Speech delivered during the reception of the Metropolitan of Pergamon as a Fellow of the Volos Academy for Theological Studies, Volos, October 29, 2011
Metropolitan John (Zizioulas) of Pergamon
Translated from Greek by Fr. Gregory Edwards
Time (χρόνος) is given meaning by kairos (καιρός), and kairos is but a stop, a waystation, which allows us to survey the past and gaze into the future. Without kairos, time flows senselessly, it drowns in death, and nothing that happens survives. In all creation, only man can turn time into kairos. The Creator gave man the privilege of freedom, and with that also the responsibility to introduce into time—if only for a while (as occurs par excellence in the Divine Liturgy)—the presence and taste of the eschaton, the last things—that which will not perish along with all the useless things that we bear in this life.
I feel like I’m experiencing such a “kairos” these days, a gift of the merciful God through the love of my brother Metropolitan Ignatios of Demetrias, as I listen to the echo of my voice in the thoughtful speech and analysis of the speakers of this conference, and as I receive from the hands of the Director of the Academy for Theological Studies the honorary distinction of becoming its first “Partner.”
I thus interrupt the flow of the time of my life and stand at this waystation of its journey first of all to thank the Lord, the Giver of good things, Who gave me the great gift of my existence and the desire to seek its meaning, and then all you who, led by the indefatigable and charismatic shepherd of this local Church, took the trouble to honor me with your presence here.
I characterized this honorable event as a “kairos” and a “waystation” in the flow of the time of my life, because today I feel the duty to stand, and with sobriety—without being influenced, either by praise or by cruel and unjust polemics—to survey the past and look to the future. One of the great lessons that the Lord allowed me to learn in my life, not without difficulty and personal cost, is that the work of each of us is not praised or discredited by the judgment of people, but by that of God.
And God’s judgment is not expressed through ephemeral publicity, but takes time to manifest — historical and, ultimately, eschatological time. “Now if anyone builds on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw, each one’s work will become clear; for the Day will declare it, because it will be revealed by fire; and the fire will test each one’s work, of what sort it is. If anyone’s work which he has built on it endures, he will receive a reward. If anyone’s work is burned, he will suffer loss” (1Cor. 3:12-15).
Let us approach with the fear of God both our own offering and the offering of others. If what we posit is true, no matter how much mud falls on it, God will bring it to light, and if it is false, it will vanish. Guided by this teaching, I avoided theological controversy in my life as much as I could. In any event, I preferred to spend my time positively, offering rather than denying, indeed even when what I should have denied had to do with either passionate criticism or personal promotion and backbiting.
With this observation, allow me to open the issue of the future of Orthodox theology in our time. The first and, in my opinion, major problem of Orthodox theology today is the absence of positive propositions. When, in the 1960s, the generation of theologians to which I belong “rebelled,” in a way, against academic theology, as it had been shaped according to Western standards by previous generations (Androutsos, etc.), it was not limited to criticism, but we submitted positive proposals. Some, such as J. Romanidis, drew from the Hesychast tradition and shaped their theology around the axis of personal experience with a strong charismatic element.
Others, such as C. Yannaras, opened Orthodox theology to the field of philosophy by highlighting the ontology of relationship. Personally, I found the Eucharist the key to understanding firstly the structure and ministries of the Church, and then anthropology itself (in the sense of the person as communion and otherness) and finally this mystery of the Triune God as essence and persons, communion and otherness.
Over time what happened to all this in the early 21st century? First, each of the above proposals received harsh criticism, but without any counter-proposal. Second, and worse, the aforementioned proposals collided with each other, making any synthesis impossible. Just recently, the eucharistic approach was judged by a “follower” of the theology of J. Romanides to be a “gestating heresy,” and C. Yannaras now expresses reservations about it. We live in an age of theological conflict. The word “heretic” tends to denote anyone who disagrees with our point of view, in defiance of what St. Photius and the ancient tradition of the Church teach us by clearly limiting the term “heresy” only to what constitutes a violation of the decisions of the Ecumenical Councils.
