[this article needs to be read beyond the title. It’s not what you think, but the title made you think]
[since I wrote this note, the Great and Holy Council has confirmed my thinking and condemnation of excessive separatism exercised in the name of ‘autocephaly’ with these words “The principle of autocephaly cannot be allowed to operate at the expense of the principle of the catholicity and the unity of the Church.”] I am supposed to be writing about the vitally important Church Council in Crete this week, but something else has happened, the UK has voted to leave the EU. I have called it a sin, and I’ll explain why. For all of you who are not Christian, bear with me, because it is still relevant. Those of you who are wanting word about the Council in Crete, I will get to that too. For Christians, the first sin is when Adam eats an apple in the garden of Eden. For someone who is not a Christian, this is nonsense, it’s a myth. Well, as a myth it still works. Contrary to popular belief, the first sin of humanity, represented by Adam in this story from the Old Testament, is not eating an apple. That would be silly. The first sin happens before that apple is eaten, before Adam commits any act, or behaves in any particular way. The first sin occurs when Adam resolves to ‘take back control’. He rejects the loving-kindness of God, which he takes for granted, and grasps self-control, autonomy and self-determination. His sin is first to be selfish, to think that he knows best and that he doesn’t have to live with the consequences of his split from God. The same selfishness pervades the whole Brexit debate. Across all the political parties and those who are not politically affiliated I have seen over the last couple of months a debate, not about the structures of the EU, but a debate about selfishness, about taking control. This has resulted in the UK taking control of its own destiny, of becoming autonomous and self-determining. The UK has voted to leave a framework within which sovereign nation states pooled their sovereignty and gave up some of their autonomy in order to express our common humanity. Now we have given permission for everyone to ‘take back control’. Every playground bully is no free to tell a foreign kid to shove off because we have taken back control. Every greed and rapacious employer can safely dump any restrictions on working conditions because we in the UK can now determine our destiny- all laws are now up for grabs. We can even establish what we think are UK human rights. Not universal human rights, but human rights that apply to us here in the UK only. We can now free-load on the common environmental protections that reduce pollution across all our borders. These are individual issues, and can and will be debated, but the underlying ethos will now be ‘we can decide’. The sociologist Michel Foucault theorised in the 1970s that the elites disciplined the individual to keep control of the people, and now we have seen the reaction to that, as we all (not just the brexiteers) take back control of our bodies. Instead of the elites, we as isolated individuals try to take control of our bodies, through discipline and punishment, we pierce, and mark, augment and reassign our bodies to fit our own sense of self. We seek to construct our own identity whilst at the same time trying to understand what it is to be male or female, what it is to be human, when all we know is how to be ourselves. The selfishness of adam descends into solipsism. The brexiteers are no more sinful or selfish than the rest of us, it’s just that they have expressed their selfishness in a particular and very obvious way, but our need, our uncontrollable desire, to self-determine is now universally celebrated. We would rather be in control of our country, in control of our bodies, in control of our own identities than cede some of that control to another human being, or to God. We are so suspicious of the stranger that we have become strange to ourselves. The debate about control and selfishness also erupted in the press and media regarding the Great and Holy Council in Crete that is happening this week. There have been discussions amongst the bishops gathered there about the Mission of the Church in Today’s World (which I commented on here) and the challenges of Orthodox Christians being scattered all over the world by war and persecution and creating a problem of the disaspora (I commented on this yesterday, but Brexit has jammed up Huffington Post’s publishing schedule, so you will have to read a draft here). Whilst the bishops went on to discuss internal issues like how much fasting we should indulge in the lead up to Christmas, the attention of the commentators shifted from the problem of the diaspora to the question of autonomy and self-governance. The discussions peaked with a debate on what actually constitutes an ‘Ecumenical Council’. The discussion is summed up by this one comment :“In reality, almost every major and divisive document at the Council revolves around the subject of ecclesiology: how do Orthodox Christians in traditionally non-Orthodox countries canonically organize themselves?... Every topic on the agenda relates to our understanding of what the Church is and how it is meant to function, on some level.” In this statement, the commentator is really grasping at the essence of all the papers at the Holy Council, and of the debates going on in the Council chamber and across the world, and it all still boils down to self-governance, autonomy and selfishness. Self-governance is an important principle in Orthodox Church circles. It is more accurately known as ‘autocephaly’- literally speaking ‘one-headed’ or ‘of one mind’. All the 14 churches of the world are essentially independent and self-governing. They have a head bishop, but they also have a synod or council of bishops who, between them, decide on important