Metropolitan Kallistos, David Bentley Hart, Universalism, and the Church of the East

[The Liturgist]

true, but I don’t think we go into invincible ignorance. that theory sounds off to me.

Indeed, it has the awkward texture of Scholastic theology, the needless systematization and rationalization and pointless complication, reorganization and at times, inappropriate revision of Patristic and Orthodox simplicity. Rather I like what Elder Nektary of Optina said:

“One of Elder Nektary's spiritual children then inquired: "But what about the millions of Chinese, Indians, Turks and other non-Christians?" The elder replied:

"God desires not only that the nations be saved, but each individual soul. A simpl...e Indian, believing in his own way in the Creator and fulfilling His will as best he can, will be saved; but he who, knowing about Christianity, follows the Indian mystical path, will not." [Ivan Kontzevitch, Elder Nektary of Optina, p. 181].”

This sounds plausible to me, in that it has the same quality of what St. Theophan the Recluse said about Christians outside of the Holy Orthodox Church. It cannot be confirmed of course, but I don’t think Elder Nektary was some kind of Universalist heretic.

"Why do you worry about them? They have a Savior, Who desires the salvation of every human being. He will take care of them. You and I should not be burdened with such a concern. Study yourself and your sins.... I will tell you one thing, however: should you, being Orthodox, and possessing the Truth in its fullness, betray Orthodoxy and enter a different faith, you will lose your soul forever."

By the way, it was from Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal, that I first learned of what St. Theophan the Recluse said.

 

[The Liturgist]

What I don't like is "hopeful universalism." Because even if universalism (whether for unbaptized infants or all around) is true at some point (i.e. before the final judgement they get prayed out of hades), clearly the way God had matters worded in the Scriptures and Church Tradition were intended not to give people the impression of univeralism, as this would diminish evangelism, receiving the sacraments, personal ascesis, etc. Hence, "hopeful universalism" is completely contrary to God's intent, which then demands the question, what spirit then brings it up if it is not of God?

Indeed, and this raises a major problem with Universalism and that is, aside from the aspect of existential horror derived from what what Metropolitan Kallistos Ware pointed out, that God cannot force us to love Him, and that any kind of Universalism either requires that Misotheists of the worst form, men who failed to heed the warning of St. Nikitas Stithatos despite every opportunity* be rewarded the same as the miserable sinners such as myself who at least beg our most merciful God for mercy, and the saints and especially our glorious lady Theotokos, unblemished by sin, a situation which would be unloving, for what St. Nikitas Stithatos warns of we see in the case of some monstrous individuals* and which we also, or at least I fear to become, before being reminded of what St. Silouan the Athonite said, that we must never believe ourselves beyond the hope of God’s salvation, that aside from this fundamental problem, if we assume apokatastasis after the model of the Assyrians for example, where Hell becomes a sort of purgatory, it creates the equally nightmarish scenario where God tortures us into loving Him, which is incompatible with the idea of God as being perfectly loving.

*the warning of St. Nikitas being “If you aspire to the spuriousness of human praise as though it were something authentic, wallow in self- indulgence because of your soul's insatiability, and through your greed entwine yourself with avarice, you will either make yourself demonic through self-conceit and arrogance, or degenerate into inappropriate behavior with animals through the gratification of belly and genitals, or become savage to others because of your gross inhuman avarice. In this way your faith in God will lapse, as Christ said it would when you accept human praise (cf. John 5:44.); you will abandon self-restraint and purity because your lower organs are unsatedly kindled and succumb to unbridled appetence; and you will be shut out from love because you minister solely to yourself and do not succor your fellow beings when they are in need. Like some polymorphic monster compounded thus out of multifarious self-antagonistic parts, you will be the implacable enemy of God, man and the animals.” (From the Philokalia, as translated by Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal, and Mother Mary).