It is, therefore, obvious that Orthodox theology is experiencing an internal polemic, from which nothing positive will come. Of course, criticism is always necessary, but only when it is “for building up and not for tearing down” (2 Cor. 13:10). It is the duty of Orthodox theologians in the 21st century to form a creative synthesis of the various trends brought to the surface by the generation of the 1960s. These trends came from the same matrix, and are not alien to each other. Eucharist and asceticism were experienced in the past by the Church as a single experience. Emphasizing one of them at the expense of the other is a recent phenomenon, which carries serious risks.
When we exclude the spiritual gifts of the “elders,” and devalue church institutions, we cultivate a Protestant theology, which sooner or later will break up the Church, as happened in the Protestant West. And when we completely disconnect these institutions from the charismatic dimension of the Church, then legalism will dry up the vitality of the Spirit in the Church. The synthesis of these trends is becoming more and more necessary in Orthodox theology.
At this point we must make a historical observation. From the 19th century until about the middle of the 20th century, the institutional element of the Church had prevailed in Orthodox theology. But today we have reached the other extreme. Initially, the deterioration of the theological element began in Greece with the moralistic undermining by the Brotherhoods. In Orthodoxy outside of Greece, the theology of the Russian Diaspora—I would say as a whole, with the positions of Nikolaos Afanasyev at its apogee—dealt the first blow to institutional ecclesiology, while in our country we have reached the point where frightened bishops are assigning their spiritual authority to charismatic “elders,” and the episcopal institution is receiving various challenges from modern Orthodox theology. Of course, the bishops themselves are not without responsibility for this situation, when they focus exclusively on administration, thus turning into government employees due to the relationship between Church and state in this country.
The synthesis, then, of the institutional and the charismatic elements in our Church will emerge as a key problem for Orthodox theology in this century. I would say that this will also determine the survival of the Orthodox Church, because, as extreme as it may sound, soon we will not know what we need the bishop for in the Church. Since everything essential for our salvation is now done by the elder (Eucharist, confession, and the other sacraments except for ordination), the bishop will now play a decorative role in the festivals, and nothing more. As for the synodical institution, it has now been transformed into an instrument for “handling current issues,” and the synodal decisions, which were once the ultimate criterion for distinguishing between truth and heresy, are now thrown out the window.
So much for the internal situation within Orthodoxy. But Orthodox theology in the 21st century will be called upon to converse with the outside world as well — otherwise it will turn into a “ghetto,” and suffer the fate of every “sect” in history. As alienating as the term “contextual theology” may sound, the core of its meaning always remains timely. Theology that does not listen to what is happening around it has condemned to death the inheritance received from its Fathers. This is also the meaning of the “neo-patristic synthesis,” proposed by the late George Florovsky. It is not a matter of transcending patristic theology but of an interpretation of it, which will allow it to give an answer to the existential problems of today’s man and to cultures different from our own. Orthodox theology is called upon to give its witness not in terms of war, but as an “incarnational” mission, speaking, according to the model of the incarnate Word, to modern man “from within,” bearing his crosses and trying to understand his anxieties. After all, the Fathers of our Church themselves transferred and existentially interpreted the Gospel into the Greek culture of their time. Patristic theology should always remain the basis of Orthodox theology, because the Fathers truly grasped the existential problems of man in all their depth. From this point of view, we cannot go beyond the Fathers. But, while the essence of patristic theology remains unchanged, people of every era and every culture experience their existential problems in a different way. The duty of Orthodox theology is to constantly try to answer the question, not what the Fathers said in their time (this is the task of historians), but what they would say today, if they were faced with the problems of a contemporary Western man or an African, etc. Would this constitute “betrayal” of the Fathers? On the contrary. It would be treason, rather, to turn the Fathers into archaeological treasures, which we keep in the museum, without letting them speak the language of our time.
