims and aspirations will inevitably fail in the emerging world order, now that Western hegemony can no longer be taken for granted, now that the legitimating myths of the Enlightenment have lost their persuasive power?”
Already in the nineteenth century, some Orthodox reached out ecumenically, mainly to Anglicans and Old Catholics. Orthodox theologians were significantly involved in Faith and Order during the interwar period. When the WCC was formed in 1948, the Soviet regime required Orthodox leaders to condemn it as part of a Western plot, but that changed dramatically in 1961. “At the New Delhi assembly of the WCC in 1961, the Orthodox churches of Eastern Europe joined the WCC en masse. Their membership was advantageous for all concerned. In various ways Orthodox membership made the WCC itself more ‘ecumenical,’ more global, more sympathetic to the diversity of situations in which Christians struggle in their witness to the gospel. At the same time, membership gave the Orthodox churches in question an opportunity to be seen in the West and gain contacts in the West, thus also raising their status back home. And the price seemed negligible. The WCC itself from the 1960s onward was becoming ever more concerned about issues like racism, liberation, and economic justice; it was especially sensitive to the strivings of churches and peoples of what was then the ‘third world.’ The Orthodox churches of Eastern Europe could express concern about such issues with little risk of running afoul of the Communist authorities back home”and indeed they might benefit by contributing in this way to building up a good image for the Socialist states, and possibly even a cadre of fellow travelers.”
“Dialogue of Love”
At Vatican Council II, the Catholic Church became ecumenically assertive; soon mutual anathemas between East and West were consigned to the memory hole and a “dialogue of love” was proclaimed. With both Catholics and the WCC, the Orthodox produced promising ecumenical statements. “But on the Orthodox side at least,” says Erickson, “this ecumenism remained at the level of professional theologians and high Church dignitaries. For the faithful in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, ecumenism brought little more than the occasional photo of the Pope greeting a prominent hierarch, or of a long row of Orthodox bishops, all with their black klobuks and jeweled panaghias and crosses, seated prominently in a WCC assembly.”
Moreover, the dialogue of love had to cope with what the Orthodox call “uniatism.” “Uniate” or “Eastern Catholic” refers, of course, to those Christians in the East who retained their liturgy and other practices while entering into full communion with Rome, beginning with the Union of Brest in 1596. “Uniate” is a term that is eschewed in polite ecumenical discourse today, but the Orthodox have a long history of resentment against what they view as Catholic poachers on their ecclesiastical turf. Erickson: “Given this troubled history, it is understandable why the Orthodox churches have viewed ‘uniatism’ as a sign of Catholic hostility towards them, as an attempt to subvert them by dividing brother from brother, and as implicit denial of their own ecclesial status. And of course it is also understandable why Eastern Catholics have resented the Orthodox for their complacent acquiescence in the suppression of the Eastern Catholic churches following World War II.” He continues: “The term ‘uniate’ itself, once used with pride in the Roman communion, had long since come to be considered as pejorative. ‘Eastern Rite Catholic’ also was no longer in vogue because it might suggest that the Catholics in question differed from Latins only in the externals of worship. The council affirmed rather that Eastern Catholics constituted churches , whose vocation was to provide a bridge to the separated churches of the East. But if, as subsequent dialogue was emphasizing, the Orthodox churches themselves are truly ‘sister churches,’ already nearly at the point of full communion with the Roman Church, what rationale”apart from purely pastoral concern for Christians who might otherwise feel alienated and possibly betrayed”can there be for the continued existence of such ‘bridge churches’?”
Animus is exacerbated by the demand of Eastern Catholics that their property, expropriated by Stalin and given to the Orthodox, be returned. The demand that all property be returned ( restitutio in integrum ) is, says Erickson, unreasonable, at least in some cases, because of demographic and other changes over the years. Then there is the matter of “proselytism.” Not only Catholics but armies of Protestant evangelizers, mainly backed by the religious groups in the U.S., are, claim the Orthodox, failing to recognize that there is an indigenous Christianity in Russia and Eastern Europe. In what Erickson calls “ecumenism as we knew it,” the Orthodox acknowledged that, while Orthodoxy actualizes the one true Church, there was a possibility of dialogue with other churches aiming at greater unity and fuller communion. Erickson writes: “But not all Orthodox would agree with these assumptions. Some would take Orthodox claims to be the one true Church in an exclusive rather than an inclusive sense, so that outside the canonical limits of the Orthodox Church as we currently perceive them there is simply undifferentiated darkness, in which the Pope is no better than a witch doctor. How are we to evaluate these conflicting views? The exclusive view today claims to represent true Orthodoxy, traditional Orthodoxy. In fact”as I could argue at greater length”this ‘traditionalist’ view is a relatively recent phenomenon, basically an eighteenth-century reaction to the equally exclusive claims advanced by the Roman Catholic Church in that period. Nevertheless this view has gained wide currency over the last decade.”
