ORTHODOX CHRISTIANS live today in one of the great critical times in the history of Christ’s Church. The enemy of man’s salvation, the devil, attacks on all fronts and strives by all means not merely to divert believers from the path of salvation shown by the Church, but even to conquer the Church of Christ itself, despite the Saviour’s promise (Mt. 16:18), and to convert the very Body of Christ into an “ecumenical” organization preparing for the coming of his own chosen one, Antichrist, the great world-ruler of the last days.
Of course, we know that this attempt of Satan will fail; the Church will be the Bride of Christ even to the end of the world and will meet Christ the Bridegroom at His Second Coming pure and undefiled by adulterous union with the apostasy of this age. But the great question of our times for all Orthodox Christians to face is a momentous one: the Church will remain, but how many of us will still be in it, having withstood the devil’s mighty attempts to draw us away from it?
“A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him saying: ‘You are mad, you are not like us.’”
Abba Anthony of Egypt
Our times are much like those of St. Mark of Ephesus in the 15th century, when it seemed that the Church was about to be dissolved into the impious Union with the Latins. Nay, our times are even worse and more dangerous than those times; for then the Union was an act imposed by force from without, while now the Orthodox people have been long prepared for the approaching “ecumenical” merger of all churches and religions by decades of laxness, indifference, worldliness, and indulgence in the ruinous falsehood that “nothing really separates us” from all others who call themselves Christians. The Orthodox Church survived the false Union of Florence, and even knew a time of outward prosperity and inward spiritual flourishing after that; but after the new false Union, now being pursued with ever-increasing momentum, will Orthodoxy exist at all save in the catacombs and the desert?
“There is nothing more burdensome and grievous then when conscience accuses us in anything, and there is nothing dearer then calmness and approval of the conscience.”
St Maximus the Confessor
During the past ten years and more [N.B. This article was written in the 1970’s - ed.], under the disastrous “ecumenical” course pursued by Patriarch Athenagoras and his successor, the Orthodox Churches have already come perilously close to total shipwreck. The newest “ecumenical” statement of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, “The Thyateira Confession” (see The Orthodox Word, Jan.-Feb., 1976), is already sufficient evidence of how far the Orthodox conscience has been lost by the Local Church that once was first among the Orthodox Churches in the confession of Christ’s truth; this dismal document only shows how close the hierarchs of Constantinople have now come to being absorbed into the heterodox “Christianity” of the West, even before the formal Union which is still being prepared.
“The sure path to perdition is indifference and the lack of principles.”
The Ever-memorable Archbishop Averky of Jordanville
THE ROOTS of today’s ecumenism in the Orthodox Churches go back to the renovationism and modernism of certain hierarchs in the 1920’s. In the Russian Church, these currents produced, first, the “Living Church” movement which, with the help of the Communist regime, tried to overthrow Patriarch Tikhon and “reform” the Church in a radically Protestant manner, and then as a more “conservative” successor to the “Living Church” the Sergianist church organization (the Moscow Patriarchate), which emphasized at first the political side of reconciliation with Communist ideology and aims (in accordance with the infamous “Declaration” of Metropolitan Sergius in 1927), and only in recent decades has ventured once again into the realm of ecclesiastical renovationism with its active participation in the ecumenical movement. In the Greek Church the situation has been similar: the renovationist “Pan-Orthodox Council” of 1923, with its Protestant reforms inspired by Patriarch Meletios Metaxakis of sorry memory, proved to be too radical for the Orthodox world to accept, and the renovationists had to be satisfied with imposing a calendar reform on several of the non-Slavic Churches.
“The outward betterment of the conditions of life alone, without first a moral improvement of the people themselves, would be total victory of evil, for such a self satisfied happiness would strengthen the hopeless corporeal condition of those who partake thereof, paralyzing all possibility for moral improvement and spiritual perfection.”
Fr. Boris Molchanoff
