The Ecumenical Engagement

Meyendorff was co-founder and first general secretary of Syndesmos, a member of the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches, and chairman of its Commission on Faith and Order from 1967. He was also a persistent critic of what he called “wrong” ecumenism, and his engagement drew sustained criticism from traditionalist Orthodox quarters. This file sets out what he actually did, what he actually argued, and the both-sides record of the dispute (METHODOLOGY §4.2).

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration) / Orthodox Church in America

What He Held

The offices are documented and should be stated precisely, because they are frequently exaggerated in both directions.

Syndesmos. Meyendorff was one of the founders of Syndesmos, the World Fellowship of Orthodox Youth, and its first general secretary; he later served as its president (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff,” svots.edu). Syndesmos was founded in 1953 and was pan-Orthodox, not inter-confessional — it brought Orthodox youth movements of different jurisdictions and nationalities into contact with each other. This was the first field of his church diplomacy and it is worth noting that it was intra-Orthodox: the concern for Orthodox unity across national lines predates and underlies the concern for Christian unity.

The World Council of Churches. He was a member of the WCC Central Committee, represented the Orthodox at the Fourth Assembly at Uppsala in 1968, and was chairman of the Commission on Faith and Order, the WCC’s doctrinal body, from 1967 (St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary, svots.edu; the Scribner encyclopedia entry describes the same office as moderating the Faith and Order Commission). [Disputed: the terminal year — 1975 (Wikipedia; Scribner encyclopedia) or 1976 (St. Vladimir's Seminary; OrthodoxWiki). Both are in circulation; the difference is probably between the end of a term and the seating of a successor.]

This is a significant office and should not be understated: Faith and Order is where the WCC’s doctrinal work is done, and an Orthodox priest chairing it for the better part of a decade was a real position of influence in the ecumenical movement, at exactly the period when the Orthodox presence in the WCC was at its height. It should also not be overstated: chairing a commission is not speaking for Orthodoxy, and Faith and Order proceeds by consensus among member churches, not by the chairman’s theology.

Orthodox–Catholic dialogue. Meyendorff was a participant in the Orthodox–Roman Catholic conversation of the post-Vatican II decades. His joint volume with the Roman Catholic theologian Michael Fahey, Trinitarian Theology East and West: St Thomas Aquinas – St Gregory Palamas (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977), is the most concrete product of that engagement; his Orthodoxy and Catholicity (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966; French Orthodoxie et Catholicité, Paris: Seuil, 1965) is the earlier statement.

What He Argued

Meyendorff’s own position is set out in the editorials he wrote for The Orthodox Church between 1965 and 1984, collected in Witness to the World and Vision of Unity (both Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1987).

The governing distinction, made in the essay “Ecumenism — A Heresy?”, is between a “good” ecumenism, which the Orthodox can espouse and which is nothing but an obligation of charity, and a “wrong” ecumenism, which confuses rather than solves the issues (Meyendorff, “Ecumenism — A Heresy?”, in Witness to the World, SVS Press, 1987; the essays are reproduced at incommunion.org, which also carries his “True and False Ecumenism” from the same collection).

The content of the distinction, as it appears across the editorials, runs roughly thus.

What is legitimate. Christians who are separated are still obliged to know one another truthfully, to speak to one another, to cooperate in works of mercy, and to bear witness. Refusing to speak is not fidelity; it is a failure of charity and, practically, a guarantee that the other side will continue to misunderstand what Orthodoxy is. The Orthodox presence in the ecumenical movement is, on this account, primarily a form of witness — the Orthodox go to say what the Church believes, in a forum where otherwise no one will say it.

What is illegitimate. Any implication that the Orthodox Church is one branch of a divided Christendom that must be reassembled; any intercommunion in advance of unity in faith; any suggestion that doctrinal differences are matters of formulation only; any procedure that treats the visible unity of Christians as achievable by negotiation rather than by the recovery of the apostolic faith. Meyendorff was explicit that Orthodox participation does not imply recognition of the ecclesial equality of the participants, and he resisted formulations that would have implied it.

The consistency of this position with the repository’s own placement of him is exact: the hub file on the ecumenism debate lists him among the “critical engagement” voices — those who hold that participation in dialogue is for the sake of Orthodox witness, without compromising ecclesiology — and describes him as having “similarly engaged in ecumenical theology while insisting on the distinctiveness of the Orthodox position” (The Ecumenism Debate).

The Criticism (§4.2)

`[Disputed: whether Meyendorff’s ecumenical engagement was a legitimate exercise of Orthodox witness or a compromise of Orthodox ecclesiology. This is a live intra-Orthodox dispute and the repository treats the general question at length at The Ecumenism Debate, which sets out three positions across the Orthodox world — anti-ecumenist, critical engagement, and open dialogue — and does not adjudicate among them. The specific charges against Meyendorff and their answers are as follows.

(a) The critical case, made from traditionalist quarters. Critics — the milieu of Fr. Seraphim Rose, of ROCOR before the 2007 reconciliation, of the Old Calendarist bodies, and of writers in that tradition — have charged that Orthodox participation in bodies such as the World Council of Churches, whatever the participants’ intentions, functions in practice as recognition of the heterodox communions as churches; that it violates the canons forbidding common prayer with heretics; that it accustoms the Orthodox faithful to treating dogmatic differences as negotiable; and that senior Orthodox ecumenists, Meyendorff among them, bear responsibility for that effect. The most formal expression of this position is the Anathema Against Ecumenism proclaimed by the ROCOR Bishops’ Council in 1983 and added to the Rite of the Triumph of Orthodoxy, which condemns the teaching that the Church is divided into branches and that the Orthodox Church is one among many (The Ecumenism Debate, on the 1983 anathema and its text; see also Fr. Seraphim Rose for the American traditionalist milieu). The wider charge, made in traditionalist commentary, is that Meyendorff and Schmemann represented an Orthodox “modernism” that relativized doctrine in the name of contemporary unity.

