This term is strange to the ear of the believer, for he is accustomed to hearing about heresy in its intellectual form. But that heresy should be administrative requires reflection and a reading that embodies doctrines behaviorally. Doctrines are not purely intellectual terms that do not touch human reality. For what benefit does a person gain from Christ being two natures or one nature, as in the model of Eutyches, for example, or God being a Trinity or a quaternity? If doctrines do not become life, they have no meaning whatsoever except for intellectual argument.
The importance of defining doctrines stems from their incarnational necessity in human life — that is, they turn from a model in the life of God and His relation to us into a model in our life among one another. Salvation is tied to the embodiment of the models of doctrines, not to memorizing them on paper or intellectually. The Apostolic Fathers characterize the expression “doctrine” by practice more than by theory, because they lived the faith or the doctrine in a practical, applied way. Otherwise we become like the states of the Middle East, whose constitutions affirm freedom of expression and human dignity while their prisons are full of thinkers and people of opinion, so that their constitution is one thing and their behavior another.
He who thinks, as Metropolitan Paul Yazigi says, that “(administration) in the church is not a (doctrinal) matter is mistaken! No, it is the first matter doctrinally”…(administration) is not separate from faith; administration is the way of (existence), that is, the way of living the faith”(1). In other words, the Christian must possess right faith (orthodoxy) and right conduct (orthopraxis). It is stated in the introduction to the book Antioch and the Canon concerning Father Afanasiev: “Through it he teaches us theology and dissolves rights within it; therefore he did not use the word canon much, and we could not discern the independence of its matter (rights) from doctrine” (2).
The theologian Edward Schillebeeckx says about orthopraxis: it has become evident that thought is an essential factor of action. But for centuries the church devoted itself to formulating the truths of divine revelation while at the same time not working for a better world. In other words, the church devoted its attention to orthodoxy, leaving orthopraxis to those outside its membership, to the non-believers”(3)
The model of the doctrine of God is a Trinity, and there is distinction among the persons, each having a hypostatic role; and the doctrine of Christ is two natures and two wills without confusion, mixture, or diminution, and so on. From these doctrines, their models must be embodied in the behavior of the church. That is, the administration of the church and all the affairs of its life, work, and organization must be built upon the models of the divine doctrines linked to human salvation. It is not enough that we believe that God is a Trinity: “Fidelity to the Christian calling will necessarily be measured by orthopraxis (effective love) more than by orthodoxy (theory)”
The church must organize its internal relations according to the model of the internal relation among the persons of the Trinity, and its external relation with the state must be according to the model of God’s external relation to man through the two natures of Christ.
I shall present two examples
The first: the model of the church’s structure is the model of the Holy Trinity. The internal relation among bishop, priest, and deacon, and the relation among the synod, the bishop, and the people, and the synod, the metropolitan, and the patriarch — these are bound to that model. As the fathers say, the bishop — the metropolitan — is the image of the Father, the priest the image of Christ, and the deacon of the Holy Spirit. On this basis there is no authoritarian hierarchy but rather absolute equality among them, each having a role in the body of Christ, the church. Whereas if we take the worldly model — the metropolitan is the king, the priest the minister, and the deacon the soldier — the church becomes a worldly model of this world, and Jesus’ saying “You are not of the world”
The second: the relation of the church to the state is like the relation of the divine nature and the human nature in the person of the Son. The divine nature is a nature not of the world, but which (entered) into the world, and the human nature is of the world and of its earthliness. What unites them is the person of the Son. Likewise, the nature of the church is “not of the world but in the world, and the nature of the state is of the world and of human thought; the human being unites them, without confusion, mixture, or diminution. The relation of the church to the Byzantine state is built on the model of the heresy of Eutyches (the two-headed eagle), and the model of the Catholic church’s relation to the state in the West is the model of the relation of Nestorius.
Just as the divine nature entered to save the human nature, to sanctify it and purify it through the person of Christ, so the church works to elevate the standing of the state through the sanctification of the human person, “to grow in stature and wisdom” and to dye it with Gospel and kingdom values so as to pour them into the state, elevate its standing, and build the model of a sound, just, free, and democratic homeland.
The example of Christ, who came for the salvation of every human being coming into the world: does the church work for the salvation of all the inhabitants of the place where it exists, or has it been formed on a nationalist, sectarian basis, working only for its own individuals and members? Sin and redemption, and salvation, is a social event, and liberation is real.
Patriarch Athenagoras says: “The churches feared the Gospel” The failure of ecclesiastical authority stems from following models different from what Jesus walked in His relation to the world. It laid down principles for its work drawn from the principles of the people of the world, departing greatly from the Gospel principles and values. We can pose a thousand questions about the reflection of faith in behavior and the embodiment of right faith in right conduct. The church’s remaining mere thought, inapplicable, makes it an existence alongside the existence of various ideologies. Consequently, as Patriarch Hazim says: “We have condemned ourselves, and thereby condemned Orthodoxy, to spiritual and geographical emigration and to being content with a symbolic existence” — Fragrances of Antioch, p. 6
Has the church applied Jesus’ declaration: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor, and He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and to set free the oppressed”(Lk 18:4) How did it apply this declaration during the Syrian crisis? What are the determinants that the ecclesiastical authority set in order to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, and how did it work to protect (what is God’s), that is, the human being in the Middle East, for example?
How did the church apply the concept of the resurrection and victory over death in reality? Did it fight the forms of death, sin, and social corruption, and work to build more just social systems?
What is the relation of the church to public life and its role toward the cry of the suffering? The discourse must suit lived reality, and they proposed forms of a social, economic, and political system that is more just, and the defense of the rights of the oppressed. Is the liberation of Jesus a liberation from a hell in another world? Is liberation from sin a moral liberation, or does it work to liberate peoples from servitudes?
How did the church authority deal with applying the concept of the diversity of the gifts of the body of Christ? How did the church authority deal with the administration of the church — did it follow the model of the two wills, or did the will of the authority swallow the will of the people? Did the metropolitans walk according to the model of Christ: I came to serve, not to be served?
References
- Metropolitan Paul Yazigi, Tower and Body, Part One, Publications of the Monastery of the Annunciation, Aleppo, 197
- Georges Tawfiq Ghandour, the book Antioch and the Canon: An Introduction to the Antiochian Canons and Their Application in the Twentieth Century, An-Nour Orthodox Cooperative, Al-Yanbou’ Press, 2009, p. 14
- Gustavo Gutiérrez the Dominican, A Theology of Liberation (History, Politics, and Salvation), translated by Jean Rizkallah and Father John Gabriel the Dominican, Christian Theology Series 2, Dar al-Aquini, first edition 2016, p. 81