In other words, the duty of Orthodox theology in our time is, to use technical academic terms, to move beyond a historical, systematic theology—something that, unfortunately, is little cultivated in our Schools of Theology. Just as no one is a good student when he “parrots,” repeating verbatim the words of his teacher, so the disciple of the Fathers is called to say “in his own words,” words of his time, what the Fathers taught him.
Thus, Orthodox theology is called upon in our time to provide answers, always drawing from the thought of the Fathers, to questions that dominate our modern culture. Today, for example, man faces a problem, unknown in the time of the Fathers: the ecological crisis. This problem arose from the arrogance and conceit of man over the rest of creation, which was cultivated mainly with the Enlightenment and the technological revolution. Patristic cosmology, together with the liturgical and ascetic tradition and experience of Orthodoxy, must be interpreted with direct reference to this problem. Here, then, is an opportunity to synthesize eucharistic and ascetic theology, which is at the same time a “contextual theology.”
But the century we live in brings with it other challenges for Orthodox theology. One of them, perhaps the most serious, is rapidly developing globalization, with all its implications. The first and important implication of globalization is connected with technology and all its consequences. Technology, especially in its digital form, makes people’s communication direct—that is, without the mediation of the local community, which is essentially abolished.
The consequences for theology are shocking, especially in the field of ecclesiology. We all know that Orthodox ecclesiology—unlike that of Roman Catholics—is based on the local Church. The nucleus and cell of the Orthodox Church is the local Church gathered together in one Eucharist around its bishop. This has been preserved through the centuries as an apple of the eye shielded by sacred canons forbidding a bishop to “intervene” in the territory of another diocese. But now that radio, television, and even the internet broadcast the Divine Liturgy and the sermon beyond the diocese, what happens to the prohibition of “interventions”? How can the believer of a local Church, watching the rebroadcast of the Divine Liturgy, pray for “his” (“our”) archbishop, when the bishop commemorated is not his, but someone else? Will we slowly become addicted to “it doesn’t matter” who our bishop is, when we participate in the Holy Eucharist? But this would now disconnect the bishop from the Eucharist, and all the sacred canons about “intervention” would become a joke.
There is no doubt, I think, that the first and most tragic victim of digital technology will soon be Eucharistic ecclesiology. A global society will also result in a global ecclesiology—i.e., a dissolution of the local church. What should be done? The answer is not easy. The least that can be done is to ban the rebroadcasting of the Divine Liturgy: for the Eucharist to become again what it once was, that is, a gathering “in one place.” The illusion that I supposedly participate in the Holy Eucharist, without coming (physically) “in one place,” undermines the very meaning of the Holy Eucharist, and encourages the dissolution of the local church, which is already happening to a large extent.
But the challenge of technology and globalization does not stop at the local church. Its next victim will be the so-called “national” or "autocephalous" Churches. When nation-states slowly cede their national sovereignty in areas such as the economy (and more; see Greece today), how will the consciousness of the national Church survive? When the demographic composition of a country is rapidly changing with the mixing of many nationalities, how can we pray “for our pious nation”? Is the Orthodox Church and its theology ready to face these new challenges or do they prefer to turn a blind eye to their coming?
Related to these challenges is the rapid disconnection of contemporary (mostly Western) societies from the beliefs and moral precepts of the Church. Religion is slowly being privatized and ceases to be a public experience. Marriage is de-sanctified, and becomes a simple contract or cohabitation. What the Church forbids, the state allows. These may not yet be a reality in our country, but anyone with eyes can see them coming here as well.
One could mention many more of the challenges of our century, but let us focus our thinking on the duty of Orthodox theology. Many of the challenges I mentioned have already been faced by Christian theology in the West. The result was either a head-on collision of theology with these challenges (this happened mainly in Roman Catholic theology) or a complete submission to it (the case of Protestantism, with the exception of its evangelical and fundamentalist portion). Orthodox theology has only now begun to be troubled. Some Orthodox following the (official) Roman Catholic or evangelical-Protestant model choose to confront these new challenges head-on. Others are willing to compromise with them, incurring the wrath of their predecessors. Orthodox theology has not yet found its way, and has no criteria to help the Church.
