John D. Zizioulas
1. Every time I have to speak about the “Orthodox point of view” on a certain subject I find myself in great difficulty. What is the “Orthodox point of view”? How can you establish it? On what ground and from what sources? The Orthodox have no Vatican II to draw from. They have no Augsburg Confession of their own, and they lack the equivalent of a Luther or a Calvin who could give them their theological identity. The only authoritative sources they possess are common to the rest of Christians: the Bible and the Fathers. How can you establish a distinctly Orthodox position on a basis that is common to non-Orthodox as well?
It seems that the distinctly Orthodox point of view is not a matter of drawing from special sources, but of interpreting the sources shared by the rest of Christians. The Orthodox differ from the Roman Catholics and the Protestants in that they approach subjects such as that of the Church from an angle typically characteristic of their mentality. They have their own theological presuppositions, which suggest also a certain problematic and method not always familiar to the non-Orthodox. When it comes to the Orthodox/non-Orthodox dialogue within the ecumenical debate, the important thing is always the theological presuppositions, not the concrete theses. The latter are only logical developments of the former.
2. There is perhaps no other area of theological discourse in which this observation becomes so valid as in the case of ecclesiology. When it comes to the question “What is the Church?”, everything that I can say as an Orthodox depends entirely on the theological presuppositions with which I arrive at it. Thus, I can say that for the Orthodox the Church is not an institution but an event—which sounds Protestant to Roman Catholic ears. Or I can say the opposite, namely, that the Church is an institution and not an event—which would cause total confusion to the ecumenical listener. Indeed, terms such as “event” or “institution” or even “Church” can mean totally different things, depending on the theological presuppositions that lie behind them. After a rather long experience in ecumenical discussions, I have come to the conclusion that instead of trying to agree on concrete theological theses we should try to agree on theological principles. After that, it is only a matter of applying pure logic, i.e., of drawing the consequences, until we all come to see and say the same things. The result may be surprising, for we may well discover that suddenly we all speak a language different from the one that has been dividing us for centuries—that, in other words, our confessional theological formulations that we inherited from the past have now become irrelevant and useless, which may in fact be the subconscious fear that prevents us from attacking the presuppositions rather than the concrete theses, the fear, that is, that our confessional identities may die. And we cherish and worship our confessional identities so much that we prefer a “reconciled diversity” to complete and full “identity” of view. This is the malaise of the present-day ecumenical movement.
3. Let us begin the consideration of our subject with the statement of certain basic theological principles that are crucial to the Orthodox approach. And let us ask ourselves first whether we agree on those. Only then can we arrive at a proper discussion of our different concrete positions on the subject.
I. Some basic theological presuppositions
1. Ecclesiology must be situated within the context of Trinitarian theology.
We must begin with a clear distinction of Persons in the Trinity, as the Cappadocian Fathers insisted. The Father is another Person, different from the Son, and so is the Spirit. The Church exists first of all because the Father—as a distinct Person—wills her to exist. It is the initiative and the good pleasure of the Father that brought her to existence. And not only that, but it is to the Father—as a Person other than the Son—that she will be finally brought when Christ submits everything to Him. Thus, both from the point of view of her origins and of her destiny, the Church is above all the “Church of God” (God=the Father in the Bible) before she is the Church of Christ or of this and that place. As it was well demonstrated by L. Cerfaux many years ago, the primary image of the Church is related to the genitive “of God.” Perhaps we all agree on this. But we shall see later if we agree also on its logical consequences.
2. Christology must be conditioned by Pneumatology in a constitutive way.
This requires some further analysis. We all recognize the importance of the Holy Spirit in Christology. Personally, I do not accept the view that the West has ever been “Christomonistic,” as it has often been accused by Orthodox theologians. But recognizing the importance of the Holy Spirit is not enough. One has to say in what way the Spirit is active in the Economy of the Son. And on this point certain details become decisive.
For some people (even whole traditions), the Spirit plays the role of the agent of Christ. He is the janitor who opens the door and lets people into Christ. He is the One who prepares our hearts to listen to the Word of God and consent to it (or to Him) in faith. He is the animator or the soul of the Body of Christ. But in all these, it is forgotten that He is above all the one who makes Christ be what He is, i.e., Χριστός—Christ. He gives Christ his personal identity, since it is of the Spirit that Christ is born, and it is by the Spirit that Ηe is risen from the dead. It is important to remember always that death was not overcome in Christ’s Resurrection by virtue of a certain communicatio idiomatum of the two natures of Christ; it was not a miracle of Christ’s divine nature, but a result of the intervention of the Spirit. Both the historical and the eschatological Christ owes his identity (not his bene esse but his esse) to the Spirit. And on this too we may easily agree. But we shall again see later whether we agree also on its ecclesiological consequences.
