The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism

Justin Popović’s 1974 book Pravoslavna Crkva i ekumenizam (The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism), his sustained critique of the ecumenical movement and the World Council of Churches. This file presents his position fully and in its strongest form — the ecclesiological premise, the argument, the famous language of “pan-heresy,” and the practical conclusions — reserving the contested question of its reception for the companion file.

Tradition: Serbian Orthodox (glorified 2010)

The Book

The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism (Pravoslavna Crkva i ekumenizam) was published in 1974, in the last years of Justin’s life, and is the most influential — and most controversial — of his shorter works (Justin Popović, The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism, English trans., Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 2000; the Serbian original 1974, in the Sabrana dela, ed. Bishop Atanasije Jevtić). It appeared at a moment of intense Orthodox engagement with the ecumenical movement: the Orthodox Churches had joined the World Council of Churches (WCC) — the Serbian Orthodox Church became a member in 1965 — and the pan-Orthodox preparations for a “Great and Holy Council” were underway, along with the lifting of the anathemas of 1054 between Rome and Constantinople in 1965 (on the WCC and Orthodox participation, see Paul Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New, London: T&T Clark, 2019, chs. on ecumenism). Justin wrote as a determined opponent of this trajectory, and related memoranda and essays — gathered in English as Notes on Ecumenism (Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2013) — carry the same argument, including his appeals to the Serbian Holy Synod against the direction of the pan-Orthodox and ecumenical process.

The Ecclesiological Premise

Justin’s critique of ecumenism is not a free-standing polemic but the direct application of his ecclesiology (see The Orthodox Ecclesiology). His governing premise is that the Church is the one, indivisible, theanthropic body of Christ the God-Man, and that this one Church is the Orthodox Church. From this it follows, for Justin, that the Church of Christ has never been divided and cannot be divided — “the Church is one and unique, because the God-Man Christ is one and unique” — so that the divisions of Christendom are not fractures within the Church but departures from it (Popović, The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism, 1974/2000; and the ecclesiological premises in Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al., Belmont, MA: IBMGS, 1994). The bodies separated from Orthodoxy — Rome, the Protestant confessions — are therefore, in his account, not “sister churches” or partial realizations of the one Church, but heterodox communities that have fallen away from the fullness of the God-Man’s body.

Given this premise, the fundamental error of the ecumenical movement, as Justin reads it, is a false ecclesiology: the assumption that the Church of Christ is divided among many “churches,” none of which possesses the fullness, and that unity is a lost good to be reconstructed by dialogue, negotiation, and mutual concession. To Justin this is to treat the Church’s God-given unity as a human problem — to “humanize” the Church — and it is of a piece with the whole anthropocentric deformation he diagnoses in European humanism (see Against European Humanism). Ecumenism, on this reading, asks the Orthodox Church to behave as though it were one denomination among others in search of a unity it does not already possess, and thereby to deny what it is.

The “Pan-Heresy”

The most famous — and most quoted, and most fought-over — element of the book is Justin’s characterization of ecumenism as a heresy of heresies. In his formulation, ecumenism is “the common name for the pseudo-Christianities, for the pseudo-churches of Western Europe,” and it gathers up within itself all the heresies of the past; he calls it the svejeres — the “pan-heresy” or “all-heresy” — of the age (Popović, The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism, 1974/2000; the phrase is the book’s most cited line). The logic is that ecumenism, by relativizing the identification of the Church with Orthodoxy and treating all the confessions as partial forms of the one Church, does not merely repeat one ancient heresy but embraces and legitimates them all at once — hence a “pan-heresy,” worse than any single one because it dissolves the very criterion by which heresy is known.

This is deliberately maximal language, and Justin meant it as such. He wrote as a confessor sounding an alarm, convinced that the Orthodox Church was being led, by its own hierarchs’ participation in the WCC and the ecumenical process, toward a betrayal of the faith of the councils and the Fathers (Popović, The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism, 1974/2000; Notes on Ecumenism, 2013, on his appeals to the Serbian Synod). The vehemence is essential to the text and must not be softened in reporting it: Justin regarded ecumenism as a mortal danger to Orthodoxy, and said so in the strongest terms the tradition affords.

The Practical Conclusions

From the diagnosis Justin drew practical conclusions. He opposed the Serbian Orthodox Church’s membership and participation in the World Council of Churches and pressed, in memoranda to the Serbian Holy Synod, for the Church to reconsider or withdraw from the ecumenical bodies and to refrain from the joint prayer and common witness that WCC membership entailed (Popović, Notes on Ecumenism, 2013; Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019, on Justin’s interventions). He objected in particular to any softening of the boundary between Orthodoxy and heterodoxy — to language of “sister churches,” to the lifting of the anathemas as a step toward union with Rome on anything less than Rome’s return to Orthodoxy, and to the practice of common prayer with the heterodox, which the ancient canons forbid (Popović, The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism, 1974/2000; on the canonical background, cf. the canons against prayer with heretics). His positive counter-proposal was not innovation but return: the Orthodox Church should witness to the divided Christian world not by joining a federation of churches but by being fully, uncompromisingly itself — the one theanthropic body of the God-Man — and calling all to return to it (Popović, The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism, 1974/2000).

What Justin Did and Did Not Do

Two points of fact bound the presentation of his position and belong here, though their interpretation is contested in the companion file. First, Justin’s critique was theological and hortatory, directed at his own Church’s hierarchy through canonical channels — memoranda and appeals to the Synod; he did not himself lead a schism, did not break communion with the Serbian Orthodox Church or its bishops over the issue, and remained to his death a priest-monk in good standing of the canonical Serbian Church, however sharply he disagreed with its ecumenical policy (Ladouceur, Modern Orthodox Theology, 2019; the record of his interventions in Notes on Ecumenism, 2013). Second, his critique was aimed at the ecumenical movement and its ecclesiology, not at the existence of the non-Orthodox as such; his objection was to a false theory of Church unity, not a call to cease all contact with other Christians. How much these facts qualify the maximal rhetoric — whether Justin is rightly read as a father of Orthodox anti-ecumenist separatism or as a sharp internal critic who nonetheless kept the peace of the Church — is exactly the contested question, and it is taken up, both-sides, in the companion file (see How His Stance Is Received Today).

See Also

• How His Stance Is Received Today — the both-sides treatment of the reception of this book
• The Orthodox Ecclesiology — the ecclesiological premise of the critique
• Against European Humanism — ecumenism as a form of the “humanization” of the Church
• Orthodoxy: Holy Tradition and The Ecumenical Councils — the conciliar criteria Justin invoked

References

• Popović, Justin. The Orthodox Church and Ecumenism [Pravoslavna Crkva i ekumenizam, Belgrade, 1974]. English trans. Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 2000. (The ecclesiological premise; the critique of the WCC and ecumenical movement; the “pan-heresy”; the practical conclusions.)
• Popović, Justin. Notes on Ecumenism. Ed. and trans. Alhambra, CA: Sebastian Press, 2013. (His memoranda and appeals to the Serbian Holy Synod on ecumenism and the pan-Orthodox process.)
• Popović, Justin. Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ. Trans. Asterios Gerostergios et al. Belmont, MA: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994. (The ecclesiological premises.)
• Ladouceur, Paul. Modern Orthodox Theology: Behold, I Make All Things New. London: T&T Clark (Bloomsbury), 2019. (Orthodox participation in the WCC; Justin’s interventions and their status.)
• Canonical background: the ancient canons forbidding common prayer with heretics (e.g., Apostolic Canons 45 and 65; Laodicea, Canon 33), invoked in the anti-ecumenist argument.