It is my humble opinion that confronting these challenges head-on is futile and does not suit the ethos of Orthodoxy. When secularization knocked on the Church’s door and threatened it in the post-Constantinian era, the Church responded with its two theological positions: liturgical life and monasticism. Both of these elements had one thing in common: their eschatological orientation. Orthodox theology does not draw from historical forms, such that it needs to defend them. It is interested in man as an image of God under whatever historical conditions he finds himself in, and it serves this man by projecting before him a vision, an eschatological perspective, in order to adapt his life to it. This is what it did in the first centuries, this is what it continued to do in the Ottoman Empire, and this essentially saved Orthodoxy when the Communist regimes deprived it of any participation in social life. Liturgical life and monasticism have been Orthodox theology’s response in all these cases.
Reverend and dear fathers, brothers and sisters. I said at the beginning of my speech that this event is a waypoint in the flow of the time of my life. I stand in this moment with thanksgiving but also with awe, surveying the past and gazing into the future. The speakers of the conference had a lot to say, having diligently searched through what I tried to do in serving the Church and its theology. I thank them again for that. Looking back on the past with an eye now on the future that our century brings with it, I remain unrepentant about one thing in my theological journey: the eucharistic approach to theology. This approach remains for me the only path that Orthodox theology has before it, facing the challenges of our century.
With this approach, Orthodoxy can not only survive, but also dialog creatively with the social sciences and even the natural sciences of our time, to seriously critique the elements of our culture that are negative for man and God’s creation, and to contribute—as far as the limitations and contradictions of history allow—to the creation of a more humane civilization. The eucharistic approach is not one-sided. Nothing is more “catholic” than the Holy Eucharist. Everything ends there: Baptism, Repentance (=ascesis), art, and everything else that includes the existence and life of man, but also of all creation. We theologians must simply open our eyes and, free from prejudices and personal disputes, look into the depth and breadth of this Mystery of Mysteries. There we shall find all our theology, not merely in our mind and intellect, but also in our experience, an experience which will not be an individual affair (as is the case with other empirical theologies), but a communion of souls and bodies, participation in God and all of creation.
Thus, gazing into the future, I look forward to what Professor Stamoulis called here the “post-Zizioulas” era. What will happen to the seed that fell, only God knows. He who directs History may annul what I have laid down, or, as I pray, find something in it that is useful for His plans. All I could say is what I would like to see in the era after me. And this could include, for example, the following:
- Students who will take steps beyond what I have said, building on them in a constructive and creative way.
- An extension of eucharistic theology in areas that I would personally like, if I had the time, to cover. One such area is Art, about which Eucharistic theology has much to say. Orthodox theology is connected by its nature with Art. It theologized with Art in the past before submitting to the captivity of the academic mentality. There is no Orthodox theology without a fruitful dialogue with Art in all its forms (literature, music, painting, theater, etc.). The Holy Eucharist quickly found its expression in Art. It’s time to find it again.
- Eucharistic theology must also dialog with Science. For the Eucharist includes a cosmology that has much in common with the natural sciences, both in content and methodology.
- Finally, in terms of ethics (or rather ethos), the topic is and will always remain inexhaustible. What does eucharistic theology have to tell us about issues of bioethics, sexual ethics, mission, dealing with violence, etc.
My humble offering tried to connect the Eucharist with church institutions and with anthropology. But Eucharistic theology has an inexhaustible potential. It will allow those younger than me to go further in areas such as the ones I mentioned. The Church needs it.
This is what I would like to say on the occasion of this event as a review of what I humbly, with the grace and mercy of God, offered to theology. Thank you for giving me the satisfaction of feeling that “I have not run in vain or labored in vain” (Phil. 2:16). This is the greatest gift for a human because you have given me the opportunity to share with you my thoughts and anxieties. I humbly pray that the Holy Spirit will direct Orthodox theology to fulfill its mission in a world that is so in need of the saving word of Orthodoxy.
Thank you.