3. The Church does not draw her identity from what she is but from what she will be.
Eschatology is absolutely crucial to ecclesiology. This had been forgotten for a long time. It can no longer be neglected in this post-Johannes Weiss period in which we live, and in which eschatology has acquired the place of the first rather than the last chapter of dogmatics in both Roman Catholic and Protestant theology. On this point, another significant detail must be stressed—a detail which I regard as decisive for ecclesiology. When we speak of the importance of eschatology we sometimes think of it as the end of the Church’s pilgrimage. I suggest that we must think of the eschata as the beginning of the Church’s life, the arche (ἀρχή), that which brings forth the Church, gives her her identity, sustains and inspires her in her existence. The Church exists not because Christ died on the Cross but because Ηe has risen from the dead, which means, because the Kingdom has come. The Church reflects the future, the final state of things, not a historical event of the past. We shall have to see the consequences of this in some detail.
4. Finally, there is the cosmic dimension of ecclesiology.
The Church is not a community of human beings unrelated to the nonpersonal cosmos. Salvation is for the entire creation that is subject to the yoke of death, and until death is eliminated from the entire cosmos there can be no salvation for the human being. It is this that makes the celebration of the sacraments, especially of the Eucharist, so crucial to the Church, perhaps more crucial than the preaching of the Word. For the sacraments involve all creation in the being of the Church—not only humans—and the Church becomes in this way the very core and nucleus of the destiny of the world. All this bears particular significance for the understanding of the Church as “mystery” and “sign,” as we shall see later.
II. The importance of these principles for ecclesiology
1. The ecclesiological question is not simply a matter of dialectic between Christ and Church. It is also a matter of a certain dialectic between Christ and the Father. This affects the entire perspective of ecclesiology. Let me be more explicit by using the following question as an illustration of this somewhat subtle and not easily grasped point.
When the Church prays to God, who prays? In a problematic based on the dialectic Christ-Church, which is normally the problematic we encounter in theological discussions,[1] it is assumed that there is on the one hand a community called “Church,” which is human, and a Person called “Christ” who is divine. Thus the Chalcedonian dialectic of divine versus human nature is transferred into ecclesiology, and the question arises whether the Church is distinguished enough from Christ or not. But the question of who prays in the Church is far more complex, and takes us away from the dialectic Christ-Church.
When the Church prays to the Father, it is Christ who prays to Ηim for us and with us. This is particularly evident in the eucharistic prayers, which from the very beginning (including the Lord’s prayer, which was eucharistic) were addressed to the Father. As such, these prayers are heard by God only because they are brought to Him by His only-begotten Son. But this would have been impossible had it not been for the fact that the Son-Christ has identified Himself so much with the ecclesial community that any separation, or even distinction in this particular case, would render these prayers meaningless and fruitless. How can one speak in this case of a dialectic between Christ and the Church? Unless the two are identified, the eucharistic prayer will lose its meaning as a prayer of the Church addressed to the Father by the Son. In this case, the three elements Church-Christ-Father will have to be seen as forming a dialectic between Church plus Christ-Father, and not as a “trialectic,” for the prayer will not work.
Of course Christ is not only the One who prays with the community, but also the One who receives the prayers, sitting next to the Father.[2] And yet the fact that the prayer of the community is no other than the prayer of Christ cannot be otherwise understood apart from a total—at that moment—identification of Christ with the Church. Any other conception will turn Christ into a sort of go-between mediator, a third person, who listens first to the Church speaking to Him and then like a messenger transmits the prayer to the Father.
Thus, the intra-Trinitarian dialectic removes ecclesiology from the dialectic Christ-Church and leads to an identification of Christ with the Church in what concerns that particular case. I suggest that a study of the liturgical evidence in some depth shows that the Eucharist was always understood as the act or event in which the identification of the Church with Christ would reach its fullest realization, and it is for this reason that in the ancient Church only the eucharistic prayer would be addressed to the Father and only the eucharistic communities would be “churches” in the fullest sense.