Capitulation Charged
So who is pushing this very untraditional traditionalism? “What is important to note is that those most committed to the ‘traditionalism’ they preach are not pious old ethnics and émigrés but more often zealous converts to Orthodoxy. Like Western converts to Buddhism and other more or less exotic religions (New Age, Native American . . . ), these converts are attracted by their new faith’s spirituality, which seems so unlike what the West today has to offer. They also are especially quick to adopt those elements which they deem most distinctive, most anti-Western, about their new faith”not just prayer ropes and headcoverings but also an exclusive, sectarian view of the Church that in fact is quite at odds with historic Orthodoxy. Superficially their message, proclaimed on numerous websites, may seem to be at one with that of the established, ‘canonical’ Orthodox churches”at one with some of the statements of Patriarch Bartholomew or the Russian Orthodox Church, which, as we have seen, have been critical of the WCC and the Vatican. But in fact their message is different, even radically different. Their message, in my opinion, is more a product of the late-modern or postmodern West than an expression of historic Eastern Christianity. According to them, any participation in or involvement with the WCC or similar bodies represents a capitulation to the panheresy of ecumenism; Orthodoxy’s claim to be the one true Church is relativized, a ‘branch theory’ of the Church is tacitly accepted, and church canons against prayer with heretics are repeatedly violated in practice and in principle.”
Breakthrough”and Alarm
During centuries of polemics, Rome tended to present itself as “the Universal Church,” and the only thing for others to do was to come home to Rome. In an earlier time, East and West recognized one another as “sister churches,” and that understanding, especially on the part of Rome, is making a comeback, most notably with the pontificate of John Paul II. Erickson writes: “Significantly, the expression ‘sister church’ did not cease to be used for the Western Church even after full eucharistic communion ended. For example, in 1948 Patriarch Alexei I of Moscow”certainly no great friend of the Roman Catholic Church”nevertheless could refer to it as a ‘sister church.’ What is remarkable about the use of the expression since 1963, when Patriarch Athenagoras I and Pope Paul VI reintroduced it into modern Orthodox”Roman Catholic dialogue, is not that the Orthodox should use it with reference to the Roman Church but that Rome should use it with reference to the Orthodox churches. While the precise significance and practical implications of the expression have not been fully explored”it is not, after all, a technical term in canon law”it must be acknowledged that its use by modern popes represents a remarkable breakthrough in Orthodox”Catholic relations.”
It is precisely that breakthrough that alarms the untraditional traditionalists in Orthodoxy. Many of them, Erickson notes, are drawing their polemical ammunition from apocalyptic Protestant “Bible prophecy” sources on the Internet and elsewhere. Traditionalist Orthodox employ these sources to depict everything from the New World Order and the use of contraceptives and implanted microchips to the papal “Antichrist” as signs of the final catastrophe from which their version of Orthodoxy is the only refuge. This accent on the Orthodox difference, Erickson says, has undermined ecumenism “as we knew it.” “The modern self-confidence which gave rise to the ecumenical movement in the first place”confidence in the possibility of reaching agreement and achieving unity through dialogue, common reflection, and common action”has given way to postmodern self-doubt. We are in the midst of a radical decentering in which many new voices are clamoring for recognition”and on the religious scene this means not only traditionalists and fundamentalists but also contextual theologies of many sorts. In principle this decentering should help us appreciate diversity and facilitate dialogue. But this does not seem to be happening. Instead we seem to be entering the age of the parallel monologue. What counts are my own people, my own tradition, my own group, my own orientation. Those formed by other contexts may be tolerated or even honored with faint words of praise, but they are, as it were, ‘ontologically different’ (to quote Patriarch Bartholomew’s Georgetown speech once again). They are, for me, spiritually empty. No solid basis exists for dialogue, communication, and communion.”