 

[ArmyMatt]

Indeed, it has the awkward texture of Scholastic theology, the needless systematization and rationalization and pointless complication, reorganization and at times, inappropriate revision of Patristic and Orthodox simplicity. Rather I like what Elder Nektary of Optina said:

“One of Elder Nektary's spiritual children then inquired: "But what about the millions of Chinese, Indians, Turks and other non-Christians?" The elder replied:

"God desires not only that the nations be saved, but each individual soul. A simpl...e Indian, believing in his own way in the Creator and fulfilling His will as best he can, will be saved; but he who, knowing about Christianity, follows the Indian mystical path, will not." [Ivan Kontzevitch, Elder Nektary of Optina, p. 181].”

This sounds plausible to me, in that it has the same quality of what St. Theophan the Recluse said about Christians outside of the Holy Orthodox Church. It cannot be confirmed of course, but I don’t think Elder Nektary was some kind of Universalist heretic.

"Why do you worry about them? They have a Savior, Who desires the salvation of every human being. He will take care of them. You and I should not be burdened with such a concern. Study yourself and your sins.... I will tell you one thing, however: should you, being Orthodox, and possessing the Truth in its fullness, betray Orthodoxy and enter a different faith, you will lose your soul forever."

By the way, it was from Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal, that I first learned of what St. Theophan the Recluse said.

St Silouan of Mt Athos has said similar stuff. we can’t judge the state of any soul unless God graces us to do so. heretical doctrines are not salvific, and anyone who clings to them is in eternal jeopardy, but who is exactly damned for eternity is something not for us to judge.

 

[The Liturgist]

Well said. A lot of these churches allow their members to receive Holy Communion, even though they are liberal Democrats, like the notorious Archbishop Elpidophoros of the Greek Archdiocese. The Democratic Party embraces concepts diametrically opposed to the holy Christian faith. The problem today is with modernism in the clergy, and I suspect it's only to get worse. St. Cosmos prophesied that in the last days the clergy would be the worst Christians of all.

While I am no fan of that political party, there actually are pious Christians who reject abortion, homosexuality and so on who for various reasons are members of that political party, which is why no Orthodox Church has proscribed all members of that party from receiving the Eucharist. Indeed we have to be careful to avoid alienating potential converts. This in my view is what Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal, was so talented at, in that without compromising on Orthodox doctrine, he was able to present it in a non-polemical manner that encouraged interest and led to conversion, and once people are received, the Holy Spirit will inspire them to greater zeal, and they will find pious leaders such as Fr. Seraphim Rose, memory eternal, or Elder Ephraim of Arizona, memory eternal, and their successors, who will cultivate their zeal as their faith becomes refined. There is a progression many converts experience, where they graduate from reading, say, CS Lewis, to Metropolitan Kallistos, and then to the likes of Fr. Seraphim Rose or Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky. Or they come from the collapsing mainline churches, whose collapse is a real tragedy, one which I lament sincerely. This is an area where I feel the Antiochian Western Rite Vicarate and the ROCOR Western Rite offer great promise, since the Orthodox church should naturally be the best at celebrating all of the ancient liturgical rites and not just, as the Ecumenical Patriarchate tends to argue, the Byzantine Rite (indeed one point where I did disagree with Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, despite my admiration for him, was on the issue of the Western Rite, and I feel the Antiochian Orthodox Church should also invest in a Maronite Rite Vicarate, because the Maronite Rite used to be exquisite, very similiar to the Syriac Orthodox liturgy, but due to an ancient schism, the Syriac Orthodox are not in a position to easily evangelize the Maronites, but the Antiochians, who are in a state of extremely close ecumenical relations with the Syriac Orthodox, could, and at the same time this would also accomplish the desire of many Antiochians to revive the use of a Syriac Rite liturgy in their own denomination. And also the Antiochian Orthodox have more footprint in Lebanon than the Syriac Orthodox (the two churches mainly overlap in Syria, but outside of Syria, the two churches have a somewhat different demographic distribution).