It is because of this particular nature of the eucharistic prayer (a prayer addressed to the Father by the Son) that the Church could herself enjoy all the privileges enjoyed by Christ. It was at that moment—the Eucharist—that she was “holy” and her members ἄγιοι by being partakers of the ἄγια (the holy things). The holiness of the Church is thus related to the identification between Head and Body acquired at the moment when the Head (Christ) brings to the Father the prayers of the community. At that moment, the president of the community would be seen as the image of Christ by virtue of the fact that he would visibly do what the Head—Christ—does invisibly, i.e., bring the prayers of the community, and the community itself, to the Father. This president would thus himself acquire prerogatives belonging to Christ. We are right at the causal roots of the theology of episcopacy, a theology which becomes inevitable once the Church is identified with Christ in this manner.
Does the Eucharist remove all dialectic between Christ and Church by virtue of the fact that another dialectic takes place there, namely that of Father-Christ plus Church? I mentioned earlier on that Christ is not only the praying One but also the recipient of the eucharistic prayers. This suggests that the Eucharist does not remove entirely the dialectic Christ-Church. If we study and analyze in some depth the prayers of the ancient eucharistic liturgies, we see that they are marked by the following dialectic: when, for example, the bishop enters the church to begin the liturgy, he is greeted by the people as Christ Himself coming into the world in his glory—“Δεῦτε προσκυνήσωμεν,” “Come, let us worship,” which signifies a full identification between the bishop and Christ. Immediately, however, the bishop transfers the prayer to Christ, as if he were not Himself Christ. Thus in the eyes of his people the bishop is Christ; but in his own eyes he is not: he prays to Christ for himself, but to the Father (as if he were Christ) for the people. What a complexity of dialectics!
In an approach like this the question whether the Church is human or divine looks so naive. In fact, she is both at the same time. In this she resembles the Chalcedonian Christ. But this is possible only because there is a personal dialectic between Father and Son, that allows for the Son to be other than the Father and “side” with man in the eucharistic prayer. The insistence of the Cappadocian Fathers on the full distinction and integrity of the Trinitarian Persons is thus an essential presupposition for the proper understanding of the mystery of the Church.
2. We stressed earlier on that it is important to think of the Spirit as constitutive of the identity of Christ, and not simply as an assistant to Him. If this is applied to ecclesiology, the implications are quite important. In the first place, it means that Christ’s identity is conditioned by the existence of the “many.” The Spirit is the Spirit of “communion,” and His primary work consists in opening up reality to become relational. The Spirit is incompatible with individualism. By being born of the Spirit, Christ is inconceivable as an individual: He becomes automatically a relational being. But a relational being draws its identity, its personhood, from its relation with others. One person is no person. The spiritual character of God’s own being lies in nothing else but in the relational nature of his existence: there is no Father unless there is a Son and the Spirit. And since the one God is the Father and not the one divine nature or ousia, the very identity of God depends on the Father’s relationship with persons other than Himself. There is no “one” whose identity is not conditioned by the “many.” And if this applies to the being of God, it must be made equally to apply also to Christ.
This de-individualization of Christ is in my view the stumbling-block of all ecclesiological discussions in the ecumenical movement. The insistence of certain people on a clear-cut distinction between Christ and the Church presupposes an individualistic understanding of Christ. But this Christ could not be the spiritual Being who incorporates all in Himself. He cannot be the Firstborn among many brothers or of creation, of whom Colossians and Ephesians speak. The “one” without the “many” is an individual not touched by the Spirit. He cannot be the Christ of our faith.
In order to speak of the identity of Christ, one has to make use of the idea of “corporate personality.” This idea, discovered and proposed by modern biblical scholars such as Wheeler, Robinson, Pedersen, de Frain, etc., constitutes a scandal to our Western minds, but seems to be the key to an understanding of the Bible. The Semitic mind did not have the difficulty we experience in thinking of, for example, Abraham as one in whom his “seed,” i.e., all generations after him, is included, forming his own personal identity. Or of Adam as being simultaneously one and many. Or of the Servant of God of Isaiah, the Son of man of Daniel, etc., as being simultaneously one and many. Why do we tend to avoid this way of thinking when we come to Christ, the corporate being par excellence? The mystery of the Church consists above all in the mystery of the “one” who is “many”—not of the “one” who is first one and then, in the eschata, becomes “many,” but of the “one” who is “one,” i.e., unique, and “other” precisely because He relates with the “many.”