(b) The answering case, including Meyendorff’s own. Meyendorff’s reply, stated repeatedly in the editorials, was that the objection collapses two different things: he rejected the branch theory and rejected intercommunion as firmly as any anti-ecumenist, and precisely for that reason held that the Orthodox must be present to say so. His “wrong ecumenism” and the anti-ecumenists’ “ecumenism” are, on his account, the same target; the disagreement is over whether Orthodox absence or Orthodox presence better resists it (Meyendorff, “Ecumenism — A Heresy?” and “True and False Ecumenism,” in Witness to the World, 1987). Defenders add that the Orthodox churches which participate in the WCC do so by synodal decision, not by the initiative of individual theologians; that the WCC’s own Toronto Statement (1950) explicitly provides that membership does not imply that any church must regard the others as churches in the full sense; and that the Orthodox presence has in fact produced doctrinal correction of ecumenical documents rather than doctrinal capitulation.

Where the dispute stands. It is unresolved and remains so across the Orthodox world; the repository’s own survey concludes that “no resolution is in sight” (The Ecumenism Debate). The 2016 Council in Crete addressed the question in its document on relations with the rest of the Christian world and drew immediate criticism from anti-ecumenist quarters (see The Council of Crete 2016). This collection reports Meyendorff’s position and its critics and adjudicates neither.]`

Two Points of Precision

Two things are frequently got wrong about Meyendorff on this subject, and both cut against the simple picture.

He was not a liberal on the substance. On the Filioque, on papal primacy, on intercommunion, on the doctrinal content of the faith, Meyendorff’s positions are those of the tradition. His volume on primacy — The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church, which he edited and which the repository cites as the reference for “the Orthodox theology of primacy” (Filioque and Papal Primacy) — is an argument against universal papal jurisdiction, not a bridge to it. His and Papadakis’s The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy frames the reformed medieval papacy as the destabilizing novelty in the relations of East and West (Papal Claims and the Frankish Factor, reference gloss). One may disagree with his ecumenical method; his ecclesiology was not in doubt.

The charge that he treated the Filioque as a mere theologoumenon is contested and should be handled carefully. It circulates in traditionalist commentary. Meyendorff’s own published treatment credits St. Photius with the classic distinction between the eternal procession of the Spirit from the Father and the temporal mission through the Son, and treats the Latin addition as a genuine doctrinal problem, not a matter of words (The Neo-Palamite Lineage, citing Byzantine Theology for the Photian attribution; see The Filioque). What he did hold — and this is what the charge distorts — is that the doctrinal difference must be stated precisely rather than polemically, and that some of what had passed for anti-Latin argument in later Byzantine and Russian polemics was imprecise. This collection has not located a published statement by Meyendorff reducing the Filioque to a theologoumenon, and the claim is reported here as an allegation of his critics rather than as an established position of his.

Assessment

Meyendorff’s ecumenical work is the part of his career that has aged least comfortably — not because his positions have been refuted but because the ecumenical movement he served has diminished, and because the Orthodox conversation about it has hardened. He belonged to a moment, running roughly from the 1960s to the 1980s, when it was possible to believe both that the Orthodox Church is the Church and that the doctrinal conversation with the separated Christians of the West was going somewhere. That combination is harder to hold now.

What remains is a record of unusual clarity. Meyendorff said in print, repeatedly, what he thought the Orthodox could and could not do in ecumenical settings, and drew the lines himself rather than leaving them to be inferred. Readers on either side of the dispute can find out exactly what he held, which is more than can be said of many of the participants.

See Also

References

  • Meyendorff, John. Witness to the World. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. (Editorials from The Orthodox Church, including “Ecumenism — A Heresy?” and “True and False Ecumenism”; the distinction between “good” ecumenism as an obligation of charity and “wrong” ecumenism that confuses the issues. Reproduced at incommunion.org.)
  • Meyendorff, John. Vision of Unity. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987.
  • Meyendorff, John. Orthodoxy and Catholicity. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966. French original Orthodoxie et Catholicité, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1965.
  • Meyendorff, John. The Orthodox Church: Its Past and Its Role in the World Today. London: Darton, Longman & Todd / New York: Pantheon, 1962; 3rd rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1981.
  • Meyendorff, John, ed. The Primacy of Peter: Essays in Ecclesiology and the Early Church. Rev. ed. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1992.
  • Meyendorff, John, and Michael A. Fahey. Trinitarian Theology East and West: St Thomas Aquinas – St Gregory Palamas. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 1977.
  • Papadakis, Aristeides, with John Meyendorff. The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy: The Church 1071–1453 A.D. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1994.
  • St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. “Protopresbyter John Meyendorff.” svots.edu. (Syndesmos; the WCC Central Committee; the Faith and Order chairmanship.)
  • ROCOR Bishops’ Council. Anathema Against Ecumenism, 1983. (Cited from the repository’s Ecumenism Debate, which gives the text.)
  • World Council of Churches. “The Church, the Churches and the World Council of Churches” (the Toronto Statement), 1950.