The Shepherd, June 2005
A Voice crying in the wilderness, 4
The third invention of the Lambeth Conference was the famous “branch theory,” stemming from the assertion that the Church of Christ is supposedly a tree of many branches, all of whose branches are mutually equal and which represent the manifestation of the one Church only in their collective unity.
Once sown, the evil seed spread quickly. By the beginning of the 20th century, in 1919, the Protestant “churches” organised a World Mission Conference in Edinburgh where it was decided to organise a worldwide Christian movement to address issues of faith and church organisation.
Simultaneously active was the Life and Work movement, whose task was to realise the unity of Christians through their cooperation on issues of practical life. Out of these two exclusively Protestant movements and with their unification in 1948 at the first General Assembly in Amsterdam, the World Council of Churches, based in Geneva, was created.
Sadly, also present at this assembly, unfortunately, were some of the Orthodox Churches, including the Œcumenical Patriarchate, the Church of Cyprus, the Church of Greece and the Russian Metropolia in America (today the Orthodox Church in America).
3. Unfortunately, Orthodoxy did not resist this temptation of modernism and secularism for long, but quickly became infected with it. Among the Orthodox Churches, the first to make a concession to ecumenism was the Patriarchate of Constantinople, from as early as January 1920, with its Encyclical “To the Churches of Christ Everywhere.” Not only does it refer to all local Orthodox Churches as “churches,” but for the first time this name is equally given to the various heretical confessions. Thus, at the very beginning of this unfortunate encyclical it is said: “...rapprochement between the various Christian Churches and fellowship between them is not excluded by the doctrinal differences which exist between them....” The Encyclical further appeals that it is necessary to work on “preparation and advancement of that blessed union;” it calls various heretical groups “churches that should no more consider one another as strangers and foreigners, but as relatives, as being a part of the household of Christ” and “fellow heirs, members of the same body and partakers of the promise of God in Christ” (Eph. 3:6). As the first practical step in the building of mutual confidence and love, it is considered necessary for the Orthodox Church to accept the New (Gregorian) Calendar, “for the celebration of the great Christian feasts at the same time by all the churches.” This was soon done by the Patriarchate of Constantinople (and later by some other local Orthodox Churches), which paid a high price: internal schism both within the Church and among the people. Other Orthodox Churches resisted this evil temptation for a time. The Patriarchate of Moscow in particular demonstrated certain signs of caution toward ecumenism. The Conference of the bishops of local Orthodox Churches held in Moscow on 8-18 July 1948, on the occasion of the 500-year anniversary of the proclamation of autocephaly of the Russian Church bore witness to this. Representatives of the Churches of Alexandria, Antioch, Russia, Serbia, Romania, Georgia, Bulgaria, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Albania taking part in the meeting rejected participation in the world ecumenical movement and in the WCC, which had just been formed, condemning it as a heresy.
4. However, this zealousness of the Orthodox in teaching God’s Truth about the Church, unfortunately, did not last long. Only four years after the formation of the WCC, in 1952, Patriarch Athenagoras of Constantinople issued an encyclical calling on all heads of local Orthodox Churches to join the WCC. In spite of the fact that the reasons for such exhortations were totally trite, clichéd and non-ecclesial (for example, “rapprochement of peoples and nations” for the purpose of “confronting the great problems which occupy the whole of humanity”), during the course of the same year (1952) individual Orthodox Churches rushed to join the WCC. The Œcumenical Patriarchate sent its permanent representatives to WCC headquarters in Geneva. In 1959, the Central Committee of the WCC met with the representatives of all the Orthodox Churches on the island of Rhodes. Since then, ecumenism has penetrated the walls of Orthodoxy and began like a cancer to consume it from within. After the Rhodes meeting, the Orthodox began to compete among themselves as to who would be the most ecumenical.
Beginning in 1961, Orthodox ecumenists began to convene one conference after another for the purpose of realising their ecumenistic goals. Thus, in 1964, a Third Conference was held on Rhodes where the decision was made to conduct dialogues with heretics “on an equal basis,” and each local Orthodox Church was obligated to establish, independently, “brotherly relations” with heretics. The ringleader in all of these ecumenical games was Patriarch Athenagoras, who began a series of meetings with the Pope of Rome, effected the mutual removal of anathemas of 1054, conducted common prayers, etc., later followed by his successors and assistants, Archbishops Iakovos of North and South America, Stylianos of Australia, Damascene of Geneva, and many others.
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