One word doing three jobs
Most disagreements about ecumenism are not disagreements at all. They are two people using one word for different things and discovering, some minutes in, that neither can make sense of the other. It is worth separating the senses before anything else is said, because the Orthodox position is quite specific about which of them it objects to, and quite specific about which it does not.
The word itself is older than the argument. It comes from the Greek oikoumene, the inhabited world, and in Christian usage it long meant something with no controversial edge whatever. The councils at Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus and Chalcedon are called ecumenical because they were councils of the whole inhabited Christian world rather than of one province. An Orthodox Christian uses the word in that sense every time the Creed is discussed.
The first sense: working together
The plainest meaning is practical. Christians of different confessions co-operate in relief after an earthquake, in hospital chaplaincy, in prison visiting, in feeding people, in defending the unborn or the trafficked, in running a food bank. No doctrinal claim is made or implied. Two groups who disagree about the sacraments carry the same boxes into the same warehouse.
Nothing in Orthodox teaching forbids this, and a good deal in the Gospel requires it. The Samaritan in the parable was not asked about his ecclesiology before he was commended. In a city like Singapore, where Orthodox Christians are a very small community among many larger Christian bodies, this kind of co-operation is simply a feature of ordinary life, and no one at this parish regards it as a compromise.
The second sense: theological dialogue
The second meaning is formal conversation between churches about what divides them, conducted by appointed theologians over decades, producing agreed statements which the churches then receive, qualify or decline. This is slower and less photogenic than it sounds, and it has been going on for a very long time.
Orthodox involvement is not a recent or marginal thing. In 1920 the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople issued an encyclical addressed to the churches of Christ everywhere, proposing a league or fellowship of churches — a document usually treated as one of the founding texts of the modern movement. Orthodox churches were present at the formation of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam in 1948. The Russian Orthodox Church joined in 1961. Bilateral dialogues with Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, Reformed and Oriental Orthodox have run, with interruptions, ever since.
There have been symbolic moments too. On 7 December 1965 Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople and Pope Paul VI simultaneously expressed regret for and lifted the anathemas of 1054 — an act of mutual courtesy which removed a mutual condemnation without restoring communion, and which was careful to say so. It is a good illustration of what dialogue can and cannot do.
The third sense: unity on the terms of indifference
The third meaning is the one that generates the heat. It is the proposal, in its various forms, that the divisions between Christians concern matters of secondary importance; that the existing confessions are branches of a single tree, none of them simply the Church; and that unity may therefore be achieved by mutual recognition and shared communion without first resolving what is actually believed.
Stated that baldly, few people would sign it. But something close to it has been advanced at various points in the last century, sometimes as a theory about the Church and sometimes as an operating assumption about how quickly things ought to move. Impatience is understandable. Division between Christians is a scandal, it is visible to the whole world, and it has lasted a very long time.
It is this third sense, and only this one, that Orthodox wariness is about. The objection is not to friendship, not to conversation, not to praying for other Christians, and not to admiring them. It is to a particular account of what the Church is.
Why the third sense is a difficulty for Orthodoxy
Orthodox ecclesiology does not work as a federation. The Church is understood as one thing, visible and identifiable, not as an invisible fellowship distributed across institutions which are all partial. That is a large claim, it is made plainly, and softening it would not be honest. It is the claim reaffirmed at the Holy and Great Council held in Crete in 2016.
From that claim a particular order follows. Communion at one chalice is not a means of reaching agreement; it is the expression of an agreement already reached. Orthodox Christians therefore do not receive communion in other churches and do not offer it, and this is not a judgement on the devotion of the people there. It follows from what the act is held to mean. Where unity of faith is absent, the sign of unity would be saying something untrue.
Nor does the difficulty concern only the sacraments. If the differences are secondary, then the councils that defined them were settling secondary matters, and the martyrs who died over them died over details. The Orthodox instinct is that the content of the faith was given, not developed by negotiation, and that it is not the Church's to trade.
What Fr. Seraphim Rose wrote in 1975
Fr. Seraphim Rose's Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, published in April 1975, is the book most often cited in English-language arguments about this, and it is also the book most often misquoted. Its Introduction contains a distinction that most of its readers overlook. He separates what he calls Christian ecumenism, which he regards as resting on a real if imprecise sense of common Christianity, from dialogue with non-Christian religions, which he treats as something else entirely.