All this means that Christology without ecclesiology is inconceivable. What is at stake is the very identity of Christ. The existence of the body is a necessary condition for the head to be head. A bodiless head is no head at all. If Christ does not draw his identity from his relation with the Church, then He is either an individual of demonic isolationism, or He should be understood only in terms of his relationship with the Father. But in this latter case we risk becoming monophysite in ecclesiology. Christ’s “I” is of course the eternal “I” that stems from his eternal filial relationship with the Father. But as the incarnate Christ, He has introduced into this eternal relationship another element: us, the many, the Church. If the Church disappears from his identity, He is no longer Christ, although He will still be the eternal Son. And yet, the “mystery hidden before all ages” in the will of the Father is nothing else but the incorporation of this other element, of us, or the many, into the eternal filial relationship between the Father and the Son. This mystery amounts, therefore, to nothing but the Church.
3. Just as Christ, the all-inclusive being, this “corporate personality,” is an eschatological reality existing in a state of conflict with the fallen creation in history, so the Church, by drawing her identity from Christ, is thrown into a world hostile to Christ and to herself and is forced to live in conflict with it. In leading her historical existence, the Church appears to the eyes of the historian as another human community or society. She is no mystery to the sociologist. Quite often she is tempted herself, either for the sake of survival or for the fulfillment of her mission, to adjust so much to the world as to forget that her true citizenship is in heaven and her identity is not drawn from history but from the eschata: she is what she will be. In this situation, the only way to preserve the eschatological identity is the celebration of the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist, and the encounter of the Word, not as a message coming to her as passed through the channels of historical experience, but as an echo of the future state of things. She is thus obliged to live by faith, not by sight. She is the great mysterium fidei, precisely by being in this world but not of this world, by drawing, that is, her identity from what she will be.
All this makes the Church an icon (εἰκὼν) of the Kingdom to come, the seed of the parable, hidden under the earth, subject to death in order that she may live. The glory of the historical Church is the Cross, the humiliation and the suffering experienced by Him who lends her his identity. There is no triumphalism in an ecclesiology that identifies the Church with Christ and the Kingdom. It would be a mistake to draw from such an ecclesiology the conclusion that the Church is stressed so much as to replace Christ, and that her identification with the Kingdom makes her irrelevant to history. By being the icon of the Kingdom, the Church is at the same time maximalized and minimalized. She is maximalized in that she will definitely survive eternally when her true identity will be revealed in the Parousia. And she is minimalized in that she has no ὑπόστασις of her own but draws her identity from Christ and the Kingdom to come. By existing in history “in persona Christi,” she is guaranteed the glory and eternal life of her Head. But for the very same reason she is no autonomous entity vis-à-vis either Christ or the Kingdom. Her existence is iconic.
This iconic character of the Church presents to our Western minds problems similar to the ones we encountered earlier on in connection with the notion of “corporate personality.” An iconic existence tends to convey to us the Platonic idea of an image or shadow, empty of reality. This makes it difficult to speak of the Church as an icon without falling into the area of the imaginative or unreal. We cannot do more here than state that the iconic nature of the Church does not imply a lack of reality. It implies, however, a lack of objectified and autonomous reality. By being iconic in her existence the Church is two things: (a) she is an image of something else that transcends her—hence, again, a relational entity; and (b) she is in her institutions and structure so transparent as to allow the eschatological realities to be reflected in them all the time. This can hardly be achieved outside the context of worship, for it is there that transcendence and transparency are experienced par excellence. This leads to another dialectic: the Church cannot be conceived as a permanent institution. She is what she is by becoming again and again what she will be. The Church is an event, taking place again and again, not a society structurally instituted in a permanent way. This does not mean that she has no institutional aspects to her existence. It means that not all such aspects pertain to her true identity, which is eschatological. Only those institutional aspects—and such aspects do exist—which stem from her existence as an event relate to her true identity. Such structures and institutions are those involved in the event of the eucharistic community and whatever stems from this event. The mystery of the Church does not involve a conflict between Amt and Geist, institution and event, as long as all institutions draw their justification from the event of the celebration of the Kingdom in each place. All other institutions are of historical significance alone and do not pertain to the true identity of the Church; they are not part of the mystery of the Church. If we understand the Church in this way, as an eschatological community existing in history, taking upon itself Christ’s Cross, suffering in this world, celebrating its true identity in the Eucharist, then all the institutions that result from this form part of its true identity and its Mystery. To my mind, institutions such as episcopacy, or the structure of the eucharistic community, or the distinction between laity, priests, and bishops, or even conciliarity, stem from the Church as event and Mystery, precisely in the celebration of the Eucharist.