What has happened to Orthodoxy and ecumenism is, of course, taking place within a cultural milieu in which all differences are fundamental, and fundamental differences are assumed to be insurmountable. Erickson reports, “Recently I was speaking to a Serbian Orthodox student from Bosnia Herzegovina. He kept insisting, ‘You here in the West just do not understand our situation.’ He really was saying, ‘You cannot understand our situation”so uniquely painful is it. You”in your very different situation”are incapable of understanding our situation.’ These days many people are saying much the same thing: women, gays, people of color, the poor, those marginalized in various ways, and even white males of the West whose position in the world now seems threatened. We are all tempted to say, ‘I am situated within a unique interpretive community. I have no need for dialogue with you or anyone else. Indeed, no basis exists for dialogue with you.’”
Waiting a Thousand Years
Erickson’s conclusion offers nought for our comfort: “We may still be convinced of the desirability of Christian unity. We may even be convinced of the need for Christian unity. But how convinced are we of the possibility of Christian unity? How many of us really believe that in Christ, crucified and risen, it is possible for us to overcome division, to understand each other’s situation, to make each other’s pain and joy our own? These are the some of the questions that face each of us involved in the ecumenical movement today.”
Erickson’s essay is remarkably candid and more than bracing. It goes a long way to explain the nonresponse, indeed hostility, of the Russian Church and others to the unprecedented initiatives of John Paul II. In the 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint (That They May be One), the Pope invited others to join in rethinking the function of the papal office itself, suggesting that reconciliation is more important than questions of jurisdiction. As one Orthodox theologian told me, “We’ve been waiting a thousand years for a pope to say what he is saying. Now this Pope has said it, and we act as though nothing has happened.”
It is safe to say that the dearest hope of this Pope for his pontificate has been ecclesial reconciliation with the Orthodox, so that, as he has often put it, “the Church may again breathe with both lungs, East and West.” It is also safe to say that such reconciliation will not happen on his watch. That is very sad. We must hope, however, that the initiatives taken since the Second Vatican Council (and there have also been constructive initiatives from the Orthodox side), combined with a revival of an authentically traditional ecclesiology among the Orthodox, will in the years to come move us beyond “ecumenism as we have known it,” and beyond “parallel monologues,” to the fulfillment of Our Lord’s prayer, Ut unum sint . For all the reasons that Prof. Erickson discusses, that seems at present to be a wan hope. But then, we Christians were long ago given our instructions, and warned that we would have to walk by faith and not by sight.
The Best Bioethicists That Money Can Buy
“A bioethicist is to ethics what a whore is to sex.” That judgment by a friend who was once viewed as a pioneer of bioethics may seem somewhat harsh, but it is not entirely off the mark. This really happened: Some years ago I was on a panel at the big annual economic conference in Davos, Switzerland. Also on the panel was Nobel Laureate James Watson, then head of the Human Genome Project. I and a few others”well, I think it was one other”were pressing moral questions about the technological manipulation of human nature. Impatient with that line of inquiry, Dr. Watson”who seems not only to subscribe to but to devoutly celebrate what Jacques Ellul called the Technological Imperative”explained that nobody should worry about the morality of what they were doing since the project had allocated millions of additional dollars “to get the best ethicists that money can buy.”
A number of publications have in recent months raised sharp questions about the biotech industry and its connections with the sub-industry of bioethics. For the most part, bioethicists are in the business of issuing permission slips for whatever the technicians want to do. After all, they are in their pay. Arthur Caplan, director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Bioethics and perhaps the most quoted bioethicist in the business, thinks that criticism is unfair. He says that possible conflicts of interest can be “managed.” He funnels money from companies such as Pfizer, DuPont, and Celera into his center, and says he is amazed by colleagues who suggest that bioethicists should do pro bono work for wealthy corporations. Why do it free when they’ll pay good money for it? U.S. News & World Report says that the biomedical industry is pouring millions into bioethics centers, and rewarding academic bioethicists with stock options worth many thousands of dollars. The same ethicists are quoted daily in the media, testify in Congress, and generally assure the public that there’s nothing to worry about so long as scientific innovations are accompanied by appropriate expressions of concern by professional handwringers. “It’s an odd development,” says U.S. News , “for a profession that has no formal education or licensing requirements.”
Wesley J. Smith is author of Culture of Death: The Assault on Medical Ethics in America . He writes, “The bioethicists have set themselves up, almost like Napoleon crowning himself emperor, as the arbiters of what is moral and ethical in health care.” Daniel Callahan is cofounder of the Hastings Center, an institution that laid the groundwork for bioethics back in the sixties. “This is a semi-scandalous situation for my field,” he says. “These companies are smart enough to know that there are a variety of views on these subjects, and with a little bit of asking or shopping around you can find a group that will be congenial to what you are doing.” Carl Elliott, who succeeded Arthur Caplan at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics, says, “Personally, it seems too much like bribery. If it’s not bribery, it becomes the perception of bribery.” Caplan, on the other hand, says that apparent conflicts of interest are comparable to the problems of magazines that accept paid advertising. The main problem with corporate money in bioethics, he says, is that there’s not enough of it. Eli Lilly stopped funding the Hastings Center when its publication criticized Prozac, a Lilly product.