Also, what St. Cosmos predicted he surely did not intend to contradict what our Lord promised in Matthew 16:18. The Church is safe; enough of it will survive to continue its function until the end, even if things will, as Scripture and the Fathers attest, get considerably worst. However considering that we do not know where we are between the beginning and the end and must rather prepare for our own demise, we really ought to not focus on the splinter in the eyes of others but on our own sins.

Lastly I really would urge that even in the case of someone who clearly you and I both disagree with (for example, Archbishop Elphidoros’s remarks on ecclesiology as the Metropolitan of Bursa were erroneous and worrisome), that we refrain from referring to current or deceased bishops of canonical churches, who are in the peace of the church or who reposed in the peace of the church, like Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal, or Archbishop Elphidoros, using highly perjorative terminology. I love and greatly admire Metropolitan Kallistos and mourn his passing and pray for his soul, and I have no doubt there are many Greek Orthodox who love Archbishop Elphidoros, so what we rather ought to do is to simply voice our concerns, I think, where we disagree with a canonical bishop, in a manner than minimizes the polemical content, and is charitable, and pray for them fervently. I greatly disagree with some Orthodox bishops, not just Archbishop Elphidoros, but also Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus, retired Archbishop Lazar Puhalo, and Metropolitan Epiphany of the OCU, but there are many others who hold these bishops in high esteem, and the real tragedy is the increased tendency towards schism, which must be resisted, despite the incalculable damage being caused by certain events.

 

[The Liturgist]

St Silouan of Mt Athos has said similar stuff. we can’t judge the state of any soul unless God graces us to do so. heretical doctrines are not salvific, and anyone who clings to them is in eternal jeopardy, but who is exactly damned for eternity is something not for us to judge.

Indeed. “Judge not lest ye not be judged.” Which of course does not mean, as some postmodern Protestant and Catholic theologians argue, that we should syncretically integrate pagan and shamanist rituals from various heathen cultures into our liturgies.

I recall an Episcopal cathedral that a few years back partitioned off a section of their worship space for use by Muslims as a political gesture (something which could come back to haunt them in the event of a neo-Turkocratia, since under Shariah once a mosque, always a mosque).

 

[ArmyMatt]

Indeed. “Judge not lest ye not be judged.” But of course we can pray, and we do, in the Great Litany and elsewhere.

yep, hence the prayers for those who depart outside of the Orthodox Church.

 

[The Liturgist]

yep, hence the prayers for those who depart outside of the Orthodox Church.

Also my understanding is that some Orthodox priests do perform burials of unidentified and indigent persons on behalf of county governments, which strikes me as admirable and a continuation of a custom that traces back into the ancient Hebrew religion (and my understanding is the Jews do this as well even today, and regard the burial of the unidentified and indigent dead as an extreme virtue, which if true is something I would have great respect for).

I am also extremely opposed to cremation and one of the things that I was delighted to learn after converting to Orthodoxy was our opposition to cremation, as I find it to be a barbaric practice and one in which many Christians were tragically misled. By the way, I have a friend who is a Korean War veteran and an Anglican, but whose recently decased wife and daughter in law are Orthodox and is very much loving of the Orthodox, but because of a horrific experience serving in the infantry in Korea and encountering unburied corpses, he has a desire to be cremated, and I pray he doesn’t do that. He also does not understand relics, but this is in part because he was horrified by the manner in which the Roman Catholics tend to display them, even the deceased remains for example of Pope John XXIII before he was canonized and who was never declared incorrupt but rather did not decompose owing to careful embalming… The Orthodox Church tends to be more tactful about how we present the relics of our saints for veneration. And it makes me sad to know my friend, who is in his 90s, is unlikely to experience the blessed experience I had of venerating the skull of Elder Joseph the Hesychast at St. Anthony’s Monastery in 2015 owing to the horror he experienced in the Korean War and the unhealthy Protestant attitude with regards to the deceased, which Fr. John Behr of Oxford, also wrote about and lectured on at length during his tenure as the dean of St. Vladimir’s.

