What are the limits of academic freedom for Orthodox scholars and students of theology as we approach the end of the first quarter of the 21^st century?

Given that the terms theology and theologian have assumed an academic and professional meaning entirely unknown to the patristic age, we do well to bear in mind that our search for “words adequate to God” comprises a fundamentally spiritual, ascetical, and especially ecclesial task. The characteristic ethos of Orthodox theology requires that each new generation strive to discover anew—in and for its own time and place—not our individual minds, but the Church’s unchanging mind. Only in the Church’s communion of faith traditioned once for all to the saints, and through each Orthodox believer’s personal practice of humility, prayer, and repentance, do we as the Church possess the mind of Christ. The Church proclaims before the Symbol of Faith at every Divine Liturgy that this ecclesial oneness of mind springs from our love for one another. Thus in the mystical life of the Church the Holy Spirit bestows both the one and the other—our mutual love in Christ and our unanimity with Christ—upon purified hearts of flesh as a gift of divine grace and a foretaste of consubstantiality in the age to come.

The Orthodox Church in America has announced the death of one of its three “retired” primates, Metropolitan Theodosius (Lazor). May his memory be eternal.

In the necrology published on the OCA website, we see a breathtaking case of historical revisionism surrounding the circumstances of Lazor’s removal from office after an egregious pattern of corruption and financial wrongdoing had come to light—for which he likely should have stood trial in a court of law and been deposed from holy orders, as befell his not-so-lucky chancellor and fellow conspirator, the former Protopresbyter Robert Kondratick.

The full record has been preserved at Orthodox Christians for Accountability, known familiarly as OCA News. Let our readers study this website carefully and form their own conclusions.

We share Archbishop Elpidophoros’ 2020 Economos Orthodoxy in America Lecture, delivered September 21 at Fordham University, with Orthodoxy in Dialogue’s readers without editorial comment for the purpose of encouraging fraternal debate within the entire body of the Orthodox Church—hierarchy, clergy, monastics, and laity alike. Orthodox ecclesiology grants no bishop the authority to speak on behalf of the Church or to impose his personal understanding of the Faith on the Church. Rather—as the ill-fated Council of Florence ever reminds us in every succeeding generation—our bishops are answerable individually and synodally to the whole Church for the proper exercise of their episcopal charism to “rightly define the word of truth.”

Clockwise from left: St. Nikolai Velimirović, Father Pavel Florensky, Father Seraphim Rose 

I happened to be already at work on this article when John Stamps’ Tell the Truth: We Must Have No Bogus History appeared at Public Orthodoxy to mark the Feast of the Elevation of the Cross. I have somewhat modified my original text in an attempt to address the tensions and ambiguities raised—but left entirely unresolved—in the Stamps article.

The Orthodox Church’s formal glorification of modern-day individuals as saints presents difficulties to a certain kind of piety characterized by a reluctance—or refusal, in the case of some believers—to accept as factual the inconvenient truths of a revered person’s biography. Our wilful blindness to the realities of a saintly person’s life, documented in his or her published writings, diaries, letters, photographs, the diaries and letters of friends and acquaintances, etc., in favour of a sanitized and partly fictitious narrative, appears to spring from two interrelated motives. First, we sometimes expect doctrinal infallibility and moral purity at every stage of a saint’s life—notwithstanding St. Augustine of Hippo’s illegitimate son and St. Mary of Egypt’s insatiable lust, to cite two examples among many from our earlier saints. Second, each of us individually seems to trace a line in the sand that we simply will not or cannot cross when faced with the unvarnished evidence from a saint’s or prospective saint’s biography. Read More