“There’s a risk that this kind of funding could reduce the critical edge of the field,” says Dartmouth’s Ronald Green, who chairs the ethics board at Advanced Cell Technology (ACT). ACT knows all about the cutting edge, having been at the center of recent “breakthroughs” in human cloning. As does Professor Green, who, in his extensive writing, has “redefined” death, birth, life, and the meaning of the universe, among other things. Like Prof. Caplan, he recognizes that there is a risk, but is sure it can be managed. He has, by his lights, managed very successfully. Minnesota’s Carl Elliott says the big danger is not that bioethicists get rich from companies but that they are, whether they know it or not, used. “Bioethics boards look like watchdogs,” he says, “but they are used like show dogs.”
Nigel Cameron, a bioethicist working with Charles Colson’s Wilberforce Forum, notes that bioethics is not what one would ordinarily call a discipline or profession. “Most bioethicists don’t train in bioethics. They move sideways from other disciplines”law, theology, medicine, philosophy.” The field is “perfectly designed to be the midwife for the birth of a whole posthuman future.” He notes that ethics as ordinarily understood”classical ethics, if you will-works from rules or principles to guide moral judgment. “Bioethics doesn’t like being locked into any kind of framework that would involve predictability. From a Christian or traditional perspective, it isn’t ethics at all, but uses items from the ethics toolbox so it can do what it wants in any situation.” William Saletan, a writer for the online magazine Slate , sums it up: “The slickest way to make yourself look ethical is to narrow the definition of ethics so that it won’t interfere with what you want to do. But that won’t make you ethical. It’ll just make you an ethicist.”
So what is to be done? Certainly biomedicine and biotechnology call for the most careful moral scrutiny. But whose scrutiny is to be trusted? Nobody comes to these questions, or any questions of importance, with a value-free or value-neutral perspective. But some are free of clear conflicts of interest, unlike the ethical pipers who sing the tunes of the companies that pay them. Their promiscuously issued permission slips would license almost anything, and the slips are typically accompanied by promissory notes that this innovation or that will lead to a cure for everything from Alzheimer’s and cancer to the heartbreak of psoriasis. Such promises are powerfully appealing, including, as proposed at a recent University of Pennsylvania conference, the promise of immortality.
Never mind that extravagant promissory notes have been issued for decades and are almost never redeemed. Those at the cutting edge assure us that the decisive breakthrough is just on the other side of the line that it was previously forbidden to cross. The biotech industry is driven by scientific curiosity, no doubt, but most importantly by the prospect of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. How many people of great means would be willing to pay how much for an extra ten, twenty, maybe fifty years of life? How much for the promise of immortality? And what moral lines would they, and those who make such promises, not be prepared to cross?
In real ethics, there are some things that must never be done. Bioethics is “procedural.” Where it can, it leaps ahead, and where it cannot, it inches ahead, enticed onward by the question, Why not? If it can be done it should be done, or in any event it will be done, and, if it will be done, why not by us rather than by the competition? This is ethical reasoning of a very low order. There is no sure way of protecting society against it. But we might begin by asking the experts who advocate the crossing of the next moral line, What’s in it for you? (See While We’re At It, p. 80, for related news about the President’s Council on Bioethics.)
The One True Church
It has been a while since the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith issued Dominus Iesus (The Lord Jesus) in September 2000, but the ecumenical bruises still show. In the general media, most of the headlines were variations on “Rome Says Catholicism is Only True Church.” I discussed and defended Dominus Iesus in these pages (see “To Say Jesus is Lord,” November 2000), and also noted that it was welcomed by some Protestants as a clear affirmation of core Christian doctrines. At the same time, and in retrospect, it is evident that some misunderstandings might have been avoided. Father Jared Wicks of the Gregorian University in Rome writes in Ecumenical Trends that the document needs to be read alongside the 1995 encyclical Ut Unum Sint (That They May be One). “It is not the case,” says the encyclical, “that beyond the boundaries of the Catholic community there is an ecclesial vacuum.” Elements of God’s justifying and sanctifying grace are to be found there, and “To the extent that these elements are found in the other Christian Communities, the one Church of Christ is effectively present in them.” There can be only one Church of Christ because there is only one Christ, and the Church is, according to the New Testament, his body. The teaching of the Second Vatican Council is that that one Church “subsists in” the Catholic Church, but the Catholic Church does not exhaust the reality of the one Church of Christ.
