A "Reality Check" on Cults and Fundamentalism
by Archbishop Chrysostomos
Well over four decades ago, in my teenage years, when the Antiochian Orthodox Christian
Archdiocese was the Syrian Orthodox Church, when the Orthodox Church in America was known
as the Metropolia, and when the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad (or the "Russian
Orthodox Church Outside Russia") and we Greek Old Calendarists were respected for our
conservative traditionalism, we had quite a different generation of Orthodox in America.
In the Churches of what was then the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South
America, old grandmothers often stood in the back of the Churches. When they were asked
about the Old Calendarists, they would whisper: "echoun dikaio hoi
palaioemerologites..." ("The Old Calendarists are right..."). The
differences between the Metropolia and the Russian Church Abroad were well known: the
Metropolia was made up of disgruntled Russians, a large number of Ukrainians, and a huge
number of former Greek Catholics who had, in America, returned to their ancestral Orthodox
Faith; the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, on the other hand, was commonly referred to as
the Church of the White Russians, a conservative group of Bishops which had fled communism
and who represented both the voice of free Russian Orthodoxy in the West and the largest
and most influential witness of the Russian Faithful. While jurisdictional squabbles
existed at a local level, and while there were occasional slaps at the
"canonicity" of the Metropolia and the "New Calendarist Greeks," such
things were usually dismissed as adolescent and divisive. The single exception was that of
the "independent" churches formed by renegade groups of Orthodox clergy and
faithful (most of them broken off from the Greek Archdiocese) or various ecclesiastical
vagantes calling themselves Orthodox, who were not considered part of the Orthodox world.
The Old World Patriarchates, most of them either under the communist yoke or suffering
from economic deprivation and social isolation from the West, were honored for what they
were: glorious symbols of a lost age of Orthodox social and political dominance.
Never, in those days, did one hear the accusation—even if the Syrian Church and
the New Calendarist Greeks were at times characterized as "ethnic social
clubs"—that the Russian Church Abroad or the Greek Old Calendarists were
"heretics," "schismatics," "outside the Church," or
"cultists." Such accusations would have been considered an outrage and an
assault against those who had "preserved Orthodoxy in its purest form," as
Metropolitan Anthony (Bashir) of the Syrian Orthodox Church said of the Greek Old Calendar
zealots. And to speak of the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad, a bastion of resistance
against the spiritual ills in the Russian Church—of which communism was but one
symptom—, would have been to speak against the spiritual "Elders" of the
time. Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) was held in the highest esteem in
Constantinople, prior to its total fall to modernism and its ill-advised support of the
Soviet-inspired "Living Church" in Russia, was praised in Greece as a great
homilist, and was beloved by the Serbian Orthodox Patriarchate and its Faithful. Likewise,
Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Florina, the "Father" of the Greek Old Calendar
movement, was, at his death, praised as a great pastor and spiritual Father by his former
Deacon, Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras. Begrudgingly, even many Bishops in the New
Calendarist State Church of Greece, chief among them Metropolitan Augustine of Florina,
often referred to the Old Calendarist Faithful as being among the most sincere Christians
of Greece.
Now, in the last decade of the century, things have changed. Recently, a spate of
articles in the official publication of the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese,
"The Word," has focused on the question of fundamentalism and cultism. Until of
late, these rather inarticulate articles have only alluded to Orthodox traditionalists as
"fundamentalists" and "outside the Church" (see, for example,
"Fundamentalism, Cults, and the Like...," in the June 1993 issue, or, in the
same issue, "Will Success Spoil [St.] John Chrysostom? Or the Dangers of Orthodox
Fundamentalism"); but a recent article
by Father Samuel Sebring (March 1998) makes these accusations openly. Postings to the
Internet by a certain Archpriest have also flatly condemned Orthodox traditionalists, and
especially the Greek Old Calendarists, as heretics, schismatics, and cultists. In better
times, the Hierarchs of the Antiochian Church would have hung their heads in shame over
these ill-conceived and vicious attacks against Orthodox Christians who have shed their
blood in defense of the Faith. The Antiochian Hierarchy has allowed irresponsible voices,
largely from among converts to their Church from Protestantism, to speak out in a way that
divides Orthodoxy and that thwarts any hope for union between the various factions of the
Church. It has sanctioned a neo-Papal ecclesiology based on the meanderings of former
Protestants who, often suffering from the anti-Papal prejudices of backwater American
religious sects, hope to find in the moribund Patriarchates of the Orthodox Church the
"canonicity" and "officialdom" denied them in their Reformed
confessions by Roman Catholicism. The end-result of this has been the emergence of an
ethos foreign to the Church, rooted in ecclesiastical egotism, and advocated by
individuals who have an insufficient grounding in the true traditions of the Orthodox
Church and a distorted, Westernized notion of Her history and teachings.
