On the Term "True Orthodox"
I have read in your last two issues about your views
of Orthodoxy in Sweden. You are not wrong, just too truthful for those who do not really
know Orthodoxy....And I am not an Old Calendarist....One of our Swedish Orthodox
magazines had a review of the "Directory of Orthodox Parishes and Institutions in
North America." The reviewer, a Priest, ruminated: "Do we really need Churches
called ‘The True Orthodox Church’ or ‘True Orthodox.’" (A.W.,
Sweden)
The directory in question, however useful, is very poorly
edited, and the names of various Churches, including our own, are incorrectly listed. (We
might also note that various publications are sometimes incorrectly cited, names are
wrongly spelled, and various parishes and institutions within particular jurisdictions are
missing.) Your reviewer, then, is working with a text that should probably have been
revised before it was reviewed.
With regard to "True Orthodox
Christians," it is a symptom of modern Orthodoxy and its multitude of self-styled
theologians and experts that so little that we read in the Church today is based on
experience, the Patristic witness, and the consensus of the Church. Western ideas in
Orthodox packaging replace the real theology of our Church. Opinion takes precedence over
theology. And criticism is always meant to denigrate and "destroy" some
supposed adversary, rather than to teach and to call others to a correction of their
errors. Thus, every critic of the Old Calendarists singles out the phrase "True
Orthodox Christians" as a contradiction in terms. Are not all Orthodox "True
Christians," we are asked? The answer from the Fathers and from history is, of
course, "no," as we have pointed out several times in this column.The
distinction between True Orthodox and those who are ailing in the Faith is as old as the
Arian controversy, when the Arians considered themselves "Orthodox." When
illness strikes the Church, there is always, until a council or synod condemns the heresy
which leads to illness and vindicates those healthy believers who have resisted it, a
distinction between "True Orthodox" and those Orthodox who hold to wrong beliefs
and who, if they persist in their error, eventually come to suffer condemnation as
heretics.
It is perhaps one of the greatest vindications of
the True Orthodox that those who criticize them for using the appellation "True"
are guilty of the very thing that the Old Calendar resistance seeks to remedy: a deviation
from Holy Tradition and the knowledge of Church history and Patristics that defines and
gives body to that Tradition.
From Orthodox Tradition, Vol. XI, No. 1, pp. 24-25.
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