4. The ecclesiological question receives its fullest treatment if it is placed also in the light of the significance of the Church to the entire cosmos. Just as Christology had very early to become “cosmic” (cf. the epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians), so as to make of the person of Christ not only the “firstborn among many brethren,” i.e., the last Adam in whom the many become one and the one becomes many, but also the One in whom “all things” (τὰ πάντα) are brought into existence (ἒκτισται) and are constituted (συνέστηκεν) (Col. 1:16–17). The mystery of Christ as the “head” of the new humanity is thus extended to include the entire cosmos, and the same is true of the Church as mystery (cf. Col. 1:18).
This cosmic dimension of the mystery of the Church is not to be conceived as a kind of cosmic mysticism in which the entire creation is absorbed into the divine, for such a conception would bring us straight into paganism. It is not to be understood either in the sense of Teilhard de Chardin’s vision of things, which implies that the entire cosmos, almost by virtue of an inherent dynamism, develops, as it were, into the reality of Christ. The proper sense in which the cosmic mystery of the Church should be conceived involves the following elements:
a) An anthropocentric view of the cosmos
By virtue of the fact that the human person shares fully in the material world, while at the same time transcending it through the privilege of freedom that he possesses, the Church constitutes the place where man acts as the “priest of creation,” referring it to God (ἀναφορὰ) in freedom and allowing it to become part of the Body of Christ, and thus survive eternally. It is precisely this anthropocentric view of the world that allows for the mystery of the Church to be exclusively Christocentric, since Christ as the incarnate Son constitutes the Priest of creation, the one who freely offers it to the Father in the form of the eternal eucharistic Anaphora. The cosmic dimension of the Church is therefore based on the freedom of the person and not on a “natural” unity or dynamism of any kind. It is not so much a matter of communicatio idiomatum between divine and human natures as it is a matter of hypostatic union in which the hypostasis or person freely assumes and refers creation to God. This safeguards a certain dialectic between man and creation while allowing for man to be the focal point of unity between God and creation in Christ.
b) An eschatological approach to the mystery of the Church
This means that the Church, particularly in her eucharistic synaxis, anticipates sacramentally the ultimate salvation of the whole creation from the “last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26), i.e., death. The “catholic Church” is thus constituted in the Eucharist in a way that involves the whole creation in it, and not just human beings or angelic powers. All this happens sacramentally, i.e., in the form of the “already and not yet,” in the form of an icon of the Kingdom to come.
All this gives profound significance to certain practical aspects of ecclesiology, such as the use of material and natural elements in the holy Eucharist, the territorial and geographical structure of the Church (for example, that there should be one bishop in each place, cf. canon 8 of I Nicea), and so on.
Let me conclude with some brief remarks. Ecclesiology is, in the first place, a question of the Church’s identity. As long as we fail to tackle the question, “What is the Church?”, we shall never reach agreement in the ecumenical movement. In my opinion, this identity is Christ’s own identity. This is why there is no hypostasis of the Church. The Church has no hypostasis of its own. This makes Christ’s identity dependent on the existence of the Church, which is paradoxical, for though the Church has no hypostasis of its own, it is a factor that conditions Christ’s identity: the one cannot exist without the many. Such a Christology, conditioned by Pneumatology, explains the fact that the Mystery of Christ is in essence nothing other than the Mystery of the Church. To accept this, we must first accept the theological presuppositions formulated at the beginning and work with an ontology that is not that of our Western individualism, but that of the biblical idea of “corporate personality.” I believe that while we remain unaccustomed to a kind of ontology that I would call “relational,” and which is bound up with Pneumatology and Trinitarian theology, we shall never be capable of understanding the Mystery of the Church.
[1] See A. Birmelé and P. Bühler’s papers at the Colloquium, Irénikon 59 (1986): pp. 401 and 482ff.
[2] Cf. the debate with Nicholas of Methone in the twelfth century, etc., and also the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.
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“The Church as Communion”, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 38: 1(1994), 3-16; The One and the Many: Studies on God, Man, the Church, and the World Today, ed. Gregory Edwards, (Los Angeles: Sebastian Press, 2010), 49-60.