Regarding the astonishing charge of cultism against us Orthodox traditionalists, before
it became the policy of the "Greek Orthodox Theological Review" no longer to
publish my articles and book reviews, because I am an Old Calendar zealot (and one wonders
about accusations of "cultism" by Churches that will not allow us to exchange
ideas in an open forum), I wrote an article for that journal on Orthodoxy and cultism
("Orthodoxy and the Cults," Vol. XXV, No. 1 [Spring 1980], pp. 37-47). In my
article, I argue that the very reason that we Orthodox do not risk cultism, in our claim
to spiritual primacy, is that we make that claim, not on institutional grounds, but on the
basis of an exclusivity "traced essentially to Christ," which in turn,
"demands love and humility." Yet we find former Protestants accusing us Orthodox
traditionalists of lacking Grace and constituting cults, if simply because we are part of
a temporary rupture, on the grounds of conscientious resistance to a deviation in the
Faith that we see in certain Orthodox jurisdictions, in the administrative structure of
the Church. Moreover, the language used in describing us, as well as the arrogant hatred
directed against us, hardly evidence love and humility on the part of our
detractors—indeed, one detractor on an Orthodox mailing list on the Internet referred
to us Old Calendarists as liars and conscious defilers of Orthodoxy.
More to the point, when the Antiochian Orthodox Church received into its ranks, some
years ago, a large segment of the so-called Evangelical Orthodox Church, was it not
sponsoring a former sect that the cult-watch group, Spiritual Counterfeits, had long
accused of having a cult-like character? And while we Orthodox traditionalists certainly
object to the innovative reception of the faithful and clergy of this former sect by
extreme economy and the unheard-of innovation of mass Ordinations, we took no umbrage with
them on "institutional" grounds; that is, that they were not part of our
jurisdictions and therefore not Orthodox. For, indeed, the official position of the major
traditionalist Orthodox bodies—the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and the Greek Old
Calendarists under Metropolitan Cyprian—has always been that, though we fear that
they are on the brink of apostasy and have walled ourselves off from the modernist
Orthodox in canonical resistance to their ills, they are not outside the pale of
Orthodoxy. Yet, in violation of love and humility, we find clergy in the Antiochian
Orthodox Archdiocese, some of them, ironically enough, from a sect of self-proclaimed and
self-ordained "Orthodox" who were accused of cultism, accusing us of lacking
Grace, of constituting cults, and of existing "outside the Orthodox Church," to
quote Father Samuel Sebring (vide supra).
The accusation that we Orthodox traditionalists are "fundamentalists" not
only shows a total lack of theological insight, but a penchant, on the part of our
detractors in the Antiochian Church, for simple name-calling.
I am an Old Calendarist zealot because, in the ancient Eucharistic and Hesychastic
tradition of the Church, I believe that the purpose of spiritual life is spiritual
enlightenment, union with God, or theosis. It is this end, to quote St. Nicodemos the
Hagiorite, which defines salvation for the Orthodox Christian. This process of
divinization is rooted in the wholeness of the liturgical and spiritual traditions of the
Orthodox Church, which form a mosaic of spiritual wisdom that rises above human knowledge
and which is embodied in the noetic encounter of man with God. I am what most
traditionalists are, in this sense. I do not believe that there are
"fundamental" elements in Orthodoxy that constitute its essence, but that
adherence to the fullness of the Church’s traditions is the source of authentic
Orthodoxy. For us traditionalists, there are no "reformed" fasts, truncated
Liturgies, or accommodations to cultural whims or historical trends. Rather, we find in
the Gestalt of Orthodoxy a path towards the cleansing of the mind, the subjugation of the
passions, and an ineffable communion with the Energies of God. If this is fundamentalism,
then black is white and 1+1=11.