 

[ArmyMatt]

Also my understanding is that some Orthodox priests do perform burials of unidentified and indigent persons on behalf of county governments, which strikes me as admirable and a continuation of a custom that traces back into the ancient Hebrew religion (and my understanding is the Jews do this as well even today, and regard the burial of the unidentified and indigent dead as an extreme virtue, which if true is something I would have great respect for).

I was taught we don’t do burials or funerals, but we can do the Trisagion portion of the funeral after the body is buried.

 

[The Liturgist]

I was taught we don’t do burials or funerals, but we can do the Trisagion portion of the funeral after the body is buried.

Forgive me, I should have clarified, that corresponds with what I read from a local Eastern Orthodox church, that their priest will say prayers for the departed when someone unknown or impoverished is buried by the county and there are no other clergy available.

And I had reckoned those would be the Trisagion prayers, since those are the default that Orthodox clergy can say for anyone.

The specific thing the Jews do that I find admirable is I believe simply burying the deceased, as opposed to any kind of religious rite beyond the actual burial, but I could be mistaken. Also if I recall they have volunteer search and recovery teams that have responded in the aftermath of building collapses and other disasters throughout the world.

It seems to me to be a very Christian thing to do, what the Roman Catholics call an act of corporal mercy, to bury the dead, since, as the Jews point out, the dead cannot offer anything in return for the service. And alas it only becomes a disservice in those certain peculiar religions such as Zoroastrianism and Hinduism which are opposed to burial and prefer cremation, or in the case of Zoroastrianism, being fed to vultures as a final act of charity, which might sound theoretically lovely, but the problem is from an Orthodox theological perspective, the human body is uniquely sacred in that it bears the image of God directly both through its creation and through the Incarnation, Transfiguration, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension of Christ the Only Begotten Son and Word of God, through which the divine image was restored and clarified, and therefore, acts which destroy the body or fail to show it proper respect are abhorrent.

Out of curiosity, one thing I never thought to ask about, but is there any Eastern Orthodox opposition to the idea of mausoleums or of the burial of persons in churches as opposed to in churchyards or cemetaries?

 

[ArmyMatt]

Out of curiosity, one thing I never thought to ask about, but is there any Eastern Orthodox opposition to the idea of mausoleums or of the burial of persons in churches as opposed to in churchyards or cemetaries?

nope

 

[The Liturgist]

nope

Good. I assumed not.

 

[ArmyMatt]

Good. I assumed not.

saints (like St John Maximovitch) are in Churches, St Tikhon’s has a mausoleum, some older places have crypts, etc.

 

[The Liturgist]

Well, I could start with the promotion of Universalism, cherry-picking Scripture and quoting the dissidents to patristic consensus on this thread.
In my own life, the most devastating has been the embrace of sexual anarchy by Orthodox Christians around me, and close to me, including family members, as well as hierarchs. The anarchy ranges from the promotion of the alphabet soup to the general approval of divorce between practicing orthodox Christians to the promotion of feminism in general, and support for these things, directly or indirectly, including on platforms like ancient faith ministries.
The promotion of leftism in general in the Church. The promotion and praise of hierarchs, who support things like the racist BLM, and forced drugs, masquerading as vaccines, of human evolution, and so on. It’s hard to know where to stop.

Are you aware that the term consensus patrum was first coined by Calvinists*? Within Orthodoxy we have Holy Tradition, which is explicitly defined from specific sources, starting with the sacred scriptures (the Gospels, Epistles, Psalms, and contents of the liturgical Prophetologion being of particular importance), then the liturgical texts, then the acts of the Ecumenical Councils, then the canons of the Councils and the Fathers compiled in the Pedalion, then the Patristic writings, and so on.

There are cases where two legitimate opinions can be held by an Orthodox Christian without incurring anathema or excommunication, on certain issues which were not addressed by the Fathers or the Ecumenical Synods and have not been definitively settled by the canonical church at present.

