The Orthodox Ecclesiology

Justin Popović’s doctrine of the Church: the Church as the one theanthropic organism, the body of Christ the God-Man, in which the human person is deified; the catholicity (sobornost) that follows from this; and the ecclesiological convictions that would become the foundation of his critique of the ecumenical movement.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

The Church as the God-Man’s Body

Justin’s ecclesiology is the direct extension of his Christology: the Church is the God-Man continued and extended through history — the body of Christ the God-Man, the theanthropic organism (bogočovečanski organizam) in which human beings are incorporated into Christ and made partakers of his deifying life (Justin Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al., Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994, esp. the essays on the Church; Andrew Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, London: SPCK, 2015). He takes the Pauline image of the Body of Christ (1 Corinthians 12; Ephesians 1:22–23, 4:15–16) with full realism: the Church is not an association of like-minded believers, nor an institution founded to propagate a teaching, but the very body of the incarnate God, in which Christ’s own life circulates and by which the faithful are grafted into him as members into a body (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994; the Pauline texts). The Head of this body is Christ himself, and — a point Justin presses polemically — Christ alone: no man, no bishop, no pope stands as the head of the Church in Christ’s place, for to substitute any man for the God-Man at the Church’s head is precisely the humanist deformation he diagnoses everywhere (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994, on Christ as the sole Head; and see Against European Humanism). The polemical vehemence here is Justin’s own, but the substance is not a private opinion: the Orthodox Church has never received the Roman claims of papal supremacy and infallibility, and in confessing Christ as the sole Head of the Church Justin states the teaching of the Church — what is distinctively his is the diagnosis of the papal claim as “humanism.”

Because the Church is the body of the one God-Man, it is, for Justin, necessarily and by its very nature one. Its unity is not a task to be achieved but a given theanthropic fact, as indivisible as Christ himself: “Christ cannot be divided,” and neither, therefore, can his body (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994; and the same principle in The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism, 1974 — see The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism). This conviction — that the Church’s unity is an already-existing reality identified with the Orthodox Church, not something divided Christians must reconstruct — is the ecclesiological premise from which his whole critique of ecumenism follows, and it is stated here because it belongs to his dogmatic ecclesiology before it becomes a matter of controversy.

Deification and the Life of the Body

The purpose of the Church, in Justin’s account, is theosis: the Church exists to deify its members, to make human beings partakers of the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4) by uniting them to the God-Man (see Orthodoxy: Theosis). This happens through the sacramental and ascetic life of the body — above all the Eucharist, in which the faithful receive the very body and blood of the God-Man and are made one body with him, and through the “theanthropic virtues” (faith, prayer, love, humility, fasting) that are the members’ participation in Christ’s own life (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994, on the sacraments and the theanthropic virtues; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015). The saints are, for Justin, the fully realized members of the body — human beings in whom the deifying life of the God-Man has done its complete work — which is why the Lives of the Saints is for him a work of ecclesiology and not merely of edification: the saints are the Church achieving its purpose (see The Lives of the Saints).

The person is again central. The Church does not absorb or dissolve the human person into a collective; it is precisely the place where the person is fulfilled, deified into the fullness of personhood in communion with the persons of the Holy Trinity and with the other members of the body (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on personhood and communion in Justin). The theanthropic organism is a communion of deified persons, not an impersonal totality.

Sobornost / Catholicity

This yields Justin’s understanding of catholicity, which he renders with the Slavic term sobornost (соборност) — a word from the Russian Slavophile tradition (Khomiakov) meaning the organic, free, love-grounded conciliar unity of the Church, as against both external authority (which he associates with Roman papalism) and individualist fragmentation (which he associates with Protestantism) (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994, on the catholicity of the Church; Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015, on the Slavophile inheritance in Justin; Paul Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New, London: T&T Clark, 2019). Catholicity, for Justin, is not primarily geographical universality but the wholeness and integrity of the faith and life of the body: the Church is “catholic” because it possesses the whole truth of the God-Man and the whole means of deification, and because each member, and each local Church, holds the fullness of the one faith in the unity of love (Popović, Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994). The councils of the Church express this sobornost; they do not create the truth but bear witness to the one truth held by the whole body (see Orthodoxy: The Ecumenical Councils and Holy Tradition).

The Ecclesiological Root of the Ecumenism Critique

It is essential to see that Justin’s later, controversial critique of the ecumenical movement is not a reactive prejudice but the application of this ecclesiology. If the Church is the one indivisible body of the one God-Man, and if the Orthodox Church is that body, then the ecumenical premise — that the Church of Christ is divided among many “churches” that must labor to restore a lost unity — is, for Justin, a false ecclesiology at its root, a “humanization” of the Church that treats its God-given unity as a human problem to be solved by negotiation (Popović, The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism, 1974, English trans. Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 2000; and the ecclesiological premises in Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, 1994; see The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism). Whether this ecclesiology entails the sharp practical conclusions Justin drew from it — refusal of Serbian participation in the World Council of Churches, the language of “pan-heresy” — is itself contested, and is treated both-sides in Section 06 (see How His Stance Is Received Today). What belongs here is the dogmatic ecclesiology itself: the Church as the one theanthropic body of the God-Man, in which persons are deified, whose unity and catholicity are given rather than constructed.

Assessment

Justin’s ecclesiology is a strong, patristically grounded, and internally coherent statement of the classical Orthodox self-understanding, and in its positive content — the Church as the deifying body of the God-Man, catholicity as wholeness, the person fulfilled in communion — it is widely admired and largely uncontroversial within Orthodoxy (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers, 2015; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019). The controversy attaches not to the ecclesiology as such but to the practical consequences Justin drew from it for relations with non-Orthodox Christians, and to the vehemence of his rhetoric. That is a matter for Section 06. Here it suffices to have shown that his ecclesiology is the coherent unfolding of his Christology: as Christ is the God-Man, so the Church is the God-Man’s body, one and catholic and deifying, and everything else in Justin flows from this.

See Also

References

  • Popović, Justin. Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ. Trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994. (The Church as the theanthropic body; Christ as sole Head; catholicity/sobornost; the sacraments and theanthropic virtues.)
  • Popović, Justin. The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism [Pravoslavna Crkva i ekumenizam, 1974]. English trans. Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 2000. (The ecclesiological premises applied to ecumenism.)
  • Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015. (Justin’s ecclesiology, personhood, and the Slavophile sobornost.)
  • Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark (Bloomsbury), 2019. (Justin’s ecclesiology and its relation to his ecumenism.)
  • Scripture: 1 Corinthians 12; Ephesians 1:22–23, 4:15–16 (the Body of Christ); 2 Peter 1:4 (partakers of the divine nature).