Let us look, too, at those who make this accusation against us. The large numbers of
former "Evangelical Orthodox" who have been absorbed into the Antiochian
Orthodox Church (first as an entity in that jurisdiction, the so-called Antiochian
Evangelical Orthodox Mission [AEOM]) are the scions of a movement whose leaders hail from
the Campus Crusade for Christ—from a group that reduced Christianity to "four
spiritual laws." And the remnants of their fundamentalism are not absent from the
innovations that one sees in their worship, in their personal spiritual lives, and in
their publications. (One thinks immediately of the Orthodox Study Bible, for
example, which is neither Orthodox nor an adequate guide to the understanding of Scripture
from a Patristic perspective [see "Sourozh,"
"Book Reviews," No. 54 (November 1993), pp. 42-49] (reviewed by
Archimandrite Ephraim); and "Orthodox Tradition," "Questions and Comments
from Readers," Vol. XI, No. 3, pp. 28-29]. These individuals should take great care
in accusing others of fundamentalism. And the Antiochian Church as a whole, deeply
involved in the ecumenical movement, can assuredly be charged with fundamentalism, since
the assumptions of ecumenism have their very source in Protestant fundamentalism (see
"Orthodoxy and Fundamentalism: The Fundamentalism of the
Orthodox Ecumenists," Chap. II in Archimandrite Cyprian Agiokyprianites, Orthodoxy
and the Ecumenical Movement [Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies,
1997]).
Finally, returning to the Orthodox world as it was, it is indeed a foolish thing to
dismiss the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad as a body "outside the Church."
Setting aside its prominent place in the history of the Russian Orthodox Church and such
luminaries from among its Hierarchs as St. John of Shanghai and San Francisco, the Russian
Orthodox Church Abroad was fully recognized by the Antiochian Orthodox Christian
Archdiocese, when the latter was the Syrian Orthodox Church. Does this surprise our recent
convert arrivals into the Antiochian jurisdiction? If so, let us provide them with another
interesting fact. The following is an entry from the 1968
"Yearbook" of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, the
American Exarchate of the Ecumenical Patriarchate: "Orthodox Churches with Whom [sic;
read "Which"] We Are in Communion. In addition to those parishes under the
spiritual leadership of the members of the Standing Conference of Bishops, as listed
above, we are in full communion with the following Churches: ...2. Russian Church Outside
Russia (Metropolitan Filaret)" (p. 155).
So much, then, for the oft-told lie that the Russian Church Abroad is an
"uncanonical" Church. (It was by choice, incidentally, that it declined
membership in the Standing Conference of [Orthodox] Bishops). So much, too, for the rather
inane accusation that those who flee to it from modernist jurisdictions thereby remove
themselves from the pale of the Church—unless, of course, the so-called
"mainstream" Churches, including the Church of Antioch, maintained communion
with a non-Orthodox Church for many decades. In fact, the unfortunate truth is that, not
until it opened communion with the Greek Old Calendarists in 1969 and Metropolitan Philaret began to decry the ecumenism of what are
now called "canonical" and "official"
Churches (nomenclature borrowed from the Papists and the ecumenical movement), did the
Greek Archdiocese cease its maintenance of "full communion" with the Russian
Orthodox Church Abroad. There are, of course, clever individuals, those not opposed to
calling others liars and not above stretching the truth themselves, who will find various
means by which to explain away the compromising facts which I have presented. But they
will simply heap upon themselves condemnation, not only for the violation of love and
humility, but for having allowed personal antipathy to supersede that common decency which
alone, in synergy with the Grace of God, will restore unity in the Church by a return to
the fullness of our Faith.
I never thought that I would prefer the Orthodoxy of a half century ago to that which I
see today, but the divisive hatred of ecumenism and of those who misuse their
Faith—in many cases an adopted one—prompt me to do so. What a sad commentary on
Orthodoxy in America!
From Orthodox Tradition, Vol. XV, No. 2.
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