For example, I very much wish we would require Eastern Orthodox churches to not use either the Violakis Typikon or the Revised Julian Calendar, due to technical problems with these, specifically the manner in which the Revised Julian Calendar, unlike the Julian and Gregorian calendars, makes a Kyriopascha impossible, and also causes the Apostles Fast to be in some years of negative duration, and also various changes in the Violakis Typikon that Metropolitan Kallistos Ware described as “ill-advised”, such as the movement of the Matins (Orthros) Gospel to between the eighth and ninth ode of the Canon. I greatly prefer services that use older versions of the typikon, such as the Sabaite Typikon used by ROCOR and most Church Slavonic parishes on the Julian Calendar, or the older recension of the Typikon used by the Edinovertsy / Russian Old Rite Orthodox, such as the very friendly people at the ROCOR Church of the Nativity in Erie, PA, under Archpriest Pimen, or the slight variation used by the OCA, the Bulgarians, and others on the Revised Julian Calendar. Conversely, I also support the work of Dr. Alexander Lingas to restore the Cathedral Typikon, and I would love to see it implemented at a cathedral where it was once used that we still have, for example, the cathedral in Thessaloniki, in preparation for its eventual use when the Orthodox will some day I hope regain control of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.

And if we do regain Constantinople, I would argue that the Blue Mosque should be converted into a church dedicated to the Dormition of the Theotokos, and the New Mosque turned into a church dedicated to St. John Chrysostom or St. Mark of Ephesus.

But on these points, and indeed on more serious issues, for example, the question of how Alexandrian hermeneutics can be applied to Genesis with regards to reconciling it with our scientific understanding of the universe, bearing in mind that according to the Gospel of St. Luke the Evangelist, our Lord showed the disciples how the Old Testament is primarily about Him, and thus as I see it everything in it should be read from a Christological perspective, yet of course this does not discount all Antiochene literal-historical exegesis; on the contrary, I have no doubt that all the events described in Genesis happened, and I believe that what is described in Genesis 1 can be fully reconciled with our understanding of science, in a few different ways, which is not true of the account of creation provided by any other religion.

But on all these points, one could disagree with me, and should if they think I am wrong, for no ecumenical council or canon or synod has authoritatively decreed on these points. There is a consensus patrum but its applicability is less certain on issues such as the specific manner in which God propagated the unvierse with light in Genesis 1:1 and whether or not the days referred to were in one sense chronological epochs, since before the Sun and Earth existed, a day would strictly speaking be meaningless; indeed since God created time as well as space, we must bear that in mind.

Also, I do believe that many of the views of various creationists including both yourself and myself, for I actually am a creationist, can be made fully compatible with our current understanding of science, by this means: God, being omnipotent, could design the universe in exact detail, as if it had existed for 14 billion years, and then assembled it in the sequence described in Genesis 1 and with regards to humans, initialized our existence as described precisely in Genesis 2 with no intermediate connection to the primates; indeed I lean towards something like this happening as I do believe that Adam and Eve were the first humans, even though I also regard evolution as a demonstrated scientific reality (but Darwin’s conception of it was somewhat erroneous, in that he misunderstood the concept of what “survival of the fittest” meant, and the idea of social Darwinism is noxious, and the specific manner in which Darwin phrased his theory I believe resulted in more frequent and severe acts of genocide in the 20th century, motivated by the psuedo-science of eugenics and the evil idea of “racial hygiene.” Now one could argue this idea lacks parsimony, and I would concede this, but I am not convinced that Occam’s Razor can be applied to a subject that directly transects an area of divine activity, given that the Universe was created through our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son and Word of God, at the will of His Father.

*If memory serves; I believe this point was made in an article on Orthodoxy and Heterodoxy.

 

[The Liturgist]

saints (like St John Maximovitch) are in Churches, St Tikhon’s has a mausoleum, some older places have crypts, etc.

Indeed, the reason I asked is i had not seen any crypts within an Orthodox church and I was curious if laity were commonly buried in vaults of the floor of churches or in crypts as is common in Western Europe, which I particularly like, since in the context of lay burials I most frequently see the beautiful cemetaries of the Slavonic and Romanian churches.