Of the first of these he writes a sentence that is worth reading twice, because the adjectives in it are not decoration. He is not conceding a point grudgingly before returning to attack. He is stating what he takes the position to be, in the voice of a man describing people he has known and whose motives he does not doubt:
The word sincere is doing real work there, and so is the word understandable. He is describing an error, and he says so, but he is describing it as the error of people trying to do something decent. That is not the sentence of a man who thought Protestants and Roman Catholics were acting in bad faith.
Two cautions belong with any use of this book. First, Chapters I, II and III are not by Fr. Seraphim: they are by Fr. Basile Sakkas, by an anonymous convert to Orthodoxy, and by Archimandrite Nicholas Drobyazgin respectively, and the preface and closing epilogue of the Fifth Edition are by Hieromonk Damascene. The chapter that argues about whether Christians and non-Christians worship the same God is Fr. Basile's, not his. Second, the text has altered between editions, including at points bearing on the Church, and this has been publicly questioned. Name the edition. This page uses the Fifth Edition of 2004.
'Christian' ecumenism at its best may be seen to represent a sincere and understandable error on the part of Protestants and Roman Catholics
Fr. Seraphim Rose, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Introduction §2 (St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, Fifth Edition, 2004)
What has changed since 1975
A reader should not assume that the situation Fr. Seraphim described in 1975 is the situation now. A good deal has moved since then, in both directions, and an honest account of the word has to say so rather than freeze the picture at the year a well-known book happened to appear.
Orthodox dissatisfaction with the World Council of Churches grew through the 1990s, and the Georgian and Bulgarian Orthodox Churches withdrew from it in the late 1990s. Rather than let the matter drift, the Council created a Special Commission on Orthodox Participation at its assembly in December 1998. The commission reported in 2002, and its central recommendation was structural: decisions would be reached by consensus rather than by majority vote, so that a minority could not be outvoted on matters of conscience. That method was tested in 2005 and applied at the assembly of 2006.
Then in June 2016 the Holy and Great Council met in Crete and adopted a document on relations with the rest of the Christian world. It holds two things together without embarrassment. It states that the Orthodox Church is the one holy catholic and apostolic Church, and it also records that she accepts the historical names of the other Christian churches and confessions not in communion with her, that she has taken part in the ecumenical movement from its beginning, and that she considers this participation consistent with her own tradition rather than foreign to it.
Four autocephalous churches did not attend that Council — Antioch, Russia, Georgia and Bulgaria — for a range of reasons, some of them unrelated to this document, and the reception of the Council's texts across the Orthodox world has been uneven. That, too, belongs in a fair account. A reader who is told only that the Council spoke has been told half of what happened.
So the argument continues, and it is worth being clear about its character. It is an argument among Orthodox Christians, conducted by bishops and theologians who are not in bad faith on either side, about how to hold a strong claim about the Church together with a real obligation of charity. It is not a settled consensus, and anyone who presents it as one is simplifying.
What this means for an ordinary friendship
Most people who read a page like this are not deciding the policy of a synod. They have a Methodist colleague, or an Anglican mother, or a husband who was raised Baptist and still is. The question is practical: what am I allowed to say and do?
Fr. Seraphim answered that question directly in a letter of November 1980, written to a catechumen who was distressed by the language she had seen other Orthodox writers use. He gave the exclusive claim about the Church without softening it, and then set a boundary on what may be inferred from it:
From that boundary the rest of his counsel follows, and it is unremarkable advice which is nevertheless hard to live up to. Call them Christians. Be on good terms with them. Keep the peace at home above everything, since the person most likely to be wounded by a convert's new vocabulary is a mother or a spouse. He held that a harsh tone was warranted only where someone was actively trying to take away the Church's flock or alter her teaching.
it is not for us to define the state of those who are outside the Orthodox Church
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood)
Where that leaves a reader
Three senses, then, and they deserve three different responses. Co-operation in works of mercy needs no defence. Theological dialogue has Orthodox participation stretching back more than a century and continues with the support of the Council of 2016. Unity purchased by treating the content of the faith as secondary is the thing Orthodox Christians decline, and the reason is not coldness but a particular understanding of what the Church is.
Saying that plainly is not the same as saying it unkindly, and Fr. Seraphim, who spent the last years of his life arguing with fellow converts about precisely this, would have insisted on the difference. He thought a cold correctness drove people away from the Church who would otherwise have come. If you have read this far and disagree with the third paragraph of every section, you are still welcome at the Dormition parish in Kovan on a Sunday morning, and no one will ask you where you stand before offering you tea.
There is no reason why we cannot call them Christians and be on good terms with them
Fr. Seraphim Rose, letter of 27 November 1980, in Hieromonk Damascene, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, ch. 84 (St Herman of Alaska Brotherhood)