The World Council of Churches and Its Orthodox Critics

Florovsky was one of the founding figures of the World Council of Churches: present at Amsterdam in 1948, elected to its executive body, long active in Faith and Order, and influential on the Toronto Statement of 1950, which defined what the Council was and was not. His own account of Orthodox participation was uncompromising — witness to the fullness of the faith, not negotiation toward a common denominator. A substantial part of the Orthodox world has nonetheless regarded the whole enterprise as illegitimate, and that dispute is reported here with both sides named.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox — with §4.2 both-sides treatment of the intra-Orthodox dispute

The Career

Florovsky’s ecumenical involvement was continuous from the 1920s to the end of his life (Père Stéphane Bigham, “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?”, stephanebigham.com, dating it 1926–1979):

From 1926: the interconfessional colloquia around Nicolas Berdyaev in Paris.
From 1928: the Fellowship of St Alban and St Sergius, the Anglican–Orthodox body — where in 1933 he opposed Bulgakov’s proposal for partial intercommunion (see The Colleague and the Critic).
The later 1930s: the Faith and Order and Life and Work conferences and the process that produced the World Council; Bigham dates his election as a founding director of the WCC to 1937 (Bigham, “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?”).
1948: the founding assembly at Amsterdam, where he was a leading theological voice — named in the accounts alongside Michael Ramsey and Karl Barth — and was elected to the Council’s executive body.
1950: the Central Committee’s Toronto Statement, on whose shape he was influential.
1954: the second assembly at Evanston, Illinois, by which time the Patriarchates of Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch, the Church of Greece, the Russian-American Metropolia and the Romanian Episcopate in America were all WCC members.
Thereafter, decades of Faith and Order work, commissions, and lecturing.

His ecumenical writings fill Collected Works vols. 13–14 (Ecumenism I: A Doctrinal Approach; Ecumenism II: A Historical Approach, Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1989) — volumes in which, as it happens, the editorial alteration of titles and the splitting of texts is at its worst (see The Florovsky Corpus and Its Editions).

Amsterdam 1948

At the founding assembly Florovsky characterized Christian division as “an open, bleeding wound on the glorious body of Christ” — a phrase that made an impression and that set the register of his ecumenical speech: division as a wound rather than as a regrettable administrative fact (Bigham, “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?”, quoting the Amsterdam address).

The address was, in its context, controversial in both directions. To the Protestant majority it insisted that the divisions were profound and that healing would be long, slow, and doctrinal — not a matter of goodwill. To Orthodox critics it appeared to concede that the Body of Christ is divided, which is precisely what Orthodox ecclesiology denies.

That second point is the crux, and it deserves care rather than a slogan. Florovsky’s ecclesiology holds that the Church is one and undivided and that she is the Orthodox Church (see Catholicity, Sobornost, and the Body of the Living Christ); the wound is in Christendom, in the separation of Christians from that unity, not a fracture within the Church herself. Whether his rhetoric consistently preserved that distinction is a fair question, and his critics say it did not.

The Toronto Statement, 1950

The WCC Central Committee’s statement “The Church, the Churches and the World Council of Churches,” adopted at Toronto in 1950, is the document that made continued Orthodox membership possible, and Florovsky was among those who shaped it (World Council of Churches, “Toronto statement,” oikoumene.org; The Patristic Revival).

Its essential provisions:

The WCC is not and must never become a “super-Church.” It has no ecclesiological authority over its members and cannot legislate for them.
Membership does not imply that a Church regards the other member Churches as Churches in the true and full sense. Each member retains its own ecclesiological self-understanding entire.
Membership does not imply acceptance of a particular doctrine of the unity of the Church.

For Orthodox participants this was decisive: it meant that being in the WCC did not constitute a tacit admission that Orthodoxy is one denomination among many. Florovsky’s involvement in securing that framing is one of the substantial and often-overlooked achievements of his ecumenical career, and it is what allows his defenders to say that his participation protected Orthodox ecclesiology rather than compromising it.

What Florovsky Thought Ecumenism Was For

His position, stated consistently over fifty years, has three parts.

It is a missionary opportunity, not a negotiation. Orthodox participation exists to bear witness to the fullness of the faith before Western Christians — to say what the undivided Church believed, in a forum where it will be heard. Florovsky did not think of himself as trading positions.

Unity can be founded only on the full faith of the undivided Church. No compromise, no doctrinal minimalism, no lowest common denominator. Reunion means the return of the separated to the faith they left, and nothing less would be reunion.

