Chilaism. Yes, I bet you haven’t heard that in church in a month of Sundays. Chiliaism has nothing to do with a popular American meat based meal, but is in fact a theory held in early Christianity that there would be a 1,000 year reign of Jesus Christ before the end of the world. I’m not going to get into the nitty-gritty here of what a ‘1,000 year reign’ might involve, but the upshot is that this theory was rejected in a Church Council in AD325 but the Church Council that is going on at the moment in Crete seems to have raised that problem again, or so some would want you to think.
The accusation of chialism was put by an internet blogger yesterday in one of a dozen or more forums that I have been monitoring. The gist of the argument is that the document that was discussed and approved on the first day of the Council, the ‘Mission of the Church in Today’s World’ (which I commented on here) is essentially chiliastic because of its social mission. Bear with me here, because it took me a while to figure out the link too. Chialism is primarily an idea that there will be a thousand years before the end of time where all evil has been conquered and good Christians will live in peace and harmony before the second coming of Jesus Christ. This notion seems to have been conflated with what theologians call the ‘social gospel’, in other words, the efforts of Christians to promote social justice, improve the social conditions of all humans, to tackle hatred and division, to improve and safeguard God’s creation. This is the basic topic of the ‘Mission of the Church in Today’s World’ document- that all humans have personal dignity before God and that no-one should be judged or discriminated against with respect to their status or because of their gender, race etc. The blogger who accuses this document of chiliasm is presuming one of two things; that the promotion of social justice is somehow an attempt to create a ‘kingdom of God’ before the end times, and (even worse in his eyes) an attempt to create such a regime of kindness and generosity, of compassion and love, without God. Chiliasm is associated in the minds of some with dirty words like ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’, that the social gospel is being propagated by godless communists under the guise of Christianity. Now, there may be some like that, but there are plenty of Christians who have no sense of ‘building’ a society without God, or thinking that such a society is even possible outside a deep communion with Jesus Christ. Chiliasm does not automatically equate to any discussion of social justice. The critics even try to suggest that words such as ‘discrimination’ have no place in a Christian document like the ‘Mission of the Church in Today’s World’. If this is the case, then pagan words like ‘homoousios’ have no place either, and therefore we cannot speak accurately about the divine human nature of Christ. Furthermore, ‘discrimination’, even if it is derived from so-called ‘socialist’ thinking, is a well understood and specific term, and does not mean that we can no longer, as Christians, discriminate or make judgements, that ‘anything goes’. What the rejection of discrimination means that that Christians should not make decisions about another person on the basis of features that are not relevant to the decision or judgement in hand. It is not legitimate to prevent a person from exercising a Christian ministry because of their sex, where the sex of that person is not relevant or a legitimate consideration. A person may not be judged as a second class Christian because they were not born of Greek or Russian families. A person may not consider themselves to be inherently Orthodox Christian because of their nationality (this is also known as the heresy of ethno-phyletism). This brings me to the second document discussed by the Council in Crete this week, that of the ‘Church in the diaspora’. Again, this is a desperately complicated business, but ultimately a facile debate that betrays our egos and sinful weaknesses more than it proclaims the Good News of salvation in Jesus Christ. Since the end of the soviet union, and with the onset of globalisation- an era of history where ordinary people (not just church elites) are moving in vast numbers around the world, and who are in instant communication around the world, and whose identity is no longer limited to a dozen or so miles around the village in which they were born, more and more Christians have moved outside the old territories of the Orthodox Churches, from the Greek speaking part of the Mediterranean, from the Balkans, from the Middle East under persecution, from Russia and the former Soviet Union territories. These Orthodox Christians in new lands (like the Americas) or in old Christian territories (like western Europe) have not been allowed to set up their own self-governing church structures, but instead are still connected back to ‘the old countries’. For some this is a good thing, because Christianity is a living community and we in the west should not be artificially cut off from the traditional structures and norms of those societies but on the other hand it does play into geopolitics of continuing to control the people who have left their homelands. On one hand, this arrangement whereby a parish founded by Russians outside Russia is still governed by a senior church leader back in Russia is at the same time a connection to the source of one’s Christianity, and a cultural enclave to remain and remember being Russian in a strange land, and also an extension of