Yep. Ecumenism is pretty dumb. I'd be very pleased if things like the WCC stopped existing. I'm not interested in a race to the bottom with a bunch of heretics who prefer warm and fuzzy feelings and vapid platitudes to God.
More to the point, I don't think any source of any traditional church or communion saw it the way many people seem to today. Whether it's the Nicene Church and the Creed written by our common fathers there and finalized at Constantinople, the Chalcedonians and their Tome, the Roman Catholics in particular and their various pronouncements like
Pastor Aeternus et al., the various Protestant statements of belief, etc., all of these function in a very real way to draw a line between who is within the circle and who is not. And to a greater and lesser degree, whatever boundary one tradition sets is going to be rejected by another. What can ya do? That's no reason to simply give up on having standards at all just so that we can play together at having a unity that we do not actually have. Christ Himself prayed that all should be one -- He didn't simply declare it to be the case on the basis of some stupid meeting or agreed statement. True unity is at the cup and in the cup, not anywhere else before.
Wanna believe in Chalcedon and its Tome? Go ahead. We're still not going to, so there's no unity to be had at that level. And those people have their own theological reasons for believing as they do, complete with accompanying supposed miracles and even also material reasons for being assured that they have clearly made the right decision, just as we have our own reasons for coming to a different conclusion. So there's no movement on that in any direction, despite how nicely we can now talk to one another if we so choose.
Similarly, if you have problems with declaring the virgin St. Mary
Theotokos, then nobody can stop you in preferring something else, just as no one has been able to stop the Nestorians up until this very day, despite many meetings with the other churches up until the current day.
And the Roman Catholics, likewise, can have whatever other theology they'd like (e.g., the filioque, the weird Augustinian notion of a depersonalized Holy Spirit, etc.), and their own very unique ecclesiology, and so on and so forth, and the rest of the churches or communions can just sort of look at them and say "Well, okay...we're not doing any of that or believing any of that, but so long as none of your heresy gets on us...", because really what else can you say...
And the Protestants...well, they're too diverse to be easily categorized, since that's kind of the point of the approach to the faith that privileges individual interpretation, but suffice it to say that they have a multitude of views and approaches, as well.
Do you notice how none of these actually require any body to move even an inch in "becoming unified" with any other body with which they already don't agree? That's why ecumenism is dumb. Not because love isn't somehow the most important thing (we can and do all read St. Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians, I take it), or because we cannot cooperate on other matters that do not touch our respective theologies/Christologies/ecclesiologies/whatever (since we already do that), but because on the very core of what has separated us in the first place, there really isn't anything to compromise on.
The most lovey-dovey, hippy-dippy ecumenist in the world will suddenly become quite cold to the idea that they should ever have to
actually do anything in order to have the unity they claim to want with everyone, and the more specific it gets, the more 'unity' -- which is supposed to be the goal of all of this, mind you -- becomes really unpalatable. "What do you mean I have to submit myself to the Roman Catholic Pope as the supreme visible head of all Christians? I don't want to do that!"; "What do you mean I have to give up my tambourine-shaking folk songs about how Jesus is groovy and replace it with this dour, heavy-sounding Byzantine chant and a bunch of icons where Jesus doesn't even look like a cast member from Hair?"; "What do you mean I have to fast over 200 days a year? What's
ful? What's an
Ag-bee-yuh? What are Matins? Why can't I just give up frowning for Lent? This is
TOO MUCH STUFF! God just wants us to, like...
love everyone, man!"
Alright, then. You don't wanna do it after all? Then don't do it. But then get the heck out of here with your calls for "unity" that you don't actually want.
The only Christianity I believe in and seek to be unified with sometimes involves things that I have no reason to believe that anyone other than myself and my fellow Oriental Orthodox Christians would want to be unified with, so it would really be harming my own faith to no benefit if I were to approach ecumenism as a matter of compromise rather than conversion of the non-Orthodox, as has already been pointed out earlier by Ignatius the Kiwi in post #9 (and, yes, I can affirm this even as the EO and the OO are not in communion, because we think the same on this matter, when push comes to shove).
No matter who likes it or dislikes it, the true faith sometimes involves kicking others out of the Church, and stating to their faces that this is happening because of what they have chosen to follow instead. Witness the following:
HG Bishop Abanoub cleans the Church of St. Simeon the Tanner at Al-Mokattam, after years of infestation by Protestant Evangelicals (and the weak-minded among us who did not want to deprive the people there of the worship that made them feel nice even as it slowly poisoned them, because "Waaaah...they're zabaleen (the famous garbage collectors who live in the dump as well - dzh.), so they have nothing!" Yeah. And
Orthodoxy is free! So there's no excuse for it.)
(In case the annotations don't show up)
"[Here] We here will sing, and all 20 million Coptic Orthodox are joyful in, the ORTHODOX hymns that are being sung at the moment. And he [who] wants to sing Protestant [songs], or non-Orthodox [songs], on their platforms, should leave along with those we have already sent [away], and we here will sing Orthodox [songs]."
I present these not to say "Oooo, what a boss!" or whatever, but because in the context of this topic, I should think that some people would think this kind of talk incredibly harsh, and unnecessarily intrusive or what have you. And I'm sure from some perspectives, it is. But that's just the thing: those perspectives are precisely what will not be nurtured in the Church, no matter why anyone has them.
Because what did HG broach that people might find reason to disagree over?
- The right of the individual to praise God as he wishes to...which the Church says is not a right that you have. Heck, it's not even a right that
we who are in the Church have, insofar as the previously-celebrated "Habashi liturgy" (which was, strangely, an Arabic translation of one of the Ethiopian anaphoras...'strangely' because Ethiopia originally received her anaphoras from Egypt) was discontinued by HH Pope Shenouda III and the Holy Synod, with the reasoning that we have our own liturgies (those of St. Basil, St. Cyril, and St. Gregory) which have passed down to us to this day that we need to protect and care for, rather than taking another Church's liturgy for own use.
- The right of the individual to attach whatever importance or meaning that they want to worship and to the sacraments, i.e. to confession and communion...which is again not a right that
anyone actually has. The Church has deep, ancient, and rock solid theology surrounding all of these things, and indeed everything that it does, so what an individual would rather have them mean so as to excuse their attendance at or approval of other things really doesn't matter. We don't rewrite the liturgy itself to better fit a modern, carefree person's ideas of personal liberty, so neither should we or will we allow those same ideas to proliferate unopposed in the Church. Such laxity would only result in the complete loss of the faith in whichever place in which it was allowed to go on. That's what HG was getting at in the second video when asking rhetorically where the Church was at this location. Everyone may be able to see the name on the door, but if what's inside isn't up to snuff, it doesn't matter what you call it or yourselves.
And that's just two short videos about one particular location!
Does anyone want to become Orthodox yet? Good. (I'm pretending some of you said yes.) Now get ready to leave whatever Western theology you have embraced that is incompatible with the Church outside forever, because we do not want to mix our pure faith with theological error. That's another thing that signals problems wherever it is found. HH Pope Shenouda III even called it "the worst problem we are facing" in the Church today, in the process of providing the correct answer to it (that only Orthodoxy is Orthodox --
el Orthodoksiya hiya el Orthodoksiya -- and there is to be no compromise):
As HH has correctly seen and put it, wrongness is tolerated to curry people's favor, where if you would tell them the truth they would leave. That's not only the case with effectively Protestant meetings held by 'Orthodox' (shudder), that's ecumenism in general, and as a result both are to be thoroughly and definitively rejected.