And the priority is doctrine, not activism. “Discussions about the nature of the Church… must be the main subject of inter-Christian dialogs” (Bigham, “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?”, quoting Florovsky). He was persistently critical of the WCC’s drift toward theological liberalism and social programme at the expense of doctrinal substance — a criticism he made from inside, repeatedly, and that grew sharper in his later years (The Patristic Revival; Florovsky, Ecumenism I: A Doctrinal Approach, Collected Works vol. 13, 1989).

The 1933 refusal of intercommunion is the practical test of all this: offered the most attractive possible ecumenical gesture, by his own senior colleague, he refused it on the ground that communion presupposes faith and cannot manufacture it.

The Orthodox Critique

Per METHODOLOGY §4.2, this is a live intra-Orthodox dispute, reported with both sides named and adjudicated neither way. The fuller treatment is at The Ecumenism Debate.

The case against Orthodox participation, held in ROCOR (for most of its history), on Athos, in the Old Calendarist bodies, and by a substantial traditionalist constituency worldwide:

The canons forbid common prayer with heretics, and the WCC’s worship life involves exactly that.
Membership in a “council of churches” is an implicit ecclesiological concession, whatever the Toronto Statement says on paper: one does not join a body of equals unless one is willing to be one.
The witness has not converted anyone. After eight decades, the argument runs, the traffic has been the other way: Orthodox theology has absorbed Western academic method and Western pastoral fashion, and the WCC’s doctrinal substance has thinned rather than deepened.
And the participation has been used politically, particularly during the Cold War, when the Soviet-era Moscow Patriarchate’s WCC delegations operated under state supervision.

On this reading Florovsky, whatever his personal orthodoxy and his stated intentions, lent enormous prestige to an enterprise that was harmful, and his own doctrinal rigour did not prevent the drift he complained of.

The case for participation as Florovsky conducted it:

The Toronto Statement exists, is binding on the Council, and secured precisely the ecclesiological protection the critics say is impossible — and it exists in large part because Orthodox theologians like Florovsky were in the room.
Witness requires a hearing. The alternative to participation is not a purer Orthodoxy but an unheard one; the enormous Western reception of patristic and Orthodox theology in the second half of the twentieth century ran substantially through the ecumenical institutions.
Florovsky’s own record refuses the charge of accommodation at the points where it would have mattered most: 1933 on intercommunion, and a fifty-year insistence that unity means the fullness of the faith and nothing less.
And the Orthodox Churches themselves have, for the most part, remained members — a fact about the mind of the episcopate that the critique has to account for.

[Disputed: whether Orthodox participation in the ecumenical movement, and specifically in the World Council of Churches, is legitimate witness or an ecclesiological compromise. Florovsky's own position (witness to the fullness of the faith, no doctrinal minimalism, no intercommunion before agreement) is documented; whether the enterprise as it developed vindicates or refutes that position is contested. ROCOR and the traditionalist constituency hold the latter; most of the canonical Orthodox Churches, and Florovsky's own successors at St Vladimir's, hold the former. See [The Ecumenism Debate](../../orthodoxy/09-orthodox-distinctives/ecumenism-debate.md), which treats the dispute at length. This repository records both and adjudicates neither.]

A Distinction Worth Keeping

Two questions are often collapsed and should not be.

Was Florovsky’s own theology of ecumenism Orthodox? On this his defenders have the stronger documentary case: he never conceded the uniqueness of the Church, never accepted intercommunion, never endorsed a branch theory, and criticized the WCC’s doctrinal thinness from within.
Was the enterprise wise? This is a prudential and historical judgment about consequences over eighty years, and it is genuinely contested among Orthodox who agree entirely about doctrine.

A reader may answer the first question yes and the second no without inconsistency, and many Orthodox do.

References

Florovsky, Georges. Ecumenism I: A Doctrinal Approach. Collected Works vol. 13. Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1989.
Florovsky, Georges. Ecumenism II: A Historical Approach. Collected Works vol. 14. Vaduz: Büchervertriebsanstalt, 1989.
World Council of Churches. “The Church, the Churches and the World Council of Churches” (the Toronto Statement). Central Committee, Toronto, 1950. oikoumene.org.
Bigham, Stéphane. “Fr. George Florovsky: Ecumenist?” stephanebigham.com. (The chronology of the ecumenical career, the Amsterdam address, and the quoted statements.)
Orthodox Church in America. “The Ecumenical Movement.” The Orthodox Faith, vol. III: Church History. oca.org.
Fr. Georges Florovsky and the Patristic Revival. Repository hub essay, ../../orthodoxy/04-russian-orthodox-tradition/theologians/patristic-revival.md.