matters like whether Orthodox Christians can marry Roman Catholics, or whether we should eat oysters on a Friday in December. Just as importantly, they get to decide whether people who are not Orthodox Christians are even Christian or not. In the last 300 years, this group of self-governed Churches have enjoyed, and in some cases exploited, the political situations in which they found themselves to increase that level of self-determination. The rise of nationalism meant that new self-governing churches stopped being identified by the city in which the lead bishop was located (the Patriarchate of Moscow, for example) to being identified with a whole country like the Church of Cyprus or the Church of Poland. Political strife, war, the rise of nationalism and imperialism like the Ottoman Empire and the Soviet Union meant that contact between the Churches was limited. Taking advantage of that, the self- governing churches became used to determining their own affairs and considering their own situation to be unique. In some cases, they developed a sense in which their version of Orthodox Christianity is the only true and correct Christianity. When it came to the scattering of ‘their people’ across the world as a result of these forces of war and empire, they took it upon themselves to make their own decisions about how to respond. When, in the middle of this, the Ecumenical Patriarchate, the Church of Constantinople-New Rome called for a collective response, it took 50 years to devise and agree on an agenda, and finally meet this week to begin to formulate a common response to new problems. Why? Because autocephaly was taken too far. The constituent member churches of the Orthodox Church made autocephaly, the ability to govern themselves, the most important aspect of their ecclesiology. They were so concerned to distinguish themselves from the centrally governed Roman Catholic church that they neglected any real sense of conciliarity amongst themselves. Formal means of remaining in communion with the other churches were strongly maintained throughout- the churches prayed for each other, they sent each other oil of chrism as visible signs of their unity, they even celebrated the divine liturgy together as an external sign of their unity. But they didn’t get to know each other as brothers. They didn’t come together as a family in Christ. This is beginning to change, and the heads of the Churches gathered in Crete have indicated that the most important parts of this meeting has not been the agenda, or the papers up for discussion, but for the chance to get to know each other, together. Whilst autocephaly means not being controlled by a higher bishop, like a pope or the Ecumenical Patriarch, we must be clear that autocephaly contains within it the problem of selfishness, the very sin of adam. The Orthodox Churches must be willing to cede some of their sovereignty, to resist ‘taking back control’, to limit their freedom in order to be obedient to the gospel, especially the quote that I started the week with and repeated again to my parishioners today; that “there 'is no jew or gentile, no slave or free, nor is there male or female, for you are all one in Christ' Galatians 3:28”. The Churches must come together to decide on what makes their decisions truly authoritative to all Orthodox Christians. There is no agenda item to decide on how decisions are made in the church. The nature of the Council is hotly contested, and this extends back into time into debates about which of the Councils in history are really ‘Ecumenical’. Some are arguing that because there is no longer a Roman emperor, no new council can ever be ecumenical, because typically emperors convened such Councils. So deciding factor on whether a Council is binding on the whole church depends on whether a civil authority like the Emperor convoked the council, not whether the council spoke the truth. Others argue that Councils are ecumenical because their decisions are important to the whole church (rather than local issues) and because they have been received as authoritative by all the churches. Some argue that there will only ever be seven ecumenical councils, convened by an Emperor. Others argue that there are more councils (like the 4th and 5th Councils of Constantinople in 879–880 and 1341–1351, the Synod of Iasi, Romania in 1642 and the Synod of Jerusalem in 1672). Some argue that any Council that does not discuss ‘dogma’, i.e. vital questions of who God and Jesus are, cannot be ecumenical. Others would consider that the first, Apostolic Council of Jerusalem, that decided that the good news of Jesus Christ could be preached to non-Jews is not an ecumenical council. This complicated picture means that the process by which we act as a church, in which we decide which issues are vitally important and affect the whole world, which ones only affect the know Roman imperial world (one way of defining the word ecumenical) or which ones affect the whole household of God (another way of defining the word ecumenical). Without that, the separate Orthodox Churches are just that, separate. They are subject to the sin of selfishness; they can be tempted to ‘take back control’. They retain the power to decide how to decide. We don’t need centralised power to resolve this problem, we need conciliarity. We need for the churches to cede some of their power to the Council of the Patriarchs. This may begin to happen. In the UK, however, we have withdrawn from conciliarity. We have withdrawn from the Council of European States. We are in the process of walking away from the difficult business of living with our neighbours and are preparing instead to treat them as ‘jews and gentiles’ as separate peoples. We are repeating again the sin of adam in demanding self-control. We are repeating the first sin of selfishness.
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