The Res Tantum
Fr. Wicks puts the crucial point this way: “In order to be heard more clearly by members of the other Christian Churches and communities, Catholic ecumenists can well make explicit something not said in Dominus Iesus . This is that being or not being ‘Church in the proper sense’ stands in the realm of the sacramental and structural expression of ecclesiality and mediation of salvation in the world. Here, the others know well our Catholic convictions, both those concerning fullness of mediatory means in our Church, however imperfectly we are actually formed and sanctified by them, and those about the defectus (flaws, lacks) found in their mediatory structures and sacraments. But the mediations of sanctification in Christ which the ecclesial communities do cherish and actualize, as in baptism, proclamation of the gospel of salvation, etc., do not mediate to them a defective justification and salvation. Using sacramental terminology, the res tantum is given whole and entire, namely, union with Christ, life in the Spirit, and access to the Father.”
I am regularly asked why, if the Catholic Church teaches that it is not necessary to salvation, one should become a Catholic. There are many possible responses to that question. The Second Vatican Council’s constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium (Light to the Nations), says that if one believes that the Catholic Church is what she claims to be, then one is bound in conscience to enter into and remain in full communion with her. In other words, it is then a matter of salvation. The Catholic Church may be defined as the Church of Jesus Christ most fully and rightly ordered through time. Since to be a Christian means living in obedience to Christ, and since Christ instituted the apostolic ordering of his Church as it is to be found uniquely in the Catholic Church, it follows that obedience to Christ entails being and remaining in full communion with the Catholic Church. It also follows that not being in full communion is disobedience to Christ. If , that is, one believes that the Catholic Church is what she claims to be.
As I say, there are many other possible, and important, answers to the question why one should be a Catholic, but that is the one that goes to the heart of the matter. Let me anticipate another frequently asked question, Why not Orthodoxy? The communion between the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church is so close that it might be said that the only thing that is lacking for full communion is full communion. But, if one believes that Christ’s institution of his one Church includes the Petrine Ministry, then it follows that it is necessary to be in full communion with the bishops, the successors of the apostles, who are in full communion with the Bishop of Rome, the successor of Peter. If one believes none of these things, there may be other good reasons for becoming a Catholic, but it would seem that they are not binding in conscience. Of course, one is bound in conscience to try to discern whether these things are true, and to act on the truth that one is able to discern.
Now I have gone quite beyond Fr. Wicks’ helpful clarification of Dominus Iesus . And the twists and turns, the eccentric starts and stops, the dead-ends and disturbing discoveries in following the Spirit’s lead are not so neatly logical or doctrinally deductive as my brief response may suggest. As with any life-defining decision, it is also the case that the heart has its reasons of which reason does not know. But this is intended as no more than a brief response to questions often asked”questions that are not, you will perhaps agree, unrelated to Dominus Iesus , to what it means to say that Jesus is Lord.
Fare Thee Well, Tony Lewis
It hardly seems possible that I have been reading Anthony Lewis for thirty-two years. In fact, I haven’t been. I stopped reading him regularly about twenty years ago. True, doing my morning penance with the New York Times , I would glance at his column to see what had set off today’s snit, and sometimes I would even read the column, merely to confirm that, once you knew the occasion for his unhappiness, you knew what he would say without reading the column. But here is the final column, “Hail and Farewell,” and I felt I owed the man a last read. “As I look back at those turbulent decades,” he writes, “I see a time of challenge to a basic tenet of modern society: faith in reason.” Tony Lewis, we are given to understand, has been, over all these years, the champion of faith in reason.
Now the challenge to his faith, he says, comes from religious “fundamentalism””not only of the Muslim variety but also in the form of “fundamentalist Christians, believing that the Bible’s story of creation is the literal truth.” Drop the Muslim reference, and the column might almost have been written in the 1920s at the height of the modernist-fundamentalist controversy. In terms of ideas, not much has happened in Tony Lewis’ world. He seems quite unaware of postmodernism’s perspectivisms, historicisms, and anti-foundationalisms that are today’s chief intellectual challengers to his understanding of reason. Those whom Lewis calls fundamentalists even question “the scientific method that has made contemporary civilization possible.” Richard Rorty, call your office.
Lewis then shifts to the American Founders, who, he says, “put their faith not in men but in law, the law of the Constitution.” So
