To any ecumenists—and especially those living in religiously pluralistic societies—who may still misunderstand these sacred responsibilities of ours before the Orthodox Church to constitute a condemnation of other confessions and religions, let us underscore what we have said above with the words of a contemporary Greek Saint, Nectarios of Aegina.  With singular eloquence, this holy personage explains that, in defending the pristine body of Truth contained within Orthodoxy, we have in no manner abandoned love and the hope for Christian unity.  It is love which transforms our preservative actions and deeds into an open call to those of all religions to join us therein and, ultimately, to embrace the fullness of truth which we so sedulously guard:

Dogmatic differences, reduced to an issue of faith, leave the matter of love free and unchallenged; dogma does not set itself against love.... Christian love is constant, and for this reason the deformed faith of the heterodox cannot change our feeling of love towards them.... Issues of faith must in no way diminish the feeling of love.⁵

 

The Orthodox in resistance see it as their Evangelical duty to expose religious syncretism (ecumenism and the ecumenical movement) as something that, with whatever misguided goodness of intention, leads one away from the conviction that there is a true Church and an established path to spiritual perfection.  At the same time, as we have seen, the ethos and spirit of the Gospel also draw us into a love of our fellow man, such that our defense of the Truth and our resistance to religious syncretism springs from an all-embracing concern for the spiritual estate of all mankind, the salvation of every man and woman, and the abhorrence of any sort of religious bigotry, intolerance, or fanaticism, whether among our Orthodox brethren or those of other religions.

 

II. The true path towards unity begins in and with the Church

 

The goal of uniting Christianity, which we consider a sacred and desired one, is accomplished, as we see and interpret the teachings of the Orthodox Church and the witness of the Church Fathers, not by dialogue and by compromise (that is, by overlooking the theological differences between various confessions and religions); it is fully realized only in the unity of Faith.  So it is that Christ—to use a Scriptural passage so often abused and misused by the ecumenical movement—expressed His desire, during His earthly mission, that all Christians “may be one,”⁶ avoiding the “scandal” of “division,” as St. John Chrysostomos tells us, in his

hermeneutical comments on these words of the Lord, by adhering to the faith of the Apostles;⁷ avoiding the “scandal” of “teachers” who are “divided” and not “of the same mind,” as St. Theophylact of Ochrid interprets this same passage;⁸ and living in unity “not in order that we may believe,” as St. Augustine affirms, “but because we have believed.”⁹

 

There is, in the sacred Patristic tradition of the Orthodox Church, not a single word about finding ultimate Truth in dialogue (though dialogue and the search for mutual understanding are salutary things when undertaken in the proper context) or in joint prayer and common worship between the Orthodox and heterodox.  Indeed, there are canonical proscriptions against such activities.  Rather, “because we have believed” and are “of the same mind,” we are one in our Orthodox confession, constantly, sincerely, and fervently calling others into the communion of the Church.  As the late Father John Romanides, Professor of Theology at the University of Thessaloniki, says of Christ’s entreaty for unity among men (with a tone of irony directed at the syncretistic “ecclesiology” of the modern ecumenical movement), it “is certainly not a prayer for the union of churches,”¹⁰ but for our unity and oneness in the transformative powers of the Orthodox Faith and our “glorification” by Grace, which Grace, as we have said, is a unique quality of Christianity in its fullness. It is in the “one body” of the Orthodox Church—in the “one faith” and the “one Baptism”—that Christ calls us to oneness: a unity to which we, in turn, invite all men and women, freely and openly.¹¹  So we teach and so our Fathers have called us to teach.