 

[ArmyMatt]

Indeed, the reason I asked is i had not seen any crypts within an Orthodox church and I was curious if laity were commonly buried in vaults of the floor of churches or in crypts as is common in Western Europe, which I particularly like, since in the context of lay burials I most frequently see the beautiful cemetaries of the Slavonic and Romanian churches.

St John Maximovitch is in one I think

 

[The Liturgist]

St John Maximovitch is in one I think

His relics are in a glass reliquary if I recall at the Holy Virgin Cathedral in San Francisco. However, I was not sure if someone who had not been declared an incorrupt saint could be buried inside a non-transparent tomb within a church as one commonly finds in Europe, less so in the US due to zoning regulations concerning cemetaries (which I suspect, if used against the Orthodox, would be a violation of the First Amendment, much like the unlawful restrictions on worship imposed on us and on members of other religions* in California and Nevada and other states such as New York in 2020.

*There was an appalling incident in which Mayor Cuomo of New York City accosted a group of Chassidic Jews who were trying to conduct a funeral for their Rebbe who had coincidentally died during the initial wave of the pandemic, and it is for reasons like this that I am sympathetic to the views of our friend @Euthymios concerning members of a certain political party receiving the Eucharist, even though I disagree with them, in part because not all members of that political party agreed with the illegal restrictions on worship, and also for other reasons relating to why people, in prior decades, were members of one political party or another.

By the way, this takes us to the interesting point that, even though members of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union were required by the Communist Party to be atheists, not all of them were, for example it is widely believed that Yuri Gagarin and several other Cosmonauts secretly practiced Orthodoxy, and the Orthodox Church allowed this (and this is probably why the KGB then made such a major push to infilitrate the Russian Orthodox Church, and in Romania the Securitate did likewise, and in the DDR, the Stasi aggressively moved to infilitrate the Lutheran church, and so on, because they desired compromat that could be used against party members when other party members who were their clientele, so to speak, felt threatened by someone.

 

[ArmyMatt]

my point was just that graveyards and cemeteries aren’t the only places the bodies of the departed are kept.

 

[Euthymios]

if there is a history of exceptions to the rule, then that shows that God isn’t bound by the Church and can save whomever He chooses.

But He is bound by his own statements and teachings. If He says there is no salvation outside belief in Christ, then it is true. God is not morally defective like degenerate human beings. He is bound by His own nature and cannot lie. (Titus 1:2, Heb. 6:18; Num. 3:19).

 

[Euthymios]

This in my view is what Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, memory eternal, was so talented at, in that without compromising on Orthodox doctrine... I love and greatly admire Metropolitan Kallistos and mourn his passing and pray for his soul,

You're caught-up on externals. As previously noted, Metropolitan Kalliostos Ware was not Orthodox, for an Orthodox Christian accepts Orthodox teaching. Kallistos Ware held to the super-ecumenist heresy of religious pluralism and religious indifferentism, which is coming out of the Vatican. The New Catholic Catechism in Part One, Section 847, states that non-Catholics who “seek God with a sincere heart” and “try in their actions to do his will as they know it through the dictates of their conscience,” will “achieve eternal salvation.” This is a rejection of the Apostolic Faith and the Tradition of the Church.

Further, He held to theistic evolution, which totally contradicts all the Holy Fathers and the Orthodox Tradition, and he supported the ordination of women (see, Women and the Priesthood, St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, Crestwood, New York, 1999, pp. 1 and 7).

Even though Metropolitan Kallistos Ware did not believe in the Orthodox Faith and was not an Orthodox Christian, I am sure God used some of his material to enlighten many people. That he received an Orthodox burial means nothing, since the Churches today are filled with modernist and ecumenist clergy who hold Orthodox Tradition and the canons in contempt.

 

[Lukaris]

The Lord said that He will save those who were good and condemn the evil. Those are His ultimate judgments and what He says in John 5:22-30 tells me that He knows and I do not.