a greater (and for some imperialist) Russia. The same goes for Greek Orthodox, Romanian Orthodox, even Serbs, Poles and Bulgarians over here because of the open movement of people as part of the European Union. You see, even the UK Referendum on the EU being voted on today (23rd June) is still relevant! The Council in Crete comprises the representatives of 10 of the 14 independent churches from around the whole world. Some of these churches are closely associated with a particular national or cultural ‘ethne’ (Greek for people). The Church of Alexandria is a complex example- populated almost entirely by parishes from across Africa but, until recently, almost entirely staffed by Greek priests and bishops. The Moscow Patriarchate, on the other hand, is almost entirely Russian, oh and Ukrainian, because this church first started in Kiev in what is now Ukraine. It also claims China, Japan, and other post-Soviet states excluding Armenia and Georgia. On top of that, it also claims authority over any Orthodox Christian of Russian, Ukrainian, Japanese descent in places like Bentham in Gloucester and Las Vegas. This approach to church governance also applies very strongly to Romanian Orthodox Christians living in Boston, UK or Chicago, Illinois. Whilst this is wonderfully post-nationalist, and represents a global Christian community, what tends to happen is that Russians stick with Russians, and Romanians shun Greeks in these new lands, known in church circles as ‘diaspora’. We also end up having several bishops looking after their own people, all living in the same city. You get eight different bishops in Paris, all looking after their own ethnic groups. This ethnic division leads to suspicion, ethno-phyletism, racism and discrimination, and leads to some groups claiming that the Council will be abolishing the traditions of fasting for Lent, with no evidence whatsoever of this being the case. Indeed, the representatives at the Council yesterday confirmed that local differences would be considered legitimate, but that fasting is not going to be banned. This is problem of the diaspora and lots of bishops in one city considered to be a breach of church norms and traditions. More importantly for me, it means that we do not speak as one church. We are not represented in the NHS or prison service as a single Christian body, but are related to according to national divisions, and dismissed because we considered too small to be of interest. Our mission in the world today is limited, stifled, because we talk over and around each other in different languages, replicating the tower of Babel. Everyone in the Church agrees that this is a problem, but nobody is willing to step forward first to solve the problem. Bishops don’t want to stop being a bishop in preference of another from a different country. Nationalists and patriots don’t want to sever links with the old countries. Bishops in the old countries don’t want to lose the income from donations of their faithful overseas, especially the Churches of Constantinople-New Rome and Antioch, who have very few faithful left in their original countries, Turkey and Syria . An interim arrangement was put in place in 2009 where the different bishops in each area or city would actually begin to meet with each other regularly. This has resulted in closer relationships and exchanges of experience. It is refreshing for church leaders to meet and agree that the tiny differences in practices between the different ethnic groups are perfectly legitimate and part of the rich diversity in unity that makes up a 2,000year old global community. The Council in Crete hasn’t yet added to the existing interim arrangement of just meeting and being nice to each other, it has been quite timid in reinforcing the current temporary arrangement, but which one of them is going to be ready to vote himself out of a job? The document has been discussed, but not finalised. In the words of Rev John Chryssavigis, the spokesperson of the Council, the Council delegates are in “agreement about the establishment of canonical normality in Churches of the diaspora, but there is no unanimity among them about exactly how this should be achieved”. Coming back to ‘chiliaism’, whilst we must be careful to ensure that social justice is not pursued for its own sake (we can leave that to the rest of society) but it must be a part of our lives as individual Christians. In the words of one of the greatest Church leaders of all time, Saint Basil the Great, “What, after all, is this hard, heavy, burdensome word which the Teacher has put forward? “Sell what you have, and give to the poor”. This clear instruction sounds like socialism, but is Christianity. Those who protest against paying taxes (state mandated theft, I hear them cry) tend not to take the words of Jesus Christ as God-mandated social justice. The message of the document ‘The Mission of the Church in Today’s World’ is not about establishing new sins where they don’t exist, but it is about recognising where our old sins have new impacts, where our selfishness and greed impacts on the environment and in global climate change, where we take advantage of modern slavery with our 99p t-shirts, where we judge people according to the colour of their skin rather because of their intentions. New problems, new contexts, new worlds , but the same old sins. Jesus Christ is the same, now and to the end of time, His Kingdom shall have no end, but we are too busy trying to build our own religions and utopias to notice.
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